Watching Point 291

291 — WATCH lest you forget that the body, or material sense, only echoes one’s own belief. Matter seems to have conversational powers, but it has none. If mortal mind says, I will kill you, as a mere suggestion that does not frighten you as much as when the body echoes this assertion, and says, I will kill you. Yet the second should not frighten you any more than the first, since an echo is no more dangerous than that which produces it. Pain is only an echo, or an ache-o, since in reality it never is in the place where it seems to be!

In the 16th edition of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy quotes from a sermon by William Ellery Channing as follows: “The philosopher… has often been led to question whether anything really exists in the universe, beyond Mind and Spirit; whether matter and the body have any substantial being; whether apparently external nature be not an actual creation of our own thought; or, in other words, whether, in believing in an outward world, we do anything more than ascribe reality to our own conceptions.”