Gone are "the good old times," when people were rugged and strong in the way that savages are rugged and strong, for evolution has decreed that man shall change into a higher and more nervous and sensitive type. In this sensitive type wrong thoughts and emotions quickly produce pain and suffering. The majority of people do not know what it is like to successfully achieve maximum health. Not only do they suffer from minor ailments, such as headaches, indigestion, rheumatism, but they also never feel hearty or completely well. They are strangers to the joy of living. Life does not thrill them: nothing quickens their blood: they have no moments of vivid ecstasy—in other words, they do not live, they merely exist at a poor dying rate.

Again, the majority of people are susceptible to infectious diseases and epidemics, yet, if they were really well, they would be immune. Instead, however, of seeking immunity through successful achievement of maximum health, they are seeking it through the use of vaccines and serums, thus adding to the burdens which the body has to bear. All attempts in this direction are bound to end in failure, not success, for as fast as one disease is suppressed another one will appear.

Many people look upon disease and sickness as inevitable, yet the truth is that health is the normal state and ill-health an abnormality. In tracing back ill-health to its source, we find, first of all, that it is due to disobedience of natural law. Large numbers of people break nearly every known natural law of health, and are surprised that they become ill. Yet the wonder is that they are as well as they are. Yet, while obedience to nature’s laws and the use of nature-cure methods will carry us a certain part of the way, we find that there must be causes even deeper than those which are physical. We are confronted by the fact that there are many people who obey every known physical law of health, who bathe, exercise, breathe, eat and drink scientifically, who adopt nature-cure methods instead of drugs and serums, who yet cannot successfully achieve maximum health. Therefore we must search deeper and go to the mind in order to discover the cause of ill-health.

When we look at the mind we find a prolific cause of sickness. Man thinks himself into ill-health and disease. It is well known that thinking about disease and sickness produces them in the body. People who are for ever thinking about disease, illness, operations and other morbid subjects, become prey to these things. Those who believe that sickness is inevitable, manifest it in their life. Morbid thinking produces a morbid state of the body, causing it either to fall an easy prey to infection or to break down into chronic ill-health, or even disease. Allowing the thoughts to dwell upon morbid things is a sure way to sickness and invalidism, and successfully achieving maximum health is beyond reach.

Man is not only made ill by his own negative thoughts and emotions, he is also under the hypnotic spell of the race mind. "The God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not." We are all under the spell, more or less, of a huge illusion. The evil, disease, sickness and other imperfections that we see and experience, have no reality, in reality, but have an existence in unreality. Although they are not real in a real sense, yet they are terribly real to this present limited consciousness. By realizing the truth, and by thinking and living in its light and power, the hypnotic spell becomes broken, not completely, else we should not grow old, but to such an extent that a state of greatly improved health can be successfully achieved.

2 Corinthians 4:4 Satan, the god of this evil world, has blinded the minds of those who don't believe, so they are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News that is shining upon them.

We are also hypnotically affected by suggestion, which reaches us from a thousand different sources. The conversations of friends and acquaintances, newspapers, magazines, books, all affect us adversely. Their beliefs in disease and sickness as realities, and in its inevitableness, influence us unless we have become too positive to be affected. From innumerable sources it is subtly suggested to us that disease, sickness, infection are realities that cannot be evaded, and to which we are prone. The effect of all this, putting it in simple and elementary language, is to divert the life power into wrong channels, thus producing disease and ill-health in place of perfection. The normal state of health has to give place to an abnormal state of disease or sickness. It is by realizing the Truth and the perfection of the Reality, by living in God’s light and power, that our thoughts cease to be negative and based on error and illusion and maximum health is successfully achieved.

It is often said that ill-health is the result of sin. It is, for thinking about disease, sickness and ill-health, believing them to be inevitable, is one of the greatest of sins. The way of life is to walk (think and act) after the Spirit (which is perfect, whole, immortal and incorruptible) and not after the flesh (corruption, disease, sickness, death). By thinking "after the flesh" we dishonor God who is absolute Wholeness and Perfection, and cut ourselves off from the Divine Life and Power.

Galatians 5:16 So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

But there are other ways by which wrong thinking destroys the health. Indulging in thoughts of hate, resentment, ill-will, fear, worry, grief, and anxiety, produces ill-health, and, by lowering the tone of the body, lays it open to infection and disease. We therefore see that the state of the mind and the character of the thoughts are important factors which cannot be ignored. It is useless to treat either ill-health or disease if they are merely the external effects of hidden causes of the mind. In order to successfully achieve maximum health we have to get back to the cause of the trouble.