Watching Point 413

413 — WATCH that you aim your denials against cause rather than effect. They should always deal with your belief in error and your tendency to fear it or to love it.

Once a student used the argument, “The mesmerism of Roman Catholicism is broken.” How can this be a helpful scientific argument, when it implies that such a mesmerism was operating, but that now it has been broken? To start with an error in premise leads to an error in conclusion. When Brer Rabbit, in the children’s story by Uncle Remus, touched the tar baby, he could not shake himself loose from it. We cannot start with an error and then shake ourselves loose from it. We must start righty in order to end rightly.

Once a student declared in Mrs. Eddy’s hearing, “It isn’t difficult to destroy mesmerism, when you see it hasn’t any power.” Mrs. Eddy corrected her by saying, “If God is All, there is nothing to destroy. There is nothing but God and what God creates. I have to go back to the book and so must you.”

To be scientific according to Science and Health, you must know that there is no mesmerism of any kind and never has been, and that you cannot be deluded into thinking that there is or has been. As God’s child you have no capacity or desire to be mesmerized, and you cannot be tricked into acknowledging its existence or operation in any form.