So long as the former conviction prevails, that disease is somehow a part of Nature, the better life contends with a double difficulty, the existing physical conditions and the false suggestion that the individual must continue to be ill in the nature of things or as the will of Deity.  The false suggestion should be displaced by the affirmation and realization of physical health.  Such a reforming suggestion, made effective by mental realization and proper regimes, tends to counteract the existing effects of previous wrong suggestions and positively to change conditions of ill-health, because fullness and harmony of the three kinds of ether-movements are the designed ideals of our lives and the laws of perfect well-being (what other design can we possibly imagine?), and the good suggestion operates to bring about that ideal.

Let us be rid of the notion that anyone is ill because a Divine Being wants him to be ill.

But we must remember that while these principles cannot be otherwise than true, every individual has behind him, at any present moment, two great forces—­the past of his ancestors and the past of his own life.  Let us be sensible, even while we insist upon truths which are among the most beautiful in the world.  The past means much to all of us.  Such is law.  We cannot get away from law, whatever our theories or religious belief.  To me all Nature’s laws are of the White Life and untellably beneficent.  The idea that law is something hard and disagreeable is itself a false suggestion and a wrong thought.  Law is good.  The law that life is determined more or less by the past is a fine example of this goodness.  If it seems to go against us in some cases, it surely goes for us in assisting a right past to make for a right future.  When it seems to work hardship, the fact is the law is trying to face us about for a right time to come.  That is the meaning of experience:  it is law talking, to us out of our past.  The law that our past and that of our ancestors must be reckoned with in all our efforts to reform the etheric vibrations in our personal fields involves the element of time, which element may be greater than we can control in the material life.  This element of time is important because there is another law, that great real reforms in the individual require effort continued more or less in order that all laws involved may properly and fully operate.  If the person who is a noble self in a weak body could add to his thought-life the sufficiently powerful affirming realization of physical health for himself and live long enough, I certainly believe the suggestion would ultimately prevail.  For I do not for a moment accept disease as a necessary part of human life.  Is disorder in your machinery a part of the machine?  I cannot see how a continuously perfect self, starting with a sound body, could ever come to possess a diseased body.  I must believe that the self, growing to the ideal, may bring into harmony a diseased body,