The Law of Rest in the Healing of Disease
By G. D. Ballou
By G. D. Ballou, for Many Years a Devoted Student of Physical and Mental Therapeutics GOD has written His word full of the law of rest. Every hopeful promise, every faithful assurance is designed to create that calm feeling of repose without which there is neither peace nor enjoyment. These full assurances,—"And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose;" and that He is "able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think"—if believed, become a basis for full appreciation and obedience to the law of rest as found in Psalm 37 and other places. "Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him." "Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in Him; and He shall bring it to pass. And He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday." "Fret not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass." "Fret not thyself, it tendeth only to evil-doing," A.R.V. "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Matt. 11: 28-30. Results of Mental Anxiety.
The state of mind which accrues to the individual from obedience to this law of his being leaves and keeps the body also in a blessed state of quietness. The worrying and fretting and the mental anxieties and cares which come from a failure to recognize this law of rest are the cause either directly or indirectly of about nine-tenths of all human ailments. Have you ever known a case where a person lost appetite thru mental anxiety, or had reached a point where there was a sighing for breath, had really forgotten to breathe, or was lying awake nights, and could not sleep because of the continuous grind? Thousands of such cases exist, and the existence of these conditions paves the way for malnutrition and poor elimination, the two things which lay the foundation for every constitutional ailment except diseases of heredity, many of which no doubt are due to the same causes in the ancestry. This worry is a mental disorder which nothing but faith and hope can permanently cure. Insanity is directly caused by it, and insanity affects the body as surely as it does the mind. Removing the Cause the Only Remedy.
Now God has made it a law of our nature that removal of the cause alone will at least give relief in every case of diseased conditions, and will bring cure in all cases that have not gone beyond the possibilities of recuperation. In other words, if the diseased condition has not become so chronic that the tissue cells can not be rebuilt, removal of the cause will effect a cure. Hence rest of mind—peace in the soul—becomes almost a panacea for the fruits of fretting and anxiety. If nine-tenths of all diseases are due to worry, it is safe to say that about four-fifths will yield to hope, courage, good cheer, and mental preoccupation. So, rest in God and His Son Jesus is the true Heaven-ordained remedy for nearly all human ills. The failure of Christianity has been upon this point. With the Master's injunction fully before them—to take no anxious care about food or raiment—the spirit of this world has prevailed until the majority of church-members are as destitute of true restful faith and trust in God as the veriest heathen in China or anywhere else. The greed for mammon, bad diet, stimulants, and the chasing of senseless fashions have helped to aggravate and deepen the difficulty. At this point in history comes into the arena as one of the chief actors It comes to us with just enough of mystery and occultism in it to appeal to the love of the marvelous in human nature and with a promise of relief from all moral responsibility, only the godless responsibility to believe all the utterances of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, and urges them upon the attention of the world. I say "promise of relief from all moral responsibility" because when a sense of sin,—the transgression of God's moral law,—and a sense of future judgment—the responsibility for sin—are blotted from the human mind there can not be a shadow of moral responsibility left. This blotting out is the chief aim of Christian Science, if I can understand it. To get rid of this responsibility is to bring peace and rest into the soul. This is the way to peace instead of the way of justification set forth in Rom. 5:1, "Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God thru our Lord Jesus Christ." Let us adapt this text to Christian Science: Therefore having blotted out of our minds a sense of the existence of sin and future judgment, we have peace with ourselves thru Christian Science. Its Denial of God and Facts of Creation.
With its denial of the doctrine of a personal God and of the facts of Creation, the reality of all substance, the existence of sin, the doctrine of forgiveness and the atonement, the evidence of the senses and all human reason based on the observations of the senses, it asks its devotees to rest and find peace in the doctrine of the nothingness of all human existence except soul, the allness of God, that is, that God is soul or spirit and pervades all things, and that all the realness in man is the god—the soul—within. It asks the seeker to find rest, comfort, and satisfaction in attempting to convince himself that there is no such thing as sickness or disease or pain or suffering, that these are only "errors of mortal mind," "old beliefs" which Christian Scientists will be able someday to surmount and forget. This hodgepodge of heathenism, occultism, absurdity, nonsense, folly, and promise of relief from all distress and trouble, gives the poor deluded seekers something to think about and believe in besides themselves—it just keeps them busy—until the effects of their former worrying and fretting wear off and they actually find health returning and in some cases fully restored. There is no use denying that Christian Science does lead the way to health just as outlined above. It is a deep and crooked philosophy sufficiently dark and mysterious to absorb all of any person's mind and attention. In this preoccupation and in the faith in its promises of cure, the cause of their maladies—anxious care—is left out until the effects disappear, so that Christian Science has in it a subtle substitute for rest in God which looks on the outside to be a panacea for mental ills as well as all the diseases that flesh is heir to. But let the Scientist undertake to cure smallpox, spinal meningitis, pneumonia, typhoid fever, broken bones, sprained ankles, bubonic plague, blood poisoning, consumption, etc., without rational or hygienic agencies, and he will soon prove himself to be a fool. To be sure, patients sick with some of these diseases do recover if nothing whatever is done for them only to give rest and water and pure air. In such cases Christian Science has no claims to advance if the patient does recover. Not all smallpox or pneumonia patients die, by any means. If Mrs. Eddy had taught the doctrine of trusting in a God that created the world and a Saviour that came to redeem a lost world, there would have been just so much Christianity in her scheme. If she had recognized the laws of nature and hygiene there would have been so much of real science in it. But her system is entirely innocent of any such truths. She even scouts every attempt to do for the sick anything outside of her formulas. That she was fully inspired, the writer will most gladly admit. But the inspiration is of such a character that when her readers stand before the people and one reads the Scripture and the other her science to explain it, the Scriptures either cease to have any sensible meaning whatever or else are said to mean just the opposite of what they say. It must be plain that an inspiration which thus nullifies the word of God and substitutes mysticism for its realities can not be from the same source. The Testimony of a Convert from Hindu Philosophy.
What Pandita Ramabai, a living authority on Hindu philosophy, said when this system was presented before her, ought to have weight with all Christian people: "I can tell you that I have sounded the depths of that philosophy; and what did I find? I will give you an idea in my own language. It means just this: You are to take the whole universe as nothing but falsehood. You are to think that it does not exist. You do not exist. I do not exist. When you realize that, that is philosophy. Can you realize it? There was once upon a time a great being called Brahma, and that person was no person at all, but something like air, full of joy and knowledge. Can you think of air as being full of joy and knowledge? I can not understand it; but philosophy tells you that you must believe that this being, full of joy and knowledge, without any personality, existed once upon a time. That being had no mind. It did not want to say anything, nor to have anything near it; and therefore, of course, it did not understand anything. Then there came another being just like itself, and that being was nothing but darkness. It was all falsehood. Now this air united with that darkness, and assumed personality. It became male and female; and as that person has formed all things, the logical inference is that everything is falsehood. The birds and beasts that you see do not exist. You do not exist. When you realize that you have no personality whatever,—that you have no life, no knowledge, nothing,—then you have attained the highest perfection of what is called Yoga, and that gives you liberation; then you are liberated from your body, and you become like him, without any personality. You draw on the blackboard zero, plus zero, minus zero, multiplied by zero, divided by zero, and it equals zero. It is just that, nothing more. "And what has that philosophy done for the people of India? A tree is judged by its fruits. An apple-tree can not bring forth a pear, but it will bring forth of its own kind. The grandeur and beauty of that philosophy must be judged by its fruit. You are a people of some feeling. Everything is real. You feel that when other people are starving, you ought to give them something to eat; but out in India they do not feel so. Men do not feel any sympathy for others. They do not feel for people who are starving or being killed in war. In the recent famine our philosophers felt no compassion for sufferers, and did not help the needy. Why should they help, when they claimed that the suffering was not real, neither were the dying children real? The first result, then, of this Hindu philosophy is the basest cruelty and selfishness,—no compassion for sufferers, supreme egotism. "To study Hindu philosophy, it is best to visit India and experience it. Plenty of opportunities are afforded, even if you go only to Bombay. That city is very large, and it is very hot there; but that will make no difference to philosophers who never experience heat. The people of India and the philosophers who have studied with the learned men, ought to feel alike toward all people and all beings, but they never show a particle of kindness to women, whose lives are made so unbearable that they want to kill themselves. These philosophers have shown mercy toward all lower animals. They have established hospitals for animals, but they have never established hospitals for women. The preachers who have come over here to preach Buddhism to the American people have established a hospital for animals in Bombay. In that hospital there is a ward devoted to bugs, and a man is hired to feed these bugs on his blood every night. They never take any thought of the women who are dying under the weight of this philosophy, but they show their charity toward the bugs. I recommend that hospital for the edification of American students of Buddhism. Let them stay one night in that bug ward. That will pay them for all their labors in studying that philosophy."