The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

There is no one thing that is emphasized so much in the Bible, and especially in Christ's teachings as faith. Every benefit, every healing depends for its efficacy on the sufferer's faith. In all of His healing this one condition of faith was imperative—"According to thy faith be it unto thee."

When the disciples told their Master that they could not heal certain cases He rebuked them, and told them that they failed because of their lack of faith. "According to thy faith be it unto thee," he reiterated constantly. He recognized the great healing power of faith, and impressed upon His followers the truth, that without it no healing was possible.

Every physician knows that his patient's faith in his power to cure him, in the efficacy of the remedies he applies, are curative agencies. Faith in medicinal remedies is what makes them effective. It is faith that furnishes the potency of thousands of so-called remedies, which have no intrinsic value whatever.

We all know how the visualizing of disease and the fear of it affect the mind in undermining the health ideal. Confidence in our health is really its sustaining and buttressing power, for the moment we destroy this we lessen our resisting power and invite disease.

The image perpetually held in the conscious mind becomes indelibly etched in the subconscious mind and the body conforms to the thought. To attain perfect health we must hold the image of physical perfection, we must constantly keep in mind this ideal state. We must build ourselves thought pictures of a superb body in all its strength and wholeness; we must relentlessly strangle every image of weakness or disease, every sick suggestion that would blur the picture of perfect wholeness and harmony into which we wish to grow.

What a revolution we would make in our lives if we could only learn to live this health ideal instead of its opposite, the disease ideal!

Every child should be reared to think health instead of disease; should be made to realize that health is the everlasting fact, that disease is not a necessary evil, and was not intended for us, that it was not intended we should suffer. If the young mind were saturated from infancy with health ideas and ideals it would build up a strong disease-resisting power that would make it immune to all health enemies. If every child were trained to believe that he was a god in the making, that he had within him the embryo of divinity which ought to develop into a God-like being, we should not have so many mental and physical Lilliputians.

One of our great health troubles lies in the fact that we have been accustomed from childhood to lay too much emphasis on matter, on the support of the body. As a matter of fact, the mind is everything. But mind is not confined to the head alone. We are all mind. We think all over. We live all over. Our sensations are the intelligent expression of all the cells of the body.

The body is a great coöperative institution composed of billions of cells. Some of these cells have a higher functioning quality than others, but they all have their appointed places. Every cell is an important member of the body corporation and has a voice in the government of the whole. When we are wounded or diseased, for instance, billions of these tiny cell repairers, healers, renewers, health builders, rush instantly to the wounded part to repair and restore the injured tissues.

We are all conscious that there is continually going on within us these repairing, renewing, reinvigorating, as well as healing, processes. We feel that there is a marvelous and beneficent intelligence ever working miracles within us, a power which heals our wounds and cures our hurts.