So it is, by not fastening my faith to a person, I’m fastening my faith to God appearing through or as a person, I can never be disappointed.  Because it isn’t the person I’m expecting anything from, it’s the God.  And I’m recognizing that what was true of the Master is true of every individual.  If I were to speak some good of you, I’d be lying.  Just as if I spoke good of myself, I’d be lying.  I, of myself am nothing; the Father within me is the good.  And so, I impersonalize good by knowing that every individual I contact anywhere on the face of the globe is an instrument through which God is flowing.  Not merely to me—flowing to everybody on this earth.  Sometimes it changes their nature completely, but even when it doesn’t, it changes their nature toward me.  And that leaves room eventually for them to change it toward others.

Now, the importance of this you can see.  You have all had faith perhaps in some government leader, or religious leader, or some man with whom you are in business, or some woman of your acquaintanceship, and probably every one of you has found disappointment and usually in the place where it hurts most.  And that is because you had your faith in man whose breath is in his nostril.  And sooner or later, he exposed his clay feet.  For as human beings, I am nothing.  Therefore, I have clay feet.

Look not to me but to the Father within me, and you’ll never be disappointed in me.  As I look not to you but to the Father within you, I will never be disappointed.  If, on the other hand, I expect anything of even those who have had the most miraculous healings, I can assure you I would have had many sharp disappointments, because it is in the nature of humans to be Judas Iscariot, or doubting Thomas, or denying Peter.  Those aren’t just men of two thousand years ago.  Those are states of human consciousness.   And you’ll meet them wherever you travel, if you are looking for good in man.  But if you look for your good in the grace of God expressing through man, you’ll never know disappointment.  And the few who come your way who do not measure up, you just say pass on brother, sister, you’ll wake up one of these days and find you haven’t cheated me, you have cheated you.

Now, the importance of this in healing work only begins to be apparent when we take up the impersonalization of evil.  For now I can tell you a secret.  No man or woman on the face of the globe has ever been a sinner.  There has never lived a sinner on the face of the globe.  St. Paul rightly discerned the nature of sin when he said, “I don’t sin but I still find a sense of sin in me.”  Sin is a universal thing, and it touches us at some point of our weakness because of our ignorance of its nature.  When you begin to perceive that no man or woman on the face of the globe has ever been a sinner or has ever sinned, although they have at times, and we all have been the outlet through which sin has taken place, you will see that sin is not personal.  It is a universal belief that touches us and usually at the point of our weakness.  It is usually the person who is lacking something that starts stealing.  Later on, it’s the person of greed who starts accumulating unwisely and dishonestly.  It is always at some point of weakness in our own makeup that this universal sense of sin begins to reach.

Now, in our work, we have to deal with sin almost as much as we do with disease, because very often disease is the result of sin.  Not in a direct sense but in the sense of guilt complexes and guilty consciences and fear complexes that have come in.  So actually in our healing work we handle both sin and disease, and we do it in this wise:  by impersonalizing evil.

Now, I’m going to give you a few little examples to show just what I mean.  Probably some of you have studied forms of New Thought, which teach that some wrong mental state has produced the disease.  In other words, perhaps resentment has caused rheumatism or hate or jealousy has caused cancer, and so forth and so forth and so on.  Of course none of this is true, as you will have proven to you in your Infinite Way experience.  But there are teachings that still prolong those things.  And unfortunately materia medica has adopted some of them from the older forms of metaphysics that long since discarded them.

That particular teaching began with Mr. Quimby.  He was the first man who taught that kidney trouble came from jealousy and envy, and cancer came from hate and jealousy, and rheumatism came from resentment and so forth and so forth and so on.  And so in her early ministry, Mrs. Eddy taught that same thing.  And Mrs. Eddy gave out a list of mental causes, specific mental causes for specific physical diseases.

Now some years later, Mrs. Eddy discovered that that was a mistake and that there was no such law, and there was no way to heal through such nonsensical belief.  And so she wrote to all of her students asking that this list be returned to her.  And I guess most of them were.  One man, however, decided he would never part with that list, and he included it in his book.  That was Edward Kimble.  And so that teaching in Christian Science has been perpetuated through what is called the Kimble School, those who studied with Kimble, or who followed Kimble, or believed in Kimble.

Now, when the New Thought Movement began, they had these same lists of Mr. Quimby’s, and so they taught this same thing.  And unfortunately, there are still some of the metaphysical movements that work through those lists.   Needless to say, they’re not known for much healing work.  But they persist in believing that they must be true, because they’ve been handed down for a long time, and they continue to use them.  Now one of the great tragedies is that when psychosomatic medicine was getting its start, somebody found one of those lists of Mrs. Eddy’s and that has become the foundational point of psychosomatic medicine.  And for this reason psychosomatic medicine can still truthfully say, after 40 years, ‘we haven’t healed anyone yet but we think we’re on the right track.’