In the first chapter of Genesis we read that God determined the name and nature of all His ideas, and many times it is declared, "God saw that it was good." Then in the allegory in the second chapter, we read that Adam gave names to all the creatures, these names standing for qualities which were not to be found in the divine creation. From this false material view-point we have all sorts of errors named and classified, diseases and crimes.
The desire, or rather the determination which seems to be inborn in the human mind, to classify and name the disorder which manifests itself as sickness, is almost as mischievous and disastrous as the sickness itself. This is due to the wrong education under which mankind has been brought up, so that the names of diseases stand for images of thought which are images of dread, suffering, mystery, and death.
On rainy days, when idle time hung heavy, as a child I enjoyed taking down the almanac which hung on a nail upon the kitchen wall, and reading with much enjoyment the description of the various diseases scheduled therein. Too ingenuous to note the connection whereby the cure of each one was always coupled with the purchase of the remedy for which the almanac was an advertisement, I scanned them all, if time permitted, and took a melancholy satisfaction in knowing that evidently the seeds of some of these most dreaded maladies lurked within my frame, since I could identify so many of the symptoms described with much that at one time or another I had felt. Indeed only those diseases which were set down plainly in black and white as being confined to mere infants in arms or to the very old, were acknowledged by me to be quite beyond the range of my achievement.
