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RATIONALE OF SPIRITUAL HEALING 133 is the spiritual side, the immaterial counterpart of the malady. This we take up, as it were, into ourselves, only in a slight degree sensationally, but rather intellectually, in order that as a cause of the disease, it may be remitted or borne away from the patient.
Space is filled with the psychic germs or embryos of things. These are identical with the atoms of Democritus. The general current of the world-life is crowded with the soul-germs of disease, which in their essence are morbid ideas and fallacious beliefs. These are the latent causes, a sort of spiritual bacteria, that may, under certain conditions, find lodgment in men's souls, and germinate, as it were, in the prima materia of the brain, and be thus the fruitful seed of disease, and develop into actuality in the physical body. These morbid ideas, which are the true interior life of disease, are to be taken up, as said before, and borne away from the patient. So when the evil, the morbid idea, the "sin”, that lies at the root of the malady is removed, a vacuum is, as it were, formed, which God and nature are said to abhor, and the opposite good or truth, from a fixed divine law, fow in. A living, life-giving truth cannot be received until the error, the illusion, the "sin" which occupies the mind is removed. Healing, saving truth does not crowd out error or a false belief from the mind, nor neutralize it as an acid combines with an alkali to make. a salt. But when the error or sin is removed, truth spontaneously flows in; when an evil is put
