Three Hebrew boys and thought trends

Much is heard today about medical conditions, including those of a mental nature. It is therefore interesting to read in the very first testimony in Chapter XVIII of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (SH) by Mary Baker Eddy titled Fruitage, that on reading this book the testifier--who was suffering from rheumatic trouble---"realized that the mental condition was what needed correcting, and that the Spirit of truth which inspired this book was [his/her] physician." (Emphasis added.) 

Wondering what sort of mental condition one might need to correct, I found a passage from Eddy's Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896 where she reminds her students about the "animal element ... of ... rivalry, jealousy, envy, revenge ..." (See pp. 280:26–11.)

We may wonder about the mental state of the three Hebrew boys (maybe including being fearless, undaunted, unbowed) and the mental state which surrounded them (authoritative, proscriptive) -- see Daniel 3: 14-27 -- both before and after they emerged unscathed from the king's fiery punishment. 

This reminds me of a passage in Science and Health:

One whom I rescued from seeming spiritual oblivion, in which the senses had engulfed him, wrote to me: “I should have died, but for the glorious Principle you teach, — supporting the power of Mind over the body and showing me the nothingness of the so-called pleasures and pains of sense. The treatises I had read and the medicines I had taken only abandoned me to more hopeless suffering and despair. Adherence to hygiene was useless. Mortal mind needed to be set right. The ailment was not bodily, but mental, and I was cured when I learned my way in Christian Science.”
(Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 382:24)

And so the testifiers we hear from in Fruitage speak of changed mental states, of being lifted into "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev. 21: 1) as was John, exiled on the island of Patmos, but with thought soaring to new realms of freedom from death, sorrow, crying and pain.

Julie Swannell