The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

Every physician should also be a metaphysician. He should be a profound believer in the principle that the Power which created the patient can re-create him, can repair damages, restore diseased or lost tissues. The most advanced physicians do believe that at best they can but help Nature in her healing processes. They realize that the same Power which created the patient is present in the healing of every wound, every broken bone and every hurt we suffer. The surgeon sets the bone, dresses the wound, but the same Power that first created the flesh and bone must do the healing.

The mental healer vigorously denies the reality of disease in the sense that truth is a reality. To him "all is Infinite Mind, and its infinite manifestation," as Mrs. Eddy says, and therefore all must be good. Only the good can be real as God made all that is.

The persistent denial that anything could exist which the Creator did not create, and that He could make anything unlike Himself, is one of the fundamental principles of the Christian Science faith. To the healer health is a vital, immortal principle, the everlasting fact, and disease, although it seems painfully real to the sufferer, is but a false belief.

The healer holds in mind only what he desires to establish in his patient's mind. He shuts out everything else. Health is what he wishes to establish, and to do this he holds insistently and tenaciously the health ideal. He refuses to see the sick, diseased man or woman, and persists in visualizing the ideal one that God intended. To him the defective, deficient, suffering being which disease and physical discord have made is not the real man or woman. That being is only a travesty of the ideal, perfect creature the Creator planned.

He does not allow himself to think of, or to picture disease symptoms. To visualize the physical appearance of disease would be to acknowledge its reality, and this would be to defeat his healing. He could not, for example, cure cancer or tuberculosis while mentally picturing the horrible symptoms of these diseases. He wishes to keep all such things out of his mind because of their baleful suggestiveness. Visualizing them would merely etch their reality deeper and deeper in his consciousness, and the suggestion would be conveyed into the patient's consciousness.

The mental healer's aim is to produce in the mind of the person he is treating a consciousness of the scientific reality of health, and of the unreality of disease. It does not matter how the disease symptoms may contradict this principle, or how loudly pain may scream for recognition, he persists in considering disease unreal and in holding the scientific sense of health as the reality. He relies wholly upon Divine Mind as the great healing potency, and steadily affirms his patient's oneness with his Divine Source, and that disease cannot exist in the Divine Presence.

At the very outset he encourages his patient by affirming that, however real his physical discord or disease may seem to him, it cannot affect the God image in him, because that is perfect, as God Himself is perfect, and that in reality there can be no disease. Truth and harmony, he asserts, are the great facts of life. Error is not a reality, but merely the absence of truth; discord is not a reality, but merely the absence of harmony. He assures him that He is God's child, and that God's image cannot be sick, distressed or diseased. "Of course," he says, "this seems very real to you, painfully real, but it is not reality in the sense that truth is a reality." This is discord, the absence of harmony, and divine harmony will antidote all discord just as truth will neutralize error, and as love will neutralize all hatred, jealousy or revenge, or as confidence, self-assurance will neutralize fear, doubt, or self-depreciation.

The healer holds continually the healing suggestions, and concentrates on arousing in his patient expectancy of relief by bracing his hope, confidence, assurance and faith in Divine Mind that restores, renews and heals. He tries to stimulate and to put into active operation the healing potencies latent in him, to awaken in his mind the lost divine image, and to impress upon him the idea that this divine image cannot possibly be dominated or in any way affected by disease.

I have seen a chemist pour a few drops of liquid from different crucibles into a jar of muddy water and in a few minutes the mud would disappear and the water be as pure as crystal. This is in effect what the mental healer does in treating a patient. No matter what the disease is his great remedy lies in mental chemistry, in neutralizing, destroying the error with its natural antidote.

The healer's constant affirmation that there can be no sickness, no disease in God's image in man, is a powerful suggestion which tends to weaken the grip of error in his patient's body. The very shutting out of all fear, of the terror of disease and death, is a great step towards a cure, because these things are depressing to all the bodily functions. Everything that discourages, that makes the patient despondent, is a great devitalizer, and constantly lowers his disease-resisting power.