Thurso was asking questions now in a different spirit to that which had prompted them before. He knew the difference himself.
“You spoke of laudanum as poisonous stuff just now,” he said. “But if God made everything, including poppies, how can it be poisonous?”
Cochrane laughed.
“Well, we had better ask Lady Maud to come back,” he said. “It was about that very point that I was going to talk to her to-day. Now, if you care to listen to that, since you have asked the question, pray do. But if it bores you, why, if you’ll read the paper or occupy yourself for half an hour, we can then all start out skating, or what you please.”
“But aren’t you going to treat me?” asked Thurso.
“Oh, I was at it this morning for some time,” he said. “I’ve paid you the morning visit, so to speak.”
Then again some spirit of antagonism entered into Thurso, and when Maud came back he crossed over to the fire with the paper. But the news was of no importance or interest, since it chiefly concerned American affairs, which meant nothing to him, and by degrees he found himself attending less to the printed page and more to the voice that sounded so cheerful and serene. Sometimes he found himself mentally ridiculing what was said, but yet he listened. It was arresting, somehow, and whether it was only the personality of the speaker that arrested him, or what he said, he found himself, whether approving or disapproving, more and more absorbed in it.
Cochrane spoke first, as he said he was going to do, about the apparently poisonous or sanative effects of drugs. These effects, he maintained, were not inherent in the drugs themselves, but in the belief of those who used them. It was quite certain, for instance, from the purely medical point of view, that an injection of plain water could be made, and that the patient, believing it to be morphia, would sleep under the influence of what had no influence at all. He slept because he believed he had been given something which would make him sleep. But, from the Christian Science point of view, to use drugs for curative purposes was merely to encourage the false belief that they could in themselves cure, while, on the other hand, anyone who knew and fully believed that they could neither be health-giving nor destructive of health might, if he chose, eat deadly poison, and be none the worse for it. But no one who held this belief would do so merely as a demonstration to satisfy the idle curiosity of those who did not believe.
Up till now he had been speaking quietly, as if all that was mere commonplace and superficial. But now intenser conviction vibrated in his voice.
“All this,” he said, “though, of course, it is perfectly true, is only a detail, a little inference that follows from the real and vital proposition. How error originally came in I don’t pretend to say. What we have got to deal with to-day is that error is here in embarrassing quantities, and that one of the commonest forms of it is to attribute real existence—real, that is to say, in comparison with the reality of Love—to material things. What is truly worth our concern is not to know what does not exist, but to know what does. And one thing only exists, and that is God, in all His manifestations. Originally, as we all know, He made the world, and pronounced what He made to be good; but that seems to have been before error entered. But the Infinite Mind, which is Divine Love, is all that has any real being. And as light, pure white light, can be split up, so that different beams of it appear as of all the colours of the rainbow, so that when you say, “This is blue, this is red,” you are only speaking of aspects of light, so when you say, “This is unselfish, this is courageous, this is pure,” you are only speaking of one of the colours of God. It is good that we should contemplate any one of these, for each of them is lovely; but we must continually be fusing them all together in our thought, so that they are mingled and made one again. And when that is done, when by the power of the little we know of the Infinite Mind we bring together all we can conceive of love and purity and unselfishness, then it is God we are contemplating. And whenever we contemplate Him like that, there is no existence possible for sin or error or imperfection. They pass into nothingness, not because we will them to do so, or make any longer an assertion of their nothingness, but because their existence is inconceivable.”