The Rev. C. A. Bartol, D. D., preached a sermon at the West Church Oct. 8th, on "Spiritual Specifics for Bodily Ills," in which he more strongly than ever expressed his belief in the "mind cure," as practised by the Christian Scientists. His text was taken from the Proverbs of Solomon, iv. 22: "For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh." The intimacy of the body and soul appears clearly in the language common to both. The same expressions are asked to describe physical and mental conditions. It has been the habit of theology to separate and contrast the body and the soul, which the Maker has so wedded and welded together that they cannot be divorced. They are so united that only death can put them asunder. I hold that the chief blessing of mankind, the supreme good, is health; health of body and health of the heart. Dr. Bartol then spoke of the way in which the emotions were mirrored in the face; it was the mind showing through the body, the face bearing the soul's superscription. The outward must reflect the inward, and if a man is vindictive, lustful, mean, it will show in his face, just as it will if he is at peace with himself and all the world. Sickness is deplorable as a symptom and effect of sin. The physician must be a philosopher, a metaphysician; he must have a stock of specifics that is larger than that comprised by all the drugs in the world. What good indeed can pills, lotions and salves do for mental ills? It is your relation with those about you that ails you; let the relation be sweet and harmonious, and the condition becomes like it. Bodily disease is caused by the shutting in the poison of evil habits and spirits within one's own breast; only by putting these out and getting good tenants in their places can one be healed.
"Yet," you say, "the good are sick, as well as the bad; is this sickness a sin?" Yes, in the antecedents if not in themselves; for every ache and pain in the world "some one has blundered." So this work of healing must be done for every one; there is no such thing as individual apart from the race; we must, therefore, be saved, not as individuals, but as a race. Every generation pays for some broken law in the generations that have preceded it. It cannot be too strongly reiterated that bodily ill is caused by mental or moral sickness. What is a drunkard but a sick man, overcome by appetite for what is killing him? And how is he to be cured, but by withholding by force that which sickens him? Temperate men are not temperate through self-denial: it is because they have healthy appetites and healthy bodies that do not seek the evil outside of them . Precaution goes for something as well as cure, and the remedy for keeping out baleful influences, and so keeping away the physical ills that they bring in their train, is to keep courage and goodness in the heart so that there may be no room for these intruders to enter. Always your sin will find you out, and not only in remorse of the soul, but it comes to a head in the body, often in some poisonous and corrupting disease; we can trace the cause by the effect. Yet even in this fearful strait, if we come in contact with some good, positive, gracious will, that takes us in hand to help us, how we feel it; down where no medicine can reach, that comforts and relieves us, as we may not, cannot tell. Life or death wait as for the healing or the venomous words. We are born to sin; the Bible considers us all members of a great infirmary; but in the truths that are coming to us and to our understanding, new ways of this healing shall be opened to us. Matter everywhere is subservient to mind, which is potent and omnipotent, and will at last have its triumph, not merely in healing, but in preventing bodily ill. Dr. Bartol closed by saying, We are all on a mission in this world, and that mission is to ward off disease. That we can do by showing to everybody with whom we come in contact both courage and sympathy.—Boston Advertiser.
