incredible to me that God should have made everything good, and that
the good alone is real, and that evil is unreal, but that we make a
reality of it simply by thinking it real. I think that is what Walter
was trying to make clear to us. To illustrate, if you should receive
word this evening that your brother was killed in a railroad disaster,
you would certainly feel sorrowful, and you would say you felt that
way because your brother was killed. Now if in the morning your brother
should step in the house perfectly well, your sorrow would flee. This
would prove that your sorrow was not caused by the death of your
brother, but simply because you believed him dead; so it was the belief
that caused the sorrow, and not the deed itself." "I can agree with
you in regard to your illustration, for it was the belief of my
brother's death, and not his real death, as he did not die, that made
me sorrowful. But the two cases are not parallel; in the one, nothing
had happened, but in the other there is in reality a sick boy, and not
simply the report of a sick boy."

"Can you not see, James, that if God never made sickness, and He made
all there was made, that sickness could not be a reality? And we could
not be sick in reality. Yet if we thought ourselves sick and believed
what we thought, this would make it seem true to us, though in fact,
it was not true. I believe it is just as Walter put it. If we believe
a falsehood to be the truth, this falsehood, then, seems like the truth
to us. But no matter how often, or how many, believe a lie to be the
truth, it still in fact remains a lie."

"What you say about the lie, wife, is plain, but sickness is not a lie
or a falsehood, it is only too real."

"James, if sin, sickness, and death are real, God must have made them,