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The Law of Life is the law of division and growth. Our life cells divide, grow and divide again. That is the principle of all cell life. Use them—break them up—and the more you release, the more the Life in you will expand and draw new life to you.

The Law of Life is no different from the Law of Supply. You must give to get.

In the material sense our bodies are nothing but plants, and to thrive must have the same four elements that plants require—food, water, sunshine, air. Why? Because the essence of growth lies in breaking each minute cell in two, and then drawing to each part the elements necesary to rebuild it to the size of the original cell. As stated before, the Law of Life is the law of division and growth.

Air, sunlight and exercise heat the cells, causing them to expand and break up. Food and water provide the elements necessary to their growth.

Experiments have shown that the inmates of insane asylums are more easily managed when kept in the sun; that the intelligence of school children is increased nearly 100% by keeping them exposed to solar radiations. Why? Because stupidity and insanity are frequently due to inactivity of the thyroid gland, whose secretions are necessary to the activity of the brain cells. And sunlight tends to increase that activity.

The only material curative agents known to man are these four—food, water, air, sunshine. They can be imitated to a degree. They can be counterfeited by drugs and appliances and treatments. But the best doctors will tell you that no drug ever discovered, no process ever invented, compares with these four methods of Nature.

The principle of all healing lies in a change of “potential.” You have an accident, let us say. You have a bad cut here, an ugly bruise there, a broken bone somewhere else. What happens?

1st, the blood coagulates (condenses) in the open wound to keep you from losing too much liquid.

2nd, the edges of the wound heat (go into a higher potential) in order that they may fuse together again.

3rd, the ends of the broken bone, when brought together, do the same.

4th, the bruised part represents broken cells. These also heat, and throw off those parts which are damaged beyond repair, drawing frantically upon the blood stream for new parts, new elements for rebuilding.

5th, all three places are sore and tender to the touch. Why? Because they are heated to a higher potential while the fusing process goes on. The cells are expanded. More blood is drawn upon. Damaged and worn-out cells accumulate.

The way the process of healing can best be expedited is from within—through the mind which controls those blood streams, which directs the building and rebuilding.

At the 156th Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society, Dr. Richard C. Cabot, Professor-Emeritus of Medicine at Harvard University, said in part:

“When you sprain your wrist, it stiffens, swells and pains. That is the body’s way of forming a splint. When the doctor places a splint on the wrist, it is only to imitate and aid the body forces.

“I remember an autopsy on a man who had been killed by an automobile. He was 65, had never been sick a day in his life and always felt in perfect health. We found his body harboring four usually fatal diseases; but his system had set up defenses which rendered all of them perfectly harmless.

“The body simply has a superwisdom which is biased in favor of life rather than death. It doesn’t win every time, and often needs our help—but it is ten times as powerful as medicine’s imitation. And it is a force that doesn’t make as many wrong diagnoses as I did when I was in practice.”

And Dr. O. H. Robertson, Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, reports that in pneumonia, the disease which causes most deaths in the winter months, the lungs of those who get well really furnish their own cure. They manufacture a large “police” cell which travels through the lungs engulfing and killing the germs of pneumonia!

What can you do to help that cure along? 1st, relax— let go of your fear of the disease. 2nd, have faith in the power and the willingness of the God Inside You to cure you.

The creative order, you know, is from states to conditions—from states of mind to conditions of the body. Stir up the life in any organ that is manifesting a diseased condition, believe that you HAVE the perfect organ made in God’s image, and it necessarily follows that the God Inside You will remold it in the form of that perfect organ.

This is all that medical men try to do with their drugs —stir up the life that has settled into the wrong molds, and hope for the best that it will settle next time in the right ones. They don’t expect their drugs to heal anything. They are like a small boy with one of these toys where you try to put several balls into their right compartments—they keep shaking them out of the wrong holes, knowing that if their patience lasts and the toy holds together, the balls will eventually drop into the right compartments.

The God in us tries hard to show us how to heal, but we think we know more than He and persist in working against Him. What is fever but the God Inside Us raising the body to a higher potential in its efforts to get rid of the impurities in the system? What is a swelling but a localized fever to accomplish the same purpose ? What is pain but a signal that it is time to re-condense that life-energy into a lower potential? Pain causes one to writhe, to strain, to harden—therefore to condense.

The body does not need drugs. What toxics it needs, it manufactures for itself. As Dr. Bertram Ball put it— “Narcotics are not necessary in the treatment of disease. The human body manufactures its own toxics, and an individual’s chemistry can be attuned without the aid of narcotics so as to expel internal poisons.”

What the body does need in time of sickness is to stir up the life latent within it. Stir it up to such a potential that it will draw to itself whatever elements it needs for its growth and perfect fruition. Alcohol will do this to a slight extent and for a limited time. So will drugs. But the poisons they leave in the system frequently do it more harm that the temporary exhilaration they produce can do good.

The only stirring of the life forces in you that will ever do you any real and permanent good is a mental stirring, a stirring of the God Inside You. That stirring-up comes best from yourself.

Whether you work alone or with another, remember this: No seed ever germinated without first heating within. The seed of life in you is no different. There are two prerequisites to every healing: ist, Faith in the ability of someone or something to heal you. 2nd, Emotion, the feeling that you HAVE been cured. Faith puts the God Inside You to work, emotion bursts the shell in which your life is now confined and enables the God in You to pour it into the perfect image He holds of you.

So, when sickness or accident assails you, don’t worry about the particular part affected, but bless the God in You and stir Him into action.

Then let go! Don’t try to heal yourself. You don’t know the first principle of it. But the Spirit of Life in you knows all about it. So let Him do the work. All you have to do is to relax and let Him work. Remember that one on God’s side is a majority. You and God together can overcome anything.

A writer in one of the metaphysical magazines tells of a time when she was sick and discouraged and burdened with responsibilities. An understanding friend kept reminding her—“God is with you. Keep your mind fixed on that, for it is true. Tell yourself and KNOW—‘I am together with God.’ ” Her friend’s faith quickened her own, lifted her for a moment into a different world, brought her a sense of peace and protection that enabled her to relax, to let go of her troubles and let the God in her solve them.

The Easterners, you know, have a theory that water is the most irresistible element, because it is the most non-resistant. Put an obstacle in its way, and it will flow around it. Dam it, and it will either seep through, or else wait until enough of it accumulates to flow over the top.

Most of our ills and difficulties come from resistance. You have seen how electric heaters work. The current flows through the wires to the central coil, with no resistance upon the part of the wires, therefore no heating, no wear and tear. But the coil is made of special alloys that resist electricity. Result? Those alloys HEAT, and continue to heat whenever the electricity tries to flow through them, until they finally wear out and become fused and useless from the force of their resistance.

“Resist not evil,” St. Paul bade us, “but overcome evil with good.”

Suppose you or someone you dearly love has a serious accident or illness, that seems likely to put an end to your well-being and usefulness for the rest of your days. The prospect appalls you, naturally. You resent it and fight against it with every atom of your being, and every drug and appliance at the command of your physician.

Result? CONFLICT! You have dubbed your problem “Evil,” you have fought it and tried to disown and get rid of it. Naturally it fights back. Naturally it does you all the harm possible.

Yet if, instead of fighting against it, you will recognize it as “Good” in disguise, it can be the greatest friend you have ever known! Remember—“When Fortune means to man most good, she looks upon him with a threatening eye.” That is true of every phase of life.

Time was when maggots in a wound were looked upon as a sure sign of corruption and death, yet in the Chaco war in South America, surgeons found maggots to be one of their greatest allies in healing dangerously infected wounds. Fever has always been looked upon with dread, and every means used to allay it, yet today malaria fever has been found to be one of the surest means of ridding the patient of the plague of syphilis, and doctors are inducing artificial fevers to cure a number of ailments. Germs have long been looked upon as enemies of mankind, but recent experiments with animals have shown that those with the normal quota of germs are far healthier than those raised under ideal germ-proof conditions.

In other words, all of life is working with us for good —provided we will LET it and not continually fight against it. God is in everything, and God’s will always works for our good—if we offer no resistance to it. Try to know of everything that happens to you that it is of God, and God is good. Then LET IT COME!

Let it come, and BLESS IT I Say aloud to yourself, whenever you think of it—“All things are working together for my good, and I am working with them in the wisdom and power of the Spirit. I put myself and all of my affairs lovingly in the hands of the Father, in the childlike trust that whatever is for my highest good will come to me.”

Bless the germs, bless the accident, bless the loss, bless any seeming misfortune that comes to you—NOT in a spirit of pious resignation—but with the active faith that it is working WITH you for your greatest good. Feel the perfect trust betokened in Lenor Anthony’s little poem—

“Secure that like the trees my days are planned,

That my whole patterned life is in Thy hand.”

Brown Landone told an interesting personal experience along these lines in an article in Nautilus Magazine.

“I am King of some 4,000 kingdoms and five hundred billion subjects,” he said.

“I have twelve empires of brain and nerve cells, and these alone consist of some 80,000,000,000 living individuals! Of course, you may have called them mere ‘cells’ but each cell is a living individual and performs its functions more intelligently than most human beings.

“We now know more about a cell than we dreamed of knowing ten years ago. We now know of its body, its brain, and its nervous system. We even know the responses of its emotions and feelings.

“Have you ever tried to manage even forty house servants, or forty office workers? If so, then think of the gigantic work my spirit and your spirit must do, to keep our hundreds of billions of subjects working together in harmony.

“What method shall we use?

“In the past, I have tried to secure perfect harmony among my subjects by decree. But as I tried to control my more than 400,000,000,000 subjects by will power, I caused resentment and racial strikes among them, and these strikes caused me aches and pains and disease.

“So of late years, I have become a little wiser. Human life and cell life want love and understanding, and each wants to feel that he is willingly working in harmony with others, with one unified desire.

“Now let me tell you of my heart.

“Up to five years ago, I had been working my heart cells under command, constantly demanding—without even thinking about it—that they do their work and keep going as many hours per day as ‘I’ wished to work. Oh, I was very autocratic and very unjust to them.

“As a result, five years ago, there was complete heart exhaustion, even a wearing out of the structure of the heart. The best specialists, examining it by every means known to science, concluded that I would be very lucky if I could live ten days, possibly not more than 10 hours.

“Now what did I do? Instead of blaming the ceils of my old heart for my condition, instead of thinking that they were failing me, I began blessing them for all they had done. I apologized to them for the way in which I had used them. I began giving them a little more rest, and loved them every day, every minute.

“I do not expect this heart to live a thousand years, but I do know that it actually rebuilt itself. Other parts of my body are being reconstructed, too.”

The methods used by Brown Landone are sound psychology. If you go back to the first forms of life on earth, you remember that they were individual cells, each with an intelligence of its own. When groups of cells united to form multi-cellular animals, they did not give up their individual intelligences. They merely subordinated these to the group intelligence, just as good soldiers subordinate themselves to their commanding officer. But each cell works intelligently for the body’s good. And each is not only a faithful servant, but a friend and partner.

Scientists tell us that the cells of our body plan their work and build their body structures just as intelligently as ever an architect or builder put up a skyscraper.

Having individual intelligence, then, is it not natural that every cell in our body should partake of our moods, should feel downcast when we are discouraged, should be peppy and active when we are joyful, should be lazy or slothful or energetic and determined, according to the way we think?

Why is it that martial music can stir you to such an emotional pitch? Why is it that revivalists, faith healers and all who want immediate group action always start with the community singing of some familiar old hymns? Why is it that mob psychology can so quickly turn an ordinary human being into a blood-thirsty lyncher or an arrant coward, even as it can turn a coward into a brave man?

Why? Because the emotionalism engendered arouses the billions of individual minds in the cells that make up the body, and unites them all on a common thought. It is the reason that a person under hypnotic spell can do things impossible to his conscious self. And it is the reason that you can be healed instantaneously of any ill of body or mind or affairs.

Go back through the Old Testament, and see how many times you are adjured to be thankful, be joyful, to sing the praises of God, as a necessary corollary to health and prosperity. “Let them shout for joy and be glad . . . Yea, let them say continually, Jehovah be magnified, Who hath pleasure in the prosperity of His servant. “Blessed be the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits, even the God of our salvation.” “Let the people praise Thee, O God; let all the people praise Thee. Then shall the earth yield her increase, and God, even our God, shall bless us.”

Praise, give thanks, be joyful—how otherwise can you convince those billions of tiny intelligences that you HAVE the thing you pray for, how else can you stir them into action to bring it into being?

We quote below part of a prayer written by Walter DeVoe of the Eloist Ministry, because it so well expresses that idea of praise and joy:

“I praise Thy healing life and intelligence in every organ, in every nerve, in every atom of my flesh. I praise Thy glorious wisdom which is illuminating my soul and purifying my mind of every limiting thought. I praise Thy tender, healing love which invigorates and upholds me and dissolves away all fear. O Living Father, this is Thy holy temple. Thou art making it a perfect dwelling place from which shall radiate Thy healing love and wisdom to all Thy children. Father, Thou art glorifying me with Thy healing power, that I also may glorify Thee.”

What do you tell YOUR army of intelligent worker-cells each day ? Do you assure them that Divine Love goes before them and prepares the way? Do you tell them that Infinite Wisdom guides them and shows them what to do? Do you set them an example of energy and courage, do you face every difficulty with serenity and confidence, do you act as a real leader should?

What would you think of a commanding general who went into battle downcast and discouraged, who let every soldier know that he was beaten before he started? What would you do to a factory superintendent who came to work each morning looking as though he had no interest in what was going on, ready to drop into the nearest chair and let the world go by?

Yet that is exactly the way that many men handle the army of workers that make up their bodies. They fill them with fear, worry, anxiety, dread. They make them doubt themselves and all their fellow-workers. They tell them they cannot be depended upon to do their work properly, so outside help in the form of drugs and medicaments must be called upon.

And when the little cell-workers accept these suggestions of incompetency and helplessness, they make them even more hopeless by telling them they are sick, that they are ageing, that soon they must die. What else can the poor things do but carry out the suggestions given them? What recourse have they but to bow to the greater intelligence above them?

“Are you suffering with the conviction that you have kidney disease?" writes a famous psychologist. “If so, do you know what you are doing while you are holding this conviction? The kidneys are as sensitive to our thoughts as the stomach or any other organ, and you are sending a lot of anxiety and fear into their cells. Instead of encouraging them when they need your encouragement, instead of giving them stimulus and uplift, you are sending to them despair and despondency.

“What is the result? Chemical poisoning, of course. You are putting extra burdens on these little cell minds which are trying to throw off any abnormal conditions of the kidneys. Instead of helping, you are hindering them, you are depressing and disheartening them. This seriously interferes with their normal functioning, and materially aids the development of any possible disease tendency that may be lurking there. You should give the little cell minds of your kidneys, as you should all the cell minds of the other organs of your body, the benefit of your encouragement, your uplifting thought, so that they will function normally.

“The stomach likewise is sensitive to our thought. When we receive a telegram containing bad news of those dear to us, of their dangerous illness or death, of some accident or other unfortunate thing that has befallen them, we know how quickly the follicles of the stomach become fevered, parched, and refuse to secrete the gastric juices. Digestion cannot go on until the gastric follicles are normal again, and this cannot be while the unfortunate news remains in the mind and is dwelt upon, because the stomach cells are in sympathy with the brain cells and all the other cells of the body.

“Knowing that the cells thus respond to the thought we give them, if we expect them to be friends to us, to work for us instead of against us, and to function normally, we must be friends to them.

“There are tremendous possibilities in this idea of sending into the cell life of various organs of the body indications of what we want of them and encouraging them to respond, just as we would children, who would never amount to anything if we were always discouraging, scolding, blaming and condemning them. We can send messages of despair or hope, joy or sorrow, the expectancy of good things to come or the reverse, to the cell intelligence of every organ and thus build into our life joy, health, hope, success, or despair, disease, pessimism. In other words, we must hold thoughts, the convictions which we wish to come true.

“If you persistently maintain a hopeful, healthful, joyous mental attitude you will soon get encouraging results on the physical plane. Your habitual thought, your fixed belief, is the strongest force in your life, and your life processes will follow your beliefs. Train your subconscious mind to expect health, to expect the normal functioning of all your organs. By an inexorable law, what we expect tends to come to us.”

You have seen men, under hypnotic suggestions, perform prodigies of strength. You have seen them stretched between two chairs, their head on one, their feet on another, supporting the weight of several people, when they could not ordinarily hold up the weight of their own bodies in that position. If the cells of the body can do that, under outside suggestion, what can they not do under proper suggestions from their own rightful master?

As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Easier to believe that now, isn’t it? Easier to believe that the thoughts you hold in your mind become imaged in your body, acting as the blue-print from which all your little cell-workers build.

The ancient Greeks understood this, and surrounded themselves with beautiful statuary and lovely pieces of art. The fable of Pygmalion and Galatea was but their way of saying that each man is his own sculptor, his own creator, and the image of his body that he holds in mind is the one which shall presently breathe the breath of life.

So give those willing fellow-workers of yours a worthwhile model to build from. Give them thoughts of youth and beauty and life. Don’t discourage them with thoughts of age or decay. Age is in no wise necessary. Biologically speaking, there is no reason why your body should not live forever, and remain as youthful and virile as in its prime. Dr. Alexis Carrel has proven this by taking the heart of an embryo chick and keeping it alive and growing indefinitely.

There is only one reason for age. There is only one reason for decay. That is the “letting down” of your cell-workers—the clogging of your pores, the failure to throw off all the wastes and poisons of the body. Keep your cell-workers on the job, and this will never happen to you. Keep them encouraged, uplifted, working on a pattern of youth and virility, and they will build you a body you can be eternally proud of.

If you want help in this, if you believe—as we do—that you get best results by uniting your prayers with those of others, and helping them even as you want them to help you, then every night at ten pause for a few minutes to join with us and other students in the following, which is adapted partly from a prayer given in Unity Weekly:

“I am of God, and God is all good. I am energy, I am strength, I am power, I am filled with omnipotent life. And as I am, so are all those others who are praying now with me to demonstrate life. The vitality of God permeates every fibre of our beings. Grace and poise are ours. We radiate life and love and riches and understanding, and as we give out these, we attract more and more of good to each other and to ourselves. The Spirit of God, which is active in us, flows through our bodies in a purifying, cleansing, healing stream that removes all obstructions and brings peace, health and harmony to our bodies. We are well, strong and vital. We are eternally youthful. We are happy, buoyant, free. We shall arise in the morning filled with energy, radiance, and the power to accomplish whatever we find to do.”

“Love that keeps thee all the day

Care for thee tonight;

Love that drives all care away

Give thee peace and light.

When the darkness seems to hide,

When the shadows fall,

Fear thou not; thou shalt abide

Where His love is all!”

—Ethel B. Cheney