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+Project Gutenberg's Christian Science, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Christian Science
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: August 19, 2006 [EBook #3187]
+Last Updated: February 24, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTIAN SCIENCE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
+
+by Mark Twain
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+Book I of this volume occupies a quarter or a third of the volume,
+and consists of matter written about four years ago, but not hitherto
+published in book form. It contained errors of judgment and of fact. I
+have now corrected these to the best of my ability and later knowledge.
+
+
+Book II was written at the beginning of 1903, and has not until
+now appeared in any form. In it my purpose has been to present a
+character-portrait of Mrs. Eddy, drawn from her own acts and words
+solely, not from hearsay and rumor; and to explain the nature and scope
+of her Monarchy, as revealed in the Laws by which she governs it, and
+which she wrote herself.
+
+MARK TWAIN
+
+NEW YORK. January, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
+
+     “It is the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that
+     a Voice has gone crashing through space with such
+     placid and complacent confidence and command.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+VIENNA 1899.
+
+This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the
+Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and
+broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was
+found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the
+nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed
+farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning
+little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright colored
+flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room,
+separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the
+front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the
+manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring
+that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables
+a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.
+
+There was a village a mile away, and a horse doctor lived there, but
+there was no surgeon. It seemed a bad outlook; mine was distinctly
+a surgery case. Then it was remembered that a lady from Boston was
+summering in that village, and she was a Christian Science doctor and
+could cure anything. So she was sent for. It was night by this time, and
+she could not conveniently come, but sent word that it was no matter,
+there was no hurry, she would give me “absent treatment” now, and come
+in the morning; meantime she begged me to make myself tranquil and
+comfortable and remember that there was nothing the matter with me. I
+thought there must be some mistake.
+
+“Did you tell her I walked off a cliff seventy-five feet high?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And struck a boulder at the bottom and bounced?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And struck another one and bounced again?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And struck another one and bounced yet again?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And broke the boulders?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“That accounts for it; she is thinking of the boulders. Why didn't you
+tell her I got hurt, too?”
+
+“I did. I told her what you told me to tell her: that you were now
+but an incoherent series of compound fractures extending from your
+scalp-lock to your heels, and that the comminuted projections caused you
+to look like a hat-rack.”
+
+“And it was after this that she wished me to remember that there was
+nothing the matter with me?”
+
+“Those were her words.”
+
+“I do not understand it. I believe she has not diagnosed the case with
+sufficient care. Did she look like a person who was theorizing, or did
+she look like one who has fallen off precipices herself and brings to
+the aid of abstract science the confirmations of personal experience?”
+
+“Bitte?”
+
+It was too large a contract for the Stubenmadchen's vocabulary; she
+couldn't call the hand. I allowed the subject to rest there, and asked
+for something to eat and smoke, and something hot to drink, and a basket
+to pile my legs in; but I could not have any of these things.
+
+“Why?”
+
+“She said you would need nothing at all.”
+
+“But I am hungry and thirsty, and in desperate pain.”
+
+“She said you would have these delusions, but must pay no attention
+to them. She wants you to particularly remember that there are no such
+things as hunger and thirst and pain.''
+
+“She does does she?”
+
+“It is what she said.”
+
+“Does she seem to be in full and functionable possession of her
+intellectual plant, such as it is?”
+
+“Bitte?”
+
+“Do they let her run at large, or do they tie her up?”
+
+“Tie her up?”
+
+“There, good-night, run along, you are a good girl, but your mental
+Geschirr is not arranged for light and airy conversation. Leave me to my
+delusions.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+It was a night of anguish, of course--at least, I supposed it was, for
+it had all the symptoms of it--but it passed at last, and the Christian
+Scientist came, and I was glad She was middle-aged, and large and bony,
+and erect, and had an austere face and a resolute jaw and a Roman beak
+and was a widow in the third degree, and her name was Fuller. I was
+eager to get to business and find relief, but she was distressingly
+deliberate. She unpinned and unhooked and uncoupled her upholsteries one
+by one, abolished the wrinkles with a flirt of her hand, and hung the
+articles up; peeled off her gloves and disposed of them, got a book out
+of her hand-bag, then drew a chair to the bedside, descended into it
+without hurry, and I hung out my tongue. She said, with pity but without
+passion:
+
+“Return it to its receptacle. We deal with the mind only, not with its
+dumb servants.”
+
+I could not offer my pulse, because the connection was broken; but she
+detected the apology before I could word it, and indicated by a negative
+tilt of her head that the pulse was another dumb servant that she had no
+use for. Then I thought I would tell her my symptoms and how I felt, so
+that she would understand the case; but that was another inconsequence,
+she did not need to know those things; moreover, my remark about how I
+felt was an abuse of language, a misapplication of terms.
+
+“One does not feel,” she explained; “there is no such thing as
+feeling: therefore, to speak of a non-existent thing as existent is a
+contradiction. Matter has no existence; nothing exists but mind; the
+mind cannot feel pain, it can only imagine it.”
+
+“But if it hurts, just the same--”
+
+“It doesn't. A thing which is unreal cannot exercise the functions of
+reality. Pain is unreal; hence, pain cannot hurt.”
+
+In making a sweeping gesture to indicate the act of shooing the illusion
+of pain out of the mind, she raked her hand on a pin in her dress, said
+“Ouch!” and went tranquilly on with her talk. “You should never allow
+yourself to speak of how you feel, nor permit others to ask you how
+you are feeling; you should never concede that you are ill, nor permit
+others to talk about disease or pain or death or similar nonexistences
+in your presence. Such talk only encourages the mind to continue its
+empty imaginings.” Just at that point the Stuben-madchen trod on the
+cat's tail, and the cat let fly a frenzy of cat-profanity. I asked, with
+caution:
+
+“Is a cat's opinion about pain valuable?”
+
+“A cat has no opinion; opinions proceed from mind only; the lower
+animals, being eternally perishable, have not been granted mind; without
+mind, opinion is impossible.”
+
+“She merely imagined she felt a pain--the cat?”
+
+“She cannot imagine a pain, for imagining is an effect of mind; without
+mind, there is no imagination. A cat has no imagination.”
+
+“Then she had a real pain?”
+
+“I have already told you there is no such thing as real pain.”
+
+“It is strange and interesting. I do wonder what was the matter with
+the cat. Because, there being no such thing as a real pain, and she not
+being able to imagine an imaginary one, it would seem that God in His
+pity has compensated the cat with some kind of a mysterious emotion
+usable when her tail is trodden on which, for the moment, joins cat and
+Christian in one common brotherhood of--”
+
+She broke in with an irritated--
+
+“Peace! The cat feels nothing, the Christian feels nothing. Your empty
+and foolish imaginings are profanation and blasphemy, and can do you an
+injury. It is wiser and better and holier to recognize and confess that
+there is no such thing as disease or pain or death.”
+
+“I am full of imaginary tortures,” I said, “but I do not think I could
+be any more uncomfortable if they were real ones. What must I do to get
+rid of them?”
+
+“There is no occasion to get rid of them since they do not exist. They
+are illusions propagated by matter, and matter has no existence; there
+is no such thing as matter.”
+
+“It sounds right and clear, but yet it seems in a degree elusive; it
+seems to slip through, just when you think you are getting a grip on
+it.”
+
+“Explain.”
+
+“Well, for instance: if there is no such thing as matter, how can matter
+propagate things?”
+
+In her compassion she almost smiled. She would have smiled if there were
+any such thing as a smile.
+
+“It is quite simple,” she said; “the fundamental propositions of
+Christian Science explain it, and they are summarized in the four
+following self-evident propositions: 1. God is All in all. 2. God is
+good. Good is Mind 3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter 4. Life,
+God, omnipotent Good, deny death, evil, sin, disease.
+
+“There--now you see.”
+
+It seemed nebulous; it did not seem to say anything about the difficulty
+in hand--how non-existent matter can propagate illusions I said, with
+some hesitancy:
+
+“Does--does it explain?”
+
+“Doesn't it? Even if read backward it will do it.”
+
+With a budding hope, I asked her to do it backwards.
+
+“Very well. Disease sin evil death deny Good omnipotent God life matter
+is nothing all being Spirit God Mind is Good good is God all in All is
+God. There do you understand now?
+
+“It--it--well, it is plainer than it was before; still--”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Could you try it some more ways?”
+
+“As many as you like; it always means the same. Interchanged in any way
+you please it cannot be made to mean anything different from what it
+means when put in any other way. Because it is perfect. You can jumble
+it all up, and it makes no difference: it always comes out the way it
+was before. It was a marvelous mind that produced it. As a mental tour
+de force it is without a mate, it defies alike the simple, the concrete,
+and the occult.”
+
+“It seems to be a corker.”
+
+I blushed for the word, but it was out before I could stop it.
+
+“A what?”
+
+“A--wonderful structure--combination, so to speak, of profound
+thoughts--unthinkable ones--um--”
+
+“It is true. Read backward, or forward, or perpendicularly, or at any
+given angle, these four propositions will always be found to agree in
+statement and proof.”
+
+“Ah--proof. Now we are coming at it. The statements agree; they agree
+with--with--anyway, they agree; I noticed that; but what is it they
+prove I mean, in particular?”
+
+“Why, nothing could be clearer. They prove:
+
+“1. GOD--Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind. Do you get
+that?”
+
+“I--well, I seem to. Go on, please.”
+
+“2. MAN--God's universal idea, individual, perfect, eternal. Is it
+clear?”
+
+“It--I think so. Continue.”
+
+“3. IDEA--An image in Mind; the immediate object of understanding. There
+it is--the whole sublime Arcana of Christian Science in a nutshell. Do
+you find a weak place in it anywhere?”
+
+“Well--no; it seems strong.”
+
+“Very well There is more. Those three constitute the Scientific
+Definition of Immortal Mind. Next, we have the Scientific Definition
+of Mortal Mind. Thus. FIRST DEGREE: Depravity I. Physical-Passions and
+appetites, fear, depraved will, pride, envy, deceit, hatred, revenge,
+sin, disease, death.”
+
+“Phantasms, madam--unrealities, as I understand it.”
+
+“Every one. SECOND DEGREE: Evil Disappearing. I. Moral-Honesty,
+affection, compassion, hope, faith, meekness, temperance. Is it clear?”
+
+“Crystal.”
+
+“THIRD DEGREE: Spiritual Salvation. I. Spiritual-Faith, wisdom, power,
+purity, understanding, health, love. You see how searchingly and
+co-ordinately interdependent and anthropomorphous it all is. In this
+Third Degree, as we know by the revelations of Christian Science, mortal
+mind disappears.”
+
+“Not earlier?”
+
+“No, not until the teaching and preparation for the Third Degree are
+completed.”
+
+“It is not until then that one is enabled to take hold of Christian
+Science effectively, and with the right sense of sympathy and kinship,
+as I understand you. That is to say, it could not succeed during the
+processes of the Second Degree, because there would still be remains
+of mind left; and therefore--but I interrupted you. You were about
+to further explain the good results proceeding from the erosions and
+disintegrations effected by the Third Degree. It is very interesting; go
+on, please.”
+
+“Yes, as I was saying, in this Third Degree mortal mind disappears.
+Science so reverses the evidence before the corporeal human senses as
+to make this scriptural testimony true in our hearts, 'the last shall
+be first and the first shall be last,' that God and His idea may be to
+us--what divinity really is, and must of necessity be all-inclusive.”
+
+“It is beautiful. And with what exhaustive exactness your choice and
+arrangement of words confirm and establish what you have claimed for
+the powers and functions of the Third Degree. The Second could probably
+produce only temporary absence of mind; it is reserved to the Third to
+make it permanent. A sentence framed under the auspices of the
+Second could have a kind of meaning--a sort of deceptive semblance of
+it--whereas it is only under the magic of the Third that that defect
+would disappear. Also, without doubt, it is the Third Degree that
+contributes another remarkable specialty to Christian Science--viz.,
+ease and flow and lavishness of words, and rhythm and swing and
+smoothness. There must be a special reason for this?”
+
+“Yes--God--all, all--God, good God, non-Matter, Matteration, Spirit,
+Bones, Truth.”
+
+“That explains it.”
+
+“There is nothing in Christian Science that is not explicable; for God
+is one, Time is one, Individuality is one, and may be one of a series,
+one of many, as an individual man, individual horse; whereas God is one,
+not one of a series, but one alone and without an equal.”
+
+“These are noble thoughts. They make one burn to know more. How does
+Christian Science explain the spiritual relation of systematic duality
+to incidental deflection?”
+
+“Christian Science reverses the seeming relation of Soul and body--as
+astronomy reverses the human perception of the movement of the solar
+system--and makes body tributary to the Mind. As it is the earth which
+is in motion, While the sun is at rest, though in viewing the sun rise
+one finds it impossible to believe the sun not to be really rising, so
+the body is but the humble servant of the restful Mind, though it seems
+otherwise to finite sense; but we shall never understand this while we
+admit that soul is in body, or mind in matter, and that man is included
+in non-intelligence. Soul is God, unchangeable and eternal; and man
+coexists with and reflects Soul, for the All-in-all is the Altogether,
+and the Altogether embraces the All-one, Soul-Mind, Mind-Soul, Love,
+Spirit, Bones, Liver, one of a series, alone and without an equal.”
+
+“What is the origin of Christian Science? Is it a gift of God, or did it
+just happen?”
+
+“In a sense, it is a gift of God. That is to say, its powers are from
+Him, but the credit of the discovery of the powers and what they are for
+is due to an American lady.”
+
+“Indeed? When did this occur?”
+
+“In 1866. That is the immortal date when pain and disease and death
+disappeared from the earth to return no more forever. That is, the
+fancies for which those terms stand disappeared. The things themselves
+had never existed; therefore, as soon as it was perceived that there
+were no such things, they were easily banished. The history and nature
+of the great discovery are set down in the book here, and--”
+
+“Did the lady write the book?”
+
+“Yes, she wrote it all, herself. The title is Science and Health, with
+Key to the Scriptures--for she explains the Scriptures; they were not
+understood before. Not even by the twelve Disciples. She begins thus--I
+will read it to you.”
+
+But she had forgotten to bring her glasses.
+
+“Well, it is no matter,” she said. “I remember the words--indeed, all
+Christian Scientists know the book by heart; it is necessary in our
+practice. We should otherwise make mistakes and do harm. She begins
+thus: 'In the year 1866 I discovered the Science of Metaphysical
+Healing, and named it Christian Science.' And She says quite
+beautifully, I think--'Through Christian Science, religion and medicine
+are inspired with a diviner nature and essence, fresh pinions are
+given to faith and understanding, and thoughts acquaint themselves
+intelligently with God.' Her very words.”
+
+“It is elegant. And it is a fine thought, too--marrying religion to
+medicine, instead of medicine to the undertaker in the old way; for
+religion and medicine properly belong together, they being the basis of
+all spiritual and physical health. What kind of medicine do you give for
+the ordinary diseases, such as--”
+
+“We never give medicine in any circumstances whatever! We--”
+
+“But, madam, it says--”
+
+“I don't care what it says, and I don't wish to talk about it.”
+
+“I am sorry if I have offended, but you see the mention seemed in some
+way inconsistent, and--”
+
+“There are no inconsistencies in Christian Science. The thing is
+impossible, for the Science is absolute. It cannot be otherwise, since
+it proceeds directly from the All-in-all and the Everything-in-Which,
+also Soul, Bones, Truth, one of a series, alone and without equal. It is
+Mathematics purified from material dross and made spiritual.”
+
+“I can see that, but--”
+
+“It rests upon the immovable basis of an Apodictical Principle.”
+
+The word flattened itself against my mind in trying to get in, and
+disordered me a little, and before I could inquire into its pertinency,
+she was already throwing the needed light:
+
+“This Apodictical Principle is the absolute Principle of Scientific
+Mind-healing, the sovereign Omnipotence which delivers the children of
+men from pain, disease, decay, and every ill that flesh is heir to.”
+
+“Surely not every ill, every decay?”
+
+“Every one; there are no exceptions; there is no such thing as decay--it
+is an unreality, it has no existence.”
+
+“But without your glasses your failing eyesight does not permit you
+to--”
+
+“My eyesight cannot fail; nothing can fail; the Mind is master, and the
+Mind permits no retrogression.”
+
+She was under the inspiration of the Third Degree, therefore there could
+be no profit in continuing this part of the subject. I shifted to other
+ground and inquired further concerning the Discoverer of the Science.
+
+“Did the discovery come suddenly, like Klondike, or after long study and
+calculation, like America?”
+
+“The comparisons are not respectful, since they refer to
+trivialities--but let it pass. I will answer in the Discoverer's own
+words: 'God had been graciously fitting me, during many years, for the
+reception of a final revelation of the absolute Principle of Scientific
+Mind-healing.'”
+
+“Many years. How many?”
+
+“Eighteen centuries!”
+
+“All--God, God--good, good--God, Truth, Bones, Liver, one of a series,
+alone and without equal--it is amazing!”
+
+“You may well say it, sir. Yet it is but the truth This American lady,
+our revered and sacred Founder, is distinctly referred to, and her
+coming prophesied, in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse; she could
+not have been more plainly indicated by St. John without actually
+mentioning her name.”
+
+“How strange, how wonderful!”
+
+“I will quote her own words, from her Key to the Scriptures: 'The
+twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse has a special suggestiveness in
+connection with this nineteenth century.' There--do you note that?
+Think--note it well.”
+
+
+“But--what does it mean?”
+
+“Listen, and you will know. I quote her inspired words again: 'In the
+opening of the Sixth Seal, typical of six thousand years since Adam,
+there is one distinctive feature which has special reference to the
+present age. Thus:
+
+“'Revelation xii. I. And there appeared a great wonder in heaven--a
+woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her
+head a crown of twelve stars.'
+
+“That is our Head, our Chief, our Discoverer of Christian
+Science--nothing can be plainer, nothing surer. And note this:
+
+“'Revelation xii. 6. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she
+had a place prepared of God.'
+
+“That is Boston. I recognize it, madam. These are sublime things, and
+impressive; I never understood these passages before; please go on with
+the--with the--proofs.”
+
+“Very well. Listen:
+
+“'And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a
+cloud; and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the
+sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. And he held in his hand a little
+book.'
+
+“A little book, merely a little book--could words be modester? Yet how
+stupendous its importance! Do you know what book that was?”
+
+“Was it--”
+
+“I hold it in my hand--Christian Science!”
+
+“Love, Livers, Lights, Bones, Truth, Kidneys, one of a series, alone and
+without equal--it is beyond imagination for wonder!”
+
+“Hear our Founder's eloquent words: 'Then will a voice from harmony cry,
+“Go and take the little book: take it and eat it up, and it shall make
+thy belly bitter; but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.”
+ Mortal, obey the heavenly evangel. Take up Divine Science. Read it from
+beginning to end. Study it, ponder it. It will be, indeed, sweet at its
+first taste, when it heals you; but murmur not over Truth, if you find
+its digestion bitter.' You now know the history of our dear and holy
+Science, sir, and that its origin is not of this earth, but only its
+discovery. I will leave the book with you and will go, now; but give
+yourself no uneasiness--I will give you absent treatment from now till I
+go to bed.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Under the powerful influence of the near treatment and the absent
+treatment together, my bones were gradually retreating inward and
+disappearing from view. The good work took a brisk start, now, and went
+on swiftly. My body was diligently straining and stretching, this way
+and that, to accommodate the processes of restoration, and every minute
+or two I heard a dull click inside and knew that the two ends of
+a fracture had been successfully joined. This muffled clicking and
+gritting and grinding and rasping continued during the next three
+hours, and then stopped--the connections had all been made. All except
+dislocations; there were only seven of these: hips, shoulders, knees,
+neck; so that was soon over; one after another they slipped into their
+sockets with a sound like pulling a distant cork, and I jumped up as
+good as new, as to framework, and sent for the horse-doctor.
+
+I was obliged to do this because I had a stomach-ache and a cold in
+the head, and I was not willing to trust these things any longer in the
+hands of a woman whom I did not know, and whose ability to successfully
+treat mere disease I had lost all confidence. My position was justified
+by the fact that the cold and the ache had been in her charge from the
+first, along with the fractures, but had experienced not a shade of
+relief; and, indeed, the ache was even growing worse and worse, and more
+and more bitter, now, probably on account of the protracted abstention
+from food and drink.
+
+The horse-doctor came, a pleasant man and full of hope and professional
+interest in the case. In the matter of smell he was pretty aromatic--in
+fact, quite horsy--and I tried to arrange with him for absent treatment,
+but it was not in his line, so, out of delicacy, I did not press it.
+He looked at my teeth and examined my hock, and said my age and general
+condition were favorable to energetic measures; therefore he would give
+me something to turn the stomach-ache into the botts and the cold in
+the head into the blind staggers; then he should be on his own beat
+and would know what to do. He made up a bucket of bran-mash, and said
+a dipperful of it every two hours, alternated with a drench with
+turpentine and axle-grease in it, would either knock my ailments out of
+me in twenty-four hours, or so interest me in other ways as to make me
+forget they were on the premises. He administered my first dose himself,
+then took his leave, saying I was free to eat and drink anything I
+pleased and in any quantity I liked. But I was not hungry any more, and
+did not care for food.
+
+I took up the Christian Science book and read half of it, then took a
+dipperful of drench and read the other half. The resulting experiences
+were full of interest and adventure. All through the rumblings and
+grindings and quakings and effervescings accompanying the evolution of
+the ache into the botts and the cold into the blind staggers I could
+note the generous struggle for mastery going on between the mash and the
+drench and the literature; and often I could tell which was ahead, and
+could easily distinguish the literature from the others when the others
+were separate, though not when they were mixed; for when a bran-mash
+and an eclectic drench are mixed together they look just like the
+Apodictical Principle out on a lark, and no one can tell it from that.
+The finish was reached at last, the evolutions were complete, and a
+fine success, but I think that this result could have been achieved with
+fewer materials. I believe the mash was necessary to the conversion of
+the stomach-ache into the botts, but I think one could develop the blind
+staggers out of the literature by itself; also, that blind staggers
+produced in this way would be of a better quality and more lasting than
+any produced by the artificial processes of the horse-doctor.
+
+For of all the strange and frantic and incomprehensible and
+uninterpretable books which the imagination of man has created, surely
+this one is the prize sample. It is written with a limitless confidence
+and complacency, and with a dash and stir and earnestness which often
+compel the effects of eloquence, even when the words do not seem to
+have any traceable meaning. There are plenty of people who imagine they
+understand the book; I know this, for I have talked with them; but in
+all cases they were people who also imagined that there were no such
+things as pain, sickness, and death, and no realities in the world;
+nothing actually existent but Mind. It seems to me to modify the value
+of their testimony. When these people talk about Christian Science
+they do as Mrs. Fuller did: they do not use their own language, but the
+book's; they pour out the book's showy incoherences, and leave you to
+find out later that they were not originating, but merely quoting;
+they seem to know the volume by heart, and to revere it as they would
+a Bible--another Bible, perhaps I ought to say. Plainly the book was
+written under the mental desolations of the Third Degree, and I feel
+sure that none but the membership of that Degree can discover meanings
+in it. When you read it you seem to be listening to a lively and
+aggressive and oracular speech delivered in an unknown tongue, a speech
+whose spirit you get but not the particulars; or, to change the figure,
+you seem to be listening to a vigorous instrument which is making a
+noise which it thinks is a tune, but which, to persons not members of
+the band, is only the martial tooting of a trombone, and merrily stirs
+the soul through the noise, but does not convey a meaning.
+
+The book's serenities of self-satisfaction do almost seem to smack of
+a heavenly origin--they have no blood-kin in the earth. It is more than
+human to be so placidly certain about things, and so finely superior,
+and so airily content with one's performance. Without ever presenting
+anything which may rightfully be called by the strong name of Evidence,
+and sometimes without even mentioning a reason for a deduction at all,
+it thunders out the startling words, “I have Proved” so and so. It takes
+the Pope and all the great guns of his Church in battery assembled to
+authoritatively settle and establish the meaning of a sole and single
+unclarified passage of Scripture, and this at vast cost of time and
+study and reflection, but the author of this work is superior to all
+that: she finds the whole Bible in an unclarified audition, and at small
+expense of time and no expense of mental effort she clarifies it from
+lid to lid, reorganizes and improves the meanings, then authoritatively
+settles and establishes them with formulas which you cannot tell from
+“Let there be light!” and “Here you have it!” It is the first time since
+the dawn-days of Creation that a Voice has gone crashing through space
+with such placid and complacent confidence and command.
+
+[January, 1903. The first reading of any book whose terminology is
+new and strange is nearly sure to leave the reader in a bewildered and
+sarcastic state of mind. But now that, during the past two months,
+I have, by diligence gained a fair acquaintanceship with Science and
+Health technicalities, I no longer find the bulk of that work hard to
+understand.--M. T.]
+
+P.S. The wisdom harvested from the foregoing thoughts has already done
+me a service and saved me a sorrow. Nearly a month ago there came to me
+from one of the universities a tract by Dr. Edward Anthony Spitzka on
+the “Encephalic Anatomy of the Races.” I judged that my opinion was
+desired by the university, and I was greatly pleased with this attention
+and wrote and said I would furnish it as soon as I could. That night
+I put my plodding and disheartening Christian Science mining aside and
+took hold of the matter. I wrote an eager chapter, and was expecting to
+finish my opinion the next day, but was called away for a week, and my
+mind was soon charged with other interests. It was not until to-day,
+after the lapse of nearly a month, that I happened upon my Encephalic
+chapter again. Meantime, the new wisdom had come to me, and I read it
+with shame. I recognized that I had entered upon that work in far from
+the right temper--far from the respectful and judicial spirit which was
+its due of reverence. I had begun upon it with the following paragraph
+for fuel:
+
+“FISSURES OF THE PARIETAL AND OCCIPITAL LOBES (LATERAL SURFACE).--The
+Postcentral Fissural Complex--In this hemicerebrum, the postcentral and
+subcentral are combined to form a continuous fissure, attaining a length
+of 8.5 cm. Dorsally, the fissure bifurcates, embracing the gyre
+indented by the caudal limb of the paracentral. The caudal limb of the
+postcentral is joined by a transparietal piece. In all, five additional
+rami spring from the combined fissure. A vadum separates it from the
+parietal; another from the central.”
+
+It humiliates me, now, to see how angry I got over that; and how
+scornful. I said that the style was disgraceful; that it was labored and
+tumultuous, and in places violent, that the treatment was involved and
+erratic, and almost, as a rule, bewildering; that to lack of simplicity
+was added a lack of vocabulary; that there was quite too much feeling
+shown; that if I had a dog that would get so excited and incoherent over
+a tranquil subject like Encephalic Anatomy I would not pay his tax; and
+at that point I got excited myself and spoke bitterly of these mongrel
+insanities, and said a person might as well try to understand Science
+and Health.
+
+[I know, now, where the trouble was, and am glad of the interruption
+that saved me from sending my verdict to the university. It makes me
+cold to think what those people might have thought of me.--M. T.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+No one doubts--certainly not I--that the mind exercises a powerful
+influence over the body. From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the
+interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack,
+the wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the
+hypnotist have made use of the client's imagination to help them in
+their work. They have all recognized the potency and availability of
+that force. Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know
+that where the disease is only a fancy, the patient's confidence in the
+doctor will make the bread pill effective.
+
+Faith in the doctor. Perhaps that is the entire thing. It seems to look
+like it. In old times the King cured the king's evil by the touch of the
+royal hand. He frequently made extraordinary cures. Could his footman
+have done it? No--not in his own clothes. Disguised as the King, could
+he have done it? I think we may not doubt it. I think we may feel sure
+that it was not the King's touch that made the cure in any instance,
+but the patient's faith in the efficacy of a King's touch. Genuine and
+remarkable cures have been achieved through contact with the relics of a
+saint. Is it not likely that any other bones would have done as well if
+the substitution had been concealed from the patient? When I was a boy a
+farmer's wife who lived five miles from our village had great fame as
+a faith-doctor--that was what she called herself. Sufferers came to
+her from all around, and she laid her hand upon them and said, “Have
+faith--it is all that is necessary,” and they went away well of their
+ailments. She was not a religious woman, and pretended to no occult
+powers. She said that the patient's faith in her did the work. Several
+times I saw her make immediate cures of severe toothaches. My mother was
+the patient. In Austria there is a peasant who drives a great trade in
+this sort of industry, and has both the high and the low for patients.
+He gets into prison every now and then for practising without a diploma,
+but his business is as brisk as ever when he gets out, for his work
+is unquestionably successful and keeps his reputation high. In Bavaria
+there is a man who performed so many great cures that he had to retire
+from his profession of stage-carpentering in order to meet the demand
+of his constantly increasing body of customers. He goes on from year
+to year doing his miracles, and has become very rich. He pretends to no
+religious helps, no supernatural aids, but thinks there is something in
+his make-up which inspires the confidence of his patients, and that it
+is this confidence which does the work, and not some mysterious power
+issuing from himself.
+
+Within the last quarter of a century, in America, several sects of
+curers have appeared under various names and have done notable things in
+the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines. There are the
+Mind Cure the Faith Cure, the Prayer Cure, the Mental Science Cure, and
+the Christian-Science Cure; and apparently they all do their miracles
+with the same old, powerful instrument--the patient's imagination.
+Differing names, but no difference in the process. But they do not give
+that instrument the credit; each sect claims that its way differs from
+the ways of the others.
+
+They all achieve some cures, there is no question about it; and the
+Faith Cure and the Prayer Cure probably do no harm when they do no good,
+since they do not forbid the patient to help out the cure with medicines
+if he wants to; but the others bar medicines, and claim ability to cure
+every conceivable human ailment through the application of their mental
+forces alone. There would seem to be an element of danger here. It has
+the look of claiming too much, I think. Public confidence would probably
+be increased if less were claimed.
+
+The Christian Scientist was not able to cure my stomach-ache and my
+cold; but the horse-doctor did it. This convinces me that Christian
+Science claims too much. In my opinion it ought to let diseases alone
+and confine itself to surgery. There it would have everything its own
+way.
+
+The horse-doctor charged me thirty kreutzers, and I paid him; in fact,
+I doubled it and gave him a shilling. Mrs. Fuller brought in an itemized
+bill for a crate of broken bones mended in two hundred and thirty-four
+places--one dollar per fracture.
+
+“Nothing exists but Mind?”
+
+“Nothing,” she answered. “All else is substanceless, all else is
+imaginary.”
+
+I gave her an imaginary check, and now she is suing me for substantial
+dollars. It looks inconsistent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to
+each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple
+many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties
+and obscurities now.
+
+Those of us who are not in the asylum, and not demonstrably due there,
+are nevertheless, no doubt, insane in one or two particulars. I think
+we must admit this; but I think that we are otherwise healthy-minded.
+I think that when we all see one thing alike, it is evidence that, as
+regards that one thing, our minds are perfectly sound. Now there are
+really several things which we do all see alike; things which we all
+accept, and about which we do not dispute. For instance, we who are
+outside of the asylum all agree that water seeks its level; that the
+sun gives light and heat; that fire consumes; that fog is damp; that six
+times six are thirty-six, that two from ten leaves eight; that eight
+and seven are fifteen. These are, perhaps, the only things we are agreed
+about; but, although they are so few, they are of inestimable value,
+because they make an infallible standard of sanity. Whosoever accepts
+them him we know to be substantially sane; sufficiently sane; in the
+working essentials, sane. Whoever disputes a single one of them him we
+know to be wholly insane, and qualified for the asylum.
+
+Very well, the man who disputes none of them we concede to be entitled
+to go at large. But that is concession enough. We cannot go any further
+than that; for we know that in all matters of mere opinion that same man
+is insane--just as insane as we are; just as insane as Shakespeare was.
+We know exactly where to put our finger upon his insanity: it is where
+his opinion differs from ours.
+
+That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful
+and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any
+question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious
+matters. When a thoughtful and unblessed Mohammedan examines the
+Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am
+spiritually insane. I cannot prove to him that he is insane, because
+you never can prove anything to a lunatic--for that is a part of his
+insanity and the evidence of it. He cannot prove to me that I am insane,
+for my mind has the same defect that afflicts his. All Democrats are
+insane, but not one of them knows it; none but the Republicans and
+Mugwumps know it. All the Republicans are insane, but only the Democrats
+and Mugwumps can perceive it. The rule is perfect: in all matters of
+opinion our adversaries are insane. When I look around me, I am often
+troubled to see how many people are mad. To mention only a few:
+
+The Atheist, The Theosophists, The Infidel, The Swedenborgians, The
+Agnostic, The Shakers, The Baptist, The Millerites, The Methodist, The
+Mormons, The Christian Scientist, The Laurence Oliphant Harrisites, The
+Catholic, and the 115 Christian sects, the Presbyterian excepted,
+The Grand Lama's people, The Monarchists, The Imperialists, The 72
+Mohammedan sects, The Democrats, The Republicans (but not the
+Mugwumps), The Buddhist, The Blavatsky-Buddhist, The Mind-Curists, The
+Faith-Curists, The Nationalist, The Mental Scientists, The Confucian,
+The Spiritualist, The Allopaths, The 2000 East Indian sects, The
+Homeopaths, The Electropaths, The Peculiar People, The--
+
+But there's no end to the list; there are millions of them! And all
+insane; each in his own way; insane as to his pet fad or opinion,
+but otherwise sane and rational. This should move us to be charitable
+towards one another's lunacies. I recognize that in his special belief
+the Christian Scientist is insane, because he does not believe as I
+do; but I hail him as my mate and fellow, because I am as insane as he
+insane from his point of view, and his point of view is as authoritative
+as mine and worth as much. That is to say, worth a brass farthing. Upon
+a great religious or political question, the opinion of the dullest head
+in the world is worth the same as the opinion of the brightest head in
+the world--a brass farthing. How do we arrive at this? It is simple.
+The affirmative opinion of a stupid man is neutralized by the negative
+opinion of his stupid neighbor no decision is reached; the affirmative
+opinion of the intellectual giant Gladstone is neutralized by the
+negative opinion of the intellectual giant Newman--no decision is
+reached. Opinions that prove nothing are, of course, without value any
+but a dead person knows that much. This obliges us to admit the truth
+of the unpalatable proposition just mentioned above--that, in disputed
+matters political and religious, one man's opinion is worth no more than
+his peer's, and hence it followers that no man's opinion possesses any
+real value. It is a humbling thought, but there is no way to get around
+it: all opinions upon these great subjects are brass-farthing opinions.
+
+It is a mere plain, simple fact--as clear and as certain as that eight
+and seven make fifteen. And by it we recognize that we are all insane,
+as concerns those matters. If we were sane, we should all see a
+political or religious doctrine alike; there would be no dispute: it
+would be a case of eight and seven--just as it is in heaven, where all
+are sane and none insane. There there is but one religion, one belief;
+the harmony is perfect; there is never a discordant note.
+
+Under protection of these preliminaries, I suppose I may now repeat
+without offence that the Christian Scientist is insane. I mean him
+no discourtesy, and I am not charging--nor even imagining--that he
+is insaner than the rest of the human race. I think he is more
+picturesquely insane than some of us. At the same time, I am quite sure
+that in one important and splendid particular he is much saner than is
+the vast bulk of the race.
+
+Why is he insane? I told you before: it is because his opinions are not
+ours. I know of no other reason, and I do not need any other; it is the
+only way we have of discovering insanity when it is not violent. It
+is merely the picturesqueness of his insanity that makes it more
+interesting than my kind or yours. For instance, consider his “little
+book”; the “little book” exposed in the sky eighteen centuries ago by
+the flaming angel of the Apocalypse, and handed down in our day to Mrs.
+Mary Baker G. Eddy, of New Hampshire, and translated by her, word for
+word, into English (with help of a polisher), and now published and
+distributed in hundreds of editions by her at a clear profit per volume,
+above cost, of seven hundred per cent.!--a profit which distinctly
+belongs to the angel of the Apocalypse, and let him collect it if he
+can; a “little book” which the C.S. very frequently calls by just that
+name, and always enclosed in quotation-marks to keep its high origin
+exultantly in mind; a “little book” which “explains” and reconstructs
+and new-paints and decorates the Bible, and puts a mansard roof on it
+and a lightning-rod and all the other modern improvements; a “little
+book” which for the present affects to travel in yoke with the Bible and
+be friendly to it, and within half a century will hitch the Bible in the
+rear and thenceforth travel tandem, itself in the lead, in the coming
+great march of Christian Scientism through the Protestant dominions of
+the planet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+“Hungry ones throng to hear the Bible read in connection with the
+text-book of Christian Science, Science and Health, with Key to the
+Scriptures, by Mary Baker G. Eddy. These are our only preachers. They
+are the word of God.” “Christian Science Journal”, October, 1898.
+
+Is that picturesque? A lady has told me that in a chapel of the Mosque
+in Boston there is a picture or image of Mrs. Eddy, and that before it
+burns a never-extinguished light. Is that picturesque? How long do you
+think it will be before the Christian Scientist will be worshipping that
+picture or image and praying to it? How long do you think it will
+be before it is claimed that Mrs. Eddy is a Redeemer, a Christ, and
+Christ's equal? Already her army of disciples speak of her reverently as
+“Our Mother.”
+
+How long will it be before they place her on the steps of the Throne
+beside the Virgin--and, later, a step higher? First, Mary the Virgin and
+Mary the Matron; later, with a change of precedence, Mary the Matron
+and Mary the Virgin. Let the artist get ready with his canvas and his
+brushes; the new Renaissance is on its way, and there will be money in
+altar-canvases--a thousand times as much as the Popes and their Church
+ever spent on the Old Masters; for their riches were poverty as
+compared with what is going to pour into the treasure-chest of the
+Christian-Scientist Papacy by-and-by, let us not doubt it. We will
+examine the financial outlook presently and see what it promises. A
+favorite subject of the new Old Master will be the first verse of the
+twelfth chapter of Revelation--a verse which Mrs. Eddy says (in her
+Annex to the Scriptures) has “one distinctive feature which has special
+reference to the present age”--and to her, as is rather pointedly
+indicated:
+
+“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the
+sun, and the moon under her feet,” etc.
+
+The woman clothed with the sun will be a portrait of Mrs. Eddy.
+
+Is it insanity to believe that Christian-Scientism is destined to make
+the most formidable show that any new religion has made in the world
+since the birth and spread of Mohammedanism, and that within a century
+from now it may stand second to Rome only, in numbers and power in
+Christendom?
+
+If this is a wild dream it will not be easy to prove it so just yet, I
+think. There seems argument that it may come true. The Christian-Science
+“boom,” proper, is not yet five years old; yet already it has two
+hundred and fifty churches.
+
+It has its start, you see, and it is a phenomenally good one. Moreover,
+it is latterly spreading with a constantly accelerating swiftness. It
+has a better chance to grow and prosper and achieve permanency than any
+other existing “ism”; for it has more to offer than any other. The past
+teaches us that in order to succeed, a movement like this must not be
+a mere philosophy, it must be a religion; also, that it must not claim
+entire originality, but content itself with passing for an improvement
+on an existing religion, and show its hand later, when strong and
+prosperous--like Mohammedanism.
+
+Next, there must be money--and plenty of it.
+
+Next, the power and authority and capital must be concentrated in the
+grip of a small and irresponsible clique, with nobody outside privileged
+to ask questions or find fault.
+
+Next, as before remarked, it must bait its hook with some new and
+attractive advantages over the baits offered by its competitors. A new
+movement equipped with some of these endowments--like spiritualism, for
+instance may count upon a considerable success; a new movement equipped
+with the bulk of them--like Mohammedanism, for instance--may count upon
+a widely extended conquest. Mormonism had all the requisites but one it
+had nothing new and nothing valuable to bait with. Spiritualism lacked
+the important detail of concentration of money and authority in the
+hands of an irresponsible clique.
+
+The above equipment is excellent, admirable, powerful, but not perfect.
+There is yet another detail which is worth the whole of it put together
+and more; a detail which has never been joined (in the beginning of
+a religious movement) to a supremely good working equipment since the
+world began, until now: a new personage to worship. Christianity had
+the Saviour, but at first and for generations it lacked money and
+concentrated power. In Mrs. Eddy, Christian Science possesses the new
+personage for worship, and in addition--here in the very beginning--a
+working equipment that has not a flaw in it. In the beginning,
+Mohammedanism had no money; and it has never had anything to offer its
+client but heaven--nothing here below that was valuable. In addition to
+heaven hereafter, Christian Science has present health and a cheerful
+spirit to offer; and in comparison with this bribe all other this-world
+bribes are poor and cheap. You recognize that this estimate is
+admissible, do you not?
+
+To whom does Bellamy's “Nationalism” appeal? Necessarily to the few:
+people who read and dream, and are compassionate, and troubled for the
+poor and the hard-driven. To whom does Spiritualism appeal? Necessarily
+to the few; its “boom” has lasted for half a century, and I believe it
+claims short of four millions of adherents in America. Who are attracted
+by Swedenborgianism and some of the other fine and delicate “isms”? The
+few again: educated people, sensitively organized, with superior mental
+endowments, who seek lofty planes of thought and find their contentment
+there. And who are attracted by Christian Science? There is no limit;
+its field is horizonless; its appeal is as universal as is the appeal
+of Christianity itself. It appeals to the rich, the poor, the high, the
+low, the cultured, the ignorant, the gifted, the stupid, the modest,
+the vain, the wise, the silly, the soldier, the civilian, the hero, the
+coward, the idler, the worker, the godly, the godless, the freeman, the
+slave, the adult, the child; they who are ailing in body or mind,
+they who have friends that are ailing in body or mind. To mass it in a
+phrase, its clientage is the Human Race. Will it march? I think so.
+
+Remember its principal great offer: to rid the Race of pain and disease.
+Can it do so? In large measure, yes. How much of the pain and disease in
+the world is created by the imaginations of the sufferers, and then kept
+alive by those same imaginations? Four-fifths? Not anything short of
+that, I should think. Can Christian Science banish that four-fifths? I
+think so. Can any other (organized) force do it? None that I know of.
+Would this be a new world when that was accomplished? And a pleasanter
+one--for us well people, as well as for those fussy and fretting sick
+ones? Would it seem as if there was not as much gloomy weather as there
+used to be? I think so.
+
+In the mean time, would the Scientist kill off a good many patients? I
+think so. More than get killed off now by the legalized methods? I will
+take up that question presently.
+
+At present, I wish to ask you to examine some of the Scientist's
+performances, as registered in his magazine, The Christian Science
+Journal--October number, 1898. First, a Baptist clergyman gives us this
+true picture of “the average orthodox Christian”--and he could have
+added that it is a true picture of the average (civilized) human being:
+
+“He is a worried and fretted and fearful man; afraid of himself and his
+propensities, afraid of colds and fevers, afraid of treading on serpents
+or drinking deadly things.”
+
+Then he gives us this contrast:
+
+“The average Christian Scientist has put all anxiety and fretting under
+his feet. He does have a victory over fear and care that is not achieved
+by the average orthodox Christian.”
+
+He has put all anxiety and fretting under his feet. What proportion of
+your earnings or income would you be willing to pay for that frame of
+mind, year in, year out? It really outvalues any price that can be put
+upon it. Where can you purchase it, at any outlay of any sort, in any
+Church or out of it, except the Scientist's?
+
+Well, it is the anxiety and fretting about colds, and fevers, and
+draughts, and getting our feet wet, and about forbidden food eaten in
+terror of indigestion, that brings on the cold and the fever and the
+indigestion and the most of our other ailments; and so, if the Science
+can banish that anxiety from the world I think it can reduce the world's
+disease and pain about four-fifths.
+
+In this October number many of the redeemed testify and give thanks;
+and not coldly, but with passionate gratitude. As a rule they seem
+drunk with health, and with the surprise of it, the wonder of it, the
+unspeakable glory and splendor of it, after a long, sober spell spent in
+inventing imaginary diseases and concreting them with doctor-stuff.
+The first witness testifies that when “this most beautiful Truth first
+dawned on him” he had “nearly all the ills that flesh is heir to”; that
+those he did not have he thought he had--and this made the tale about
+complete. What was the natural result? Why, he was a dump-pit “for all
+the doctors, druggists, and patent medicines of the country.” Christian
+Science came to his help, and “the old sick conditions passed away,” and
+along with them the “dismal forebodings” which he had been accustomed
+to employ in conjuring up ailments. And so he was a healthy and cheerful
+man, now, and astonished.
+
+But I am not astonished, for from other sources I know what must have
+been his method of applying Christian Science. If I am in the right, he
+watchfully and diligently diverted his mind from unhealthy channels and
+compelled it to travel in healthy ones. Nothing contrivable by human
+invention could be more formidably effective than that, in banishing
+imaginary ailments and in closing the entrances against sub-sequent
+applicants of their breed. I think his method was to keep saying, “I
+am well! I am sound!--sound and well! well and sound! Perfectly sound,
+perfectly well! I have no pain; there's no such thing as pain! I have no
+disease; there's no such thing as disease! Nothing is real but Mind; all
+is Mind, All-Good Good-Good, Life, Soul, Liver, Bones, one of a series,
+ante and pass the buck!”
+
+I do not mean that that was exactly the formula used, but that it
+doubtless contains the spirit of it. The Scientist would attach value to
+the exact formula, no doubt, and to the religious spirit in which it was
+used. I should think that any formula that would divert the mind from
+unwholesome channels and force it into healthy ones would answer every
+purpose with some people, though not with all. I think it most likely
+that a very religious man would find the addition of the religious
+spirit a powerful reinforcement in his case.
+
+The second witness testifies that the Science banished “an old organic
+trouble,” which the doctor and the surgeon had been nursing with drugs
+and the knife for seven years.
+
+He calls it his “claim.” A surface-miner would think it was not
+his claim at all, but the property of the doctor and his pal the
+surgeon--for he would be misled by that word, which is Christian-Science
+slang for “ailment.” The Christian Scientist has no ailment; to him
+there is no such thing, and he will not use the hateful word. All that
+happens to him is that upon his attention an imaginary disturbance
+sometimes obtrudes itself which claims to be an ailment but isn't.
+
+This witness offers testimony for a clergyman seventy years old who had
+preached forty years in a Christian church, and has now gone over to the
+new sect. He was “almost blind and deaf.” He was treated by the C. S.
+method, and “when he heard the voice of Truth he saw spiritually.” Saw
+spiritually? It is a little indefinite; they had better treat him again.
+Indefinite testimonies might properly be waste-basketed, since there is
+evidently no lack of definite ones procurable; but this C. S. magazine
+is poorly edited, and so mistakes of this kind must be expected.
+
+The next witness is a soldier of the Civil War. When Christian Science
+found him, he had in stock the following claims:
+
+Indigestion, Rheumatism, Catarrh, Chalky deposits in Shoulder-joints,
+Arm-joints, Hand-joints, Insomnia, Atrophy of the muscles of Arms.
+Shoulders, Stiffness of all those joints, Excruciating pains most of the
+time.
+
+These claims have a very substantial sound. They came of exposure in the
+campaigns. The doctors did all they could, but it was little. Prayers
+were tried, but “I never realized any physical relief from that source.”
+ After thirty years of torture, he went to a Christian Scientist and took
+an hour's treatment and went home painless. Two days later, he “began
+to eat like a well man.” Then “the claims vanished--some at once, others
+more gradually”; finally, “they have almost entirely disappeared.”
+ And--a thing which is of still greater value--he is now “contented and
+happy.” That is a detail which, as earlier remarked, is a Scientist
+Church specialty. And, indeed, one may go further and assert with
+little or no exaggeration that it is a Christian-Science monopoly. With
+thirty-one years' effort, the Methodist Church had not succeeded in
+furnishing it to this harassed soldier.
+
+And so the tale goes on. Witness after witness bulletins his claims,
+declares their prompt abolishment, and gives Mrs. Eddy's Discovery the
+praise. Milk-leg is cured; nervous prostration is cured; consumption is
+cured; and St. Vitus's dance is made a pastime. Even without a fiddle.
+And now and then an interesting new addition to the Science slang
+appears on the page. We have “demonstrations over chilblains” and such
+things. It seems to be a curtailed way of saying “demonstrations of
+the power of Christian-Science Truth over the fiction which masquerades
+under the name of Chilblains.” The children, as well as the adults,
+share in the blessings of the Science. “Through the study of the 'little
+book' they are learning how to be healthful, peaceful, and wise.”
+ Sometimes they are cured of their little claims by the professional
+healer, and sometimes more advanced children say over the formula and
+cure themselves.
+
+A little Far-Western girl of nine, equipped with an adult vocabulary,
+states her age and says, “I thought I would write a demonstration to
+you.” She had a claim, derived from getting flung over a pony's head and
+landed on a rockpile. She saved herself from disaster by remembering to
+say “God is All” while she was in the air. I couldn't have done it.
+I shouldn't even have thought of it. I should have been too excited.
+Nothing but Christian Science could have enabled that child to do that
+calm and thoughtful and judicious thing in those circumstances. She came
+down on her head, and by all the rules she should have broken it;
+but the intervention of the formula prevented that, so the only claim
+resulting was a blackened eye. Monday morning it was still swollen and
+shut. At school “it hurt pretty badly--that is, it seemed to.” So “I was
+excused, and went down to the basement and said, 'Now I am depending on
+mamma instead of God, and I will depend on God instead of mamma.'” No
+doubt this would have answered; but, to make sure, she added Mrs. Eddy
+to the team and recited “the Scientific Statement of Being,” which
+is one of the principal incantations, I judge. Then “I felt my eye
+opening.” Why, dear, it would have opened an oyster. I think it is one
+of the touchingest things in child-history, that pious little rat down
+cellar pumping away at the Scientific Statement of Being.
+
+There is a page about another good child--little Gordon. Little Gordon
+“came into the world without the assistance of surgery or anaesthetics.”
+ He was a “demonstration.” A painless one; therefore, his coming evoked
+“joy and thankfulness to God and the Discoverer of Christian Science.”
+ It is a noticeable feature of this literature--the so frequent linking
+together of the Two Beings in an equal bond; also of Their Two Bibles.
+When little Gordon was two years old, “he was playing horse on the bed,
+where I had left my 'little book.' I noticed him stop in his play, take
+the book carefully in his little hands, kiss it softly, then look about
+for the highest place of safety his arms could reach, and put it there.”
+ This pious act filled the mother “with such a train of thought as I had
+never experienced before. I thought of the sweet mother of long ago
+who kept things in her heart,” etc. It is a bold comparison; however,
+unconscious profanations are about as common in the mouths of the lay
+member ship of the new Church as are frank and open ones in the mouths
+of its consecrated chiefs.
+
+Some days later, the family library--Christian-Science books--was lying
+in a deep-seated window. This was another chance for the holy child to
+show off. He left his play and went there and pushed all the books to
+one side, except the Annex “It he took in both hands, slowly raised
+it to his lips, then removed it carefully, and seated himself in the
+window.” It had seemed to the mother too wonderful to be true, that
+first time; but now she was convinced that “neither imagination nor
+accident had anything to do with it.” Later, little Gordon let the
+author of his being see him do it. After that he did it frequently;
+probably every time anybody was looking. I would rather have that child
+than a chromo. If this tale has any object, it is to intimate that the
+inspired book was supernaturally able to convey a sense of its sacred
+and awful character to this innocent little creature, without
+the intervention of outside aids. The magazine is not edited with
+high-priced discretion. The editor has a “claim,” and he ought to get it
+treated.
+
+Among other witnesses there is one who had a “jumping toothache,”
+ which several times tempted her to “believe that there was sensation in
+matter, but each time it was overcome by the power of Truth.” She would
+not allow the dentist to use cocaine, but sat there and let him
+punch and drill and split and crush the tooth, and tear and slash its
+ulcerations, and pull out the nerve, and dig out fragments of bone; and
+she wouldn't once confess that it hurt. And to this day she thinks it
+didn't, and I have not a doubt that she is nine-tenths right, and that
+her Christian Science faith did her better service than she could have
+gotten out of cocaine.
+
+There is an account of a boy who got broken all up into small bits by
+an accident, but said over the Scientific Statement of Being, or some of
+the other incantations, and got well and sound without having suffered
+any real pain and without the intrusion of a surgeon.
+
+Also, there is an account of the restoration to perfect health, in
+a single night, of a fatally injured horse, by the application of
+Christian Science. I can stand a good deal, but I recognize that the ice
+is getting thin, here. That horse had as many as fifty claims; how
+could he demonstrate over them? Could he do the All-Good, Good-Good,
+Good-Gracious, Liver, Bones, Truth, All down but Nine, Set them up on
+the Other Alley? Could he intone the Scientific Statement of Being?
+Now, could he? Wouldn't it give him a relapse? Let us draw the line at
+horses. Horses and furniture.
+
+There is plenty of other testimonies in the magazine, but these quoted
+samples will answer. They show the kind of trade the Science is driving.
+Now we come back to the question, Does the Science kill a patient here
+and there and now and then? We must concede it. Does it compensate
+for this? I am persuaded that it can make a plausible showing in that
+direction. For instance: when it lays its hand upon a soldier who has
+suffered thirty years of helpless torture and makes him whole in body
+and mind, what is the actual sum of that achievement? This, I think:
+that it has restored to life a subject who had essentially died ten
+deaths a year for thirty years, and each of them a long and painful one.
+But for its interference that man in the three years which have since
+elapsed, would have essentially died thirty times more. There are
+thousands of young people in the land who are now ready to enter upon a
+life-long death similar to that man's. Every time the Science
+captures one of these and secures to him life-long immunity from
+imagination-manufactured disease, it may plausibly claim that in his
+person it has saved three hundred lives. Meantime, it will kill a man
+every now and then. But no matter, it will still be ahead on the credit
+side.
+
+[NOTE.--I have received several letters (two from educated and
+ostensibly intelligent persons), which contained, in substance, this
+protest: “I don't object to men and women chancing their lives with
+these people, but it is a burning shame that the law should allow them
+to trust their helpless little children in their deadly hands.” Isn't it
+touching? Isn't it deep? Isn't it modest? It is as if the person said:
+“I know that to a parent his child is the core of his heart, the apple
+of his eye, a possession so dear, so precious that he will trust its
+life in no hands but those which he believes, with all his soul, to be
+the very best and the very safest, but it is a burning shame that the
+law does not require him to come to me to ask what kind of healer I will
+allow him to call.” The public is merely a multiplied “me.”--M.T.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+“We consciously declare that Science and Health, with Key to the
+Scriptures, was foretold, as well as its author, Mary Baker Eddy, in
+Revelation x. She is the 'mighty angel,' or God's highest thought to
+this age (verse 1), giving us the spiritual interpretation of the
+Bible in the 'little book open' (verse 2). Thus we prove that Christian
+Science is the second coming of Christ-Truth-Spirit.”--Lecture by Dr.
+George Tomkins, D.D. C.S.
+
+There you have it in plain speech. She is the mighty angel; she is the
+divinely and officially sent bearer of God's highest thought. For the
+present, she brings the Second Advent. We must expect that before she
+has been in her grave fifty years she will be regarded by her following
+as having been herself the Second Advent. She is already worshiped, and
+we must expect this feeling to spread, territorially, and also to deepen
+in intensity.
+
+Particularly after her death; for then, as any one can foresee,
+Eddy-Worship will be taught in the Sunday-schools and pulpits of the
+cult. Already whatever she puts her trade-mark on, though it be only
+a memorial-spoon, is holy and is eagerly and gratefully bought by the
+disciple, and becomes a fetish in his house. I say bought, for the
+Boston Christian-Science Trust gives nothing away; everything it has
+is for sale. And the terms are cash; and not only cash, but cash in
+advance. Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar. Not a spiritual
+Dollar, but a real one. From end to end of the Christian Science
+literature not a single (material) thing in the world is conceded to be
+real, except the Dollar. But all through and through its advertisements
+that reality is eagerly and persistently recognized.
+
+The Dollar is hunted down in all sorts of ways; the Christian-Science
+Mother-Church and Bargain-Counter in Boston peddles all kinds of
+spiritual wares to the faithful, and always on the one condition--cash,
+cash in advance. The Angel of the Apocalypse could not go there and get
+a copy of his own pirated book on credit. Many, many precious Christian
+Science things are to be had there for cash: Bible Lessons; Church
+Manual; C. S. Hymnal; History of the building of the Mother-Church; lot
+of Sermons; Communion Hymn, “Saw Ye My Saviour,” by Mrs. Eddy, half a
+dollar a copy, “words used by special permission of Mrs. Eddy.” Also we
+have Mrs. Eddy's and the Angel's little Blue-Annex in eight styles
+of binding at eight kinds of war-prices; among these a sweet thing in
+“levant, divinity circuit, leather lined to edge, round corners, gold
+edge, silk sewed, each, prepaid, $6,” and if you take a million you get
+them a shilling cheaper--that is to say, “prepaid, $5.75.” Also we
+have Mrs. Eddy's Miscellaneous Writings, at 'andsome big prices, the
+divinity-circuit style heading the exertions, shilling discount where
+you take an edition Next comes Christ and Christmas, by the fertile Mrs.
+Eddy--a poem--would God I could see it!--price $3, cash in advance. Then
+follow five more books by Mrs. Eddy, at highwayman's rates, some of
+them in “leatherette covers,” some of them in “pebble cloth,” with
+divinity-circuit, compensation-balance, twin-screw, and the other modern
+improvements; and at the same bargain-counter can be had The Christian
+Science Journal.
+
+Christian-Science literary discharges are a monopoly of the
+Mother-Church Headquarters Factory in Boston; none genuine without the
+trade-mark of the Trust. You must apply there and not elsewhere.
+
+One hundred dollars for it. And I have a case among my statistics where
+the student had a three weeks' course and paid three hundred for it.
+
+The Trust does love the Dollar, when it isn't a spiritual one.
+
+In order to force the sale of Mrs Eddy's Bible-Annex, no healer,
+Metaphysical-College-bred or other, is allowed to practice the game
+unless he possesses a copy of that book. That means a large and
+constantly augmenting income for the Trust. No C.S. family would
+consider itself loyal or pious or pain-proof without an Annex or two in
+the house. That means an income for the Trust, in the near future, of
+millions; not thousands-millions a year.
+
+No member, young or old, of a branch Christian-Scientist church can
+acquire and retain membership in the Mother-Church unless he pay
+“capitation tax” (of “not less than a dollar,” say the By-Laws) to the
+Boston Trust every year. That means an income for the Trust, in the near
+future, of--let us venture to say--millions more per year.
+
+It is a reasonably safe guess that in America in 1920 there will be ten
+million Christian Scientists, and three millions in Great Britain;
+that these figures will be trebled in 1930; that in America in 1920
+the Christian Scientists will be a political force, in 1930 politically
+formidable, and in 1940 the governing power in the Republic--to remain
+that, permanently. And I think it a reasonable guess that the Trust
+(which is already in our day pretty brusque in its ways) will then be
+the most insolent and unscrupulous and tyrannical politico-religious
+master that has dominated a people since the palmy days of the
+Inquisition. And a stronger master than the strongest of bygone times,
+because this one will have a financial strength not dreamed of by any
+predecessor; as effective a concentration of irresponsible power as any
+predecessor has had; in the railway, the telegraph, and the subsidized
+newspaper, better facilities for watching and managing his empire
+than any predecessor has had; and, after a generation or two, he will
+probably divide Christendom with the Catholic Church.
+
+The Roman Church has a perfect organization, and it has an effective
+centralization of power--but not of its cash. Its multitude of Bishops
+are rich, but their riches remain in large measure in their own hands.
+They collect from two hundred millions of people, but they keep the
+bulk of the result at home. The Boston Pope of by-and-by will draw his
+dollar-a-head capitation-tax from three hundred millions of the human
+race, and the Annex and the rest of his book-shop stock will fetch in as
+much more; and his Metaphysical Colleges, the annual Pilgrimage to Mrs.
+Eddy's tomb, from all over the world-admission, the Christian-Science
+Dollar (payable in advance)--purchases of consecrated glass beads,
+candles, memorial spoons, aureoled chrome-portraits and bogus autographs
+of Mrs. Eddy; cash offerings at her shrine no crutches of cured cripples
+received, and no imitations of miraculously restored broken legs and
+necks allowed to be hung up except when made out of the Holy Metal
+and proved by fire-assay; cash for miracles worked at the tomb: these
+money-sources, with a thousand to be yet invented and ambushed upon the
+devotee, will bring the annual increment well up above a billion. And
+nobody but the Trust will have the handling of it. In that day, the
+Trust will monopolize the manufacture and sale of the Old and New
+Testaments as well as the Annex, and raise their price to Annex rates,
+and compel the devotee to buy (for even to-day a healer has to have the
+Annex and the Scriptures or he is not allowed to work the game), and
+that will bring several hundred million dollars more. In those days, the
+Trust will have an income approaching five million dollars a day, and
+no expenses to be taken out of it; no taxes to pay, and no charities
+to support. That last detail should not be lightly passed over by the
+reader; it is well entitled to attention.
+
+No charities to support. No, nor even to contribute to. One searches in
+vain the Trust's advertisements and the utterances of its organs for
+any suggestion that it spends a penny on orphans, widows, discharged
+prisoners, hospitals, ragged schools, night missions, city missions,
+libraries, old people's homes, or any other object that appeals to a
+human being's purse through his heart.
+
+I have hunted, hunted, and hunted, by correspondence and otherwise, and
+have not yet got upon the track of a farthing that the Trust has spent
+upon any worthy object. Nothing makes a Scientist so uncomfortable as to
+ask him if he knows of a case where Christian Science has spent money
+on a benevolence, either among its own adherents or elsewhere. He is
+obliged to say “No” And then one discovers that the person questioned
+has been asked the question many times before, and that it is getting to
+be a sore subject with him. Why a sore subject? Because he has written
+his chiefs and asked with high confidence for an answer that will
+confound these questioners--and the chiefs did not reply. He has written
+again, and then again--not with confidence, but humbly, now--and has
+begged for defensive ammunition in the voice of supplication. A reply
+does at last come to this effect: “We must have faith in Our Mother, and
+rest content in the conviction that whatever She does with the money
+it is in accordance with orders from Heaven, for She does no act of any
+kind without first 'demonstrating over' it.”
+
+That settles it--as far as the disciple is concerned. His mind
+is satisfied with that answer; he gets down his Annex and does an
+incantation or two, and that mesmerizes his spirit and puts that to
+sleep--brings it peace. Peace and comfort and joy, until some inquirer
+punctures the old sore again.
+
+Through friends in America I asked some questions, and in some cases
+got definite and informing answers; in other cases the answers were not
+definite and not valuable. To the question, “Does any of the money go to
+charities?” the answer from an authoritative source was: “No, not in
+the sense usually conveyed by this word.” (The italics are mine.) That
+answer is cautious. But definite, I think--utterly and unassailably
+definite--although quite Christian-Scientifically foggy in its phrasing.
+Christian-Science testimony is generally foggy, generally diffuse,
+generally garrulous. The writer was aware that the first word in his
+phrase answered the question which I was asking, but he could not help
+adding nine dark words. Meaningless ones, unless explained by him. It is
+quite likely, as intimated by him, that Christian Science has invented
+a new class of objects to apply the word “charity” to, but without an
+explanation we cannot know what they are. We quite easily and naturally
+and confidently guess that they are in all cases objects which will
+return five hundred per cent. on the Trust's investment in them,
+but guessing is not knowledge; it is merely, in this case, a sort
+of nine-tenths certainty deducible from what we think we know of the
+Trust's trade principles and its sly and furtive and shifty ways.
+
+Sly? Deep? Judicious? The Trust understands its business. The Trust does
+not give itself away. It defeats all the attempts of us impertinents to
+get at its trade secrets. To this day, after all our diligence, we have
+not been able to get it to confess what it does with the money. It does
+not even let its own disciples find out. All it says is, that the matter
+has been “demonstrated over.” Now and then a lay Scientist says, with
+a grateful exultation, that Mrs. Eddy is enormously rich, but he stops
+there; as to whether any of the money goes to other charities or not,
+he is obliged to admit that he does not know. However, the Trust is
+composed of human beings; and this justifies the conjecture that if it
+had a charity on its list which it was proud of, we should soon hear of
+it.
+
+“Without money and without price.” Those used to be the terms. Mrs.
+Eddy's Annex cancels them. The motto of Christian Science is, “The
+laborer is worthy of his hire.” And now that it has been “demonstrated
+over,” we find its spiritual meaning to be, “Do anything and everything
+your hand may find to do; and charge cash for it, and collect the money
+in advance.” The Scientist has on his tongue's end a cut-and-dried,
+Boston-supplied set of rather lean arguments, whose function is to show
+that it is a Heaven-commanded duty to do this, and that the croupiers of
+the game have no choice but to obey.
+
+The Trust seems to be a reincarnation. Exodus xxxii. 4.
+
+I have no reverence for the Trust, but I am not lacking in reverence for
+the sincerities of the lay membership of the new Church. There is every
+evidence that the lay members are entirely sincere in their faith, and
+I think sincerity is always entitled to honor and respect, let the
+inspiration of the sincerity be what it may. Zeal and sincerity can
+carry a new religion further than any other missionary except fire and
+sword, and I believe that the new religion will conquer the half of
+Christendom in a hundred years. I am not intending this as a compliment
+to the human race; I am merely stating an opinion. And yet I think that
+perhaps it is a compliment to the race. I keep in mind that saying of
+an orthodox preacher--quoted further back. He conceded that this new
+Christianity frees its possessor's life from frets, fears, vexations,
+bitterness, and all sorts of imagination-propagated maladies and pains,
+and fills his world with sunshine and his heart with gladness. If
+Christian Science, with this stupendous equipment--and final salvation
+added--cannot win half the Christian globe, I must be badly mistaken in
+the make-up of the human race.
+
+I think the Trust will be handed down like the other Papacy, and will
+always know how to handle its limitless cash. It will press the button;
+the zeal, the energy, the sincerity, the enthusiasm of its countless
+vassals will do the rest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal it or make
+it sick is a force which none of us is born without. The first man had
+it, the last one will possess it. If left to himself, a man is most
+likely to use only the mischievous half of the force--the half which
+invents imaginary ailments for him and cultivates them; and if he is
+one of these--very wise people, he is quite likely to scoff at the
+beneficent half of the force and deny its existence. And so, to heal
+or help that man, two imaginations are required: his own and some
+outsider's. The outsider, B, must imagine that his incantations are the
+healing-power that is curing A, and A must imagine that this is so. I
+think it is not so, at all; but no matter, the cure is effected, and
+that is the main thing. The outsider's work is unquestionably valuable;
+so valuable that it may fairly be likened to the essential work
+performed by the engineer when he handles the throttle and turns on the
+steam; the actual power is lodged exclusively in the engine, but if
+the engine were left alone it would never start of itself. Whether the
+engineer be named Jim, or Bob, or Tom, it is all one--his services are
+necessary, and he is entitled to such wage as he can get you to pay.
+Whether he be named Christian Scientist, or Mental Scientist, or Mind
+Curist, or King's-Evil Expert, or Hypnotist, it is all one; he is merely
+the Engineer; he simply turns on the same old steam and the engine does
+the whole work.
+
+The Christian-Scientist engineer drives exactly the same trade as the
+other engineers, yet he out-prospers the whole of them put together.
+
+Is it because he has captured the takingest name? I think that that is
+only a small part of it. I think that the secret of his high prosperity
+lies elsewhere.
+
+The Christian Scientist has organized the business. Now that was
+certainly a gigantic idea. Electricity, in limitless volume, has
+existed in the air and the rocks and the earth and everywhere since
+time began--and was going to waste all the while. In our time we have
+organized that scattered and wandering force and set it to work,
+and backed the business with capital, and concentrated it in few and
+competent hands, and the results are as we see.
+
+The Christian Scientist has taken a force which has been lying idle in
+every member of the human race since time began, and has organized it,
+and backed the business with capital, and concentrated it at Boston
+headquarters in the hands of a small and very competent Trust, and there
+are results.
+
+Therein lies the promise that this monopoly is going to extend its
+commerce wide in the earth. I think that if the business were conducted
+in the loose and disconnected fashion customary with such things, it
+would achieve but little more than the modest prosperity usually secured
+by unorganized great moral and commercial ventures; but I believe that
+so long as this one remains compactly organized and closely concentrated
+in a Trust, the spread of its dominion will continue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Four years ago I wrote the preceding chapters. I was assured by the wise
+that Christian Science was a fleeting craze and would soon perish. This
+prompt and all-competent stripe of prophet is always to be had in the
+market at ground-floor rates. He does not stop to load, or consider, or
+take aim, but lets fly just as he stands. Facts are nothing to him, he
+has no use for such things; he works wholly by inspiration. And so, when
+he is asked why he considers a new movement a passing fad and quickly
+perishable, he finds himself unprepared with a reason and is more or
+less embarrassed. For a moment. Only for a moment. Then he waylays the
+first spectre of a reason that goes flitting through the desert places
+of his mind, and is at once serene again and ready for conflict. Serene
+and confident. Yet he should not be so, since he has had no chance
+to examine his catch, and cannot know whether it is going to help his
+contention or damage it.
+
+The impromptu reason furnished by the early prophets of whom I have
+spoken was this:
+
+“There is nothing to Christian Science; there is nothing about it
+that appeals to the intellect; its market will be restricted to the
+unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not think.”
+
+They called that a reason why the cult would not flourish and endure. It
+seems the equivalent of saying:
+
+“There is no money in tinware; there is nothing about it that appeals to
+the rich; its market will be restricted to the poor.”
+
+It is like bringing forward the best reason in the world why Christian
+Science should flourish and live, and then blandly offering it as a
+reason why it should sicken and die.
+
+That reason was furnished me by the complacent and unfrightened
+prophets four years ago, and it has been furnished me again to-day. If
+conversions to new religions or to old ones were in any considerable
+degree achieved through the intellect, the aforesaid reason would be
+sound and sufficient, no doubt; the inquirer into Christian Science
+might go away unconvinced and unconverted. But we all know that
+conversions are seldom made in that way; that such a thing as a serious
+and painstaking and fairly competent inquiry into the claims of a
+religion or of a political dogma is a rare occurrence; and that the
+vast mass of men and women are far from being capable of making such
+an examination. They are not capable, for the reason that their minds,
+howsoever good they may be, are not trained for such examinations. The
+mind not trained for that work is no more competent to do it than
+are lawyers and farmers competent to make successful clothes without
+learning the tailor's trade. There are seventy-five million men and
+women among us who do not know how to cut out and make a dress-suit, and
+they would not think of trying; yet they all think they can competently
+think out a political or religious scheme without any apprenticeship to
+the business, and many of them believe they have actually worked that
+miracle. But, indeed, the truth is, almost all the men and women of our
+nation or of any other get their religion and their politics where they
+get their astronomy--entirely at second hand. Being untrained, they are
+no more able to intelligently examine a dogma or a policy than they are
+to calculate an eclipse.
+
+Men are usually competent thinkers along the lines of their specialized
+training only. Within these limits alone are their opinions and
+judgments valuable; outside of these limits they grope and are
+lost--usually without knowing it. In a church assemblage of five hundred
+persons, there will be a man or two whose trained minds can seize upon
+each detail of a great manufacturing scheme and recognize its value
+or its lack of value promptly; and can pass the details in intelligent
+review, section by section, and finally as a whole, and then deliver a
+verdict upon the scheme which cannot be flippantly set aside nor easily
+answered. And there will be one or two other men there who can do the
+same thing with a great and complicated educational project; and one
+or two others who can do the like with a large scheme for applying
+electricity in a new and unheard-of way; and one or two others who can
+do it with a showy scheme for revolutionizing the scientific world's
+accepted notions regarding geology. And so on, and so on. But the
+manufacturing experts will not be competent to examine the educational
+scheme intelligently, and their opinion about it would not be valuable;
+neither of these two groups will be able to understand and pass upon the
+electrical scheme; none of these three batches of experts will be able
+to understand and pass upon the geological revolution; and probably not
+one man in the entire lot will be competent to examine, capably, the
+intricacies of a political or religious scheme, new or old, and deliver
+a judgment upon it which any one need regard as precious.
+
+There you have the top crust. There will be four hundred and
+seventy-five men and women present who can draw upon their training and
+deliver incontrovertible judgments concerning cheese, and leather,
+and cattle, and hardware, and soap, and tar, and candles, and patent
+medicines, and dreams, and apparitions, and garden trucks, and cats, and
+baby food, and warts, and hymns, and time-tables, and freight-rates, and
+summer resorts, and whiskey, and law, and surgery, and dentistry, and
+blacksmithing, and shoemaking, and dancing, and Huyler's candy, and
+mathematics, and dog fights, and obstetrics, and music, and sausages,
+and dry goods, and molasses, and railroad stocks, and horses, and
+literature, and labor unions, and vegetables, and morals, and lamb's
+fries, and etiquette, and agriculture. And not ten among the five
+hundred--let their minds be ever so good and bright--will be competent,
+by grace of the requisite specialized mental training, to take hold of a
+complex abstraction of any kind and make head or tail of it.
+
+The whole five hundred are thinkers, and they are all capable
+thinkers--but only within the narrow limits of their specialized
+trainings. Four hundred and ninety of them cannot competently examine
+either a religious plan or a political one. A scattering few of them do
+examine both--that is, they think they do. With results as precious as
+when I examine the nebular theory and explain it to myself.
+
+If the four hundred and ninety got their religion through their minds,
+and by weighed and measured detail, Christian Science would not be a
+scary apparition. But they don't; they get a little of it through their
+minds, more of it through their feelings, and the overwhelming bulk of
+it through their environment.
+
+Environment is the chief thing to be considered when one is proposing to
+predict the future of Christian Science. It is not the ability to reason
+that makes the Presbyterian, or the Baptist, or the Methodist, or the
+Catholic, or the Mohammedan, or the Buddhist, or the Mormon; it is
+environment. If religions were got by reasoning, we should have the
+extraordinary spectacle of an American family with a Presbyterian in it,
+and a Baptist, a Methodist, a Catholic, a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, and
+a Mormon. A Presbyterian family does not produce Catholic families
+or other religious brands, it produces its own kind; and not
+by intellectual processes, but by association. And so also with
+Mohammedanism, the cult which in our day is spreading with the sweep of
+a world-conflagration through the Orient, that native home of profound
+thought and of subtle intellectual fence, that fertile womb whence has
+sprung every great religion that exists. Including our own; for with all
+our brains we cannot invent a religion and market it.
+
+The language of my quoted prophets recurs to us now, and we wonder to
+think how small a space in the world the mighty Mohammedan Church would
+be occupying now, if a successful trade in its line of goods had been
+conditioned upon an exhibit that would “appeal to the intellect” instead
+of to “the unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not
+think.”
+
+The Christian Science Church, like the Mohammedan Church, makes no
+embarrassing appeal to the intellect, has no occasion to do it, and can
+get along quite well without it.
+
+Provided. Provided what? That it can secure that thing which is
+worth two or three hundred thousand times more than an “appeal to the
+intellect”--an environment. Can it get that? Will it be a menace
+to regular Christianity if it gets that? Is it time for regular
+Christianity to get alarmed? Or shall regular Christianity smile a smile
+and turn over and take another nap? Won't it be wise and proper for
+regular Christianity to do the old way, Me customary way, the historical
+way--lock the stable-door after the horse is gone? Just as Protestantism
+has smiled and nodded this long time (while the alert and diligent
+Catholic was slipping in and capturing the public schools), and is now
+beginning to hunt around for the key when it is too late?
+
+Will Christian Science get a chance to show its wares? It has already
+secured that chance. Will it flourish and spread and prosper if it
+shall create for itself the one thing essential to those conditions--an
+environment? It has already created an environment. There are families
+of Christian Scientists in every community in America, and each family
+is a factory; each family turns out a Christian Science product at the
+customary intervals, and contributes it to the Cause in the only way
+in which contributions of recruits to Churches are ever made on a large
+scale--by the puissant forces of personal contact and association.
+Each family is an agency for the Cause, and makes converts among the
+neighbors, and starts some more factories.
+
+Four years ago there were six Christian Scientists in a certain town
+that I am acquainted with; a year ago there were two hundred and fifty
+there; they have built a church, and its membership now numbers four
+hundred. This has all been quietly done; done without frenzied revivals,
+without uniforms, brass bands, street parades, corner oratory, or any of
+the other customary persuasions to a godly life. Christian Science, like
+Mohammedanism, is “restricted” to the “unintelligent, the people who
+do not think.” There lies the danger. It makes Christian Science
+formidable. It is “restricted” to ninety-nine one-hundredths of the
+human race, and must be reckoned with by regular Christianity. And will
+be, as soon as it is too late.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+“There were remarkable things about the stranger called the
+Man--Mystery-things so very extraordinary that they monopolized
+attention and made all of him seem extraordinary; but this was not so,
+the most of his qualities being of the common, every-day size and like
+anybody else's. It was curious. He was of the ordinary stature, and had
+the ordinary aspects; yet in him were hidden such strange contradictions
+and disproportions! He was majestically fearless and heroic; he had
+the strength of thirty men and the daring of thirty thousand; handling
+armies, organizing states, administering governments--these were
+pastimes to him; he publicly and ostentatiously accepted the human race
+at its own valuation--as demigods--and privately and successfully dealt
+with it at quite another and juster valuation--as children and slaves;
+his ambitions were stupendous, and his dreams had no commerce with the
+humble plain, but moved with the cloud-rack among the snow-summits.
+These features of him were, indeed, extraordinary, but the rest of
+him was ordinary and usual. He was so mean-minded, in the matter of
+jealousy, that it was thought he was descended from a god; he was vain
+in little ways, and had a pride in trivialities; he doted on ballads
+about moonshine and bruised hearts; in education he was deficient, he
+was indifferent to literature, and knew nothing of art; he was dumb upon
+all subjects but one, indifferent to all except that one--the Nebular
+Theory. Upon that one his flow of words was full and free, he was a
+geyser. The official astronomers disputed his facts and deeded his
+views, and said that he had invented both, they not being findable in
+any of the books. But many of the laity, who wanted their nebulosities
+fresh, admired his doctrine and adopted it, and it attained to great
+prosperity in spite of the hostility of the experts.”--The Legend of the
+Man-Mystery, ch. i.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+JANUARY, 1903. When we do not know a public man personally, we guess him
+out by the facts of his career. When it is Washington, we all arrive
+at about one and the same result. We agree that his words and his acts
+clearly interpret his character to us, and that they never leave us in
+doubt as to the motives whence the words and acts proceeded. It is the
+same with Joan of Arc, it is the same with two or three or five or six
+others among the immortals. But in the matter of motives and of a few
+details of character we agree to disagree upon Napoleon, Cromwell, and
+all the rest; and to this list we must add Mrs. Eddy. I think we can
+peacefully agree as to two or three extraordinary features of her
+make-up, but not upon the other features of it. We cannot peacefully
+agree as to her motives, therefore her character must remain crooked to
+some of us and straight to the others.
+
+No matter, she is interesting enough without an amicable agreement. In
+several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the
+most extraordinary. The same may be said of her career, and the same
+may be said of its chief result. She started from nothing. Her enemies
+charge that she surreptitiously took from Quimby a peculiar system of
+healing which was mind-cure with a Biblical basis. She and her friends
+deny that she took anything from him. This is a matter which we
+can discuss by-and-by. Whether she took it or invented it, it
+was--materially--a sawdust mine when she got it, and she has turned it
+into a Klondike; its spiritual dock had next to no custom, if any at
+all: from it she has launched a world-religion which has now six hundred
+and sixty-three churches, and she charters a new one every four days.
+When we do not know a person--and also when we do--we have to judge his
+size by the size and nature of his achievements, as compared with the
+achievements of others in his special line of business--there is no
+other way. Measured by this standard, it is thirteen hundred years
+since the world has produced any one who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy's
+waistbelt.
+
+Figuratively speaking, Mrs. Eddy is already as tall as the Eiffel tower.
+She is adding surprisingly to her stature every day. It is quite within
+the probabilities that a century hence she will be the most imposing
+figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration
+of our era. I grant that after saying these strong things, it is
+necessary that I offer some details calculated to satisfactorily
+demonstrate the proportions which I have claimed for her. I will do that
+presently; but before exhibiting the matured sequoia gigantea, I believe
+it will be best to exhibit the sprout from which it sprang. It may save
+the reader from making miscalculations. The person who imagines that a
+Big Tree sprout is bigger than other kinds of sprouts is quite mistaken.
+It is the ordinary thing; it makes no show, it compels no notice, it
+hasn't a detectible quality in it that entitles it to attention, or
+suggests the future giant its sap is suckling. That is the kind of
+sprout Mrs. Eddy was.
+
+From her childhood days up to where she was running a half-century a
+close race and gaining on it, she was most humanly commonplace.
+
+She is the witness I am drawing this from. She has revealed it in her
+autobiography not intentionally, of course--I am not claiming that. An
+autobiography is the most treacherous thing there is. It lets out
+every secret its author is trying to keep; it lets the truth shine
+unobstructed through every harmless little deception he tries to play;
+it pitilessly exposes him as a tin hero worshipping himself as Big Metal
+every time he tries to do the modest-unconsciousness act before the
+reader. This is not guessing; I am speaking from autobiographical
+personal experience; I was never able to refrain from mentioning, with
+a studied casualness that could deceive none but the most incautious
+reader, that an ancestor of mine was sent ambassador to Spain by Charles
+I., nor that in a remote branch of my family there exists a claimant
+to an earldom, nor that an uncle of mine used to own a dog that was
+descended from the dog that was in the Ark; and at the same time I was
+never able to persuade myself to call a gibbet by its right name when
+accounting for other ancestors of mine, but always spoke of it as the
+“platform”--puerilely intimating that they were out lecturing when it
+happened.
+
+It is Mrs. Eddy over again. As regards her minor half, she is as
+commonplace as the rest of us. Vain of trivial things all the first half
+of her life, and still vain of them at seventy and recording them with
+naive satisfaction--even rescuing some early rhymes of hers of the sort
+that we all scribble in the innocent days of our youth--rescuing them
+and printing them without pity or apology, just as the weakest and
+commonest of us do in our gray age. More--she still frankly admires
+them; and in her introduction of them profanely confers upon them the
+holy name of “poetry.” Sample:
+
+     “And laud the land whose talents rock
+     The cradle of her power,
+     And wreaths are twined round Plymouth Rock
+     From erudition's bower.”
+
+     “Minerva's silver sandals still
+     Are loosed and not effete.”
+
+You note it is not a shade above the thing which all human beings churn
+out in their youth.
+
+You would not think that in a little wee primer--for that is what the
+Autobiography is--a person with a tumultuous career of seventy years
+behind her could find room for two or three pages of padding of this
+kind, but such is the case. She evidently puts narrative together with
+difficulty and is not at home in it, and is glad to have something
+ready-made to fill in with. Another sample:
+
+     “Here fame-honored Hickory rears his bold form,
+     And bears a brave breast to the lightning and storm,
+     While Palm, Bay, and Laurel in classical glee,
+     Chase Tulip, Magnolia, and fragrant Fringe-tree.”
+
+Vivid? You can fairly see those trees galloping around. That she
+could still treasure up, and print, and manifestly admire those Poems,
+indicates that the most daring and masculine and masterful woman that
+has appeared in the earth in centuries has the same soft, girly-girly
+places in her that the rest of us have.
+
+When it comes to selecting her ancestors she is still human, natural,
+vain, commonplace--as commonplace as I am myself when I am sorting
+ancestors for my autobiography. She combs out some creditable Scots, and
+labels them and sets them aside for use, not overlooking the one to whom
+Sir William Wallace gave “a heavy sword encased in a brass scabbard,”
+ and naively explaining which Sir William Wallace it was, lest we get
+the wrong one by the hassock; this is the one “from whose patriotism
+and bravery comes that heart-stirring air, 'Scots wha hae wi' Wallace
+bled.'” Hannah More was related to her ancestors. She explains who
+Hannah More was.
+
+Whenever a person informs us who Sir William Wallace was, or who wrote
+“Hamlet,” or where the Declaration of Independence was fought, it fills
+us with a suspicion wellnigh amounting to conviction, that that person
+would not suspect us of being so empty of knowledge if he wasn't
+suffering from the same “claim” himself. Then we turn to page 20 of the
+Autobiography and happen upon this passage, and that hasty suspicion
+stands rebuked:
+
+“I gained book-knowledge with far less labor than is usually requisite.
+At ten years of age I was as familiar with Lindley Murray's Grammar as
+with the Westminster Catechism; and the latter I had to repeat every
+Sunday. My favorite studies were Natural Philosophy, Logic, and Moral
+Science. From my brother Albert I received lessons in the ancient
+tongues, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.”
+
+You catch your breath in astonishment, and feel again and still again
+the pang of that rebuke. But then your eye falls upon the next sentence
+but one, and the pain passes away and you set up the suspicion again
+with evil satisfaction:
+
+“After my discovery of Christian Science, most of the knowledge I had
+gleaned from school-books vanished like a dream.”
+
+That disappearance accounts for much in her miscellaneous writings. As I
+was saying, she handles her “ancestral shadows,” as she calls them, just
+as I do mine. It is remarkable. When she runs across “a relative of my
+Grandfather Baker, General Henry Knox, of Revolutionary fame,” she sets
+him down; when she finds another good one, “the late Sir John Macneill,
+in the line of my Grandfather Baker's family,” she sets him down, and
+remembers that he “was prominent in British politics, and at one time
+held the position of ambassador to Persia”; when she discovers that her
+grandparents “were likewise connected with Captain John Lovewell, whose
+gallant leadership and death in the Indian troubles of 1722-25 caused
+that prolonged contest to be known historically as Lovewell's War,”
+ she sets the Captain down; when it turns out that a cousin of her
+grandmother “was John Macneill, the New Hampshire general, who fought at
+Lundy's Lane and won distinction in 1814 at the battle of Chippewa,”
+ she catalogues the General. (And tells where Chippewa was.) And then she
+skips all her platform people; never mentions one of them. It shows that
+she is just as human as any of us.
+
+Yet, after all, there is something very touching in her pride in these
+worthy small-fry, and something large and fine in her modesty in not
+caring to remember that their kinship to her can confer no distinction
+upon her, whereas her mere mention of their names has conferred upon
+them a faceless earthly immortality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+When she wrote this little biography her great life-work had already
+been achieved, she was become renowned; to multitudes of reverent
+disciples she was a sacred personage, a familiar of God, and His
+inspired channel of communication with the human race. Also, to them
+these following things were facts, and not doubted:
+
+She had written a Bible in middle age, and had published it; she had
+recast it, enlarged it, and published it again; she had not stopped
+there, but had enlarged it further, polished its phrasing, improved
+its form, and published it yet again. It was at last become a compact,
+grammatical, dignified, and workman-like body of literature. This was
+good training, persistent training; and in all arts it is training that
+brings the art to perfection. We are now confronted with one of the most
+teasing and baffling riddles of Mrs. Eddy's history--a riddle which may
+be formulated thus:
+
+How is it that a primitive literary gun which began as a hundred-yard
+flint-lock smooth-bore muzzle-loader, and in the course of forty years
+has acquired one notable improvement after another--percussion cap;
+fixed cartridge; rifled barrel; efficiency at half a mile how is it that
+such a gun, sufficiently good on an elephant hunt (Christian Science)
+from the beginning, and growing better and better all the time during
+forty years, has always collapsed back to its original flint-lock
+estate the moment the huntress trained it on any other creature than an
+elephant?
+
+Something more than a generation ago Mrs. Eddy went out with her
+flint-lock on the rabbit range; and this was a part of the result:
+
+“After his decease, and a severe casualty deemed fatal by skilful
+physicians, we discovered that the Principle of all healing and the law
+that governs it is God, a divine Principle, and a spiritual not material
+law, and regained health.”--Preface to Science and Health, first
+revision, 1883.
+
+N.B. Not from the book itself; from the Preface.
+
+You will notice the awkwardness of that English. If you should carry
+that paragraph up to the Supreme Court of the United States in order
+to find out for good and all whether the fatal casualty happened to the
+dead man--as the paragraph almost asserts--or to some person or persons
+not even hinted at in the paragraph, the Supreme Court would be obliged
+to say that the evidence established nothing with certainty except that
+there had been a casualty--victim not known.
+
+The context thinks it explains who the victim was, but it does nothing
+of the kind. It furnishes some guessing-material of a sort which enables
+you to infer that it was “we” that suffered the mentioned injury, but if
+you should carry the language to a court you would not be able to prove
+that it necessarily meant that. “We” are Mrs. Eddy; a funny little
+affectation. She replaced it later with the more dignified third person.
+
+The quoted paragraph is from Mrs. Eddy's preface to the first revision
+of Science and Health (1883). Sixty-four pages further along--in the
+body of the book (the elephant-range), she went out with that same
+flint-lock and got this following result. Its English is very nearly
+as straight and clean and competent as is the English of the latest
+revision of Science and Health after the gun has been improved from
+smooth-bore musket up to globe-sighted, long distance rifle:
+
+“Man controlled by his Maker has no physical suffering. His body is
+harmonious, his days are multiplying instead of diminishing, he is
+journeying towards Life instead of death, and bringing out the new man
+and crucifying the old affections, cutting them off in every material
+direction until he learns the utter supremacy of Spirit and yields
+obedience thereto.”
+
+In the latest revision of Science and Health (1902), the perfected
+gun furnishes the following. The English is clean, compact, dignified,
+almost perfect. But it is observable that it is not prominently better
+than it is in the above paragraph, which was a product of the primitive
+flint-lock:
+
+“How unreasonable is the belief that we are wearing out life and
+hastening to death, and at the same time we are communing with
+immortality? If the departed are in rapport with mortality, or matter,
+they are not spiritual, but must still be mortal, sinful, suffering,
+and dying. Then wherefore look to them--even were communication
+possible--for proofs of immortality and accept them as oracles?”
+ --Edition of 1902, page 78.
+
+With the above paragraphs compare these that follow. It is Mrs. Eddy
+writing--after a good long twenty years of pen-practice. Compare also
+with the alleged Poems already quoted. The prominent characteristic of
+the Poems is affectation, artificiality; their makeup is a complacent
+and pretentious outpour of false figures and fine writing, in the
+sophomoric style. The same qualities and the same style will be found,
+unchanged, unbettered, in these following paragraphs--after a lapse of
+more than fifty years, and after--as aforesaid--long literary training.
+The italics are mine:
+
+1. “What plague spot or bacilli were [sic] gnawing [sic] at the heart of
+this metropolis... and bringing it [the heart] on bended knee? Why, it
+was an institute that had entered its vitals--that, among other things,
+taught games,” et cetera.--C.S. Journal, p. 670, article entitled “A
+Narrative--by Mary Baker G. Eddy.”
+
+2. “Parks sprang up [sic]... electric-cars run [sic] merrily through
+several streets, concrete sidewalks and macadamized roads dotted [sic]
+the place,” et cetera.--Ibid.
+
+3. “Shorn [sic] of its suburbs it had indeed little left to admire, save
+to [sic] such as fancy a skeleton above ground breathing [sic] slowly
+through a barren [sic] breast.”--Ibid.
+
+This is not English--I mean, grown-up English. But it is
+fifteen-year-old English, and has not grown a month since the same
+mind produced the Poems. The standard of the Poems and of the
+plague-spot-and-bacilli effort is exactly the same. It is most strange
+that the same intellect that worded the simple and self-contained and
+clean-cut paragraph beginning with “How unreasonable is the belief,”
+ should in the very same lustrum discharge upon the world such a verbal
+chaos as the utterance concerning that plague-spot or bacilli which
+were gnawing at the insides of the metropolis and bringing its heart on
+bended knee, thus exposing to the eye the rest of the skeleton breathing
+slowly through a barren breast.
+
+The immense contrast between the legitimate English of Science and
+Health and the bastard English of Mrs. Eddy's miscellaneous work, and
+between the maturity of the one diction and the juvenility of the other,
+suggests--compels--the question, Are there two guns? It would seem so.
+Is there a poor, foolish, old, scattering flint-lock for rabbit, and a
+long-range, centre-driving, up-to-date Mauser-magazine for elephant?
+It looks like it. For it is observable that in Science and Health (the
+elephant-ground) the practice was good at the start and has remained so,
+and that the practice in the miscellaneous, outside, small-game field
+was very bad at the start and was never less bad at any later time.
+
+I wish to say that of Mrs. Eddy I am not requiring perfect English,
+but only good English. No one can write perfect English and keep it
+up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done. It was
+approached in the “well of English undefiled”; it has been approached
+in Mrs. Eddy's Annex to that Book; it has been approached in several
+English grammars; I have even approached it myself; but none of us has
+made port.
+
+Now, the English of Science and Health is good. In passages to be found
+in Mrs. Eddy's Autobiography (on pages 53, 57, 101, and 113), and on
+page 6 of her squalid preface to Science and Health, first revision, she
+seems to me to claim the whole and sole authorship of the book. That
+she wrote the Autobiography, and that preface, and the Poems, and the
+Plague-spot-Bacilli, we are not permitted to doubt. Indeed, we know she
+wrote them. But the very certainty that she wrote these things compels
+a doubt that she wrote Science and Health. She is guilty of little
+awkwardnesses of expression in the Autobiography which a practiced pen
+would hardly allow to go uncorrected in even a hasty private letter,
+and could not dream of passing by uncorrected in passages intended for
+print. But she passes them placidly by; as placidly as if she did not
+suspect that they were offenses against third-class English. I think
+that that placidity was born of that very unawareness, so to speak. I
+will cite a few instances from the Autobiography. The italics are mine:
+
+“I remember reading in my childhood certain manuscripts containing
+Scriptural Sonnets, besides other verses and enigmas,” etc. Page 7.
+
+[On page 27.] “Many pale cripples went into the Church leaning on
+crutches who came out carrying them on their shoulders.”
+
+It is awkward, because at the first glance it seems to say that the
+cripples went in leaning on crutches which went out carrying the
+cripples on their shoulders. It would have cost her no trouble to
+put her “who” after her “cripples.” I blame her a little; I think her
+proof-reader should have been shot. We may let her capital C pass, but
+it is another awkwardness, for she is talking about a building, not
+about a religious society.
+
+“Marriage and Parentage” [Chapter-heading. Page 30]. You imagine that
+she is going to begin a talk about her marriage and finish with
+some account of her father and mother. And so you will be deceived.
+“Marriage” was right, but “Parentage” was not the best word for the rest
+of the record. It refers to the birth of her own child. After a certain
+period of time “my babe was born.” Marriage and Motherhood--Marriage and
+Maternity--Marriage and Product--Marriage and Dividend--either of these
+would have fitted the facts and made the matter clear.
+
+“Without my knowledge he was appointed a guardian.” Page 32.
+
+She is speaking of her child. She means that a guardian for her child
+was appointed, but that isn't what she says.
+
+“If spiritual conclusions are separated from their premises, the
+nexus is lost, and the argument with its rightful conclusions, becomes
+correspondingly obscure.” Page 34.
+
+We shall never know why she put the word “correspondingly” in
+there. Any fine, large word would have answered just as well:
+psychosuperintangibly--electroincandescently--oligarcheologically--
+sanchrosynchro-stereoptically--any of these would have answered,
+any of these would have filled the void.
+
+“His spiritual noumenon and phenomenon silenced portraiture.” Page 34.
+
+Yet she says she forgot everything she knew, when she discovered
+Christian Science. I realize that noumenon is a daisy; and I will not
+deny that I shall use it whenever I am in a company which I think I can
+embarrass with it; but, at the same time, I think it is out of place
+among friends in an autobiography. There, I think a person ought not
+to have anything up his sleeve. It undermines confidence. But my
+dissatisfaction with the quoted passage is not on account of noumenon;
+it is on account of the misuse of the word “silenced.” You cannot
+silence portraiture with a noumenon; if portraiture should make a noise,
+a way could be found to silence it, but even then it could not be done
+with a noumenon. Not even with a brick, some authorities think.
+
+“It may be that the mortal life-battle still wages,” etc. Page 35.
+
+That is clumsy. Battles do not wage, battles are waged. Mrs. Eddy has
+one very curious and interesting peculiarity: whenever she notices that
+she is chortling along without saying anything, she pulls up with a
+sudden “God is over us all,” or some other sounding irrelevancy, and for
+the moment it seems to light up the whole district; then, before you can
+recover from the shock, she goes flitting pleasantly and meaninglessly
+along again, and you hurry hopefully after her, thinking you are going
+to get something this time; but as soon as she has led you far enough
+away from her turkey lot she takes to a tree. Whenever she discovers
+that she is getting pretty disconnected, she couples-up with an
+ostentatious “But” which has nothing to do with anything that went
+before or is to come after, then she hitches some empties to the
+train-unrelated verses from the Bible, usually--and steams out of sight
+and leaves you wondering how she did that clever thing. For striking
+instances, see bottom paragraph on page 34 and the paragraph on page
+35 of her Autobiography. She has a purpose--a deep and dark and artful
+purpose--in what she is saying in the first paragraph, and you guess
+what it is, but that is due to your own talent, not hers; she has
+made it as obscure as language could do it. The other paragraph has
+no meaning and no discoverable intention. It is merely one of her
+God-over-alls. I cannot spare room for it in this place.
+
+“I beheld with ineffable awe our great Master's marvelous skill in
+demanding neither obedience to hygienic laws nor,” etc. Page 41.
+
+The word is loosely chosen-skill. She probably meant judgment,
+intuition, penetration, or wisdom.
+
+“Naturally, my first jottings were but efforts to express in feeble
+diction Truth's ultimate.” Page 42.
+
+One understands what she means, but she should have been able to say
+what she meant--at any time before she discovered Christian Science and
+forgot everything she knew--and after it, too. If she had put “feeble”
+ in front of “efforts” and then left out “in” and “diction,” she would
+have scored.
+
+“... its written expression increases in perfection under the guidance
+of the great Master.” Page 43.
+
+It is an error. Not even in those advantageous circumstances can
+increase be added to perfection.
+
+“Evil is not mastered by evil; it can only be overcome with Good.
+This brings out the nothingness of evil, and the eternal Somethingness
+vindicates the Divine Principle and improves the race of Adam.” Page 76.
+
+This is too extraneous for me. That is the trouble with Mrs. Eddy when
+she sets out to explain an over-large exhibit: the minute you think the
+light is bursting upon you the candle goes out and your mind begins to
+wander.
+
+“No one else can drain the cup which I have drunk to the dregs, as the
+discoverer and teacher of Christian Science” Page 47.
+
+That is saying we cannot empty an empty cup. We knew it before; and we
+know she meant to tell us that that particular cup is going to remain
+empty. That is, we think that that was the idea, but we cannot be sure.
+She has a perfectly astonishing talent for putting words together
+in such a way as to make successful inquiry into their intention
+impossible.
+
+She generally makes us uneasy when she begins to tune up on her
+fine-writing timbrel. It carries me back to her Plague-Spot and Poetry
+days, and I just dread those:
+
+“Into mortal mind's material obliquity I gazed and stood abashed.
+Blanched was the cheek of pride. My heart bent low before the
+omnipotence of Spirit, and a tint of humility soft as the heart of
+a moonbeam mantled the earth. Bethlehem and Bethany, Gethsemane and
+Calvary, spoke to my chastened sense as by the tearful lips of a babe.”
+ Page 48.
+
+The heart of a moonbeam is a pretty enough Friendship's-Album
+expression--let it pass, though I do think the figure a little strained;
+but humility has no tint, humility has no complexion, and if it had it
+could not mantle the earth. A moonbeam might--I do not know--but she
+did not say it was the moonbeam. But let it go, I cannot decide it, she
+mixes me up so. A babe hasn't “tearful lips,” it's its eyes. You find
+none of Mrs. Eddy's kind of English in Science and Health--not a line of
+it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Setting aside title-page, index, etc., the little Autobiography begins
+on page 7 and ends on page 130. My quotations are from the first forty
+pages. They seem to me to prove the presence of the 'prentice hand. The
+style of the forty pages is loose and feeble and 'prentice-like. The
+movement of the narrative is not orderly and sequential, but rambles
+around, and skips forward and back and here and there and yonder,
+'prentice-fashion. Many a journeyman has broken up his narrative and
+skipped about and rambled around, but he did it for a purpose, for
+an advantage; there was art in it, and points to be scored by it; the
+observant reader perceived the game, and enjoyed it and respected it, if
+it was well played. But Mrs. Eddy's performance was without intention,
+and destitute of art. She could score no points by it on those terms,
+and almost any reader can see that her work was the uncalculated
+puttering of a novice.
+
+In the above paragraph I have described the first third of the booklet.
+That third being completed, Mrs. Eddy leaves the rabbit-range,
+crosses the frontier, and steps out upon her far-spreading big-game
+territory--Christian Science and there is an instant change! The style
+smartly improves; and the clumsy little technical offenses disappear. In
+these two-thirds of the booklet I find only one such offence, and it has
+the look of being a printer's error.
+
+I leave the riddle with the reader. Perhaps he can explain how it is
+that a person-trained or untrained--who on the one day can write nothing
+better than Plague-Spot-Bacilli and feeble and stumbling and wandering
+personal history littered with false figures and obscurities and
+technical blunders, can on the next day sit down and write fluently,
+smoothly, compactly, capably, and confidently on a great big thundering
+subject, and do it as easily and comfortably as a whale paddles around
+the globe.
+
+As for me, I have scribbled so much in fifty years that I have become
+saturated with convictions of one sort and another concerning a
+scribbler's limitations; and these are so strong that when I am familiar
+with a literary person's work I feel perfectly sure that I know enough
+about his limitations to know what he can not do. If Mr. Howells should
+pretend to me that he wrote the Plague-Spot Bacilli rhapsody, I should
+receive the statement courteously; but I should know it for a--well, for
+a perversion. If the late Josh Billings should rise up and tell me that
+he wrote Herbert Spencer's philosophies; I should answer and say that
+the spelling casts a doubt upon his claim. If the late Jonathan Edwards
+should rise up and tell me he wrote Mr. Dooley's books, I should answer
+and say that the marked difference between his style and Dooley's is
+argument against the soundness of his statement. You see how much I
+think of circumstantial evidence. In literary matters--in my belief--it
+is often better than any person's word, better than any shady
+character's oath. It is difficult for me to believe that the same hand
+that wrote the Plague-Spot-Bacilli and the first third of the little
+Eddy biography wrote also Science and Health. Indeed, it is more than
+difficult, it is impossible.
+
+Largely speaking, I have read acres of what purported to be Mrs. Eddy's
+writings, in the past two months. I cannot know, but I am convinced,
+that the circumstantial evidence shows that her actual share in the
+work of composing and phrasing these things was so slight as to be
+inconsequential. Where she puts her literary foot down, her trail
+across her paid polisher's page is as plain as the elephant's in a
+Sunday-school procession. Her verbal output, when left undoctored by
+her clerks, is quite unmistakable It always exhibits the strongly
+distinctive features observable in the virgin passages from her pen
+already quoted by me:
+
+Desert vacancy, as regards thought. Self-complacency. Puerility.
+Sentimentality. Affectations of scholarly learning. Lust after eloquent
+and flowery expression. Repetition of pet poetic picturesquenesses.
+Confused and wandering statement. Metaphor gone insane. Meaningless
+words, used because they are pretty, or showy, or unusual. Sorrowful
+attempts at the epigrammatic. Destitution of originality.
+
+The fat volume called Miscellaneous Writings of Mrs. Eddy contains
+several hundred pages. Of the five hundred and fifty-four pages of prose
+in it I find ten lines, on page 319, to be Mrs. Eddy's; also about a
+page of the preface or “Prospectus”; also about fifteen pages scattered
+along through the book. If she wrote any of the rest of the prose, it
+was rewritten after her by another hand. Here I will insert two-thirds
+of her page of the prospectus. It is evident that whenever, under the
+inspiration of the Deity, she turns out a book, she is always allowed to
+do some of the preface. I wonder why that is? It always mars the work.
+I think it is done in humorous malice I think the clerks like to see
+her give herself away. They know she will, her stock of usable materials
+being limited and her procedure in employing them always the same,
+substantially. They know that when the initiated come upon her first
+erudite allusion, or upon any one of her other stage-properties, they
+can shut their eyes and tell what will follow. She usually throws off
+an easy remark all sodden with Greek or Hebrew or Latin learning; she
+usually has a person watching for a star--she can seldom get away
+from that poetic idea--sometimes it is a Chaldee, sometimes a Walking
+Delegate, sometimes an entire stranger, but be he what he may, he is
+generally there when the train is ready to move, and has his pass in his
+hat-band; she generally has a Being with a Dome on him, or some other
+cover that is unusual and out of the fashion; she likes to fire off a
+Scripture-verse where it will make the handsomest noise and come nearest
+to breaking the connection; she often throws out a Forefelt, or a
+Foresplendor, or a Foreslander where it will have a fine nautical
+foreto'gallant sound and make the sentence sing; after which she is
+nearly sure to throw discretion away and take to her deadly passion,
+Intoxicated Metaphor. At such a time the Mrs. Eddy that does not
+hesitate is lost:
+
+“The ancient Greek looked longingly for the Olympiad. The Chaldee
+watched the appearing of a star; to him no higher destiny dawned on the
+dome of being than that foreshadowed by signs in the heavens. The meek
+Nazarene, the scoffed of all scoffers, said, 'Ye can discern the face
+of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?'--for He
+forefelt and foresaw the ordeal of a perfect Christianity, hated by
+sinners.
+
+“To kindle all minds with a gleam of gratitude, the new idea that comes
+welling up from infinite Truth needs to be understood. The seer of this
+age should be a sage.
+
+“Humility is the stepping-stone to a higher recognition of Deity. The
+mounting sense gathers fresh forms and strange fire from the ashes
+of dissolving self, and drops the world. Meekness heightens immortal
+attributes, only by removing the dust that dims them. Goodness reveals
+another scene and another self seemingly rolled up in shades, but
+brought to light by the evolutions of advancing thought, whereby we
+discern the power of Truth and Love to heal the sick.
+
+“Pride is ignorance; those assume most who have the least wisdom or
+experience; and they steal from their neighbor, because they have so
+little of their own.”--Miscellaneous Writings, page 1, and six lines at
+top of page 2.
+
+It is not believable that the hand that wrote those clumsy and affected
+sentences wrote the smooth English of Science and Health.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+It is often said in print that Mrs. Eddy claims that God was the Author
+of Science and Health. Mr. Peabody states in his pamphlet that “she says
+not she but God was the Author.” I cannot find that in her autobiography
+she makes this transference of the authorship, but I think that in
+it she definitely claims that she did her work under His
+inspiration--definitely for her; for as a rule she is not a very
+definite person, even when she seems to be trying her best to be clear
+and positive. Speaking of the early days when her Science was beginning
+to unfold itself and gather form in her mind, she says (Autobiography,
+page 43):
+
+“The divine hand led me into a new world of light and Life, a fresh
+universe--old to God, but new to His 'little one.'”
+
+She being His little one, as I understand it.
+
+The divine hand led her. It seems to mean “God inspired me”; but when
+a person uses metaphors instead of statistics--and that is Mrs. Eddy's
+common fashion--one cannot always feel sure about the intention.
+
+[Page 56.] “Even the Scripture gave no direct interpretation of the
+Scientific basis for demonstrating the spiritual Principle of healing,
+until our Heavenly Father saw fit, through the Key to the Scriptures, in
+Science and Health, to unlock this 'mystery of godliness.'”
+
+Another baffling metaphor. If she had used plain forecastle English,
+and said “God wrote the Key and I put it in my book”; or if she had said
+“God furnished me the solution of the mystery and I put it on paper”;
+or if she had said “God did it all,” then we should understand; but her
+phrase is open to any and all of those translations, and is a Key
+which unlocks nothing--for us. However, it seems to at least mean “God
+inspired me,” if nothing more.
+
+There was personal and intimate communion, at any rate we get that
+much out of the riddles. The connection extended to business, after the
+establishment of the teaching and healing industry.
+
+[Page 71.] “When God impelled me to set a price on my instruction,” etc.
+Further down: “God has since shown me, in multitudinous ways, the wisdom
+of this decision.”
+
+She was not able to think of a “financial equivalent”--meaning a
+pecuniary equivalent--for her “instruction in Christian Science
+Mind-healing.” In this emergency she was “led” to charge three hundred
+dollars for a term of “twelve half-days.” She does not say who led her,
+she only says that the amount greatly troubled her. I think it means
+that the price was suggested from above, “led” being a theological term
+identical with our commercial phrase “personally conducted.” She “shrank
+from asking it, but was finally led, by a strange providence, to accept
+this fee.” “Providence” is another theological term. Two leds and
+a providence, taken together, make a pretty strong argument for
+inspiration. I think that these statistics make it clear that the price
+was arranged above. This view is constructively supported by the fact,
+already quoted, that God afterwards approved, “in multitudinous
+ways,” her wisdom in accepting the mentioned fee. “Multitudinous
+ways”--multitudinous encoring--suggests enthusiasm. Business enthusiasm.
+And it suggests nearness. God's nearness to his “little one.” Nearness,
+and a watchful personal interest. A warm, palpitating, Standard-Oil
+interest, so to speak. All this indicates inspiration. We may assume,
+then, two inspirations: one for the book, the other for the business.
+
+The evidence for inspiration is further augmented by the testimony of
+Rev. George Tomkins, D.D., already quoted, that Mrs. Eddy and her book
+were foretold in Revelation, and that Mrs. Eddy “is God's brightest
+thought to this age, giving us the spiritual interpretation of the Bible
+in the 'little book'” of the Angel.
+
+I am aware that it is not Mr. Tomkins that is speaking, but Mrs. Eddy.
+The commissioned lecturers of the Christian Science Church have to be
+members of the Board of Lectureship. (By-laws Sec. 2, p. 70.) The Board
+of Lectureship is selected by the Board of Directors of the Church.
+(By-laws, Sec. 3, p. 70.) The Board of Directors of the Church is the
+property of Mrs. Eddy. (By-laws, p. 22.) Mr. Tomkins did not make that
+statement without authorization from headquarters. He necessarily got it
+from the Board of Directors, the Board of Directors from Mrs. Eddy, Mrs.
+Eddy from the Deity. Mr. Tomkins would have been turned down by that
+procession if his remarks had been unsatisfactory to it.
+
+It may be that there is evidence somewhere--as has been claimed--that
+Mrs. Eddy has charged upon the Deity the verbal authorship of Science
+and Health. But if she ever made the charge, she has withdrawn it (as it
+seems to me), and in the most formal and unqualified; of all ways. See
+Autobiography, page 57:
+
+“When the demand for this book increased... the copyright was infringed.
+I entered a suit at Law, and my copyright was protected.”
+
+Thus it is plain that she did not plead that the Deity was the (verbal)
+Author; for if she had done that, she would have lost her case--and with
+rude promptness. It was in the old days before the Berne Convention and
+before the passage of our amended law of 1891, and the court would have
+quoted the following stern clause from the existing statute and frowned
+her out of the place:
+
+“No Foreigner can acquire copyright in the United States.”
+
+To sum up. The evidence before me indicates three things:
+
+1. That Mrs. Eddy claims the verbal author ship for herself. 2. That she
+denies it to the Deity. 3. That--in her belief--she wrote the book under
+the inspiration of the Deity, but furnished the language herself.
+
+In one place in the Autobiography she claims both the language and
+the ideas; but when this witness is testifying, one must draw the line
+somewhere, or she will prove both sides of her case-nine sides, if
+desired.
+
+It is too true. Much too true. Many, many times too true. She is a most
+trying witness--the most trying witness that ever kissed the Book, I am
+sure. There is no keeping up with her erratic testimony. As soon as you
+have got her share of the authorship nailed where you half hope and half
+believe it will stay and cannot be joggled loose any more, she joggles
+it loose again--or seems to; you cannot be sure, for her habit of
+dealing in meaningless metaphors instead of in plain, straightforward
+statistics, makes it nearly always impossible to tell just what it
+is she is trying to say. She was definite when she claimed both the
+language and the ideas of the book. That seemed to settle the matter.
+It seemed to distribute the percentages of credit with precision between
+the collaborators: ninety-two per cent. to Mrs. Eddy, who did all the
+work, and eight per cent. to the Deity, who furnished the inspiration
+not enough of it to damage the copyright in a country closed against
+Foreigners, and yet plenty to advertise the book and market it at famine
+rates. Then Mrs. Eddy does not keep still, but fetches around and comes
+forward and testifies again. It is most injudicious. For she resorts to
+metaphor this time, and it makes trouble, for she seems to reverse the
+percentages and claim only the eight per cent. for her self. I quote
+from Mr. Peabody's book (Eddyism, or Christian Science. Boston: 15 Court
+Square, price twenty-five cents):
+
+“Speaking of this book, Mrs. Eddy, in January last (1901) said: 'I
+should blush to write of Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures,
+as I have, were it of human origin, and I, apart from God, its author;
+but as I was only a scribe echoing the harmonies of Heaven in
+divine metaphysics, I cannot be supermodest of the Christian Science
+text-book.”'
+
+Mr. Peabody's comment:
+
+“Nothing could be plainer than that. Here is a distinct avowal that the
+book entitled Science and Health was the work of Almighty God.”
+
+It does seem to amount to that. She was only a “scribe.” Confound the
+word, it is just a confusion, it has no determinable meaning there, it
+leaves us in the air. A scribe is merely a person who writes. He may be
+a copyist, he may be an amanuensis, he may be a writer of originals, and
+furnish both the language and the ideas. As usual with Mrs. Eddy, the
+connection affords no help--“echoing” throws no light upon “scribe.” A
+rock can reflect an echo, a wall can do it, a mountain can do it, many
+things can do it, but a scribe can't. A scribe that could reflect
+an echo could get over thirty dollars a week in a side-show. Many
+impresarios would rather have him than a cow with four tails. If we
+allow that this present scribe was setting down the “harmonies of
+Heaven”--and certainly that seems to have been the case then there was
+only one way to do it that I can think of: listen to the music and put
+down the notes one after another as they fell. In that case Mrs.
+Eddy did not invent the tune, she only entered it on paper. Therefore
+dropping the metaphor--she was merely an amanuensis, and furnished
+neither the language of Science and Health nor the ideas. It reduces her
+to eight per cent. (and the dividends on that and the rest).
+
+Is that it? We shall never know. For Mrs. Eddy is liable to testify
+again at any time. But until she does it, I think we must conclude
+that the Deity was Author of the whole book, and Mrs. Eddy merely His
+telephone and stenographer. Granting this, her claim as the Voice of God
+stands-for the present--justified and established.
+
+
+
+
+POSTSCRIPT
+
+I overlooked something. It appears that there was more of that utterance
+than Mr. Peabody has quoted in the above paragraph. It will be found
+in Mrs. Eddy's organ, the Christian Science Journal (January, 1901) and
+reads as follows:
+
+“It was not myself... which dictated Science and Health, with Key to the
+Scriptures.”
+
+That is certainly clear enough. The words which I have removed from that
+important sentence explain Who it was that did the dictating. It was
+done by
+
+“the divine power of Truth and Love, infinitely above me.”
+
+Certainly that is definite. At last, through her personal testimony,
+we have a sure grip upon the following vital facts, and they settle the
+authorship of Science and Health beyond peradventure:
+
+1. Mrs. Eddy furnished “the ideas and the language.” 2. God furnished
+the ideas and the language.
+
+It is a great comfort to have the matter authoritatively settled.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+It is hard to locate her, she shifts about so much. She is a shining
+drop of quicksilver which you put your finger on and it isn't there.
+There is a paragraph in the Autobiography (page 96) which places in
+seemingly darkly significant procession three Personages:
+
+1. The Virgin Mary 2. Jesus of Nazareth. 3. Mrs. Eddy.
+
+This is the paragraph referred to:
+
+“No person can take the individual place of the Virgin Mary. No person
+can compass or fulfil the individual mission of Jesus of Nazareth.
+No person can take the place of the author of Science and Health, the
+discoverer and founder of Christian Science. Each individual must fill
+his own niche in time and eternity.”
+
+I have read it many times, but I still cannot be sure that I rightly
+understand it. If the Saviour's name had been placed first and the
+Virgin Mary's second and Mrs. Eddy's third, I should draw the inference
+that a descending scale from First Importance to Second Importance and
+then to Small Importance was indicated; but to place the Virgin first,
+the Saviour second, and Mrs. Eddy third, seems to turn the scale the
+other way and make it an ascending scale of Importances, with Mrs. Eddy
+ranking the other two and holding first place.
+
+I think that that was perhaps the intention, but none but a seasoned
+Christian Scientist can examine a literary animal of Mrs. Eddy's
+creation and tell which end of it the tail is on. She is easily the most
+baffling and bewildering writer in the literary trade.
+
+Eddy is a commonplace name, and would have an unimpressive aspect in the
+list of the reformed Holy Family. She has thought of that. In the book
+of By-laws written by her--“impelled by a power not one's own”--there is
+a paragraph which explains how and when her disciples came to confer a
+title upon her; and this explanation is followed by a warning as to what
+will happen to any female Scientist who shall desecrate it:
+
+“The title of Mother. Therefore if a student of Christian Science shall
+apply this title, either to herself or to others, except as the term for
+kinship according to the flesh, it shall be regarded by the Church as an
+indication of disrespect for their Pastor Emeritus, and unfitness to be
+a member of the Mother-Church.”
+
+She is the Pastor Emeritus.
+
+While the quoted paragraph about the Procession seems to indicate that
+Mrs. Eddy is expecting to occupy the First Place in it, that expectation
+is not definitely avowed. In an earlier utterance of hers she is
+clearer--clearer, and does not claim the first place all to herself, but
+only the half of it. I quote from Mr. Peabody's book again:
+
+“In the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, when it was her
+property, and published by her, it was claimed for her, and with her
+sanction, that she was equal with Jesus, and elaborate effort was made
+to establish the claim.
+
+“Mrs. Eddy has distinctly authorized the claim in her behalf that she
+herself was the chosen successor to and equal of Jesus.”
+
+In her Miscellaneous Writings (using her once favorite “We” for “I”) she
+says that “While we entertain decided views... and shall express them as
+duty demands, we shall claim no especial gift from our divine origin,”
+ etc.
+
+Our divine origin. It suggests Equal again. It is inferable, then,
+that in the near by-and-by the new Church will officially rank the Holy
+Family in the following order:
+
+1. Jesus of Nazareth.--1. Our Mother. 2. The Virgin Mary.
+
+
+
+
+SUMMARY
+
+I am not playing with Christian Science and its founder, I am examining
+them; and I am doing it because of the interest I feel in the inquiry.
+My results may seem inadequate to the reader, but they have for me
+clarified a muddle and brought a sort of order out of a chaos, and so I
+value them.
+
+My readings of Mrs. Eddy's uninspired miscellaneous literary efforts
+have convinced me of several things:
+
+1. That she did not write Science and Health. 2. That the Deity did (or
+did not) write it. 3. That She thinks She wrote it. 4. That She believes
+She wrote it under the Deity's inspiration. 5. That She believes She is
+a Member of the Holy Family. 6. That She believes She is the equal of
+the Head of it.
+
+Finally, I think She is now entitled to the capital S--on her own
+evidence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Thus far we have a part of Mrs. Eddy's portrait. Not made of fictions,
+surmises, reports, rumors, innuendoes, dropped by her enemies; no, she
+has furnished all of the materials herself, and laid them on the canvas,
+under my general superintendence and direction. As far as she has gone
+with it, it is the presentation of a complacent, commonplace, illiterate
+New England woman who “forgot everything she knew” when she discovered
+her discovery, then wrote a Bible in good English under the inspiration
+of God, and climbed up it to the supremest summit of earthly grandeur
+attainable by man--where she sits serene to-day, beloved and worshiped
+by a multitude of human beings of as good average intelligence as is
+possessed by those that march under the banner of any competing cult.
+This is not intended to flatter the competing cults, it is merely a
+statement of cold fact.
+
+That a commonplace person should go climbing aloft and become a god or
+a half-god or a quarter-god and be worshiped by men and women of average
+intelligence, is nothing. It has happened a million times, it will
+happen a hundred million more. It has been millions of years since the
+first of these supernaturals appeared, and by the time the last one in
+that inconceivably remote future shall have performed his solemn little
+high-jinks on the stage and closed the business, there will be enough
+of them accumulated in the museum on the Other Side to start a heaven of
+their own-and jam it.
+
+Each in his turn those little supernaturals of our by-gone ages and
+aeons joined the monster procession of his predecessors and marched
+horizonward, disappeared, and was forgotten. They changed nothing,
+they built nothing, they left nothing behind them to remember them by,
+nothing to hold their disciples together, nothing to solidify their work
+and enable it to defy the assaults of time and the weather. They passed,
+and left a vacancy. They made one fatal mistake; they all made it,
+each in his turn: they failed to organize their forces, they failed to
+centralize their strength, they failed to provide a fresh Bible and a
+sure and perpetual cash income for business, and often they failed to
+provide a new and accepted Divine Personage to worship.
+
+Mrs. Eddy is not of that small fry. The materials that go to the
+making of the rest of her portrait will prove it. She will furnish them
+herself:
+
+She published her book. She copyrighted it. She copyrights everything.
+If she should say, “Good-morning; how do you do?” she would copyright
+it; for she is a careful person, and knows the value of small things.
+
+She began to teach her Science, she began to heal, she began to gather
+converts to her new religion--fervent, sincere, devoted, grateful
+people. A year or two later she organized her first Christian Science
+“Association,” with six of her disciples on the roster.
+
+She continued to teach and heal. She was charging nothing, she says,
+although she was very poor. She taught and healed gratis four years
+altogether, she says.
+
+Then, in 1879-81 she was become strong enough, and well enough
+established, to venture a couple of impressively important moves. The
+first of these moves was to aggrandize the “Association” to a “Church.”
+ Brave? It is the right name for it, I think. The former name suggests
+nothing, invited no remark, no criticism, no inquiry, no hostility; the
+new name invited them all. She must have made this intrepid venture on
+her own motion. She could have had no important advisers at that early
+day. If we accept it as her own idea and her own act--and I think we
+must--we have one key to her character. And it will explain subsequent
+acts of hers that would merely stun us and stupefy us without it. Shall
+we call it courage? Or shall we call it recklessness? Courage observes;
+reflects; calculates; surveys the whole situation; counts the cost,
+estimates the odds, makes up its mind; then goes at the enterprise
+resolute to win or perish. Recklessness does not reflect, it plunges
+fearlessly in with a hurrah, and takes the risks, whatever they may be,
+regardless of expense. Recklessness often fails, Mrs. Eddy has never
+failed--from the point of view of her followers. The point of view of
+other people is naturally not a matter of weighty importance to her.
+
+The new Church was not born loose-jointed and featureless, but had a
+defined plan, a definite character, definite aims, and a name which was
+a challenge, and defied all comers. It was “a Mind-healing Church.” It
+was “without a creed.” Its name, “The Church of Christ, Scientist.”
+
+Mrs. Eddy could not copyright her Church, but she chartered it, which
+was the same thing and relieved the pain. It had twenty-six charter
+members. Mrs. Eddy was at once installed as its pastor.
+
+The other venture, above referred to, was Mrs. Eddy's Massachusetts
+Metaphysical College, in which was taught “the pathology of spiritual
+power.” She could not copyright it, but she got it chartered. For
+faculty it had herself, her husband of the period (Dr. Eddy), and her
+adopted son, Dr. Foster-Eddy. The college term was “barely three
+weeks,” she says. Again she was bold, brave, rash, reckless--choose for
+yourself--for she not only began to charge the student, but charged him
+a hundred dollars a week for the enlightenments. And got it? some may
+ask. Easily. Pupils flocked from far and near. They came by the hundred.
+Presently the term was cut down nearly half, but the price remained as
+before. To be exact, the term-cut was to seven lessons--price,
+three hundred dollars. The college “yielded a large income.” This is
+believable. In seven years Mrs. Eddy taught, as she avers, over four
+thousand students in it. (Preface to 1902 edition of Science and
+Health.) Three hundred times four thousand is--but perhaps you can
+cipher it yourself. I could do it ordinarily, but I fell down yesterday
+and hurt my leg. Cipher it; you will see that it is a grand sum for a
+woman to earn in seven years. Yet that was not all she got out of her
+college in the seven.
+
+At the time that she was charging the primary student three hundred
+dollars for twelve lessons she was not content with this tidy
+assessment, but had other ways of plundering him. By advertisement she
+offered him privileges whereby he could add eighteen lessons to his
+store for five hundred dollars more. That is to say, he could get a
+total of thirty lessons in her college for eight hundred dollars.
+
+Four thousand times eight hundred is--but it is a difficult sum for a
+cripple who has not been “demonstrated over” to cipher; let it go.
+She taught “over” four thousand students in seven years. “Over” is not
+definite, but it probably represents a non-paying surplus of learners
+over and above the paying four thousand. Charity students, doubtless. I
+think that as interesting an advertisement as has been printed since the
+romantic old days of the other buccaneers is this one from the Christian
+Science Journal for September, 1886:
+
+
+“MASSACHUSETTS METAPHYSICAL COLLEGE
+
+“Rev. MARY BAKER G. EDDY, PRESIDENT
+
+“571 Columbus Avenue, Boston
+
+“The collegiate course in Christian Science metaphysical healing
+includes twelve lessons. Tuition, three hundred dollars.
+
+“Course in metaphysical obstetrics includes six daily lectures, and is
+open only to students from this college. Tuition, one hundred dollars.
+
+“Class in theology, open (like the above) to graduates, receives six
+additional lectures on the Scriptures, and summary of the principle and
+practice of Christian Science, two hundred dollars.
+
+“Normal class is open to those who have taken the first course at this
+college; six daily lectures complete the Normal course. Tuition, two
+hundred dollars.
+
+“No invalids, and only persons of good moral character, are accepted
+as students. All students are subject to examination and rejection; and
+they are liable to leave the class if found unfit to remain in it.
+
+“A limited number of clergymen received free of charge.
+
+“Largest discount to indigent students, one hundred dollars on the first
+course.
+
+“No deduction on the others.
+
+“Husband and wife, entered together, three hundred dollars.
+
+“Tuition for all strictly in advance.”
+
+There it is--the horse-leech's daughter alive again, after a
+three-century vacation. Fifty or sixty hours' lecturing for eight
+hundred dollars.
+
+I was in error as to one matter: there are no charity students.
+Gratis-taught clergymen must not be placed under that head; they are
+merely an advertisement. Pauper students can get into the infant class
+on a two-third rate (cash in advance), but not even an archangel can get
+into the rest of the game at anything short of par, cash down. For it is
+“in the spirit of Christ's charity, as one who is joyful to hear healing
+to the sick” that Mrs. Eddy is working the game. She sends the healing
+to them outside. She cannot bear it to them inside the college, for the
+reason that she does not allow a sick candidate to get in. It is true
+that this smells of inconsistency, but that is nothing; Mrs. Eddy
+would not be Mrs. Eddy if she should ever chance to be consistent about
+anything two days running.
+
+Except in the matter of the Dollar. The Dollar, and appetite for power
+and notoriety. English must also be added; she is always consistent,
+she is always Mrs. Eddy, in her English: it is always and consistently
+confused and crippled and poor. She wrote the Advertisement; her
+literary trade-marks are there. When she says all “students” are subject
+to examination, she does not mean students, she means candidates for
+that lofty place When she says students are “liable” to leave the class
+if found unfit to remain in it, she does not mean that if they find
+themselves unfit, or be found unfit by others, they will be likely to
+ask permission to leave the class; she means that if she finds them
+unfit she will be “liable” to fire them out. When she nobly offers
+“tuition for all strictly in advance,” she does not mean “instruction
+for all in advance-payment for it later.” No, that is only what she
+says, it is not what she means. If she had written Science and Health,
+the oldest man in the world would not be able to tell with certainty
+what any passage in it was intended to mean.
+
+Her Church was on its legs.
+
+She was its pastor. It was prospering.
+
+She was appointed one of a committee to draught By-laws for its
+government. It may be observed, without overplus of irreverence, that
+this was larks for her. She did all of the draughting herself. From the
+very beginning she was always in the front seat when there was business
+to be done; in the front seat, with both eyes open, and looking sharply
+out for Number One; in the front seat, working Mortal Mind with fine
+effectiveness and giving Immortal Mind a rest for Sunday. When her
+Church was reorganized, by-and-by, the By-laws were retained. She saw
+to that. In these Laws for the government of her Church, her empire, her
+despotism, Mrs. Eddy's character is embalmed for good and all. I think
+a particularized examination of these Church-laws will be found
+interesting. And not the less so if we keep in mind that they were
+“impelled by a power not one's own,” as she says--Anglice--the
+inspiration of God.
+
+It is a Church “without a creed.” Still, it has one. Mrs. Eddy draughted
+it--and copyrighted it. In her own name. You cannot become a member of
+the Mother-Church (nor of any Christian Science Church) without signing
+it. It forms the first chapter of the By-laws, and is called “Tenets.”
+ “Tenets of The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist.” It
+has no hell in it--it throws it overboard.
+
+
+
+
+THE PASTOR EMERITUS
+
+About the time of the reorganization, Mrs. Eddy retired from her
+position of pastor of her Church, abolished the office of pastor in
+all branch Churches, and appointed her book, Science and Health, to be
+pastor-universal. Mrs. Eddy did not disconnect herself from the office
+entirely, when she retired, but appointed herself Pastor Emeritus. It is
+a misleading title, and belongs to the family of that phrase “without
+a creed.” It advertises her as being a merely honorary official, with
+nothing to do, and no authority. The Czar of Russia is Emperor Emeritus
+on the same terms. Mrs. Eddy was Autocrat of the Church before, with
+limitless authority, and she kept her grip on that limitless authority
+when she took that fictitious title.
+
+It is curious and interesting to note with what an unerring instinct the
+Pastor Emeritus has thought out and forecast all possible encroachments
+upon her planned autocracy, and barred the way against them, in the
+By-laws which she framed and copyrighted--under the guidance of the
+Supreme Being.
+
+
+
+
+THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
+
+For instance, when Article I. speaks of a President and Board of
+Directors, you think you have discovered a formidable check upon the
+powers and ambitions of the honorary pastor, the ornamental pastor, the
+functionless pastor, the Pastor Emeritus, but it is a mistake. These
+great officials are of the phrase--family of the Church-Without-a-Creed
+and the Pastor-With-Nothing-to-Do; that is to say, of the family of
+Large-Names-Which-Mean-Nothing. The Board is of so little consequence
+that the By-laws do not state how it is chosen, nor who does it; but
+they do state, most definitely, that the Board cannot fill a vacancy in
+its number “except the candidate is approved by the Pastor Emeritus.”
+
+The “candidate.” The Board cannot even proceed to an election until the
+Pastor Emeritus has examined the list and squelched such candidates as
+are not satisfactory to her.
+
+Whether the original first Board began as the personal property of Mrs.
+Eddy or not, it is foreseeable that in time, under this By-law, she
+would own it. Such a first Board might chafe under such a rule as that,
+and try to legislate it out of existence some day. But Mrs. Eddy was
+awake. She foresaw that danger, and added this ingenious and effective
+clause:
+
+“This By-law can neither be amended nor annulled, except by consent of
+Mrs. Eddy, the Pastor Emeritus.”
+
+
+
+
+THE PRESIDENT
+
+The Board of Directors, or Serfs, or Ciphers, elects the President.
+
+On these clearly worded terms: “Subject to the approval of the Pastor
+Emeritus.”
+
+Therefore She elects him.
+
+A long term can invest a high official with influence and power, and
+make him dangerous. Mrs. Eddy reflected upon that; so she limits the
+President's term to a year. She has a capable commercial head, an
+organizing head, a head for government.
+
+
+
+
+TREASURER AND CLERK
+
+There are a Treasurer and a Clerk. They are elected by the Board of
+Directors. That is to say, by Mrs. Eddy.
+
+Their terms of office expire on the first Tuesday in June of each year,
+“or upon the election of their successors.” They must be watchfully
+obedient and satisfactory to her, or she will elect and install their
+successors with a suddenness that can be unpleasant to them. It goes
+without saying that the Treasurer manages the Treasury to suit Mrs.
+Eddy, and is in fact merely Temporary Deputy Treasurer.
+
+Apparently the Clerk has but two duties to perform: to read messages
+from Mrs. Eddy to First Members assembled in solemn Council, and provide
+lists of candidates for Church membership. The select body entitled
+First Members are the aristocracy of the Mother-Church, the Charter
+Members, the Aborigines, a sort of stylish but unsalaried little
+College of Cardinals, good for show, but not indispensable. Nobody is
+indispensable in Mrs. Eddy's empire; she sees to that.
+
+When the Pastor Emeritus sends a letter or message to that little
+Sanhedrin, it is the Clerk's “imperative duty” to read it “at the place
+and time specified.” Otherwise, the world might come to an end. These
+are fine, large frills, and remind us of the ways of emperors and such.
+Such do not use the penny-post, they send a gilded and painted special
+messenger, and he strides into the Parliament, and business comes to
+a sudden and solemn and awful stop; and in the impressive hush that
+follows, the Chief Clerk reads the document. It is his “imperative
+duty.” If he should neglect it, his official life would end. It is
+the same with this Mother-Church Clerk; “if he fail to perform this
+important function of his office,” certain majestic and unshirkable
+solemnities must follow: a special meeting “shall” be called; a member
+of the Church “shall” make formal complaint; then the Clerk “shall” be
+“removed from office.” Complaint is sufficient, no trial is necessary.
+
+There is something very sweet and juvenile and innocent and pretty about
+these little tinsel vanities, these grave apings of monarchical fuss and
+feathers and ceremony, here on our ostentatiously democratic soil. She
+is the same lady that we found in the Autobiography, who was so naively
+vain of all that little ancestral military riffraff that she had dug up
+and annexed. A person's nature never changes. What it is in childhood,
+it remains. Under pressure, or a change of interest, it can partially or
+wholly disappear from sight, and for considerable stretches of time, but
+nothing can ever permanently modify it, nothing can ever remove it.
+
+
+
+
+BOARD OF TRUSTEES
+
+There isn't any--now. But with power and money piling up higher and
+higher every day and the Church's dominion spreading daily wider and
+farther, a time could come when the envious and ambitious could start
+the idea that it would be wise and well to put a watch upon these
+assets--a watch equipped with properly large authority. By custom, a
+Board of Trustees. Mrs. Eddy has foreseen that probability--for she is
+a woman with a long, long look ahead, the longest look ahead that ever a
+woman had--and she has provided for that emergency. In Art. I., Sec.
+5, she has decreed that no Board of Trustees shall ever exist in the
+Mother-Church “except it be constituted by the Pastor Emeritus.”
+
+The magnificence of it, the daring of it! Thus far, she is:
+
+The Massachusetts Metaphysical College; Pastor Emeritus; President;
+Board of Directors; Treasurer; Clerk; and future Board of Trustees;
+
+and is still moving onward, ever onward. When I contemplate her from
+a commercial point of view, there are no words that can convey my
+admiration of her.
+
+
+
+
+READERS
+
+These are a feature of first importance in the church-machinery of
+Christian Science. For they occupy the pulpit. They hold the place
+that the preacher holds in the other Christian Churches. They hold that
+place, but they do not preach. Two of them are on duty at a time--a man
+and a woman. One reads a passage from the Bible, the other reads
+the explanation of it from Science and Health--and so they go on
+alternating. This constitutes the service--this, with choir-music. They
+utter no word of their own. Art. IV., Sec. 6, closes their mouths with
+this uncompromising gag:
+
+“They shall make no remarks explanatory of the Lesson-Sermon at any time
+during the service.”
+
+It seems a simple little thing. One is not startled by it at a first
+reading of it; nor at the second, nor the third. One may have to read it
+a dozen times before the whole magnitude of it rises before the mind.
+It far and away oversizes and outclasses the best business-idea yet
+invented for the safe-guarding and perpetuating of a religion. If it had
+been thought of and put in force eighteen hundred and seventy years ago,
+there would be but one Christian sect in the world now, instead of ten
+dozens of them.
+
+There are many varieties of men in the world, consequently there are
+many varieties of minds in its pulpits. This insures many differing
+interpretations of important Scripture texts, and this in turn insures
+the splitting up of a religion into many sects. It is what has happened;
+it was sure to happen.
+
+Mrs. Eddy has noted this disastrous result of preaching, and has put up
+the bars. She will have no preaching in her Church. She has explained
+all essential Scriptures, and set the explanations down in her book. In
+her belief her underlings cannot improve upon those explanations, and
+in that stern sentence “they shall make no explanatory remarks” she has
+barred them for all time from trying. She will be obeyed; there is no
+question about that.
+
+In arranging her government she has borrowed ideas from various
+sources--not poor ones, but the best in the governmental market--but
+this one is new, this one came out of no ordinary business-head, this
+one must have come out of her own, there has been no other commercial
+skull in a thousand centuries that was equal to it. She has borrowed
+freely and wisely, but I am sure that this idea is many times
+larger than all her borrowings bulked together. One must respect the
+business-brain that produced it--the splendid pluck and impudence that
+ventured to promulgate it, anyway.
+
+
+
+
+ELECTION OF READERS
+
+Readers are not taken at hap-hazard, any more than preachers are taken
+at hap-hazard for the pulpits of other sects. No, Readers are elected by
+the Board of Directors. But--
+
+“Section 3. The Board shall inform the Pas. for Emeritus of the names
+of candidates for Readers before they are elected, and if she objects to
+the nomination, said candidates shall not be chosen.”
+
+Is that an election--by the Board? Thus far I have not been able to
+find out what that Board of Spectres is for. It certainly has no real
+function, no duty which the hired girl could not perform, no office
+beyond the mere recording of the autocrat's decrees.
+
+There are no dangerously long office-terms in Mrs. Eddy's government.
+The Readers are elected for but one year. This insures their
+subserviency to their proprietor.
+
+Readers are not allowed to copy out passages and read them from the
+manuscript in the pulpit; they must read from Mrs. Eddy's book itself.
+She is right. Slight changes could be slyly made, repeated, and in time
+get acceptance with congregations. Branch sects could grow out of these
+practices. Mrs. Eddy knows the human race, and how far to trust it. Her
+limit is not over a quarter of an inch. It is all that a wise person
+will risk.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's inborn disposition to copyright everything, charter
+everything, secure the rightful and proper credit to herself for
+everything she does, and everything she thinks she does, and everything
+she thinks, and everything she thinks she thinks or has thought or
+intends to think, is illustrated in Sec. 5 of Art. IV., defining the
+duties of official Readers--in church:
+
+“Naming Book and Author. The Reader of Science and Health, with Key
+to the Scriptures, before commencing to read from this book, shall
+distinctly announce its full title and give the author's name.”
+
+Otherwise the congregation might get the habit of forgetting who
+(ostensibly) wrote the book.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARISTOCRACY
+
+This consists of First Members and their apostolic succession. It is a
+close corporation, and its membership limit is one hundred. Forty will
+answer, but if the number fall below that, there must be an election, to
+fill the grand quorum.
+
+This Sanhedrin can't do anything of the slightest importance, but it
+can talk. It can “discuss.” That is, it can discuss “important questions
+relative to Church members”, evidently persons who are already Church
+members. This affords it amusement, and does no harm.
+
+It can “fix the salaries of the Readers.”
+
+Twice a year it “votes on” admitting candidates. That is, for Church
+membership. But its work is cut out for it beforehand, by Art. IX.:
+
+“Every recommendation for membership In the Church 'shall be
+countersigned by a loyal student of Mrs. Eddy's, by a Director of this
+Church, or by a First Member.'”
+
+All these three classes of beings are the personal property of Mrs.
+Eddy. She has absolute control of the elections.
+
+Also it must “transact any Church business that may properly come before
+it.”
+
+“Properly” is a thoughtful word. No important business can come before
+it. The By laws have attended to that. No important business goes before
+any one for the final word except Mrs. Eddy. She has looked to that.
+
+The Sanhedrin “votes on” candidates for admission to its own body. But
+is its vote worth any more than mine would be? No, it isn't. Sec. 4, of
+Art. V.--Election of First Members--makes this quite plain:
+
+“Before being elected, the candidates for First Members shall be
+approved by the Pastor Emeritus over her own signature.”
+
+Thus the Sanhedrin is the personal property of Mrs. Eddy. She owns it.
+It has no functions, no authority, no real existence. It is another
+Board of Shadows. Mrs. Eddy is the Sanhedrin herself.
+
+But it is time to foot up again and “see where we are at.” Thus far,
+Mrs. Eddy is:
+
+The Massachusetts Metaphysical College; Pastor Emeritus, President;
+Board of Directors; Treasurer; Clerk; Future Board of Trustees;
+Proprietor of the Priesthood: Dictator of the Services; Proprietor of
+the Sanhedrin. She has come far, and is still on her way.
+
+
+
+
+CHURCH MEMBERSHIP
+
+In this Article there is another exhibition of a couple of the large
+features of Mrs. Eddy's remarkable make-up: her business-talent and her
+knowledge of human nature.
+
+She does not beseech and implore people to join her Church. She knows
+the human race better than that. She gravely goes through the motions of
+reluctantly granting admission to the applicant as a favor to him. The
+idea is worth untold shekels. She does not stand at the gate of the fold
+with welcoming arms spread, and receive the lost sheep with glad emotion
+and set up the fatted calf and invite the neighbor and have a time. No,
+she looks upon him coldly, she snubs him, she says:
+
+“Who are you? Who is your sponsor? Who asked you to come here? Go away,
+and don't come again until you are invited.”
+
+It is calculated to strikingly impress a person accustomed to Moody and
+Sankey and Sam Jones revivals; accustomed to brain-turning appeals to
+the unknown and unendorsed sinner to come forward and enter into the
+joy, etc.--“just as he is”; accustomed to seeing him do it; accustomed
+to seeing him pass up the aisle through sobbing seas of welcome, and
+love, and congratulation, and arrive at the mourner's bench and be
+received like a long-lost government bond.
+
+No, there is nothing of that kind in Mrs. Eddy's system. She knows that
+if you wish to confer upon a human being something which he is not sure
+he wants, the best way is to make it apparently difficult for him to get
+it--then he is no son of Adam if that apple does not assume an interest
+in his eyes which it lacked before. In time this interest can grow into
+desire. Mrs. Eddy knows that when you cannot get a man to try--free of
+cost--a new and effective remedy for a disease he is afflicted with, you
+can generally sell it to him if you will put a price upon it which he
+cannot afford. When, in the beginning, she taught Christian Science
+gratis (for good reasons), pupils were few and reluctant, and required
+persuasion; it was when she raised the limit to three hundred dollars
+for a dollar's worth that she could not find standing room for the
+invasion of pupils that followed.
+
+With fine astuteness she goes through the motions of making it difficult
+to get membership in her Church. There is a twofold value in this
+system: it gives membership a high value in the eyes of the applicant;
+and at the same time the requirements exacted enable Mrs. Eddy to keep
+him out if she has doubts about his value to her. A word further as to
+applications for membership:
+
+“Applications of students of the Metaphysical College must be signed by
+the Board of Directors.”
+
+That is safe. Mrs. Eddy is proprietor of that Board.
+
+Children of twelve may be admitted if invited by “one of Mrs. Eddy's
+loyal students, or by a First Member, or by a Director.”
+
+These sponsors are the property of Mrs. Eddy, therefore her Church is
+safeguarded from the intrusion of undesirable children.
+
+Other Students. Applicants who have not studied with Mrs. Eddy can get
+in only “by invitation and recommendation from students of Mrs. Eddy....
+or from members of the Mother-Church.”
+
+Other paragraphs explain how two or three other varieties of applicants
+are to be challenged and obstructed, and tell us who is authorized to
+invite them, recommend them endorse them, and all that.
+
+The safeguards are definite, and would seem to be sufficiently
+strenuous--to Mr. Sam Jones, at any rate. Not for Mrs. Eddy. She adds
+this clincher:
+
+“The candidates be elected by a majority vote of the First Members
+present.”
+
+That is the aristocracy, the aborigines, the Sanhedrin. It is Mrs.
+Eddy's property. She herself is the Sanhedrin. No one can get into the
+Church if she wishes to keep him out.
+
+This veto power could some time or other have a large value for her,
+therefore she was wise to reserve it.
+
+It is likely that it is not frequently used. It is also probable that
+the difficulties attendant upon getting admission to membership have
+been instituted more to invite than to deter, more to enhance the
+value of membership and make people long for it than to make it really
+difficult to get. I think so, because the Mother. Church has many
+thousands of members more than its building can accommodate.
+
+
+
+
+AND SOME ENGLISH REQUIRED
+
+Mrs. Eddy is very particular as regards one detail curiously so, for
+her, all things considered. The Church Readers must be “good English
+scholars”; they must be “thorough English scholars.”
+
+She is thus sensitive about the English of her subordinates for cause,
+possibly. In her chapter defining the duties of the Clerk there is an
+indication that she harbors resentful memories of an occasion when the
+hazy quality of her own English made unforeseen and mortifying trouble:
+
+“Understanding Communications. Sec. 2. If the Clerk of this Church shall
+receive a communication from the Pastor Emeritus which he does not fully
+understand, he shall inform her of this fact before presenting it to
+the Church, and obtain a clear understanding of the matter--then act in
+accordance therewith.”
+
+She should have waited to calm down, then, but instead she added this,
+which lacks sugar:
+
+“Failing to adhere to this By-law, the Clerk must resign.”
+
+I wish I could see that communication that broke the camel's back.
+It was probably the one beginning: “What plague spot or bacilli were
+gnawing at the heart of this metropolis and bringing it on bended knee?”
+ and I think it likely that the kindly disposed Clerk tried to translate
+it into English and lost his mind and had to go to the hospital.
+That Bylaw was not the offspring of a forecast, an intuition, it was
+certainly born of a sorrowful experience. Its temper gives the fact
+away.
+
+The little book of By-laws has manifestly been tinkered by one of Mrs.
+Eddy's “thorough English scholars,” for in the majority of cases its
+meanings are clear. The book is not even marred by Mrs. Eddy's peculiar
+specialty--lumbering clumsinesses of speech. I believe the salaried
+polisher has weeded them all out but one. In one place, after referring
+to Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy goes on to say “the Bible and the
+above-named book, with other works by the same author,” etc.
+
+It is an unfortunate sentence, for it could mislead a hasty or careless
+reader for a moment. Mrs. Eddy framed it--it is her very own--it bears
+her trade-mark. “The Bible and Science and Health, with other works by
+the same author,” could have come from no literary vacuum but the one
+which produced the remark (in the Autobiography): “I remember reading,
+in my childhood, certain manuscripts containing Scriptural Sonnets,
+besides other verses and enigmas.”
+
+We know what she means, in both instances, but a low-priced Clerk would
+not necessarily know, and on a salary like his he could quite excusably
+aver that the Pastor Emeritus had commanded him to come and make
+proclamation that she was author of the Bible, and that she was thinking
+of discharging some Scriptural sonnets and other enigmas upon the
+congregation. It could lose him his place, but it would not be fair, if
+it happened before the edict about “Understanding Communications” was
+promulgated.
+
+
+
+
+“READERS” AGAIN
+
+The By-law book makes a showy pretence of orderliness and system, but it
+is only a pretence. I will not go so far as to say it is a harum-scarum
+jumble, for it is not that, but I think it fair to say it is at least
+jumbulacious in places. For instance, Articles III. and IV. set forth
+in much detail the qualifications and duties of Readers, she then
+skips some thirty pages and takes up the subject again. It looks
+like slovenliness, but it may be only art. The belated By-law has a
+sufficiently quiet look, but it has a ton of dynamite in it. It makes
+all the Christian Science Church Readers on the globe the personal
+chattels of Mrs. Eddy. Whenever she chooses, she can stretch her long
+arm around the world's fat belly and flirt a Reader out of his pulpit,
+though he be tucked away in seeming safety and obscurity in a lost
+village in the middle of China:
+
+“In any Church. Sec. 2. The Pastor Emeritus of the Mother-Church shall
+have the right (through a letter addressed to the individual and Church
+of which he is the Reader) to remove a Reader from this office in any
+Church of Christ, Scientist, both in America and in foreign nations;
+or to appoint the Reader to fill any office belonging to the Christian
+Science denomination.”
+
+She does not have to prefer charges against him, she does not have to
+find him lazy, careless, incompetent, untidy, ill-mannered, unholy,
+dishonest, she does not have to discover a fault of any kind in him,
+she does not have to tell him nor his congregation why she dismisses and
+disgraces him and insults his meek flock, she does not have to explain
+to his family why she takes the bread out of their mouths and turns them
+out-of-doors homeless and ashamed in a strange land; she does not have
+to do anything but send a letter and say: “Pack!--and ask no questions!”
+
+Has the Pope this power?--the other Pope--the one in Rome. Has he
+anything approaching it? Can he turn a priest out of his pulpit and
+strip him of his office and his livelihood just upon a whim, a caprice,
+and meanwhile furnishing no reasons to the parish? Not in America. And
+not elsewhere, we may believe.
+
+It is odd and strange, to see intelligent and educated people among
+us worshipping this self-seeking and remorseless tyrant as a God. This
+worship is denied--by persons who are themselves worshippers of Mrs.
+Eddy. I feel quite sure that it is a worship which will continue during
+ages.
+
+That Mrs. Eddy wrote that amazing By-law with her own hand we have much
+better evidence than her word. We have her English. It is there. It
+cannot be imitated. She ought never to go to the expense of copyrighting
+her verbal discharges. When any one tries to claim them she should call
+me; I can always tell them from any other literary apprentice's at a
+glance. It was like her to call America a “nation”; she would call a
+sand-bar a nation if it should fall into a sentence in which she was
+speaking of peoples, for she would not know how to untangle it and get
+it out and classify it by itself. And the closing arrangement of that
+By-law is in true Eddysonian form, too. In it she reserves authority to
+make a Reader fill any office connected with a Science church-sexton,
+grave-digger, advertising-agent, Annex-polisher, leader of the choir,
+President, Director, Treasurer, Clerk, etc. She did not mean that.
+She already possessed that authority. She meant to clothe herself with
+power, despotic and unchallengeable, to appoint all Science Readers to
+their offices, both at home and abroad. The phrase “or to appoint”
+ is another miscarriage of intention; she did not mean “or,” she meant
+“and.”
+
+
+That By-law puts into Mrs. Eddy's hands absolute command over the most
+formidable force and influence existent in the Christian Science kingdom
+outside of herself, and it does this unconditionally and (by auxiliary
+force of Laws already quoted) irrevocably. Still, she is not quite
+satisfied. Something might happen, she doesn't know what. Therefore she
+drives in one more nail, to make sure, and drives it deep:
+
+“This By-law can neither be amended nor annulled, except by consent of
+the Pastor Emeritus.”
+
+Let some one with a wild and delirious fancy try and see if he can
+imagine her furnishing that consent.
+
+
+
+
+MONOPOLY OF SPIRITUAL BREAD
+
+Very properly, the first qualification for membership in the
+Mother-Church is belief in the doctrines of Christian Science.
+
+But these doctrines must not be gathered from secondary sources. There
+is but one recognized source. The candidate must be a believer in the
+doctrines of Christian Science “according to the platform and teaching
+contained in the Christian Science text-book, 'Science and Health, with
+Key to the Scriptures,' by Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy.”
+
+That is definite, and is final. There are to be no commentaries, no
+labored volumes of exposition and explanation by anybody except Mrs.
+Eddy. Because such things could sow error, create warring opinions,
+split the religion into sects, and disastrously cripple its power. Mrs.
+Eddy will do the whole of the explaining, Herself--has done it, in fact.
+She has written several books. They are to be had (for cash in advance),
+they are all sacred; additions to them can never be needed and will
+never be permitted. They tell the candidate how to instruct himself,
+how to teach others, how to do all things comprised in the business--and
+they close the door against all would-be competitors, and monopolize the
+trade:
+
+“The Bible and the above--named book [Science and Health], with
+other works by the same author,” must be his only text-books for the
+commerce--he cannot forage outside.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's words are to be the sole elucidators of the Bible and
+Science and Health--forever. Throughout the ages, whenever there is
+doubt as to the meaning of a passage in either of these books the
+inquirer will not dream of trying to explain it to himself; he would
+shudder at the thought of such temerity, such profanity, he would be
+haled to the Inquisition and thence to the public square and the stake
+if he should be caught studying into text-meanings on his own hook; he
+will be prudent and seek the meanings at the only permitted source, Mrs.
+Eddy's commentaries.
+
+Value of this Strait-jacket. One must not underrate the magnificence
+of this long-headed idea, one must not underestimate its giant
+possibilities in the matter of trooping the Church solidly together and
+keeping it so. It squelches independent inquiry, and makes such a thing
+impossible, profane, criminal, it authoritatively settles every dispute
+that can arise. It starts with finality--a point which the Roman Church
+has travelled towards fifteen or sixteen centuries, stage by stage,
+and has not yet reached. The matter of the Immaculate Conception of
+the Virgin Mary was not authoritatively settled until the days of Pius
+IX.--yesterday, so to speak.
+
+As already noticed, the Protestants are broken up into a long array of
+sects, a result of disputes about the meanings of texts, disputes made
+unavoidable by the absence of an infallible authority to submit doubtful
+passages to. A week or two ago (I am writing in the middle of January,
+1903), the clergy and others hereabouts had a warm dispute in the papers
+over this question: Did Jesus anywhere claim to be God? It seemed an
+easy question, but it turned out to be a hard one. It was ably and
+elaborately discussed, by learned men of several denominations, but in
+the end it remained unsettled.
+
+A week ago, another discussion broke out. It was over this text:
+
+“Sell all that thou hast and distribute unto the poor.”
+
+One verdict was worded as follows:
+
+“When Christ answered the rich young man and said for him to give to the
+poor all he possessed or he could not gain everlasting life, He did not
+mean it in the literal sense. My interpretation of His words is that we
+should part with what comes between us and Christ.
+
+“There is no doubt that Jesus believed that the rich young man thought
+more of his wealth than he did of his soul, and, such being the case, it
+was his duty to give up the wealth.
+
+“Every one of us knows that there is something we should give up for
+Christ. Those who are true believers and followers know what they have
+given up, and those who are not yet followers know down in their hearts
+what they must give up.”
+
+Ten clergymen of various denominations were interviewed, and nine of
+them agreed with that verdict. That did not settle the matter, because
+the tenth said the language of Jesus was so strait and definite that it
+explained itself: “Sell all,” not a percentage.
+
+There is a most unusual feature about that dispute: the nine persons
+who decided alike, quoted not a single authority in support of their
+position. I do not know when I have seen trained disputants do the like
+of that before. The nine merely furnished their own opinions, founded
+upon--nothing at all. In the other dispute (“Did Jesus anywhere claim to
+be God?”) the same kind of men--trained and learned clergymen--backed up
+their arguments with chapter and verse. On both sides. Plenty of verses.
+Were no reinforcing verses to be found in the present case? It looks
+that way.
+
+The opinion of the nine seems strange to me, for it is unsupported
+by authority, while there was at least constructive authority for the
+opposite view.
+
+It is hair-splitting differences of opinion over disputed text-meanings
+that have divided into many sects a once united Church. One may
+infer from some of the names in the following list that some of
+the differences are very slight--so slight as to be not distinctly
+important, perhaps--yet they have moved groups to withdraw from
+communions to which they belonged and set up a sect of their own. The
+list--accompanied by various Church statistics for 1902, compiled by
+Rev. Dr. H. K. Carroll--was published, January 8, 1903, in the New York
+Christian Advocate:
+
+Adventists (6 bodies), Baptists (13 bodies), Brethren (Plymouth) (4
+bodies), Brethren (River) (3 bodies), Catholics (8 bodies), Catholic
+Apostolic, Christadelphians, Christian Connection, Christian Catholics,
+Christian Missionary Association, Christian Scientists, Church of God
+(Wine-brennarian), Church of the New Jerusalem, Congregationalists,
+Disciples of Christ, Dunkards (4 bodies), Evangelical (2 bodies),
+Friends (4 bodies), Friends of the Temple, German Evangelical
+Protestant, German Evangelical Synod, Independent congregations, Jews (2
+bodies), Latter-day Saints (2 bodies), Lutherans (22 bodies), Mennonites
+(12 bodies), Methodists (17 bodies), Moravians, Presbyterians (12
+bodies), Protestant Episcopal (2 bodies), Reformed (3 bodies),
+Schwenkfeldians, Social Brethren, Spiritualists, Swedish Evangelical
+Miss. Covenant (Waldenstromians), Unitarians, United Brethren (2
+bodies), Universalists.
+
+Total of sects and splits--139.
+
+In the present month (February), Mr. E. I. Lindh, A.M., has communicated
+to the Boston Transcript a hopeful article on the solution of the
+problem of the “divided church.” Divided is not too violent a term.
+Subdivided could have been permitted if he had thought of it. He came
+near thinking of it, for he mentions some of the subdivisions himself:
+“the 12 kinds of Presbyterians, the 17 kinds of Methodists, the 13 kinds
+of Baptists, etc.” He overlooked the 12 kinds of Mennonites and the 22
+kinds of Lutherans, but they are in Rev. Mr. Carroll's list. Altogether,
+76 splits under 5 flags. The Literary Digest (February 14th) is pleased
+with Mr. Lindh's optimistic article, and also with the signs of the
+times, and perceives that “the idea of Church unity is in the air.”
+
+Now, then, is not Mrs. Eddy profoundly wise in forbidding, for all time,
+all explanations of her religion except such as she shall let on to be
+her own?
+
+I think so. I think there can be no doubt of it. In a way, they will be
+her own; for, no matter which member of her clerical staff shall furnish
+the explanations, not a line of them will she ever allow to be printed
+until she shall have approved it, accepted it, copyrighted it, cabbaged
+it. We may depend on that with a four-ace confidence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW INFALLIBILITY
+
+All in proper time Mrs. Eddy's factory will take hold of that
+Commandment, and explain it for good and all. It may be that one member
+of the shift will vote that the word “all” means all; it may be that ten
+members of the shift will vote that “all” means only a percentage; but
+it is Mrs. Eddy, not the eleven, who will do the deciding. And if she
+says it is percentage, then percentage it is, forevermore--and that
+is what I am expecting, for she doesn't sell all herself, nor any
+considerable part of it, and as regards the poor, she doesn't declare
+any dividend; but if she says “all” means all, then all it is, to the
+end of time, and no follower of hers will ever be allowed to reconstruct
+that text, or shrink it, or inflate it, or meddle with it in any way at
+all. Even to-day--right here in the beginning--she is the sole person
+who, in the matter of Christian Science exegesis, is privileged to
+exploit the Spiral Twist. The Christian world has two Infallibles now.
+
+Of equal power? For the present only. When Leo XIII. passes to his rest
+another Infallible will ascend his throne; others, and yet others, and
+still others will follow him, and be as infallible as he, and decide
+questions of doctrine as long as they may come up, all down the far
+future; but Mary Baker G. Eddy is the only Infallible that will ever
+occupy the Science throne. Many a Science Pope will succeed her, but
+she has closed their mouths; they will repeat and reverently praise and
+adore her infallibilities, but venture none themselves. In her grave she
+will still outrank all other Popes, be they of what Church they may.
+She will hold the supremest of earthly titles, The Infallible--with
+a capital T. Many in the world's history have had a hunger for such
+nuggets and slices of power as they might reasonably hope to grab out
+of an empire's or a religion's assets, but Mrs. Eddy is the only person
+alive or dead who has ever struck for the whole of them. For small
+things she has the eye of a microscope, for large ones the eye of a
+telescope, and whatever she sees, she wants. Wants it all.
+
+
+
+
+THE SACRED POEMS
+
+When Mrs. Eddy's “sacred revelations” (that is the language of the
+By-laws) are read in public, their authorship must be named. The By-laws
+twice command this, therefore we mention it twice, to be fair.
+
+But it is also commanded that when a member publicly quotes “from the
+poems of our Pastor Emeritus” the authorship shall be named. For these
+are sacred, too. There are kindly people who may suspect a hidden
+generosity in that By-law; they may think it is there to protect the
+Official Reader from the suspicion of having written the poems himself.
+Such do not know Mrs. Eddy. She does an inordinate deal of protecting,
+but in no distinctly named and specified case in her history has Number
+Two been the object of it. Instances have been claimed, but they have
+failed of proof, and even of plausibility.
+
+“Members shall also instruct their students” to look out and advertise
+the authorship when they read those poems and things. Not on Mrs. Eddy's
+account, but “for the good of our Cause.”
+
+
+
+
+THE CHURCH EDIFICE
+
+1. Mrs. Eddy gave the land. It was not of much value at the time, but it
+is very valuable now. 2. Her people built the Mother-Church edifice on
+it, at a cost of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. 3. Then they
+gave the whole property to her. 4. Then she gave it to the Board of
+Directors. She is the Board of Directors. She took it out of one pocket
+and put it in the other. 5. Sec. 10 (of the deed). “Whenever said
+Directors shall determine that it is inexpedient to maintain preaching,
+reading, or speaking in said church in accordance with the terms of this
+deed, they are authorized and required to reconvey forthwith said lot
+of land with the building thereon to Mary Baker G. Eddy, her heirs and
+assigns forever, by a proper deed of conveyance.”
+
+She is never careless, never slipshod, about a matter of business.
+Owning the property through her Board of Waxworks was safe enough, still
+it was sound business to set another grip on it to cover accidents,
+and she did it. Her barkers (what a curious name; I wonder if it is
+copyrighted); her barkers persistently advertise to the public her
+generosity in giving away a piece of land which cost her a trifle, and
+a two--hundred--and--fifty--thousand--dollar church which cost her
+nothing; and they can hardly speak of the unselfishness of it without
+breaking down and crying; yet they know she gave nothing away, and never
+intended to. However, such is the human race. Often it does seem such a
+pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
+
+Some of the hostiles think that Mrs. Eddy's idea in protecting this
+property in the interest of her heirs, and in accumulating a great money
+fortune, is, that she may leave her natural heirs well provided for when
+she goes. I think it is a mistake. I think she is of late years giving
+herself large concern about only one interest-her power and glory, and
+the perpetuation and worship of her Name--with a capital N. Her Church
+is her pet heir, and I think it will get her wealth. It is the torch
+which is to light the world and the ages with her glory.
+
+I think she once prized money for the ease and comfort it could bring,
+the showy vanities it could furnish, and the social promotion it could
+command; for we have seen that she was born into the world with little
+ways and instincts and aspirations and affectations that are duplicates
+of our own. I do not think her money-passion has ever diminished in
+ferocity, I do not think that she has ever allowed a dollar that had no
+friends to get by her alive, but I think her reason for wanting it
+has changed. I think she wants it now to increase and establish and
+perpetuate her power and glory with, not to add to her comforts and
+luxuries, not to furnish paint and fuss and feathers for vain display.
+I think her ambitions have soared away above the fuss-and-feather stage.
+She still likes the little shows and vanities--a fact which she
+exposed in a public utterance two or three days ago when she was not
+noticing--but I think she does not place a large value upon them now.
+She could build a mighty and far-shining brass-mounted palace if she
+wanted to, but she does not do it. She would have had that kind of an
+ambition in the early scrabbling times. She could go to England to-day
+and be worshiped by earls, and get a comet's attention from the
+million, if she cared for such things. She would have gone in the early
+scrabbling days for much less than an earl, and been vain of it, and
+glad to show off before the remains of the Scotch kin. But those things
+are very small to her now--next to invisible, observed through the
+cloud-rack from the dizzy summit where she perches in these great days.
+She does not want that church property for herself. It is worth but a
+quarter of a million--a sum she could call in from her far-spread flocks
+to-morrow with a lift of her hand. Not a squeeze of it, just a lift. It
+would come without a murmur; come gratefully, come gladly. And if her
+glory stood in more need of the money in Boston than it does where her
+flocks are propagating it, she would lift the hand, I think.
+
+She is still reaching for the Dollar, she will continue to reach for it;
+but not that she may spend it upon herself; not that she may spend it
+upon charities; not that she may indemnify an early deprivation and
+clothe herself in a blaze of North Adams gauds; not that she may have
+nine breeds of pie for breakfast, as only the rich New-Englander can;
+not that she may indulge any petty material vanity or appetite that once
+was hers and prized and nursed, but that she may apply that Dollar to
+statelier uses, and place it where it may cast the metallic sheen of her
+glory farthest across the receding expanses of the globe.
+
+
+
+
+PRAYER
+
+A brief and good one is furnished in the book of By-laws. The Scientist
+is required to pray it every day.
+
+
+
+
+THE LORD'S PRAYER-AMENDED
+
+This is not in the By-laws, it is in the first chapter of Science and
+Health, edition of 1902. I do not find it in the edition of 1884. It
+is probable that it had not at that time been handed down. Science and
+Health's (latest) rendering of its “spiritual sense” is as follows:
+
+“Our Father-Mother God' all-harmonious, adorable One. Thy kingdom is
+within us, Thou art ever-present. Enable us to know--as in heaven, so
+on earth--God is supreme. Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished
+affections. And infinite Love is reflected in love. And Love leadeth us
+not into temptation, but delivereth from sin, disease, and death. For
+God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and Love.”
+
+If I thought my opinion was desired and would be properly revered, I
+should say that in my judgment that is as good a piece of carpentering
+as any of those eleven Commandment--experts could do with the material
+after all their practice. I notice only one doubtful place. “Lead us not
+into temptation” seems to me to be a very definite request, and that the
+new rendering turns the definite request into a definite assertion. I
+shall be glad to have that turned back to the old way and the marks of
+the Spiral Twist removed, or varnished over; then I shall be satisfied,
+and will do the best I can with what is left. At the same time, I do
+feel that the shrinkage in our spiritual assets is getting serious.
+First the Commandments, now the Prayer. I never expected to see these
+steady old reliable securities watered down to this. And this is not
+the whole of it. Last summer the Presbyterians extended the Calling and
+Election suffrage to nearly everybody entitled to salvation. They did
+not even stop there, but let out all the unbaptized American infants
+we had been accumulating for two hundred years and more. There are some
+that believe they would have let the Scotch ones out, too, if they could
+have done it. Everything is going to ruin; in no long time we shall have
+nothing left but the love of God.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW UNPARDONABLE SIN
+
+“Working Against the Cause. Sec. 2. If a member of this Church shall
+work against the accomplishment of what the Discoverer and Founder of
+Christian Science understands is advantageous to the individual, to this
+Church, and to the Cause of Christian Science”--out he goes. Forever.
+
+The member may think that what he is doing will advance the Cause,
+but he is not invited to do any thinking. More than that, he is not
+permitted to do any--as he will clearly gather from this By-law. When a
+person joins Mrs. Eddy's Church he must leave his thinker at home. Leave
+it permanently. To make sure that it will not go off some time or other
+when he is not watching, it will be safest for him to spike it. If he
+should forget himself and think just once, the By-law provides that he
+shall be fired out-instantly-forever-no return.
+
+“It shall be the duty of this Church immediately to call a meeting, and
+drop forever the name of this member from its records.”
+
+My, but it breathes a towering indignation!
+
+There are forgivable offenses, but this is not one of them; there are
+admonitions, probations, suspensions, in several minor cases; mercy is
+shown the derelict, in those cases he is gently used, and in time he can
+get back into the fold--even when he has repeated his offence. But let
+him think, just once, without getting his thinker set to Eddy time,
+and that is enough; his head comes off. There is no second offence, and
+there is no gate open to that lost sheep, ever again.
+
+“This rule cannot be changed, amended, or annulled, except by unanimous
+vote of all the First Members.”
+
+The same being Mrs. Eddy. It is naively sly and pretty to see her keep
+putting forward First Members, and Boards of This and That, and other
+broideries and ruffles of her raiment, as if they were independent
+entities, instead of a part of her clothes, and could do things all by
+themselves when she was outside of them.
+
+Mrs. Eddy did not need to copyright the sentence just quoted, its
+English would protect it. None but she would have shovelled that
+comically superfluous “all” in there.
+
+The former Unpardonable Sin has gone out of service. We may frame the
+new Christian Science one thus:
+
+“Whatsoever Member shall think, and without Our Mother's permission act
+upon his think, the same shall be cut off from the Church forever.”
+
+It has been said that I make many mistakes about Christian Science
+through being ignorant of the spiritual meanings of its terminology.
+I believe it is true. I have been misled all this time by that word
+Member, because there was no one to tell me that its spiritual meaning
+was Slave.
+
+
+
+
+AXE AND BLOCK
+
+There is a By-law which forbids Members to practice hypnotism; the
+penalty is excommunication.
+
+1. If a member is found to be a mental practitioner--2. Complaint is to
+be entered against him--3. By the Pastor Emeritus, and by none else;
+4. No member is allowed to make complaint to her in the matter; 5. Upon
+Mrs. Eddy's mere “complaint”--unbacked by evidence or proof, and without
+giving the accused a chance to be heard--his name shall be dropped from
+this Church.
+
+Mrs. Eddy has only to say a member is guilty--that is all. That ends
+it. It is not a case of he “may” be cut off from Christian Science
+salvation, it is a case of he “shall” be. Her serfs must see to it, and
+not say a word.
+
+Does the other Pope possess this prodigious and irresponsible power?
+Certainly not in our day.
+
+Some may be curious to know how Mrs. Eddy finds out that a member is
+practicing hypnotism, since no one is allowed to come before her throne
+and accuse him. She has explained this in Christian Science History,
+first and second editions, page 16:
+
+“I possess a spiritual sense of what the malicious mental practitioner
+is mentally arguing which cannot be deceived; I can discern in the human
+mind thoughts, motives, and purposes, and neither mental arguments nor
+psychic power can affect this spiritual insight.”
+
+A marvelous woman; with a hunger for power such as has never been seen
+in the world before. No thing, little or big, that contains any seed or
+suggestion of power escapes her avaricious eye; and when once she gets
+that eye on it, her remorseless grip follows. There isn't a Christian
+Scientist who isn't ecclesiastically as much her property as if she had
+bought him and paid for him, and copyrighted him and got a charter.
+She cannot be satisfied when she has handcuffed a member, and put a
+leg-chain and ball on him and plugged his ears and removed his thinker,
+she goes on wrapping needless chains round and round him, just as a
+spider would. For she trusts no one, believes in no one's honesty,
+judges every one by herself. Although we have seen that she has absolute
+and irresponsible command over her spectral Boards and over every
+official and servant of her Church, at home and abroad, over every
+minute detail of her Church's government, present and future, and can
+purge her membership of guilty or suspected persons by various plausible
+formalities and whenever she will, she is still not content, but must
+set her queer mind to work and invent a way by which she can take a
+member--any member--by neck and crop and fling him out without anything
+resembling a formality at all.
+
+She is sole accuser and sole witness, and her testimony is final and
+carries uncompromising and irremediable doom with it.
+
+The Sole-Witness Court! It should make the Council of Ten and the
+Council of Three turn in their graves for shame, to see how little they
+knew about satanic concentrations of irresponsible power. Here we have
+one Accuser, one Witness, one Judge, one Headsman--and all four bunched
+together in Mrs. Eddy, the Inspired of God, His Latest Thought to His
+People, New Member of the Holy Family, the Equal of Jesus.
+
+When a Member is not satisfactory to Mrs. Eddy, and yet is blameless in
+his life and faultless in his membership and in his Christian Science
+walk and conversation, shall he hold up his head and tilt his hat over
+one ear and imagine himself safe because of these perfections? Why,
+in that very moment Mrs. Eddy will cast that spiritual X-ray of hers
+through his dungarees and say:
+
+“I see his hypnotism working, among his insides--remove him to the
+block!”
+
+What shall it profit him to know it isn't so? Nothing. His testimony is
+of no value. No one wants it, no one will ask for it. He is not present
+to offer it (he does not know he has been accused), and if he were there
+to offer it, it would not be listened to.
+
+It was out of powers approaching Mrs. Eddy's--though not equalling
+them--that the Inquisition and the devastations of the Interdict grew.
+She will transmit hers. The man born two centuries from now will think
+he has arrived in hell; and all in good time he will think he knows it.
+Vast concentrations of irresponsible power have never in any age been
+used mercifully, and there is nothing to suggest that the Christian
+Science Papacy is going to spend money on novelties.
+
+Several Christian Scientists have asked me to refrain from prophecy.
+There is no prophecy in our day but history. But history is a
+trustworthy prophet. History is always repeating itself, because
+conditions are always repeating themselves. Out of duplicated conditions
+history always gets a duplicate product.
+
+
+
+
+READING LETTERS AT MEETINGS
+
+I wonder if there is anything a Member can do that will not raise Mrs.
+Eddy's jealousy? The By-laws seem to hunt him from pillar to post all
+the time, and turn all his thoughts and acts and words into sins against
+the meek and lowly new deity of his worship. Apparently her jealousy
+never sleeps. Apparently any trifle can offend it, and but one penalty
+appease it--excommunication. The By-laws might properly and reasonably
+be entitled Laws for the Coddling and Comforting of Our Mother's Petty
+Jealousies. The By-law named at the head of this paragraph reads its
+transgressor out of the Church if he shall carry a letter from Mrs. Eddy
+to the congregation and forget to read it or fail to read the whole of
+it.
+
+
+
+
+HONESTY REQUISITE
+
+Dishonest members are to be admonished; if they continue in dishonest
+practices, excommunication follows. Considering who it is that draughted
+this law, there is a certain amount of humor in it.
+
+
+
+
+FURTHER APPLICATIONS OF THE AXE
+
+Here follow the titles of some more By-laws whose infringement is
+punishable by excommunication:
+
+
+Silence Enjoined. Misteaching. Departure from Tenets. Violation of
+Christian Fellowship. Moral Offences. Illegal Adoption. Broken By-laws.
+Violation of By-laws. (What is the difference?) Formulas Forbidden.
+Official Advice. (Forbids Tom, Dick, and Harry's clack.) Unworthy of
+Membership. Final Excommunication. Organizing Churches.
+
+This looks as if Mrs. Eddy had devoted a large share of her time and
+talent to inventing ways to get rid of her Church members. Yet in
+another place she seems to invite membership. Not in any urgent way,
+it is true, still she throws out a bait to such as like notice and
+distinction (in other words, the Human Race). Page 82:
+
+“It is important that these seemingly strict conditions be complied
+with, as the names of the Members of the Mother-Church will be recorded
+in the history of the Church and become a part thereof.”
+
+We all want to be historical.
+
+
+
+
+MORE SELF-PROTECTIONS
+
+The Hymnal. There is a Christian Science Hymnal. Entrance to it was
+closed in 1898. Christian Science students who make hymns nowadays may
+possibly get them sung in the Mother-Church, “but not unless approved by
+the Pastor Emeritus.” Art. XXVII, Sec. 2.
+
+Solo Singers. Mrs. Eddy has contributed the words of three of the hymns
+in the Hymnal. Two of them appear in it six times altogether, each of
+them being set to three original forms of musical anguish. Mrs. Eddy,
+always thoughtful, has promulgated a By-law requiring the singing of one
+of her three hymns in the Mother Church “as often as once each month.”
+ It is a good idea. A congregation could get tired of even Mrs. Eddy's
+muse in the course of time, without the cordializing incentive of
+compulsion. We all know how wearisome the sweetest and touchingest
+things can become, through rep-rep-repetition, and still
+rep-rep-repetition, and more rep-rep-repetition-like “the sweet
+by-and-by, in the sweet by-and-by,” for instance, and “Tah-rah-rah
+boom-de-aye”; and surely it is not likely that Mrs. Eddy's machine has
+turned out goods that could outwear those great heart-stirrers, without
+the assistance of the lash. “O'er Waiting Harpstrings of the Mind” is
+pretty good, quite fair to middling--the whole seven of the stanzas--but
+repetition would be certain to take the excitement out of it in the
+course of time, even if there were fourteen, and then it would sound
+like the multiplication table, and would cease to save. The congregation
+would be perfectly sure to get tired; in fact, did get tired--hence the
+compulsory By-law. It is a measure born of experience, not foresight.
+
+The By-laws say that “if a solo singer shall neglect or refuse to sing
+alone” one of those three hymns as often as once a month, and oftener if
+so directed by the Board of Directors--which is Mrs. Eddy--the singer's
+salary shall be stopped. It is circumstantial evidence that some
+soloists neglected this sacrament and others refused it. At least that
+is the charitable view to take of it. There is only one other view to
+take: that Mrs. Eddy did really foresee that there would be singers
+who would some day get tired of doing her hymns and proclaiming the
+authorship, unless persuaded by a Bylaw, with a penalty attached. The
+idea could of course occur to her wise head, for she would know that a
+seven-stanza break might well be a calamitous strain upon a soloist, and
+that he might therefore avoid it if unwatched. He could not curtail it,
+for the whole of anything that Mrs. Eddy does is sacred, and cannot be
+cut.
+
+
+
+
+BOARD OF EDUCATION
+
+It consists of four members, one of whom is President of it. Its members
+are elected annually. Subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval. Art. XXX., Sec.
+2.
+
+She owns the Board--is the Board.
+
+Mrs. Eddy is President of the Metaphysical College. If at any time she
+shall vacate that office, the Directors of the College (that is to say,
+Mrs. Eddy) “shall” elect to the vacancy the President of the Board of
+Education (which is merely re-electing herself).
+
+It is another case of “Pastor Emeritus.” She gives up the shadow of
+authority, but keeps a good firm hold on the substance.
+
+
+
+
+PUBLIC TEACHERS
+
+Applicants for admission to this industry must pass a thorough three
+days' examination before the Board of Education “in Science and Health,
+chapter on 'Recapitulation'; the Platform of Christian Science; page 403
+of Christian Science Practice, from line second to the second paragraph
+of page 405; and page 488, second and third paragraphs.”
+
+
+
+
+BOARD OF LECTURESHIP
+
+The lecturers are exceedingly important servants of Mrs. Eddy, and she
+chooses them with great care. Each of them has an appointed territory
+in which to perform his duties--in the North, the South, the East, the
+West, in Canada, in Great Britain, and so on--and each must stick to
+his own territory and not forage beyond its boundaries. I think it goes
+without saying--from what we have seen of Mrs. Eddy--that no lecture is
+delivered until she has examined and approved it, and that the lecturer
+is not allowed to change it afterwards.
+
+The members of the Board of Lectureship are elected annually--
+
+“Subject to the approval of Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy.”
+
+
+
+
+MISSIONARIES
+
+There are but four. They are elected--like the rest of the
+domestics--annually. So far as I can discover, not a single servant of
+the Sacred Household has a steady job except Mrs. Eddy. It is plain that
+she trusts no human being but herself.
+
+
+
+
+THE BY-LAWS
+
+The branch Churches are strictly forbidden to use them.
+
+So far as I can see, they could not do it if they wanted to. The By-laws
+are merely the voice of the master issuing commands to the servants.
+There is nothing and nobody for the servants to re-utter them to.
+
+That useless edict is repeated in the little book, a few pages farther
+on. There are several other repetitions of prohibitions in the book that
+could be spared-they only take up room for nothing.
+
+
+
+
+THE CREED It is copyrighted. I do not know why, but I suppose it is to
+keep adventurers from some day claiming that they invented it, and
+not Mrs. Eddy and that “strange Providence” that has suggested so many
+clever things to her.
+
+No Change. It is forbidden to change the Creed. That is important, at
+any rate.
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT
+
+I can understand why Mrs. Eddy copyrighted the early editions
+and revisions of Science and Health, and why she had a mania for
+copyrighting every scrap of every sort that came from her pen in those
+jejune days when to be in print probably seemed a wonderful distinction
+to her in her provincial obscurity, but why she should continue this
+delirium in these days of her godship and her far-spread fame, I cannot
+explain to myself. And particularly as regards Science and Health. She
+knows, now, that that Annex is going to live for many centuries; and so,
+what good is a fleeting forty-two-year copyright going to do it?
+
+Now a perpetual copyright would be quite another matter. I would like to
+give her a hint. Let her strike for a perpetual copyright on that book.
+There is precedent for it. There is one book in the world which bears
+the charmed life of perpetual copyright (a fact not known to twenty
+people in the world). By a hardy perversion of privilege on the part of
+the lawmaking power the Bible has perpetual copyright in Great Britain.
+There is no justification for it in fairness, and no explanation of it
+except that the Church is strong enough there to have its way, right
+or wrong. The recent Revised Version enjoys perpetual copyright, too--a
+stronger precedent, even, than the other one.
+
+Now, then, what is the Annex but a Revised Version itself? Which of
+course it is--Lord's Prayer and all. With that pair of formidable
+British precedents to proceed upon, what Congress of ours--
+
+But how short-sighted I am. Mrs. Eddy has thought of it long ago. She
+thinks of everything. She knows she has only to keep her copyright of
+1902 alive through its first stage of twenty-eight years, and perpetuity
+is assured. A Christian Science Congress will reign in the Capitol then.
+She probably attaches small value to the first edition (1875). Although
+it was a Revelation from on high, it was slim, lank, incomplete, padded
+with bales of refuse rags, and puffs from lassoed celebrities to fill
+it out, an uncreditable book, a book easily sparable, a book not to
+be mentioned in the same year with the sleek, fat, concise, compact,
+compressed, and competent Annex of to-day, in its dainty flexible
+covers, gilt--edges, rounded corners, twin screw, spiral twist,
+compensation balance, Testament-counterfeit, and all that; a book just
+born to curl up on the hymn-book-shelf in church and look just too sweet
+and holy for anything. Yes, I see now what she was copyrighting that
+child for.
+
+
+
+
+CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION
+
+It is true in matters of business Mrs. Eddy thinks of everything. She
+thought of an organ, to disseminate the Truth as it was in Mrs. Eddy.
+Straightway she started one--the Christian Science Journal.
+
+It is true--in matters of business Mrs. Eddy thinks of everything. As
+soon as she had got the Christian Science Journal sufficiently in debt
+to make its presence on the premises disagreeable to her, it occurred
+to her to make somebody a present of it. Which she did, along with
+its debts. It was in the summer of 1889. The victim selected was
+her Church--called, in those days, The National Christian Scientist
+Association.
+
+She delivered this sorrow to those lambs as a “gift” in consideration of
+their “loyalty to our great cause.”
+
+Also--still thinking of everything--she told them to retain Mr. Bailey
+in the editorship and make Mr. Nixon publisher. We do not know what it
+was she had against those men; neither do we know whether she scored on
+Bailey or not, we only know that God protected Nixon, and for that I am
+sincerely glad, although I do not know Nixon and have never even seen
+him.
+
+Nixon took the Journal and the rest of the Publishing Society's
+liabilities, and demonstrated over them during three years, then brought
+in his report:
+
+“On assuming my duties as publisher, there was not a dollar in the
+treasury; but on the contrary the Society owed unpaid printing and
+paper bills to the amount of several hundred dollars, not to mention
+a contingent liability of many more hundreds”--represented by
+advance--subscriptions paid for the Journal and the “Series,” the which
+goods Mrs. Eddy had not delivered. And couldn't, very well, perhaps, on
+a Metaphysical College income of but a few thousand dollars a day, or a
+week, or whatever it was in those magnificently flourishing times. The
+struggling Journal had swallowed up those advance-payments, but its
+“claim” was a severe one and they had failed to cure it. But Nixon cured
+it in his diligent three years, and joyously reported the news that he
+had cleared off all the debts and now had a fat six thousand dollars in
+the bank.
+
+It made Mrs. Eddy's mouth water.
+
+At the time that Mrs. Eddy had unloaded that dismal gift on to her
+National Association, she had followed her inveterate custom: she had
+tied a string to its hind leg, and kept one end of it hitched to her
+belt. We have seen her do that in the case of the Boston Mosque. When
+she deeds property, she puts in that string-clause. It provides that
+under certain conditions she can pull the string and land the property
+in the cherished home of its happy youth. In the present case she
+believed that she had made provision that if at any time the National
+Christian Science Association should dissolve itself by a formal vote,
+she could pull.
+
+A year after Nixon's handsome report, she writes the Association that
+she has a “unique request to lay before it.” It has dissolved, and she
+is not quite sure that the Christian Science Journal has “already fallen
+into her hands” by that act, though it “seems” to her to have met with
+that accident; so she would like to have the matter decided by a formal
+vote. But whether there is a doubt or not, “I see the wisdom,” she says,
+“of again owning this Christian Science waif.”
+
+I think that that is unassailable evidence that the waif was making
+money, hands down.
+
+She pulled her gift in. A few years later she donated the Publishing
+Society, along with its real estate, its buildings, its plant, its
+publications, and its money--the whole worth twenty--two thousand
+dollars, and free of debt--to--Well, to the Mother-Church!
+
+That is to say, to herself. There is an account of it in the Christian
+Science Journal, and of how she had already made some other handsome
+gifts--to her Church--and others to--to her Cause besides “an almost
+countless number of private charities” of cloudy amount and otherwise
+indefinite. This landslide of generosities overwhelmed one of her
+literary domestics. While he was in that condition he tried to express
+what he felt:
+
+“Let us endeavor to lift up our hearts in thankfulness to... our Mother
+in Israel for these evidences of generosity and self-sacrifice that
+appeal to our deepest sense of gratitude, even while surpassing our
+comprehension.”
+
+A year or two later, Mrs. Eddy promulgated some By-laws of a
+self-sacrificing sort which assuaged him, perhaps, and perhaps enabled
+his surpassed comprehension to make a sprint and catch up. These are to
+be found in Art. XII., entitled.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING SOCIETY
+
+This Article puts the whole publishing business into the hands of a
+publishing Board--special. Mrs. Eddy appoints to its vacancies.
+
+The profits go semi-annually to the Treasurer of the Mother-Church. Mrs.
+Eddy owns the Treasurer.
+
+Editors and publishers of the Christian Science Journal cannot be
+elected or removed without Mrs. Eddy's knowledge and consent.
+
+Every candidate for employment in a high capacity or a low one, on the
+other periodicals or in the publishing house, must first be “accepted
+by Mrs. Eddy as suitable.” And “by the Board of Directors”--which is
+surplusage, since Mrs. Eddy owns the Board.
+
+If at any time a weekly shall be started, “it shall be owned by The
+First Church of Christ, Scientist”--which is Mrs. Eddy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+I think that any one who will carefully examine the By-laws (I have
+placed all of the important ones before the reader), will arrive at the
+conclusion that of late years the master-passion in Mrs. Eddy's heart is
+a hunger for power and glory; and that while her hunger for money still
+remains, she wants it now for the expansion and extension it can furnish
+to that power and glory, rather than what it can do for her towards
+satisfying minor and meaner ambitions.
+
+I wish to enlarge a little upon this matter. I think it is quite clear
+that the reason why Mrs. Eddy has concentrated in herself all powers,
+all distinctions, all revenues that are within the command of the
+Christian Science Church Universal is that she desires and intends
+to devote them to the purpose just suggested--the upbuilding of her
+personal glory--hers, and no one else's; that, and the continuing of her
+name's glory after she shall have passed away. If she has overlooked a
+single power, howsoever minute, I cannot discover it. If she has found
+one, large or small, which she has not seized and made her own, there is
+no record of it, no trace of it. In her foragings and depredations she
+usually puts forward the Mother-Church--a lay figure--and hides behind
+it. Whereas, she is in manifest reality the Mother-Church herself. It
+has an impressive array of officials, and committees, and Boards of
+Direction, of Education, of Lectureship, and so on--geldings, every one,
+shadows, spectres, apparitions, wax-figures: she is supreme over them
+all, she can abolish them when she will; blow them out as she would a
+candle. She is herself the Mother-Church. Now there is one By-law which
+says that the Mother-Church:
+
+“shall be officially controlled by no other church.”
+
+That does not surprise us--we know by the rest of the By-laws that that
+is a quite irrelevant remark. Yet we do vaguely and hazily wonder why
+she takes the trouble to say it; why she wastes the words; what her
+object can be--seeing that that emergency has been in so many, many
+ways, and so effectively and drastically barred off and made impossible.
+Then presently the object begins to dawn upon us. That is, it does after
+we have read the rest of the By-law three or four times, wondering
+and admiring to see Mrs. Eddy--Mrs. Eddy--Mrs. Eddy, of all
+persons--throwing away power!--making a fair exchange--doing a fair
+thing for once more, an almost generous thing! Then we look it through
+yet once more unsatisfied, a little suspicious--and find that it is
+nothing but a sly, thin make-believe, and that even the very title of it
+is a sarcasm and embodies a falsehood--“self” government:
+
+“Local Self-Government. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in
+Boston, Massachusetts, shall assume no official control of other
+churches of this denomination. It shall be officially controlled by no
+other church.”
+
+It has a most pious and deceptive give-and-take air of perfect fairness,
+unselfishness, magnanimity--almost godliness, indeed. But it is all art.
+
+
+In the By-laws, Mrs. Eddy, speaking by the mouth of her other self, the
+Mother-Church, proclaims that she will assume no official control of
+other churches-branch churches. We examine the other By-laws, and they
+answer some important questions for us:
+
+1. What is a branch Church? It is a body of Christian Scientists,
+organized in the one and only permissible way--by a member, in good
+standing, of the Mother-Church, and who is also a pupil of one of Mrs.
+Eddy's accredited students. That is to say, one of her properties. No
+other can do it. There are other indispensable requisites; what are
+they?
+
+2. The new Church cannot enter upon its functions until its members have
+individually signed, and pledged allegiance to, a Creed furnished by
+Mrs. Eddy.
+
+3. They are obliged to study her books, and order their lives by them.
+And they must read no outside religious works.
+
+4. They must sing the hymns and pray the prayers provided by her, and
+use no others in the services, except by her permission.
+
+5. They cannot have preachers and pastors. Her law.
+
+6. In their Church they must have two Readers--a man and a woman.
+
+7. They must read the services framed and appointed by her.
+
+8. She--not the branch Church--appoints those Readers.
+
+9. She--not the branch Church--dismisses them and fills the vacancies.
+
+10. She can do this without consulting the branch Church, and without
+explaining.
+
+11. The branch Church can have a religious lecture from time to time. By
+applying to Mrs. Eddy. There is no other way.
+
+12. But the branch Church cannot select the lecturer. Mrs. Eddy does it.
+
+13. The branch Church pays his fee.
+
+14. The harnessing of all Christian Science wedding-teams, members
+of the branch Church, must be done by duly authorized and consecrated
+Christian Science functionaries. Her factory is the only one that makes
+and licenses them.
+
+[15. Nothing is said about christenings. It is inferable from this that
+a Christian Science child is born a Christian Scientist and requires no
+tinkering.]
+
+[16. Nothing is said about funerals. It is inferable, then, that a
+branch Church is privileged to do in that matter as it may choose.]
+
+To sum up. Are any important Church-functions absent from the list? I
+cannot call any to mind. Are there any lacking ones whose exercise
+could make the branch in any noticeable way independent of the Mother.
+Church?--even in any trifling degree? I think of none. If the named
+functions were abolished would there still be a Church left? Would there
+be even a shadow of a Church left? Would there be anything at all left?
+even the bare name?
+
+Manifestly not. There isn't a single vital and essential Church-function
+of any kind, that is not named in the list. And over every one of them
+the Mother-Church has permanent and unchallengeable control, upon
+every one of them Mrs. Eddy has set her irremovable grip. She holds,
+in perpetuity, autocratic and indisputable sovereignty and control over
+every branch Church in the earth; and yet says, in that sugary, naive,
+angel-beguiling way of hers, that the Mother-Church:
+
+“shall assume no official control of other churches of this
+denomination.”
+
+Whereas in truth the unmeddled-with liberties of a branch Christian
+Science Church are but very, very few in number, and are these:
+
+1. It can appoint its own furnace-stoker, winters. 2. It can appoint
+its own fan-distributors, summers. 3. It can, in accordance with its own
+choice in the matter, burn, bury, or preserve members who are pretending
+to be dead--whereas there is no such thing as death. 4. It can take up a
+collection.
+
+The branch Churches have no important liberties, none that give them an
+important voice in their own affairs. Those are all locked up, and Mrs.
+Eddy has the key. “Local Self-Government” is a large name and sounds
+well; but the branch Churches have no more of it than have the privates
+in the King of Dahomey's army.
+
+
+
+
+“MOTHER-CHURCH UNIQUE”
+
+Mrs. Eddy, with an envious and admiring eye upon the solitary and
+rivalless and world-shadowing majesty of St. Peter's, reveals in her
+By-laws her purpose to set the Mother-Church apart by itself in a
+stately seclusion and make it duplicate that lone sublimity under the
+Western sky. The By-law headed “Mother-Church Unique” says--
+
+“In its relation to other Christian Science churches, the Mother-Church
+stands alone.
+
+“It occupies a position that no other Church can fill.
+
+“Then for a branch Church to assume such position would be disastrous to
+Christian Science,
+
+“Therefore--”
+
+Therefore no branch Church is allowed to have branches. There shall
+be no Christian Science St. Peter's in the earth but just one--the
+Mother-Church in Boston.
+
+
+
+
+“NO FIRST MEMBERS”
+
+But for the thoughtful By-law thus entitled, every Science branch in the
+earth would imitate the Mother-Church and set up an aristocracy. Every
+little group of ground-floor Smiths and Furgusons and Shadwells and
+Simpsons that organized a branch would assume that great title, of
+“First Members,” along with its vast privileges of “discussing” the
+weather and casting blank ballots, and soon there would be such a
+locust-plague of them burdening the globe that the title would lose its
+value and have to be abolished.
+
+But where business and glory are concerned, Mrs. Eddy thinks of
+everything, and so she did not fail to take care of her Aborigines,
+her stately and exclusive One Hundred, her college of functionless
+cardinals, her Sanhedrin of Privileged Talkers (Limited). After taking
+away all the liberties of the branch Churches, and in the same breath
+disclaiming all official control over their affairs, she smites them on
+the mouth with this--the very mouth that was watering for those nobby
+ground-floor honors--
+
+“No First Members. Branch Churches shall not organize with First
+Members, that special method of organization being adapted to the
+Mother-Church alone.”
+
+And so, first members being prohibited, we pierce through the cloud
+of Mrs. Eddy's English and perceive that they must then necessarily
+organize with Subsequent Members. There is no other way. It will occur
+to them by-and-by to found an aristocracy of Early Subsequent Members.
+There is no By-law against it.
+
+
+
+
+“THE”
+
+I uncover to that imperial word. And to the mind, too, that conceived
+the idea of seizing and monopolizing it as a title. I believe it is Mrs.
+Eddy's dazzlingest invention. For show, and style, and grandeur, and
+thunder and lightning and fireworks it outclasses all the previous
+inventions of man, and raises the limit on the Pope. He can never put
+his avid hand on that word of words--it is pre-empted. And copyrighted,
+of course. It lifts the Mother-Church away up in the sky, and
+fellowships it with the rare and select and exclusive little company of
+the THE's of deathless glory--persons and things whereof history and
+the ages could furnish only single examples, not two: the Saviour, the
+Virgin, the Milky Way, the Bible, the Earth, the Equator, the Devil,
+the Missing Link--and now The First Church, Scientist. And by clamor of
+edict and By-law Mrs. Eddy gives personal notice to all branch Scientist
+Churches on this planet to leave that THE alone.
+
+She has demonstrated over it and made it sacred to the Mother-Church:
+
+“The article 'The' must not be used before the titles of branch
+Churches--
+
+“Nor written on applications for membership in naming such churches.”
+
+Those are the terms. There can and will be a million First Churches
+of Christ, Scientist, scattered over the world, in a million towns and
+villages and hamlets and cities, and each may call itself (suppressing
+the article), “First Church of Christ. Scientist”--it is permissible,
+and no harm; but there is only one The Church of Christ, Scientist, and
+there will never be another. And whether that great word fall in the
+middle of a sentence or at the beginning of it, it must always have its
+capital T.
+
+I do not suppose that a juvenile passion for fussy little worldly shows
+and vanities can furnish a match to this, anywhere in the history of
+the nursery. Mrs. Eddy does seem to be a shade fonder of little special
+distinctions and pomps than is usual with human beings.
+
+She instituted that immodest “The” with her own hand; she did not wait
+for somebody else to think of it.
+
+
+
+
+A LIFE-TERM MONOPOLY
+
+There is but one human Pastor in the whole Christian Science world; she
+reserves that exalted place to herself.
+
+
+
+
+A PERPETUAL ONE
+
+There is but one other object in the whole Christian Science world
+honored with that title and holding that office: it is her book, the
+Annex--permanent Pastor of The First Church, and of all branch Churches.
+
+With her own hand she draughted the By-laws which make her the only
+really absolute sovereign that lives to-day in Christendom.
+
+She does not allow any objectionable pictures to be exhibited in the
+room where her book is sold, nor any indulgence in idle gossip there;
+and from the general look of that By-law I judge that a lightsome and
+improper person can be as uncomfortable in that place as he could be in
+heaven.
+
+
+
+
+THE SANCTUM SANCTORUM AND SACRED CHAIR
+
+In a room in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, there is a museum
+of objects which have attained to holiness through contact with Mrs.
+Eddy--among them an electrically lighted oil-picture of a chair which
+she used to sit in--and disciples from all about the world go softly
+in there, in restricted groups, under proper guard, and reverently gaze
+upon those relics. It is worship. Mrs. Eddy could stop it if she was not
+fond of it, for her sovereignty over that temple is supreme.
+
+The fitting-up of that place as a shrine is not an accident, nor a
+casual, unweighed idea; it is imitated from age--old religious custom.
+In Treves the pilgrim reverently gazes upon the Seamless Robe, and
+humbly worships; and does the same in that other continental church
+where they keep a duplicate; and does likewise in the Church of the
+Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem, where memorials of the Crucifixion are
+preserved; and now, by good fortune we have our Holy Chair and things,
+and a market for our adorations nearer home.
+
+But is there not a detail that is new, fresh, original? Yes, whatever
+old thing Mrs. Eddy touches gets something new by the contact--something
+not thought of before by any one--something original, all her own, and
+copyrightable. The new feature is self worship--exhibited in permitting
+this shrine to be installed during her lifetime, and winking her sacred
+eye at it.
+
+A prominent Christian Scientist has assured me that the Scientists do
+not worship Mrs. Eddy, and I think it likely that there may be five or
+six of the cult in the world who do not worship her, but she herself
+is certainly not of that company. Any healthy-minded person who will
+examine Mrs. Eddy's little Autobiography and the Manual of By-laws
+written by her will be convinced that she worships herself; and that she
+brings to this service a fervor of devotion surpassing even that which
+she formerly laid at the feet of the Dollar, and equalling any which
+rises to the Throne of Grace from any quarter.
+
+I think this is as good a place as any to salve a hurt which I was the
+means of inflicting upon a Christian Scientist lately. The first third
+of this book was written in 1899 in Vienna. Until last summer I had
+supposed that that third had been printed in a book which I published
+about a year later--a hap which had not happened. I then sent the
+chapters composing it to the North American Review, but failed in one
+instance, to date them. And so, in an undated chapter I said a lady told
+me “last night” so and so. There was nothing to indicate to the reader
+that that “last night” was several years old, therefore the phrase
+seemed to refer to a night of very recent date. What the lady had told
+me was, that in a part of the Mother-Church in Boston she had seen
+Scientists worshipping a portrait of Mrs. Eddy before which a light was
+kept constantly burning.
+
+A Scientist came to me and wished me to retract that “untruth.” He said
+there was no such portrait, and that if I wanted to be sure of it I
+could go to Boston and see for myself. I explained that my “last night”
+ meant a good while ago; that I did not doubt his assertion that there
+was no such portrait there now, but that I should continue to believe it
+had been there at the time of the lady's visit until she should retract
+her statement herself. I was at no time vouching for the truth of the
+remark, nevertheless I considered it worth par.
+
+And yet I am sorry the lady told me, since a wound which brings me no
+happiness has resulted. I am most willing to apply such salve as I can.
+The best way to set the matter right and make everything pleasant and
+agreeable all around will be to print in this place a description of the
+shrine as it appeared to a recent visitor, Mr. Frederick W. Peabody, of
+Boston. I will copy his newspaper account, and the reader will see that
+Mrs. Eddy's portrait is not there now:
+
+“We lately stood on the threshold of the Holy of Holies of the
+Mother-Church, and with a crowd of worshippers patiently waited for
+admittance to the hallowed precincts of the 'Mother's Room.' Over the
+doorway was a sign informing us that but four persons at a time would be
+admitted; that they would be permitted to remain but five minutes only,
+and would please retire from the 'Mother's Room' at the ringing of the
+bell. Entering with three of the faithful, we looked with profane
+eyes upon the consecrated furnishings. A show-woman in attendance
+monotonously announced the character of the different appointments.
+Set in a recess of the wall and illumined with electric light was an
+oil-painting the show-woman seriously declared to be a lifelike and
+realistic picture of the Chair in which the Mother sat when she composed
+her 'inspired' work. It was a picture of an old-fashioned? country, hair
+cloth rocking-chair, and an exceedingly commonplace-looking table with a
+pile of manuscript, an ink-bottle, and pen conspicuously upon it. On
+the floor were sheets of manuscript. 'The mantel-piece is of pure onyx,'
+continued the show-woman, 'and the beehive upon the window-sill is made
+from one solid block of onyx; the rug is made of a hundred breasts of
+eider-down ducks, and the toilet-room you see in the corner is of the
+latest design, with gold-plated drain-pipes; the painted windows are
+from the Mother's poem, “Christ and Christmas,” and that case contains
+complete copies of all the Mother's books.' The chairs upon which the
+sacred person of the Mother had reposed were protected from sacrilegious
+touch by a broad band of satin ribbon. My companions expressed their
+admiration in subdued and reverent tones, and at the tinkling of the
+bell we reverently tiptoed out of the room to admit another delegation
+of the patient waiters at the door.”
+
+Now, then, I hope the wound is healed. I am willing to relinquish the
+portrait, and compromise on the Chair. At the same time, if I were going
+to worship either, I should not choose the Chair.
+
+As a picturesquely and persistently interesting personage, there is no
+mate to Mrs. Eddy, the accepted Equal of the Saviour. But some of her
+tastes are so different from His! I find it quite impossible to imagine
+Him, in life, standing sponsor for that museum there, and taking
+pleasure in its sumptuous shows. I believe He would put that Chair in
+the fire, and the bell along with it; and I think He would make the
+show-woman go away. I think He would break those electric bulbs, and the
+“mantel-piece of pure onyx,” and say reproachful things about the golden
+drain-pipes of the lavatory, and give the costly rug of duck-breasts to
+the poor, and sever the satin ribbon and invite the weary to rest and
+ease their aches in the consecrated chairs. What He would do with the
+painted windows we can better conjecture when we come presently to
+examine their peculiarities.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PASTOR-UNIVERSAL
+
+When Mrs. Eddy turned the pastors out of all the Christian Science
+churches and abolished the office for all time as far as human occupancy
+is concerned--she appointed the Holy Ghost to fill their place. If this
+language be blasphemous, I did not invent the blasphemy, I am merely
+stating a fact. I will quote from page 227 of Science and Health
+(edition 1899), as a first step towards an explanation of this startling
+matter--a passage which sets forth and classifies the Christian Science
+Trinity:
+
+“Life, Truth, and Love constitute the triune God, or triply divine
+Principle. They represent a trinity in unity, three in one--the same in
+essence, though multiform in office: God the Father; Christ the type of
+Sonship; Divine Science, or the Holy Comforter....
+
+“The Holy Ghost, or Spirit, reveals this triune Principle, and (the Holy
+Ghost) is expressed in Divine Science, which is the Comforter,
+leading into all Truth, and revealing the divine Principle of the
+universe--universal and perpetual harmony.”
+
+I will cite another passage. Speaking of Jesus--
+
+“His students then received the Holy Ghost. By this is meant, that by
+all they had witnessed and suffered they were roused to an enlarged
+understanding of Divine Science, even to the spiritual interpretation..
+... of His teachings,” etc.
+
+Also, page 579, in the chapter called the Glossary:
+
+“HOLY GHOST. Divine Science; the developments of Life, Truth, and Love.”
+
+The Holy Ghost reveals the massed spirit of the fused trinity; this
+massed spirit is expressed in Divine Science, and is the Comforter;
+Divine Science conveys to men the “spiritual interpretation” of
+the Saviour's teachings. That seems to be the meaning of the quoted
+passages.
+
+Divine Science is Christian Science; the book “Science and Health” is a
+“revelation” of the whole spirit of the Trinity, and is therefore “The
+Holy Ghost”; it conveys to men the “spiritual interpretation” of the
+Bible's teachings and therefore is “the Comforter.”
+
+I do not find this analyzing work easy, I would rather saw wood; and a
+person can never tell whether he has added up a Science and Health sum
+right or not, anyway, after all his trouble. Neither can he easily find
+out whether the texts are still on the market or have been discarded
+from the Book; for two hundred and fifty-eight editions of it have been
+issued, and no two editions seem to be alike. The annual changes--in
+technical terminology; in matter and wording; in transpositions of
+chapters and verses; in leaving out old chapters and verses and putting
+in new ones--seem to be next to innumerable, and as there is no index,
+there is no way to find a thing one wants without reading the book
+through. If ever I inspire a Bible-Annex I will not rush at it in a
+half-digested, helter-skelter way and have to put in thirty-eight years
+trying to get some of it the way I want it, I will sit down and think it
+out and know what it is I want to say before I begin. An inspirer cannot
+inspire for Mrs. Eddy and keep his reputation. I have never seen such
+slipshod work, bar the ten that interpreted for the home market the
+“sell all thou hast.” I have quoted one “spiritual” rendering of the
+Lord's Prayer, I have seen one other one, and am told there are
+five more. Yet the inspirer of Mrs. Eddy the new Infallible casts a
+complacent critical stone at the other Infallible for being unable to
+make up its mind about such things. Science and Health, edition 1899,
+page 33:
+
+“The decisions, by vote of Church Councils, as to what should and
+should not be considered Holy Writ, the manifest mistakes in the ancient
+versions: the thirty thousand different readings in the Old Testament
+and the three hundred thousand in the New--these facts show how a mortal
+and material sense stole into the divine record, darkening, to some
+extent, the inspired pages with its own hue.”
+
+To some extent, yes--speaking cautiously. But it is nothing, really
+nothing; Mrs. Eddy is only a little way behind, and if her inspirer
+lives to get her Annex to suit him that Catholic record will have to “go
+'way back and set down,” as the ballad says. Listen to the boastful song
+of Mrs. Eddy's organ, the Christian Science Journal for March, 1902,
+about that year's revamping and half-soling of Science and Health,
+whose official name is the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, and who is now
+the Official Pastor and Infallible and Unerring Guide of every Christian
+Science church in the two hemispheres, hear Simple Simon that met the
+pieman brag of the Infallible's fallibility:
+
+“Throughout the entire book the verbal changes are so numerous as to
+indicate the vast amount of time and labor Mrs. Eddy has devoted to this
+revision. The time and labor thus bestowed is relatively as great as
+that of--the committee who revised the Bible.... Thus we have additional
+evidence of the herculean efforts our beloved Leader has made and is
+constantly making for the promulgation of Truth and the furtherance of
+her divinely bestowed mission,” etc.
+
+It is a steady job. I could help inspire if desired; I am not doing
+much now, and would work for half-price, and should not object to the
+country.
+
+
+
+
+PRICE OF THE PASTOR-UNIVERSAL
+
+The price of the Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, called in Science
+literature the Comforter--and by that other sacred Name--is three
+dollars in cloth, as heretofore, six when it is finely bound, and shaped
+to imitate the Testament, and is broken into verses. Margin of profit
+above cost of manufacture, from five hundred to seven hundred per
+cent., as already noted In the profane subscription-trade, it costs
+the publisher heavily to canvass a three-dollar book; he must pay the
+general agent sixty per cent. commission--that is to say, one dollar and
+eighty-cents. Mrs. Eddy escapes this blistering tax, because she owns
+the Christian Science canvasser, and can compel him to work for nothing.
+Read the following command--not request--fulminated by Mrs. Eddy, over
+her signature, in the Christian Science Journal for March, 1897, and
+quoted by Mr. Peabody in his book. The book referred to is Science and
+Health:
+
+“It shall be the duty of all Christian Scientists to circulate and to
+sell as many of these books as they can.”
+
+That is flung at all the elect, everywhere that the sun shines, but no
+penalty is shaken over their heads to scare them. The same command was
+issued to the members (numbering to-day twenty-five thousand) of The
+Mother-Church, also, but with it went a threat, of the infliction, in
+case of disobedience, of the most dreaded punishment that has a place
+in the Church's list of penalties for transgressions of Mrs. Eddy's
+edicts--excommunication:
+
+“If a member of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, shall fail to
+obey this injunction, it will render him liable to lose his membership
+in this Church. MARY BAKER EDDY.”
+
+It is the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition.
+
+None but accepted and well established gods can venture an affront like
+that and do it with confidence. But the human race will take anything
+from that class. Mrs. Eddy knows the human race; knows it better than
+any mere human being has known it in a thousand centuries. My confidence
+in her human-beingship is getting shaken, my confidence in her godship
+is stiffening.
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN HUNDRED PER CENT.
+
+A Scientist out West has visited a bookseller--with intent to find fault
+with me--and has brought away the information that the price at which
+Mrs. Eddy sells Science and Health is not an unusually high one for the
+size and make of the book. That is true. But in the book-trade--that
+profit-devourer unknown to Mrs. Eddy's book--a three-dollar book that
+is made for thirty-five or forty cents in large editions is put at
+three dollars because the publisher has to pay author, middleman, and
+advertising, and if the price were much below three the profit accruing
+would not pay him fairly for his time and labor. At the same time, if
+he could get ten dollars for the book he would take it, and his morals
+would not fall under criticism.
+
+But if he were an inspired person commissioned by the Deity to receive
+and print and spread broadcast among sorrowing and suffering and poor
+men a precious message of healing and cheer and salvation, he would have
+to do as Bible Societies do--sell the book at a pinched margin above
+cost to such as could pay, and give it free to all that couldn't; and
+his name would be praised. But if he sold it at seven hundred per cent.
+profit and put the money in his pocket, his name would be mocked and
+derided. Just as Mrs. Eddy's is. And most justifiably, as it seems to
+me.
+
+The complete Bible contains one million words. The New Testament by
+itself contains two hundred and forty thousand words.
+
+My '84 edition of Science and Health contains one hundred and twenty
+thousand words--just half as many as the New Testament.
+
+Science and Health has since been so inflated by later inspirations that
+the 1902 edition contains one hundred and eighty thousand words--not
+counting the thirty thousand at the back, devoted by Mrs. Eddy to
+advertising the book's healing abilities--and the inspiring continues
+right along.
+
+If you have a book whose market is so sure and so great that you
+can give a printer an everlasting order for thirty or forty or fifty
+thousand copies a year he will furnish them at a cheap rate, because
+whenever there is a slack time in his press-room and bindery he can
+fill the idle intervals on your book and be making something instead
+of losing. That is the kind of contract that can be let on Science and
+Health every year. I am obliged to doubt that the three-dollar Science
+and Health costs Mrs. Eddy above fifteen cents, or that the six dollar
+copy costs her above eighty cents. I feel quite sure that the average
+profit to her on these books, above cost of manufacture, is all of seven
+hundred per cent.
+
+Every proper Christian Scientist has to buy and own (and canvass for)
+Science and Health (one hundred and eighty thousand words), and he must
+also own a Bible (one million words). He can buy the one for from three
+to six dollars, and the other for fifteen cents. Or, if three dollars is
+all the money he has, he can get his Bible for nothing. When the Supreme
+Being disseminates a saving Message through uninspired agents--the New
+Testament, for instance--it can be done for five cents a copy, but when
+He sends one containing only two-thirds as many words through the shop
+of a Divine Personage, it costs sixty times as much. I think that
+in matters of such importance it is bad economy to employ a wild-cat
+agency.
+
+Here are some figures which are perfectly authentic, and which seem to
+justify my opinion.
+
+“These [Bible] societies, inspired only by a sense of religious duty,
+are issuing the Bible at a price so small that they have made it the
+cheapest book printed. For example, the American Bible Society offers an
+edition of the whole Bible as low as fifteen cents and the New Testament
+at five cents, and the British Society at sixpence and one penny,
+respectively. These low prices, made possible by their policy of selling
+the books at cost or below cost,” etc.--New York Sun, February 25, 1903.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+We may now make a final footing-up of Mrs. Eddy, and see what she is, in
+the fulness of her powers. She is:
+
+The Massachusetts Metaphysical College Pastor Emeritus; President; Board
+of Directors; Board of Education; Board of Lectureships; Future Board of
+Trustees, Proprietor of the Publishing-House and Periodicals; Treasurer;
+Clerk; Proprietor of the Teachers; Proprietor of the Lecturers;
+Proprietor of the Missionaries; Proprietor of the Readers; Dictator of
+the Services; sole Voice of the Pulpit; Proprietor of the Sanhedrin;
+Sole Proprietor of the Creed. (Copyrighted.); Indisputable Autocrat
+of the Branch Churches, with their life and death in her hands; Sole
+Thinker for The First Church (and the others); Sole and Infallible
+Expounder of Doctrine, in life and in death; Sole permissible
+Discoverer, Denouncer, Judge, and Executioner of Ostensible Hypnotists;
+Fifty-handed God of Excommunication--with a thunderbolt in every hand;
+Appointer and Installer of the Pastor of all the Churches--the Perpetual
+Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, “the Comforter.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+There she stands-painted by herself. No witness but herself has been
+allowed to testify. She stands there painted by her acts, and decorated
+by her words. When she talks, she has only a decorative value as
+a witness, either for or against herself, for she deals mainly in
+unsupported assertion; and in the rare cases where she puts forward a
+verifiable fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses to furnish
+to anybody else. Also, when she talks, she is unstable, she wanders,
+she is incurably inconsistent; what she says to-day she contradicts
+tomorrow.
+
+But her acts are consistent. They are always faithful to her, they never
+misinterpret her, they are a mirror which always reflects her exactly,
+precisely, minutely, unerringly, and always the same, to date, with only
+those progressive little natural changes in stature, dress, complexion,
+mood, and carriage that mark--exteriorly--the march of the years and
+record the accumulations of experience, while--interiorly--through all
+this steady drift of evolution the one essential detail, the commanding
+detail, the master detail of the make-up remains as it was in the
+beginning, suffers no change and can suffer none; the basis of the
+character; the temperament, the disposition, that indestructible iron
+framework upon which the character is built, and whose shape it must
+take, and keep, throughout life. We call it a person's nature.
+
+The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally--with his
+hands; but not with his heart. The man born kind and compassionate
+can have that disposition crushed down out of sight by embittering
+experience; but if it were an organ the post-mortem would find it still
+in his corpse. The man born ambitious of power and glory may live long
+without finding it out, but when the opportunity comes he will know,
+will strike for the largest thing within the limit of his chances at the
+time-constable, perhaps--and will be glad and proud when he gets it,
+and will write home about it. But he will not stop with that start; his
+appetite will come again; and by-and-by again, and yet again; and when
+he has climbed to police commissioner it will at last begin to dawn upon
+him that what his Napoleon soul wants and was born for is something away
+higher up--he does not quite know what, but Circumstance and Opportunity
+will indicate the direction and he will cut a road through and find out.
+
+I think Mrs. Eddy was born with a far-seeing business-eye, but did not
+know it; and with a great organizing and executive talent, and did not
+know it; and with a large appetite for power and distinction, and did
+not know it. I think the reason that her make did not show up until
+middle life was that she had General Grant's luck--Circumstance and
+Opportunity did not come her way when she was younger. The qualities
+that were born in her had to wait for circumstance and opportunity--but
+they were there: they were there to stay, whether they ever got a chance
+to fructify or not. If they had come early, they would have found her
+ready and competent. And they--not she--would have determined what they
+would set her at and what they would make of her. If they had elected to
+commission her as second-assistant cook in a bankrupt boarding-house,
+I know the rest of it--I know what would have happened. She would have
+owned the boarding-house within six months; she would have had the late
+proprietor on salary and humping himself, as the worldly say; she would
+have had that boarding-house spewing money like a mint; she would have
+worked the servants and the late landlord up to the limit; she would
+have squeezed the boarders till they wailed, and by some mysterious
+quality born in her she would have kept the affections of certain of the
+lot whose love and esteem she valued, and flung the others down the back
+area; in two years she would own all the boarding-houses in the town, in
+five all the boarding-houses in the State, in twenty all the hotels in
+America, in forty all the hotels on the planet, and would sit at home
+with her finger on a button and govern the whole combination as easily
+as a bench-manager governs a dog-show.
+
+It would be a grand thing to see, and I feel a kind of
+disappointment--but never mind, a religion is better and larger; and
+there is more to it. And I have not been steeping myself in Christian
+Science all these weeks without finding out that the one sensible thing
+to do with a disappointment is to put it out of your mind and think of
+something cheerfuler.
+
+We outsiders cannot conceive of Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science Religion
+as being a sudden and miraculous birth, but only as a growth from a seed
+planted by circumstances, and developed stage by stage by command and
+compulsion of the same force. What the stages were we cannot know, but
+are privileged to guess. She may have gotten the mental-healing idea
+from Quimby--it had been experimented with for ages, and was no one's
+special property. [For the present, for convenience' sake, let us
+proceed upon the hypothesis that that was all she got of him, and that
+she put up the rest of the assets herself. This will strain us, but
+let us try it.] In each and all its forms and under all its many names,
+mental healing had had limits, always, and they were rather narrow
+ones--Mrs. Eddy, let us imagine, removed the fence, abolished the
+frontiers. Not by expanding mental-healing, but by absorbing its small
+bulk into the vaster bulk of Christian Science--Divine Science, The Holy
+Ghost, the Comforter--which was a quite different and sublimer force,
+and one which had long lain dormant and unemployed.
+
+The Christian Scientist believes that the Spirit of God (life and love)
+pervades the universe like an atmosphere; that whoso will study Science
+and Health can get from it the secret of how to inhale that transforming
+air; that to breathe it is to be made new; that from the new man all
+sorrow, all care, all miseries of the mind vanish away, for that only
+peace, contentment and measureless joy can live in that divine fluid;
+that it purifies the body from disease, which is a vicious creation of
+the gross human mind, and cannot continue to exist in the presence of
+the Immortal Mind, the renewing Spirit of God.
+
+The Scientist finds this reasonable, natural, and not harder to believe
+than that the disease germ, a creature of darkness, perishes when
+exposed to the light of the great sun--a new revelation of profane
+science which no one doubts. He reminds us that the actinic ray, shining
+upon lupus, cures it--a horrible disease which was incurable fifteen
+years ago, and had been incurable for ten million years before; that
+this wonder, unbelievable by the physicians at first, is believed by
+them now; and so he is tranquilly confident that the time is coming when
+the world will be educated up to a point where it will comprehend and
+grant that the light of the Spirit of God, shining unobstructed upon the
+soul, is an actinic ray which can purge both mind and body from disease
+and set them free and make them whole.
+
+It is apparent, then, that in Christian Science it is not one man's mind
+acting upon another man's mind that heals; that it is solely the Spirit
+of God that heals; that the healer's mind performs no office but to
+convey that force to the patient; that it is merely the wire which
+carries the electric fluid, so to speak, and delivers the message.
+Therefore, if these things be true, mental-healing and Science-healing
+are separate and distinct processes, and no kinship exists between them.
+
+To heal the body of its ills and pains is a mighty benefaction, but in
+our day our physicians and surgeons work a thousand miracles--prodigies
+which would have ranked as miracles fifty years ago--and they have so
+greatly extended their domination over disease that we feel so well
+protected that we are able to look with a good deal of composure and
+absence of hysterics upon the claims of new competitors in that field.
+
+But there is a mightier benefaction than the healing of the body, and
+that is the healing of the spirit--which is Christian Science's other
+claim. So far as I know, so far as I can find out, it makes it good.
+Personally I have not known a Scientist who did not seem serene,
+contented, unharassed. I have not found an outsider whose observation
+of Scientists furnished him a view that differed from my own. Buoyant
+spirits, comfort of mind, freedom from care these happinesses we all
+have, at intervals; but in the spaces between, dear me, the black hours!
+They have put a curse upon the life of every human being I have ever
+known, young or old. I concede not a single exception. Unless it might
+be those Scientists just referred to. They may have been playing a part
+with me; I hope they were not, and I believe they were not.
+
+Time will test the Science's claim. If time shall make it good; if time
+shall prove that the Science can heal the persecuted spirit of man and
+banish its troubles and keep it serene and sunny and content--why, then
+Mrs. Eddy will have a monument that will reach above the clouds. For if
+she did not hit upon that imperial idea and evolve it and deliver it,
+its discoverer can never be identified with certainty, now, I think.
+It is the giant feature, it is the sun that rides in the zenith of
+Christian Science, the auxiliary features are of minor consequence [Let
+us still leave the large “if” aside, for the present, and proceed as if
+it had no existence.]
+
+It is not supposable that Mrs. Eddy realized, at first, the size of her
+plunder. (No, find--that is the word; she did not realize the size of
+her find, at first.) It had to grow upon her, by degrees, in accordance
+with the inalterable custom of Circumstance, which works by stages, and
+by stages only, and never furnishes any mind with all the materials for
+a large idea at one time.
+
+In the beginning, Mrs. Eddy was probably interested merely in the
+mental-healing detail, and perhaps mainly interested in it pecuniary,
+for she was poor.
+
+She would succeed in anything she undertook. She would attract pupils,
+and her commerce would grow. She would inspire in patient and pupil
+confidence in her earnestness, her history is evidence that she would
+not fail of that.
+
+There probably came a time, in due course, when her students began to
+think there was something deeper in her teachings than they had
+been suspecting--a mystery beyond mental-healing, and higher. It is
+conceivable that by consequence their manner towards her changed little
+by little, and from respectful became reverent. It is conceivable that
+this would have an influence upon her; that it would incline her to
+wonder if their secret thought--that she was inspired--might not be a
+well-grounded guess. It is conceivable that as time went on the
+thought in their minds and its reflection in hers might solidify into
+conviction.
+
+She would remember, then, that as a child she had been called, more
+than once, by a mysterious voice--just as had happened to little Samuel.
+(Mentioned in her Autobiography.) She would be impressed by that ancient
+reminiscence, now, and it could have a prophetic meaning for her.
+
+It is conceivable that the persuasive influences around her and within
+her would give a new and powerful impulse to her philosophizings, and
+that from this, in time, would result that great birth, the healing of
+body and mind by the inpouring of the Spirit of God--the central and
+dominant idea of Christian Science--and that when this idea came she
+would not doubt that it was an inspiration direct from Heaven.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+[I must rest a little, now. To sit here and painstakingly spin out a
+scheme which imagines Mrs. Eddy, of all people, working her mind on
+a plane above commercialism; imagines her thinking, philosophizing,
+discovering majestic things; and even imagines her dealing in
+sincerities--to be frank, I find it a large contract But I have begun
+it, and I will go through with it.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+It is evident that she made disciples fast, and that their belief in her
+and in the authenticity of her heavenly ambassadorship was not of the
+lukewarm and half-way sort, but was profoundly earnest and sincere.
+Her book was issued from the press in 1875, it began its work of
+convert-making, and within six years she had successfully launched a new
+Religion and a new system of healing, and was teaching them to crowds of
+eager students in a College of her own, at prices so extraordinary
+that we are almost compelled to accept her statement (no, her guarded
+intimation) that the rates were arranged on high, since a mere human
+being unacquainted with commerce and accustomed to think in pennies
+could hardly put up such a hand as that without supernatural help.
+
+From this stage onward--Mrs. Eddy being what she was--the rest of the
+development--stages would follow naturally and inevitably.
+
+But if she had been anybody else, there would have been a different
+arrangement of them, with different results. Being the extraordinary
+person she was, she realized her position and its possibilities;
+realized the possibilities, and had the daring to use them for all they
+were worth.
+
+We have seen what her methods were after she passed the stage where her
+divine ambassadorship was granted its executer in the hearts and minds
+of her followers; we have seen how steady and fearless and calculated
+and orderly was her march thenceforth from conquest to conquest; we have
+seen her strike dead, without hesitancy, any hostile or questionable
+force that rose in her path: first, the horde of pretenders that sprang
+up and tried to take her Science and its market away from her--she
+crushed them, she obliterated them; when her own National Christian
+Science Association became great in numbers and influence, and loosely
+and dangerously garrulous, and began to expound the doctrines according
+to its own uninspired notions, she took up her sponge without a tremor
+of fear and wiped that Association out; when she perceived that
+the preachers in her pulpits were becoming afflicted with
+doctrine-tinkering, she recognized the danger of it, and did not
+hesitate nor temporize, but promptly dismissed the whole of them in a
+day, and abolished their office permanently; we have seen that, as fast
+as her power grew, she was competent to take the measure of it, and that
+as fast as its expansion suggested to her gradually awakening native
+ambition a higher step she took it; and so, by this evolutionary
+process, we have seen the gross money-lust relegated to second place,
+and the lust of empire and glory rise above it. A splendid dream; and by
+force of the qualities born in her she is making it come true.
+
+These qualities--and the capacities growing out of them by the nurturing
+influences of training, observation, and experience seem to be clearly
+indicated by the character of her career and its achievements. They seem
+to be:
+
+A clear head for business, and a phenomenally long one; Clear
+understanding of business situations; Accuracy in estimating the
+opportunities they offer; Intelligence in planning a business move;
+Firmness in sticking to it after it has been decided upon; Extraordinary
+daring; Indestructible persistency; Devouring ambition; Limitless
+selfishness; A knowledge of the weaknesses and poverties and docilities
+of human nature and how to turn them to account which has never been
+surpassed, if ever equalled.
+
+And--necessarily--the foundation-stone of Mrs. Eddy's character is a
+never-wavering confidence in herself.
+
+It is a granite character. And--quite naturally--a measure of the talc
+of smallnesses common to human nature is mixed up in it and distributed
+through it. When Mrs. Eddy is not dictating servilities from her throne
+in the clouds to her official domestics in Boston or to her far-spread
+subjects round about the planet, but is down on the ground, she is kin
+to us and one of us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical,
+incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable,
+inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly
+self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the
+commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass
+god with clay legs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+In drawing Mrs. Eddy's portrait it has been my purpose to restrict
+myself to materials furnished by herself, and I believe I have done
+that. If I have misinterpreted any of her acts, it was not done
+intentionally.
+
+It will be noticed that in skeletonizing a list of the qualities which
+have carried her to the dizzy summit which she occupies, I have not
+mentioned the power which was the commanding force employed in achieving
+that lofty flight. It did not belong in that list; it was a force that
+was not a detail of her character, but was an outside one. It was
+the power which proceeded from her people's recognition of her as
+a supernatural personage, conveyer of the Latest Word, and divinely
+commissioned to deliver it to the world. The form which such a
+recognition takes, consciously or unconsciously, is worship; and worship
+does not question nor criticize, it obeys. The object of it does not
+need to coddle it, bribe it, beguile it, reason with it, convince
+it--it commands it; that is sufficient; the obedience rendered is not
+reluctant, but prompt and whole-hearted. Admiration for a Napoleon,
+confidence in him, pride in him, affection for him, can lift him high
+and carry him far; and these are forms of worship, and are strong
+forces, but they are worship of a mere human being, after all, and are
+infinitely feeble, as compared with those that are generated by that
+other worship, the worship of a divine personage. Mrs. Eddy has this
+efficient worship, this massed and centralized force, this force which
+is indifferent to opposition, untroubled by fear, and goes to battle
+singing, like Cromwell's soldiers; and while she has it she can command
+and it will obey, and maintain her on her throne, and extend her empire.
+
+She will have it until she dies; and then we shall see a curious and
+interesting further development of her revolutionary work begin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+The President and Board of Directors will succeed her, and the
+government will go on without a hitch. The By-laws will bear that
+interpretation. All the Mother-Church's vast powers are concentrated in
+that Board. Mrs. Eddy's unlimited personal reservations make the Board's
+ostensible supremacy, during her life, a sham, and the Board itself a
+shadow. But Mrs. Eddy has not made those reservations for any one but
+herself--they are distinctly personal, they bear her name, they are not
+usable by another individual. When she dies her reservations die, and
+the Board's shadow-powers become real powers, without the change of
+any important By-law, and the Board sits in her place as absolute and
+irresponsible a sovereign as she was.
+
+It consists of but five persons, a much more manageable Cardinalate than
+the Roman Pope's. I think it will elect its Pope from its own body, and
+that it will fill its own vacancies. An elective Papacy is a safe and
+wise system, and a long-liver.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+We may take that up now.
+
+It is not a single if, but a several-jointed one; not an oyster, but a
+vertebrate.
+
+1. Did Mrs. Eddy borrow from Quimby the Great Idea, or only the little
+one, the old-timer, the ordinary mental-healing-healing by “mortal”
+ mind?
+
+2. If she borrowed the Great Idea, did she carry it away in her head, or
+in manuscript?
+
+3. Did she hit upon the Great Idea herself? By the Great Idea I mean, of
+course, the conviction that the Force involved was still existent, and
+could be applied now just as it was applied by Christ's Disciples and
+their converts, and as successfully.
+
+4. Did she philosophize it, systematize it, and write it down in a book?
+
+5. Was it she, and not another, that built a new Religion upon the book
+and organized it?
+
+I think No. 5 can be answered with a Yes, and dismissed from the
+controversy. And I think that the Great Idea, great as it was, would
+have enjoyed but a brief activity, and would then have gone to sleep
+again for some more centuries, but for the perpetuating impulse it got
+from that organized and tremendous force.
+
+As for Nos. 1, 2, and 4, the hostiles contend that Mrs. Eddy got the
+Great Idea from Quimby and carried it off in manuscript. But their
+testimony, while of consequence, lacks the most important detail; so far
+as my information goes, the Quimby manuscript has not been produced. I
+think we cannot discuss No. 1 and No. 2 profitably. Let them go.
+
+For me, No. 3 has a mild interest, and No. 4 a violent one.
+
+As regards No. 3, Mrs. Eddy was brought up, from the cradle, an
+old-time, boiler-iron, Westminster-Catechism Christian, and knew
+her Bible as well as Captain Kydd knew his, “when he sailed, when he
+sailed,” and perhaps as sympathetically. The Great Idea had struck a
+million Bible-readers before her as being possible of resurrection and
+application--it must have struck as many as that, and been cogitated,
+indolently, doubtingly, then dropped and forgotten--and it could have
+struck her, in due course. But how it could interest her, how it
+could appeal to her--with her make this a thing that is difficult to
+understand.
+
+For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful: the power,
+through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and
+pains and grief--all--with a word, with a touch of the hand! This power
+was given by the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the converted.
+All--every one. It was exercised for generations afterwards.
+Any Christian who was in earnest and not a make-believe, not a
+policy--Christian, not a Christian for revenue only, had that healing
+power, and could cure with it any disease or any hurt or damage possible
+to human flesh and bone. These things are true, or they are not. If they
+were true seventeen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago it would be
+difficult to satisfactorily explain why or how or by what argument that
+power should be nonexistent in Christians now.
+
+To wish to exercise it could occur to Mrs. Eddy--but would it?
+
+Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money,
+power, glory--vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent,
+pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate,
+shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines,
+immeasurably selfish--
+
+Of course the Great Idea could strike her, we have to grant that, but
+why it should interest her is a question which can easily overstrain the
+imagination and bring on nervous prostration, or something like that,
+and is better left alone by the judicious, it seems to me--
+
+Unless we call to our help the alleged other side of Mrs. Eddy's
+make and character the side which her multitude of followers see, and
+sincerely believe in. Fairness requires that their view be stated
+here. It is the opposite of the one which I have drawn from Mrs. Eddy's
+history and from her By-laws. To her followers she is this:
+
+Patient, gentle, loving, compassionate, noble hearted, unselfish,
+sinless, widely cultured, splendidly equipped mentally, a profound
+thinker, an able writer, a divine personage, an inspired messenger whose
+acts are dictated from the Throne, and whose every utterance is the
+Voice of God.
+
+She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their
+lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and
+flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has
+no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with
+a break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into
+eternity as fancies of the waking day melt into the dreams of sleep.
+
+They believe it is a Christianity that is in the New Testament; that
+it has always been there, that in the drift of ages it was lost through
+disuse and neglect, and that this benefactor has found it and given it
+back to men, turning the night of life into day, its terrors into myths,
+its lamentations into songs of emancipation and rejoicing.
+
+There we have Mrs. Eddy as her followers see her. She has lifted
+them out of grief and care and doubt and fear, and made their lives
+beautiful; she found them wandering forlorn in a wintry wilderness, and
+has led them to a tropic paradise like that of which the poet sings:
+
+     “O, islands there are on the face of the deep
+     Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep.”
+
+To ask them to examine with a microscope the character of such a
+benefactor; to ask them to examine it at all; to ask them to look at a
+blemish which another person believes he has found in it--well, in their
+place could you do it? Would you do it? Wouldn't you be ashamed to do
+it? If a tramp had rescued your child from fire and death, and saved its
+mother's heart from breaking, could you see his rags? Could you smell
+his breath? Mrs. Eddy has done more than that for these people.
+
+They are prejudiced witnesses. To the credit of human nature it is not
+possible that they should be otherwise. They sincerely believe that
+Mrs. Eddy's character is pure and perfect and beautiful, and her history
+without stain or blot or blemish. But that does not settle it. They
+sincerely believe she did not borrow the Great Idea from Quimby, but hit
+upon it herself. It may be so, and it could be so. Let it go--there
+is no way to settle it. They believe she carried away no Quimby
+manuscripts. Let that go, too--there is no way to settle it. They
+believe that she, and not another, built the Religion upon the book, and
+organized it. I believe it, too.
+
+Finally, they believe that she philosophized Christian Science,
+explained it, systematized it, and wrote it all out with her own hand in
+the book Science and Health.
+
+I am not able to believe that. Let us draw the line there. The known
+and undisputed products of her pen are a formidable witness against
+her. They do seem to me to prove, quite clearly and conclusively, that
+writing, upon even simple subjects, is a difficult labor for her: that
+she has never been able to write anything above third-rate English; that
+she is weak in the matter of grammar; that she has but a rude and
+dull sense of the values of words; that she so lacks in the matter of
+literary precision that she can seldom put a thought into words that
+express it lucidly to the reader and leave no doubts in his mind as to
+whether he has rightly understood or not; that she cannot even draught a
+Preface that a person can fully comprehend, nor one which can by any
+art be translated into a fully understandable form; that she can
+seldom inject into a Preface even single sentences whose meaning is
+uncompromisingly clear--yet Prefaces are her specialty, if she has one.
+
+Mrs. Eddy's known and undisputed writings are very limited in bulk;
+they exhibit no depth, no analytical quality, no thought above school
+composition size, and but juvenile ability in handling thoughts of even
+that modest magnitude. She has a fine commercial ability, and could
+govern a vast railway system in great style; she could draught a set
+of rules that Satan himself would say could not be improved on--for
+devilish effectiveness--by his staff; but we know, by our excursions
+among the Mother-Church's By-laws, that their English would discredit
+the deputy baggage-smasher. I am quite sure that Mrs. Eddy cannot write
+well upon any subject, even a commercial one.
+
+In the very first revision of Science and Health (1883), Mrs. Eddy wrote
+a Preface which is an unimpeachable witness that the rest of the book
+was written by somebody else. I have put it in the Appendix along with a
+page or two taken from the body of the book, and will ask the reader to
+compare the labored and lumbering and confused gropings of this Preface
+with the easy and flowing and direct English of the other exhibit, and
+see if he can believe that the one hand and brain produced both.
+
+And let him take the Preface apart, sentence by sentence, and
+searchingly examine each sentence word by word, and see if he can find
+half a dozen sentences whose meanings he is so sure of that he can
+rephrase them--in words of his own--and reproduce what he takes to be
+those meanings. Money can be lost on this game. I know, for I am the one
+that lost it.
+
+Now let the reader turn to the excerpt which I have made from the
+chapter on “Prayer” (last year's edition of Science and Health), and
+compare that wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of
+work with the aforesaid Preface, and with Mrs. Eddy's poetry concerning
+the gymnastic trees, and Minerva's not yet effete sandals, and the
+wreaths imported from Erudition's bower for the decoration of Plymouth
+Rock, and the Plague-spot and Bacilli, and my other exhibits (turn back
+to my Chapters I. and II.) from the Autobiography, and finally with
+the late Communication concerning me, and see if he thinks anybody's
+affirmation, or anybody's sworn testimony, or any other testimony of
+any imaginable kind would ever be likely to convince him that Mrs. Eddy
+wrote that chapter on Prayer.
+
+I do not wish to impose my opinion on any one who will not permit
+it, but such as it is I offer it here for what it is worth. I cannot
+believe, and I do not believe, that Mrs. Eddy originated any of the
+thoughts and reasonings out of which the book Science and Health is
+constructed; and I cannot believe, and do not believe that she ever
+wrote any part of that book.
+
+I think that if anything in the world stands proven, and well and
+solidly proven, by unimpeachable testimony--the treacherous testimony of
+her own pen in her known and undisputed literary productions--it is that
+Mrs. Eddy is not capable of thinking upon high planes, nor of reasoning
+clearly nor writing intelligently upon low ones.
+
+Inasmuch as--in my belief--the very first editions of the book Science
+and Health were far above the reach of Mrs. Eddy's mental and literary
+abilities, I think she has from the very beginning been claiming as
+her own another person's book, and wearing as her own property laurels
+rightfully belonging to that person--the real author of Science and
+Health. And I think the reason--and the only reason--that he has not
+protested is because his work was not exposed to print until after he
+was safely dead.
+
+That with an eye to business, and by grace of her business talent,
+she has restored to the world neglected and abandoned features of the
+Christian religion which her thousands of followers find gracious and
+blessed and contenting, I recognize and confess; but I am convinced that
+every single detail of the work except just that one--the delivery of
+the Product to the world--was conceived and performed by another.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX A
+
+ORIGINAL FIRST PREFACE TO SCIENCE AND HEALTH
+
+There seems a Christian necessity of learning God's power and purpose to
+heal both mind and body. This thought grew out of our early seeking
+Him in all our ways, and a hopeless as singular invalidism that drugs
+increased instead of diminished, and hygiene benefited only for a
+season. By degrees we have drifted into more spiritual latitudes of
+thought, and experimented as we advanced until demonstrating fully the
+power of mind over the body. About the year 1862, having heard of a
+mesmerist in Portland who was treating the sick by manipulation, we
+visited him; he helped us for a time, then we relapsed somewhat. After
+his decease, and a severe casualty deemed fatal by skilful physicians,
+we discovered that the Principle of all healing and the law that governs
+it is God, a divine Principle, and a spiritual not material law, and
+regained health.
+
+It was not an individual or mortal mind acting upon another so-called
+mind that healed us. It was the glorious truths of Christian Science
+that we discovered as we neared that verge of so-called material life
+named death; yea, it was the great Shekinah, the spirit of Life, Truth,
+and Love illuminating our understanding of the action and might of
+Omnipotence! The old gentleman to whom we have referred had some very
+advanced views on healing, but he was not avowedly religious neither
+scholarly. We interchanged thoughts on the subject of healing the sick.
+I restored some patients of his that he failed to heal, and left in
+his possession some manuscripts of mine containing corrections of his
+desultory pennings, which I am informed at his decease passed into the
+hands of a patient of his, now residing in Scotland. He died in 1865 and
+left no published works. The only manuscript that we ever held of his,
+longer than to correct it, was one of perhaps a dozen pages, most of
+which we had composed. He manipulated the sick; hence his ostensible
+method of healing was physical instead of mental.
+
+We helped him in the esteem of the public by our writings, but never
+knew of his stating orally or in writing that he treated his patients
+mentally; never heard him give any directions to that effect; and have
+it from one of his patients, who now asserts that he was the founder of
+mental healing, that he never revealed to anyone his method. We refer
+to these facts simply to refute the calumnies and false claims of our
+enemies, that we are preferring dishonest claims to the discovery and
+founding at this period of Metaphysical Healing or Christian Science.
+
+The Science and laws of a purely mental healing and their method of
+application through spiritual power alone, else a mental argument
+against disease, are our own discovery at this date. True, the Principle
+is divine and eternal, but the application of it to heal the sick had
+been lost sight of, and required to be again spiritually discerned
+and its science discovered, that man might retain it through the
+understanding. Since our discovery in 1866 of the divine science of
+Christian Healing, we have labored with tongue and pen to found this
+system. In this endeavor every obstacle has been thrown in our path that
+the envy and revenge of a few disaffected students could devise. The
+superstition and ignorance of even this period have not failed to
+contribute their mite towards misjudging us, while its Christian
+advancement and scientific research have helped sustain our feeble
+efforts.
+
+Since our first Edition of Science and Health, published in 1875, two
+of the aforesaid students have plagiarized and pirated our works. In the
+issues of E. J. A., almost exclusively ours, were thirteen paragraphs,
+without credit, taken verbatim from our books.
+
+Not one of our printed works was ever copied or abstracted from the
+published or from the unpublished writings of anyone. Throughout our
+publications of Metaphysical Healing or Christian Science, when writing
+or dictating them, we have given ourselves to contemplation wholly apart
+from the observation of the material senses: to look upon a copy would
+have distracted our thoughts from the subject before us. We were seldom
+able to copy our own compositions, and have employed an amanuensis
+for the last six years. Every work that we have had published has been
+extemporaneously written; and out of fifty lectures and sermons that we
+have delivered the last year, forty-four have been extemporaneous. We
+have distributed many of our unpublished manuscripts; loaned to one of
+our youngest students, R. K--------y, between three and four hundred
+pages, of which we were sole author--giving him liberty to copy but not
+to publish them.
+
+Leaning on the sustaining Infinite with loving trust, the trials of
+to-day grow brief, and to-morrow is big with blessings.
+
+The wakeful shepherd, tending his flocks, beholds from the mountain's
+top the first faint morning beam ere cometh the risen day. So from
+Soul's loftier summits shines the pale star to prophet-shepherd, and
+it traverses night, over to where the young child lies, in cradled
+obscurity, that shall waken a world. Over the night of error dawn the
+morning beams and guiding star of Truth, and “the wise men” are led by
+it to Science, which repeats the eternal harmony that it reproduced, in
+proof of immortality. The time for thinkers has come; and the time for
+revolutions, ecclesiastical and civil, must come. Truth, independent of
+doctrines or time-honored systems, stands at the threshold of history.
+Contentment with the past, or the cold conventionality of custom, may no
+longer shut the door on science; though empires fall, “He whose right it
+is shall reign.” Ignorance of God should no longer be the stepping-stone
+to faith; understanding Him, “whom to know aright is Life eternal,” is
+the only guaranty of obedience.
+
+This volume may not open a new thought, and make it at once familiar. It
+has the sturdy task of a pioneer, to hack away at the tall oaks and cut
+the rough granite, leaving future ages to declare what it has done.
+We made our first discovery of the adaptation of metaphysics to the
+treatment of disease in the winter of 1866; since then we have tested
+the Principle on ourselves and others, and never found it to fail to
+prove the statements herein made of it. We must learn the science of
+Life, to reach the perfection of man. To understand God as the Principle
+of all being, and to live in accordance with this Principle, is the
+Science of Life. But to reproduce this harmony of being, the error
+of personal sense must yield to science, even as the science of music
+corrects tones caught from the ear, and gives the sweet concord of
+sound. There are many theories of physic and theology, and many calls in
+each of their directions for the right way; but we propose to settle the
+question of “What is Truth?” on the ground of proof, and let that method
+of healing the sick and establishing Christianity be adopted that is
+found to give the most health and to make the best Christians; science
+will then have a fair field, in which case we are assured of its triumph
+over all opinions and beliefs. Sickness and sin have ever had their
+doctors; but the question is, Have they become less because of them? The
+longevity of our antediluvians would say, No! and the criminal records
+of today utter their voices little in favor of such a conclusion. Not
+that we would deny to Caesar the things that are his, but that we
+ask for the things that belong to Truth; and safely affirm, from the
+demonstrations we have been able to make, that the science of man
+understood would have eradicated sin, sickness, and death, in a less
+period than six thousand years. We find great difficulties in starting
+this work right. Some shockingly false claims are already made to a
+metaphysical practice; mesmerism, its very antipodes, is one of them.
+Hitherto we have never, in a single instance of our discovery, found
+the slightest resemblance between mesmerism and metaphysics. No especial
+idiosyncrasy is requisite to acquire a knowledge of metaphysical
+healing; spiritual sense is more important to its discernment than the
+intellect; and those who would learn this science without a high moral
+standard of thought and action, will fail to understand it until they
+go up higher. Owing to our explanations constantly vibrating between the
+same points, an irksome repetition of words must occur; also the use of
+capital letters, genders, and technicalities peculiar to the science.
+Variety of language, or beauty of diction, must give place to close
+analysis and unembellished thought. “Hoping all things, enduring all
+things,” to do good to our enemies, to bless them that curse us, and to
+bear to the sorrowing and the sick consolation and healing, we commit
+these pages to posterity.
+
+MARY BAKER G. EDDY.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX B
+
+The Gospel narratives bear brief testimony even to the life of our great
+Master. His spiritual noumenon and phenomenon, silenced portraiture.
+Writers, less wise than the Apostles, essayed in the Apocryphal New
+Testament, a legendary and traditional history of the early life of
+Jesus. But Saint Paul summarized the character of Jesus as the model
+of Christianity, in these words: “Consider Him who endured such
+contradictions of sinners against Himself. Who for the joy that was set
+before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at
+the right hand of the throne of God.”
+
+It may be that the mortal life battle still wages, and must continue
+till its involved errors are vanquished by victory-bringing Science; but
+this triumph will come! God is over all. He alone is our origin, aim,
+and Being. The real man is not of the dust, nor is he ever created
+through the flesh; for his father and mother are the one Spirit, and his
+brethren are all the children of one parent, the eternal Good.
+
+Any kind of literary composition was excessively difficult for Mrs.
+Eddy. She found it grinding hard work to dig out anything to say. She
+realized, at the above stage in her life, that with all her trouble she
+had not been able to scratch together even material enough for a child's
+Autobiography, and also that what she had secured was in the main not
+valuable, not important, considering the age and the fame of the person
+she was writing about; and so it occurred to her to attempt, in that
+paragraph, to excuse the meagreness and poor quality of the feast she
+was spreading, by letting on that she could do ever so much better if
+she wanted to, but was under constraint of Divine etiquette. To feed
+with more than a few indifferent crumbs a plebeian appetite for personal
+details about Personages in her class was not the correct thing, and she
+blandly points out that there is Precedent for this reserve. When Mrs.
+Eddy tries to be artful--in literature--it is generally after the manner
+of the ostrich; and with the ostrich's luck. Please try to find the
+connection between the two paragraphs.--M. T.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX C
+
+The following is the spiritual signification of the Lord's Prayer:
+
+Principle, eternal and harmonious, Nameless and adorable Intelligence,
+Thou art ever present and supreme. And when this supremacy of
+Spirit shall appear, the dream of matter will disappear. Give us the
+understanding of Truth and Love. And loving we shall learn God, and
+Truth will destroy all error. And lead us unto the Life that is Soul,
+and deliver us from the errors of sense, sin, sickness, and death, For
+God is Life, Truth, and Love for ever.--Science and Health, edition of
+1881.
+
+It seems to me that this one is distinctly superior to the one that was
+inspired for last year's edition. It is strange, but to my mind plain,
+that inspiring is an art which does not improve with practice.--M. T.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX D
+
+“For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain,
+Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in
+his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come
+to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you,
+What things soever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them,
+and ye shall have them.
+
+“Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask
+Him.”--CHRIST JESUS.
+
+The prayer that reclaims the sinner and heals the sick, is an absolute
+faith that all things are possible to God--a spiritual understanding of
+Him--an unselfed love. Regardless of what another may say or think
+on this subject, I speak from experience. This prayer, combined with
+self-sacrifice and toil, is the means whereby God has enabled me to do
+what I have done for the religion and health of mankind.
+
+Thoughts unspoken are not unknown to the divine Mind. Desire is prayer;
+and no less can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may
+be moulded and exalted before they take form in audible word, and in
+deeds.
+
+What are the motives for prayer? Do we pray to make ourselves better, or
+to benefit those that hear us; to enlighten the Infinite, or to be heard
+of men? Are we benefited by praying? Yes, the desire which goes forth
+hungering after righteousness is blessed of our Father, and it does not
+return unto us void.
+
+God is not moved by the breath of praise to do more than He has already
+done; nor can the Infinite do less than bestow all good, since He is
+unchanging Wisdom and Love. We can do more for ourselves by humble
+fervent petitions; but the All-loving does not grant them simply on the
+ground of lip-service, for He already knows all.
+
+Prayer cannot change the Science of Being, but it does bring us into
+harmony with it. Goodness reaches the demonstration of Truth. A request
+that another may work for us never does our work. The habit of pleading
+with the divine Mind, as one pleads with a human being, perpetuates the
+belief in God as humanly circumscribed--an error which impedes spiritual
+growth.
+
+God is Love. Can we ask Him to be more? God is Intelligence. Can we
+inform the infinite Mind, or tell Him anything He does not already
+comprehend? Do we hope to change perfection? Shall we plead for more
+at the open fount, which always pours forth more than we receive? The
+unspoken prayer does bring us nearer the Source of all existence and
+blessedness.
+
+Asking God to be God is a “vain repetition.” God is “the same yesterday,
+and to-day, and forever”; and He who is immutably right will do right,
+without being reminded of His province. The wisdom of man is not
+sufficient to warrant him in advising God.
+
+Who would stand before a blackboard, and pray the principle of
+mathematics to work out the problem? The rule is already established,
+and it is our task to work out the solution. Shall we ask the divine
+Principle of all goodness to do His own work? His work is done; and
+we have only to avail ourselves of God's rule, in order to receive the
+blessing thereof.
+
+The divine Being must be reflected by man--else man is not the image and
+likeness of the patient, tender, and true, the one “altogether lovely”;
+but to understand God is the work of eternity, and demands absolute
+concentration of thought and energy.
+
+How empty are our conceptions of Deity! We admit theoretically that
+God is good, omnipotent, omnipresent, infinite, and then we try to give
+information to this infinite Mind; and plead for unmerited pardon, and a
+liberal outpouring of benefactions. Are we really grateful for the good
+already received? Then we shall avail ourselves of the blessings we
+have, and thus be fitted to receive more. Gratitude is much more than a
+verbal expression of thanks. Action expresses more gratitude than speech.
+
+If we are ungrateful for Life, Truth, and Love, and yet return thanks to
+God for all blessings, we are insincere; and incur the sharp censure
+our Master pronounces on hypocrites. In such a case the only acceptable
+prayer is to put the finger on the lips and remember our blessings.
+While the heart is far from divine Truth and Love, we cannot conceal the
+ingratitude of barren lives, for God knoweth all things.
+
+What we most need is the prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace,
+expressed in patience, meekness, love, and good deeds. To keep the
+commandments of our Master and follow his example, is our proper debt to
+Him, and the only worthy evidence of our gratitude for all He has
+done. Outward worship is not of itself sufficient to express loyal
+and heartfelt gratitude, since He has said: “If ye love Me, keep My
+Commandments.”
+
+The habitual struggle to be always good, is unceasing prayer. Its
+motives are made manifest in the blessings they bring--which, if
+not acknowledged in audible words, attest our worthiness to be made
+partakers of Love.
+
+Simply asking that we may love God will never make us love Him; but the
+longing to be better and holier--expressed in daily watchfulness, and in
+striving to assimilate more of the divine character--this will mould and
+fashion us anew, until we awake in His likeness. We reach the Science
+of Christianity through demonstration of the divine nature; but in this
+wicked world goodness will “be evil spoken of,” and patience must work
+experience.
+
+Audible prayer can never do the works of spiritual understanding, which
+regenerates; but silent prayer, watchfulness, and devout obedience,
+enable us to follow Jesus' example. Long prayers, ecclesiasticism, and
+creeds, have clipped the divine pinions of Love, and clad religion in
+human robes. They materialize worship, hinder the Spirit, and keep man
+from demonstrating his power over error.
+
+Sorrow for wrong-doing is but one step towards reform, and the very
+easiest step. The next and great step required by Wisdom is the test of
+our sincerity--namely, reformation. To this end we are placed under the
+stress of circumstances. Temptation bids us repeat the offence, and woe
+comes in return for what is done. So it will ever be, till we learn that
+there is no discount in the law of justice, and that we must pay “the
+uttermost farthing.” The measure ye mete “shall be measured to you
+again,” and it will be full “and running over.”
+
+Saints and sinners get their full award, but not always in this world.
+The followers of Christ drank His cup. Ingratitude and persecution
+filled it to the brim; but God pours the riches of His love into the
+understanding and affections, giving us strength according to our day.
+Sinners flourish “like a green bay-tree”; but, looking farther, the
+Psalmist could see their end--namely, the destruction of sin through
+suffering.
+
+Prayer is sometimes used, as a confessional to cancel sin. This error
+impedes true religion. Sin is forgiven, only as it is destroyed by
+Christ-Truth and Life. If prayer nourishes the belief that sin is
+cancelled, and that man is made better by merely praying, it is an evil.
+He grows worse who continues in sin because he thinks himself forgiven.
+
+An apostle says that the Son of God (Christ) came to “destroy the
+works of the devil.” We should follow our divine Exemplar, and seek the
+destruction of all evil works, error and disease included. We cannot
+escape the penalty due for sin. The Scriptures say, that if we deny
+Christ, “He also will deny us.”
+
+The divine Love corrects and governs man. Men may pardon, but this
+divine Principle alone reforms the sinner. God is not separate from the
+wisdom He bestows. The talents He gives we must improve. Calling on
+Him to forgive our work, badly done or left undone, implies the vain
+supposition that we have nothing to do but to ask pardon, and that
+afterwards we shall be free to repeat the offence.
+
+To cause suffering, as the result of sin, is the means of destroying
+sin. Every supposed pleasure in sin will furnish more than its
+equivalent of pain, until belief in material life and sin is destroyed.
+To reach heaven, the harmony of Being, we must understand the divine
+Principle of Being.
+
+“God is Love.” More than this we cannot ask; higher we cannot look;
+farther we cannot go. To suppose that God forgives or punishes sin,
+according as His mercy is sought or unsought, is to misunderstand Love
+and make prayer the safety-valve for wrong-doing.
+
+Jesus uncovered and rebuked sin before He cast it out. Of a sick woman
+He said that Satan had bound her; and to Peter He said, “Thou art an
+offense unto me.” He came teaching and showing men how to destroy sin,
+sickness, and death. He said of the fruitless tree, “It is hewn down.”
+
+It is believed by many that a certain magistrate, who lived in the time
+of Jesus, left this record: “His rebuke is fearful.” The strong language
+of our Master confirms this description.
+
+The only civil sentence which He had for error was, “Get thee behind
+Me, Satan.” Still stronger evidence that Jesus' reproof was pointed and
+pungent is in His own words--showing the necessity for such forcible
+utterance, when He cast out devils and healed the sick and sinful. The
+relinquishment of error deprives material sense of its false claims.
+
+Audible prayer is impressive; it gives momentary solemnity and elevation
+to thought; but does it produce any lasting benefit? Looking deeply into
+these things, we find that “a zeal... not according to knowledge,” gives
+occasion for reaction unfavorable to spiritual growth, sober resolve,
+and wholesome perception of God's requirements. The motives for verbal
+prayer may embrace too much love of applause to induce or encourage
+Christian sentiment.
+
+Physical sensation, not Soul, produces material ecstasy, and emotions.
+If spiritual sense always guided men at such times, there would grow out
+of those ecstatic moments a higher experience and a better life, with
+more devout self-abnegation, and purity. A self-satisfied ventilation
+of fervent sentiments never makes a Christian. God is not influenced by
+man. The “divine ear” is not an auditorial nerve. It is the all-hearing
+and all-knowing Mind, to whom each want of man is always known, and by
+whom it will be supplied.
+
+The danger from audible prayer is, that it may lead us into temptation.
+By it we may become involuntary hypocrites, uttering desires which
+are not real, and consoling ourselves in the midst of sin, with the
+recollection that we have prayed over it--or mean to ask forgiveness at
+some later day. Hypocrisy is fatal to religion.
+
+A wordy prayer may afford a quiet sense of self-justification, though it
+makes the sinner a hypocrite. We never need despair of an honest heart,
+but there is little hope for those who only come spasmodically face to
+face with their wickedness, and then seek to hide it. Their prayers are
+indexes which do not correspond with their character. They hold secret
+fellowship with sin; and such externals are spoken of by Jesus as “like
+unto whited sepulchres... full of all uncleanness.”
+
+If a man, though apparently fervent and prayerful, is impure, and
+therefore insincere, what must be the comment upon him? If he had
+reached the loftiness of his prayer, there would be no occasion for such
+comment. If we feel the aspiration, humility, gratitude, and love
+which our words express--this God accepts; and it is wise not to try to
+deceive ourselves or others, for “there is nothing covered that shall
+not be revealed.” Professions and audible prayers are like charity in
+one respect--they “cover a multitude of sins.” Praying for humility,
+with whatever fervency of expression, does not always mean a desire
+for it. If we turn away from the poor, we are not ready to receive the
+reward of Him who blesses the poor. We confess to having a very wicked
+heart, and ask that it may be laid bare before us; but do we not already
+know more of this heart than we are willing to have our neighbor see?
+
+We ought to examine ourselves, and learn what is the affection and
+purpose of the heart; for this alone can show us what we honestly are.
+If a friend informs us of a fault, do we listen to the rebuke patiently,
+and credit what is said? Do we not rather give thanks that we are “not
+as other men?” During many years the author has been most grateful for
+merited rebuke. The sting lies in unmerited censure--in the falsehood
+which does no one any good.
+
+The test of all prayer lies in the answer to these questions: Do we
+love our neighbor better because of this asking? Do we pursue the old
+selfishness, satisfied with having prayed for something better,
+though we give no evidence of the sincerity of our requests by living
+consistently with our prayer? If selfishness has given place to
+kindness, we shall regard our neighbor unselfishly, and bless them that
+curse us; but we shall never meet this great duty by simply asking that
+it may be done. There is a cross to be taken up, before we can enjoy the
+fruition of our hope and faith.
+
+Dost thou “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
+soul, and with all thy mind?” This command includes much--even the
+surrender of all merely material sensation, affection, and worship. This
+is the El Dorado of Christianity. It involves the Science of Life,
+and recognizes only the divine control of Spirit, wherein Soul is our
+master, and material sense and human will have no place.
+
+Are you willing to leave all for Christ, for Truth, and so be counted
+among sinners? No! Do you really desire to attain this point? No! Then
+why make long prayers about it, and ask to be Christians, since you care
+not to tread in the footsteps of our dear Master? If unwilling to follow
+His example, wherefore pray with the lips that you may be partakers of
+His nature? Consistent prayer is the desire to do right. Prayer means
+that we desire to, and will, walk in the light so far as we receive it,
+even though with bleeding footsteps, and waiting patiently on the Lord,
+will leave our real desires to be rewarded by Him.
+
+The world must grow to the spiritual understanding of prayer. If good
+enough to profit by Jesus' cup of earthly sorrows, God will sustain us
+under these sorrows. Until we are thus divinely qualified, and willing
+to drink His cup, millions of vain repetitions will never pour into
+prayer the unction of Spirit, in demonstration of power, and “with signs
+following.” Christian Science reveals a necessity for overcoming the
+world, the flesh and evil, and thus destroying all error.
+
+Seeking is not sufficient. It is striving which enables us to enter.
+Spiritual attainments open the door to a higher understanding of the
+divine Life.
+
+One of the forms of worship in Thibet is to carry a praying-machine
+through the streets, and stop at the doors to earn a penny by grinding
+out a prayer; whereas civilization pays for clerical prayers, in lofty
+edifices. Is the difference very great, after all?
+
+Experience teaches us that we do not always receive the blessings we ask
+for in prayer.
+
+There is some misapprehension of the source and means of all goodness
+and blessedness, or we should certainly receive what we ask for. The
+Scriptures say: “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye
+may consume it upon your lusts.” What we desire and ask for it is not
+always best for us to receive. In this case infinite Love will not grant
+the request. Do you ask Wisdom to be merciful and not punish sin? Then
+“ye ask amiss.” Without punishment, sin would multiply. Jesus' prayer,
+“forgive us our debts,” specified also the terms of forgiveness. When
+forgiving the adulterous woman He said, “Go, and sin no more.”
+
+A magistrate sometimes remits the penalty, but this may be no moral
+benefit to the criminal; and at best, it only saves him from one form
+of punishment. The moral law, which has the right to acquit or condemn,
+always demands restitution, before mortals can “go up higher.” Broken
+law brings penalty, in order to compel this progress.
+
+Mere legal pardon (and there is no other, for divine Principle never
+pardons our sins or mistakes till they are corrected) leaves the
+offender free to repeat the offense; if, indeed, he has not already
+suffered sufficiently from vice to make him turn from it with loathing.
+Truth bestows no pardon upon error, but wipes it out in the most
+effectual manner. Jesus suffered for our sins, not to annul the divine
+sentence against an individual's sin, but to show that sin must bring
+inevitable suffering.
+
+Petitions only bring to mortals the results of their own faith. We know
+that a desire for holiness is requisite in order to gain it; but if we
+desire holiness above all else, we shall sacrifice everything for it.
+We must be willing to do this, that we may walk securely in the only
+practical road to holiness. Prayer alone cannot change the unalterable
+Truth, or give us an understanding of it; but prayer coupled with a
+fervent habitual desire to know and do the will of God will bring us
+into all Truth. Such a desire has little need of audible expression. It
+is best expressed in thought and life.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX E
+
+Reverend Heber Newton on Christian Science:
+
+To begin, then, at the beginning, Christian Science accepts the work
+of healing sickness as an integral part of the discipleship of Jesus
+Christ. In Christ it finds, what the Church has always recognized,
+theoretically, though it has practically ignored the fact--the Great
+Physician. That Christ healed the sick, we none of us question. It
+stands plainly upon the record. This ministry of healing was too large
+a part of His work to be left out from any picture of that life. Such
+service was not an incident of His career--it was an essential
+element of that career. It was an integral factor in His mission. The
+Evangelists leave us no possibility of confusion on this point. Co-equal
+with his work of instruction and inspiration was His work of healing.
+
+The records make it equally clear that the Master laid His charge upon
+His disciples to do as He had done. “When He had called unto Him His
+twelve disciples, He gave them power over unclean spirits, to cast them
+out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease.” In
+sending them forth, “He commanded them, saying,... As ye go, preach,
+saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the
+lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons.”
+
+That the twelve disciples undertook to do the Master's work of healing,
+and that they, in their measure, succeeded, seems beyond question. They
+found in themselves the same power that the Master found in Himself,
+and they used it as He had used His power. The record of The Acts of the
+Apostles, if at all trustworthy history, shows that they, too, healed
+the sick.
+
+Beyond the circle of the original twelve, it is equally clear that the
+early disciples believed themselves charged with the same mission, and
+that they sought to fulfil it. The records of the early Church make it
+indisputable that powers of healing were recognized as among the gifts
+of the Spirit. St. Paul's letters render it certain that these gifts
+were not a privilege of the original twelve, merely, but that they were
+the heritage into which all the disciples entered.
+
+Beyond the era of the primitive Church, through several generations, the
+early Christians felt themselves called to the same ministry of healing,
+and enabled with the same secret of power. Through wellnigh three
+centuries, the gifts of healing appear to have been, more or less,
+recognized and exercised in the Church. Through those generations,
+however, there was a gradual disuse of this power, following upon a
+failing recognition of its possession. That which was originally the
+rule became the exception. By degrees, the sense of authority and power
+to heal passed out from the consciousness of the Church. It ceased to be
+a sign of the indwelling Spirit. For fifteen centuries, the recognition
+of this authority and power has been altogether exceptional. Here and
+there, through the history of these centuries, there have been those who
+have entered into this belief of their own privilege and duty, and have
+used the gift which they recognized. The Church has never been left
+without a line of witnesses to this aspect of the discipleship of
+Christ. But she has come to accept it as the normal order of things that
+what was once the rule in the Christian Church should be now only
+the exception. Orthodoxy has framed a theory of the words of Jesus to
+account for this strange departure of His Church from them. It teaches
+us to believe that His example was not meant to be followed, in this
+respect, by all His disciples. The power of healing which was in Him
+was a purely exceptional power. It was used as an evidence of His divine
+mission. It was a miraculous gift. The gift of working miracles was not
+bestowed upon His Church at large. His original disciples, the twelve
+apostles, received this gift, as a necessity of the critical epoch of
+Christianity--the founding of the Church. Traces of the power lingered
+on, in weakening activity, until they gradually ceased, and the normal
+condition of the Church was entered upon, in which miracles are no
+longer possible.
+
+
+We accept this, unconsciously, as the true state of things in
+Christianity. But it is a conception which will not bear a moment's
+examination. There is not the slightest suggestion upon record that
+Christ set any limit to this charge which He gave His disciples. On the
+contrary, there are not lacking hints that He looked for the possession
+and exercise of this power wherever His spirit breathed in men.
+
+Even if the concluding paragraph of St. Mark's Gospel were a later
+appendix, it may none the less have been a faithful echo of words of
+the Master, as it certainly is a trustworthy record of the belief of the
+early Christians as to the thought of Jesus concerning His followers.
+In that interesting passage, Jesus, after His death, appeared to the
+eleven, and formally commissioned them, again, to take up His work in
+the world; bidding them, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel
+to every creature.” “And these signs,” He tells them, “shall follow them
+that believe”--not the apostles only, but “them that believe,” without
+limit of time; “in My name they shall cast out devils... they shall lay
+hands on the sick and they shall recover.” The concluding discourse to
+the disciples, recorded in the Gospel according to St. John, affirms the
+same expectation on the part of Jesus; emphasizing it in His solemn way:
+“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me, the works that
+I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do.”
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX F
+
+Few will deny that an intelligence apart from man formed and governs the
+spiritual universe and man; and this intelligence is the eternal
+Mind, and neither matter nor man created this intelligence and divine
+Principle; nor can this Principle produce aught unlike itself. All that
+we term sin, sickness, and death is comprised in the belief of matter.
+The realm of the real is spiritual; the opposite of Spirit is matter;
+and the opposite of the real is unreal or material. Matter is an error
+of statement, for there is no matter. This error of premises leads to
+error of conclusion in every statement of matter as a basis. Nothing
+we can say or believe regarding matter is true, except that matter is
+unreal, simply a belief that has its beginning and ending.
+
+The conservative firm called matter and mind God never formed. The
+unerring and eternal Mind destroys this imaginary copartnership,
+formed only to be dissolved in a manner and at a period unknown. This
+copartnership is obsolete. Placed under the microscope of metaphysics
+matter disappears. Only by understanding there are not two, matter
+and mind, is a logical and correct conclusion obtained by either one.
+Science gathers not grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. Intelligence
+never produced non-intelligence, such as matter: the immortal never
+produced mortality, good never resulted in evil. The science of Mind
+shows conclusively that matter is a myth. Metaphysics are above physics,
+and drag not matter, or what is termed that, into one of its premises
+or conclusions. Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges
+the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul. These ideas are perfectly
+tangible and real to consciousness, and they have this advantage--they
+are eternal. Mind and its thoughts comprise the whole of God, the
+universe, and of man. Reason and revelation coincide with this
+statement, and support its proof every hour, for nothing is harmonious
+or eternal that is not spiritual: the realization of this will bring
+out objects from a higher source of thought; hence more beautiful and
+immortal.
+
+The fact of spiritualization produces results in striking contrast to
+the farce of materialization: the one produces the results of chastity
+and purity, the other the downward tendencies and earthward gravitation
+of sensualism and impurity.
+
+The exalting and healing effects of metaphysics show their fountain.
+Nothing in pathology has exceeded the application of metaphysics.
+Through mind alone we have prevented disease and preserved health. In
+cases of chronic and acute diseases, in their severest forms, we have
+changed the secretions, renewed structure, and restored health; have
+elongated shortened limbs, relaxed rigid muscles, made cicatrized joints
+supple; restored carious bones to healthy conditions, renewed that
+which is termed the lost substance of the lungs; and restored healthy
+organizations where disease was organic instead of functional.
+
+
+
+
+MRS. EDDY IN ERROR
+
+I feel almost sure that Mrs. Eddy's inspiration--works are getting out
+of repair. I think so because they made some errors in a statement which
+she uttered through the press on the 17th of January. Not large ones,
+perhaps, still it is a friend's duty to straighten such things out and
+get them right when he can. Therefore I will put my other duties aside
+for a moment and undertake this helpful service. She said as follows:
+
+“In view of the circulation of certain criticisms from the pen of Mark
+Twain, I submit the following statement:
+
+“It is a fact, well understood, that I begged the students who first
+gave me the endearing appellative 'mother' not to name me thus. But,
+without my consent, that word spread like wildfire. I still must think
+the name is not applicable to me. I stand in relation to this century as
+a Christian discoverer, founder, and leader. I regard self-deification
+as blasphemous; I may be more loved, but I am less lauded, pampered,
+provided for, and cheered than others before me--and wherefore? Because
+Christian Science is not yet popular, and I refuse adulation.
+
+“My visit to the Mother-Church after it was built and dedicated pleased
+me, and the situation was satisfactory. The dear members wanted to greet
+me with escort and the ringing of bells, but I declined, and went alone
+in my carriage to the church, entered it, and knelt in thanks upon the
+steps of its altar. There the foresplendor of the beginnings of truth
+fell mysteriously upon my spirit. I believe in one Christ, teach one
+Christ, know of but one Christ. I believe in but one incarnation, one
+Mother Mary, and know I am not that one, and never claimed to be. It
+suffices me to learn the Science of the Scriptures relative to this
+subject.
+
+“Christian Scientists have no quarrel with Protestants, Catholics,
+or any other sect. They need to be understood as following the divine
+Principle God, Love and not imagined to be unscientific worshippers of a
+human being.
+
+“In the aforesaid article, of which I have seen only extracts, Mark
+Twain's wit was not wasted In certain directions. Christian Science
+eschews divine rights in human beings. If the individual governed human
+consciousness, my statement of Christian Science would be disproved, but
+to understand the spiritual idea is essential to demonstrate Science
+and its pure monotheism--one God, one Christ, no idolatry, no human
+propaganda. Jesus taught and proved that what feeds a few feeds all. His
+life-work subordinated the material to the spiritual, and He left
+this legacy of truth to mankind. His metaphysics is not the sport of
+philosophy, religion, or Science; rather it is the pith and finale of
+them all.
+
+“I have not the inspiration or aspiration to be a first or second
+Virgin-Mother--her duplicate, antecedent, or subsequent. What I am
+remains to be proved by the good I do. We need much humility, wisdom,
+and love to perform the functions of foreshadowing and foretasting
+heaven within us. This glory is molten in the furnace of affliction.”
+
+She still thinks the name of Our Mother not applicable to her; and she
+is also able to remember that it distressed her when it was conferred
+upon her, and that she begged to have it suppressed. Her memory is at
+fault here. If she will take her By-laws, and refer to Section 1 of
+Article XXII., written with her own hand--she will find that she has
+reserved that title to herself, and is so pleased with it, and so--may
+we say jealous?--about it, that she threatens with excommunication any
+sister Scientist who shall call herself by it. This is that Section 1:
+
+“The Title of Mother. In the year 1895 loyal Christian Scientists
+had given to the author of their text-book, the Founder of Christian
+Science, the individual, endearing term of Mother. Therefore, if a
+student of Christian Science shall apply this title, either to herself
+or to others, except as the term for kinship according to the flesh, it
+shall be regarded by the Church as an indication of disrespect for their
+Pastor Emeritus, and unfitness to be a member of the Mother-Church.”
+
+Mrs. Eddy is herself the Mother-Church--its powers and authorities are
+in her possession solely--and she can abolish that title whenever it may
+please her to do so. She has only to command her people, wherever they
+may be in the earth, to use it no more, and it will never be uttered
+again. She is aware of this.
+
+It may be that she “refuses adulation” when she is not awake, but when
+she is awake she encourages it and propagates it in that museum called
+“Our Mother's Room,” in her Church in Boston. She could abolish that
+institution with a word, if she wanted to. She is aware of that. I will
+say a further word about the museum presently.
+
+Further down the column, her memory is unfaithful again:
+
+“I believe in... but one Mother Mary, and know I am not that one, and
+never claimed to be.”
+
+At a session of the National Christian Science Association, held in the
+city of New York on the 27th of May, 1890, the secretary was “instructed
+to send to our Mother greetings and words of affection from her
+assembled children.”
+
+Her telegraphic response was read to the Association at next day's
+meeting:
+
+“All hail! He hath filled the hungry with good things and the sick hath
+He not sent empty away.--MOTHER MARY.”
+
+Which Mother Mary is this one? Are there two? If so, she is both
+of them; for, when she signed this telegram in this satisfied and
+unprotesting way, the Mother-title which she was going to so strenuously
+object to, and put from her with humility, and seize with both hands,
+and reserve as her sole property, and protect her monopoly of it with
+a stern By-law, while recognizing with diffidence that it was “not
+applicable” to her (then and to-day)--that Mother--title was not yet
+born, and would not be offered to her until five years later. The date
+of the above “Mother Mary” is 1890; the “individual, endearing title of
+Mother” was given her “in 1895”--according to her own testimony. See her
+By-law quoted above.
+
+In his opening Address to that Convention of 1890, the President
+recognized this Mary--our Mary-and abolished all previous ones. He said:
+
+“There is but one Moses, one Jesus; and there is but one Mary.”
+
+The confusions being now dispersed, we have this clarified result:
+
+There had been a Moses at one time, and only one; there had been a Jesus
+at one time, and only one; there is a Mary and “only one.” She is not a
+Has Been, she is an Is--the “Author of Science and Health; and we cannot
+ignore her.”
+
+1. In 1890, there was but one Mother Mary. The President said so. 2.
+Mrs. Eddy was that one. She said so, in signing the telegram. 3. Mrs.
+Eddy was not that one for she says so, in her Associated Press utterance
+of January 17th. 4. And has “never claimed to be that one”--unless the
+signature to the telegram is a claim.
+
+Thus it stands proven and established that she is that Mary and isn't,
+and thought she was and knows she wasn't. That much is clear.
+
+She is also “The Mother,” by the election of 1895, and did not want the
+title, and thinks it is not applicable to her, and will excommunicate
+any one that tries to take it away from her. So that is clear.
+
+I think that the only really troublesome confusion connected with these
+particular matters has arisen from the name Mary. Much vexation, much
+misunderstanding, could have been avoided if Mrs. Eddy had used some of
+her other names in place of that one. “Mother Mary” was certain to stir
+up discussion. It would have been much better if she had signed
+the telegram “Mother Baker”; then there would have been no Biblical
+competition, and, of course, that is a thing to avoid. But it is not too
+late, yet.
+
+I wish to break in here with a parenthesis, and then take up this
+examination of Mrs. Eddy's Claim of January 17th again.
+
+The history of her “Mother Mary” telegram--as told to me by one who
+ought to be a very good authority--is curious and interesting. The
+telegram ostensibly quotes verse 53 from the “Magnificat,” but really
+makes some pretty formidable changes in it. This is St. Luke's version:
+
+“He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent
+empty away.”
+
+This is “Mother Mary's” telegraphed version:
+
+“He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the sick hath He not
+sent empty away.”
+
+To judge by the Official Report, the bursting of this bombshell in that
+massed convention of trained Christians created no astonishment, since
+it caused no remark, and the business of the convention went tranquilly
+on, thereafter, as if nothing had happened.
+
+Did those people detect those changes? We cannot know. I think they must
+have noticed them, the wording of St. Luke's verse being as familiar to
+all Christians as is the wording of the Beatitudes; and I think that the
+reason the new version provoked no surprise and no comment was, that the
+assemblage took it for a “Key”--a spiritualized explanation of verse 53,
+newly sent down from heaven through Mrs. Eddy. For all Scientists study
+their Bibles diligently, and they know their Magnificat. I believe that
+their confidence in the authenticity of Mrs. Eddy's inspirations is so
+limitless and so firmly established that no change, however violent,
+which she might make in a Bible text could disturb their composure or
+provoke from them a protest.
+
+Her improved rendition of verse 53 went into the convention's report and
+appeared in a New York paper the next day. The (at that time) Scientist
+whom I mentioned a minute ago, and who had not been present at the
+convention, saw it and marvelled; marvelled and was indignant--indignant
+with the printer or the telegrapher, for making so careless and so
+dreadful an error. And greatly distressed, too; for, of course, the
+newspaper people would fall foul of it, and be sarcastic, and make fun
+of it, and have a blithe time over it, and be properly thankful for the
+chance. It shows how innocent he was; it shows that he did not know the
+limitations of newspaper men in the matter of Biblical knowledge. The
+new verse 53 raised no insurrection in the press; in fact, it was not
+even remarked upon; I could have told him the boys would not know there
+was anything the matter with it. I have been a newspaper man myself, and
+in those days I had my limitations like the others.
+
+The Scientist hastened to Concord and told Mrs. Eddy what a disastrous
+mistake had been made, but he found to his bewilderment that she was
+tranquil about it, and was not proposing to correct it. He was not able
+to get her to promise to make a correction. He asked her secretary if
+he had heard aright when the telegram was dictated to him; the secretary
+said he had, and took the filed copy of it and verified its authenticity
+by comparing it with the stenographic notes.
+
+Mrs. Eddy did make the correction, two months later, in her official
+organ. It attracted no attention among the Scientists; and, naturally,
+none elsewhere, for that periodical's circulation was practically
+confined to disciples of the cult.
+
+That is the tale as it was told to me by an ex-Scientist. Verse
+53--renovated and spiritualized--had a narrow escape from a tremendous
+celebrity. The newspaper men would have made it as famous as the
+assassination of Caesar, but for their limitations.
+
+To return to the Claim. I find myself greatly embarrassed by Mrs. Eddy's
+remark: “I regard self-deification as blasphemous.” If she is right
+about that, I have written a half-ream of manuscript this past week
+which I must not print, either in the book which I am writing, or
+elsewhere: for it goes into that very matter with extensive elaboration,
+citing, in detail, words and acts of Mrs. Eddy's which seem to me to
+prove that she is a faithful and untiring worshipper of herself, and has
+carried self-deification to a length which has not been before ventured
+in ages. If ever. There is not room enough in this chapter for that
+Survey, but I can epitomize a portion of it here.
+
+With her own untaught and untrained mind, and without outside help,
+she has erected upon a firm and lasting foundation the most minutely
+perfect, and wonderful, and smoothly and exactly working, and best
+safe-guarded system of government that has yet been devised in the
+world, as I believe, and as I am sure I could prove if I had room for my
+documentary evidences here.
+
+It is a despotism (on this democratic soil); a sovereignty more absolute
+than the Roman Papacy, more absolute than the Russian Czarship; it has
+not a single power, not a shred of authority, legislative or executive,
+which is not lodged solely in the sovereign; all its dreams, its
+functions, its energies, have a single object, a single reason for
+existing, and only the one--to build to the sky the glory of the
+sovereign, and keep it bright to the end of time.
+
+Mrs. Eddy is the sovereign; she devised that great place for herself,
+she occupies that throne.
+
+In 1895, she wrote a little primer, a little body of autocratic laws,
+called the Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and put
+those laws in force, in permanence. Her government is all there; all
+in that deceptively innocent-looking little book, that cunning little
+devilish book, that slumbering little brown volcano, with hell in its
+bowels. In that book she has planned out her system, and classified and
+defined its purposes and powers.
+
+
+
+
+MAIN PARTS OF THE MACHINE
+
+A Supreme Church. At Boston. Branch Churches. All over the world One
+Pastor for the whole of them: to wit, her book, Science and Health. Term
+of the book's office--forever.
+
+In every C.S. pulpit, two “Readers,” a man and a woman. No talkers,
+no preachers, in any Church-readers only. Readers of the Bible and her
+books--no others. No commentators allowed to write or print.
+
+A Church Service. She has framed it--for all the C.S. Churches--selected
+its readings, its prayers, and the hymns to be used, and has appointed
+the order of procedure. No changes permitted.
+
+A Creed. She wrote it. All C.S. Churches must subscribe to it. No other
+permitted.
+
+A Treasury. At Boston. She carries the key.
+
+A C.S. Book--Publishing House. For books approved by her. No others
+permitted.
+
+Journals and Magazines. These are organs of hers, and are controlled by
+her.
+
+A College. For teaching C.S.
+
+
+
+
+DISTRIBUTION OF THE MACHINE'S POWERS AND DIGNITIES
+
+Supreme Church. Pastor Emeritus--Mrs. Eddy. Board of Directors. Board
+of Education. Board of Finance. College Faculty. Various Committees.
+Treasurer. Clerk. First Members (of the Supreme Church). Members of the
+Supreme Church.
+
+It looks fair, it looks real, but it is all a fiction.
+
+Even the little “Pastor Emeritus” is a fiction. Instead of being merely
+an honorary and ornamental official, Mrs. Eddy is the only official in
+the entire body that has the slightest power. In her Manual, she has
+provided a prodigality of ways and forms whereby she can rid herself of
+any functionary in the government whenever she wants to. The officials
+are all shadows, save herself; she is the only reality. She allows no
+one to hold office more than a year--no one gets a chance to become
+over-popular or over-useful, and dangerous. “Excommunication” is the
+favorite penalty-it is threatened at every turn. It is evidently the pet
+dread and terror of the Church's membership.
+
+The member who thinks, without getting his thought from Mrs. Eddy before
+uttering it, is banished permanently. One or two kinds of sinners can
+plead their way back into the fold, but this one, never. To think--in
+the Supreme Church--is the New Unpardonable Sin.
+
+To nearly every severe and fierce rule, Mrs. Eddy adds this rivet: “This
+By-law shall not be changed without the consent of the Pastor Emeritus.”
+
+Mrs. Eddy is the entire Supreme Church, in her own person, in the matter
+of powers and authorities.
+
+Although she has provided so many ways of getting rid of unsatisfactory
+members and officials, she was still afraid she might have left a
+life-preserver lying around somewhere, therefore she devised a rule to
+cover that defect. By applying it, she can excommunicate (and this is
+perpetual again) every functionary connected with the Supreme Church,
+and every one of the twenty-five thousand members of that Church, at an
+hour's notice--and do it all by herself without anybody's help.
+
+By authority of this astonishing By-law, she has only to say a
+person connected with that Church is secretly practicing hypnotism or
+mesmerism; whereupon, immediate excommunication, without a hearing,
+is his portion! She does not have to order a trial and produce
+evidence--her accusation is all that is necessary.
+
+Where is the Pope? and where the Czar? As the ballad says:
+
+     “Ask of the winds that far away
+     With fragments strewed the sea!”
+
+The Branch Church's pulpit is occupied by two “Readers.” Without them
+the Branch Church is as dead as if its throat had been cut. To have
+control, then, of the Readers, is to have control of the Branch
+Churches. Mrs. Eddy has that control--a control wholly without limit, a
+control shared with no one.
+
+1. No Reader can be appointed to any Church in the Christian Science
+world without her express approval.
+
+2. She can summarily expel from his or her place any Reader, at home or
+abroad, by a mere letter of dismissal, over her signature, and without
+furnishing any reason for it, to either the congregation or the Reader.
+
+Thus she has as absolute control over all Branch Churches as she has
+over the Supreme Church. This power exceeds the Pope's.
+
+In simple truth, she is the only absolute sovereign in all Christendom.
+The authority of the other sovereigns has limits, hers has none, none
+whatever. And her yoke does not fret, does not offend. Many of the
+subjects of the other monarchs feel their yoke, and are restive under
+it; their loyalty is insincere. It is not so with this one's human
+property; their loyalty is genuine, earnest, sincere, enthusiastic.
+The sentiment which they feel for her is one which goes out in sheer
+perfection to no other occupant of a throne; for it is love, pure from
+doubt, envy, exaction, fault-seeking, a love whose sun has no
+spot--that form of love, strong, great, uplifting, limitless, whose vast
+proportions are compassable by no word but one, the prodigious word,
+Worship. And it is not as a human being that her subjects worship her,
+but as a supernatural one, a divine one, one who has comradeship with
+God, and speaks by His voice.
+
+Mrs. Eddy has herself created all these personal grandeurs and
+autocracies--with others which I have not (in this article) mentioned.
+They place her upon an Alpine solitude and supremacy of power and
+spectacular show not hitherto attained by any other self-seeking
+enslaver disguised in the Christian name, and they persuade me that,
+although she may regard “self-deification as blasphemous,” she is as
+fond of it as I am of pie.
+
+She knows about “Our Mother's Room” in the Supreme Church in
+Boston--above referred to--for she has been in it. In a recently
+published North American Review article, I quoted a lady as saying Mrs.
+Eddy's portrait could be seen there in a shrine, lit by always-burning
+lights, and that C.S. disciples came and worshiped it. That remark hurt
+the feelings of more than one Scientist. They said it was not true, and
+asked me to correct it. I comply with pleasure. Whether the portrait was
+there four years ago or not, it is not there now, for I have
+inquired. The only object in the shrine now, and lit by electrics--and
+worshiped--is an oil-portrait of the horse-hair chair Mrs. Eddy used
+to sit in when she was writing Science and Health! It seems to me that
+adulation has struck bottom, here.
+
+Mrs. Eddy knows about that. She has been there, she has seen it, she has
+seen the worshippers. She could abolish that sarcasm with a word. She
+withholds the word. Once more I seem to recognize in her exactly the
+same appetite for self-deification that I have for pie. We seem to be
+curiously alike; for the love of self-deification is really only the
+spiritual form of the material appetite for pie, and nothing could be
+more strikingly Christian-Scientifically “harmonious.”
+
+I note this phrase:
+
+“Christian Science eschews divine rights in human beings.”
+
+“Rights” is vague; I do not know what it means there. Mrs. Eddy is not
+well acquainted with the English language, and she is seldom able to say
+in it what she is trying to say. She has no ear for the exact word, and
+does not often get it. “Rights.” Does it mean “honors?” “attributes?”
+
+“Eschews.” This is another umbrella where there should be a torch; it
+does not illumine the sentence, it only deepens the shadows. Does she
+mean “denies?” “refuses?” “forbids?” or something in that line? Does she
+mean:
+
+“Christian Science denies divine honors to human beings?” Or:
+
+“Christian Science refuses to recognize divine attributes in human
+beings?” Or:
+
+“Christian Science forbids the worship of human beings?”
+
+The bulk of the succeeding sentence is to me a tunnel, but, when I
+emerge at this end of it, I seem to come into daylight. Then I seem to
+understand both sentences--with this result:
+
+“Christian Science recognizes but one God, forbids the worship of human
+beings, and refuses to recognize the possession of divine attributes by
+any member of the race.”
+
+I am subject to correction, but I think that that is about what Mrs.
+Eddy was intending to convey. Has her English--which is always difficult
+to me--beguiled me into misunderstanding the following remark, which she
+makes (calling herself “we,” after an old regal fashion of hers) in her
+preface to her Miscellaneous Writings?
+
+“While we entertain decided views as to the best method for elevating
+the race physically, morally, and spiritually, and shall express these
+views as duty demands, we shall claim no especial gift from our divine
+organ, no supernatural power.”
+
+Was she meaning to say:
+
+“Although I am of divine origin and gifted with supernatural power, I
+shall not draw upon these resources in determining the best method of
+elevating the race?”
+
+If she had left out the word “our,” she might then seem to say:
+
+“I claim no especial or unusual degree of divine origin--”
+
+Which is awkward--most awkward; for one either has a divine origin or
+hasn't; shares in it, degrees of it, are surely impossible. The idea of
+crossed breeds in cattle is a thing we can entertain, for we are used to
+it, and it is possible; but the idea of a divine mongrel is unthinkable.
+
+Well, then, what does she mean? I am sure I do not know, for certain. It
+is the word “our” that makes all the trouble. With the “our” in, she is
+plainly saying “my divine origin.” The word “from” seems to be intended
+to mean “on account of.” It has to mean that or nothing, if “our” is
+allowed to stay. The clause then says:
+
+“I shall claim no especial gift on account of my divine origin.”
+
+And I think that the full sentence was intended to mean what I have
+already suggested:
+
+“Although I am of divine origin, and gifted with supernatural power, I
+shall not draw upon these resources in determining the best method of
+elevating the race.”
+
+When Mrs. Eddy copyrighted that Preface seven years ago, she had long
+been used to regarding herself as a divine personage. I quote from Mr.
+F. W. Peabody's book:
+
+“In the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, when it was her
+property, and published by her, it was claimed for her, and with her
+sanction, that she was equal with Jesus, and elaborate effort was made
+to establish the claim.”
+
+“Mrs. Eddy has distinctly authorized the claim in her behalf, that she
+herself was the chosen successor to and equal of Jesus.”
+
+The following remark in that April number, quoted by Mr. Peabody,
+indicates that her claim had been previously made, and had excited
+“horror” among some “good people”:
+
+“Now, a word about the horror many good people have of our making the
+Author of Science and Health 'equal with Jesus.'”
+
+Surely, if it had excited horror in Mrs. Eddy also, she would have
+published a disclaimer. She owned the paper; she could say what she
+pleased in its columns. Instead of rebuking her editor, she lets him
+rebuke those “good people” for objecting to the claim.
+
+These things seem to throw light upon those words, “our [my] divine
+origin.”
+
+It may be that “Christian Science eschews divine rights in human
+beings,” and forbids worship of any but “one God, one Christ”; but, if
+that is the case, it looks as if Mrs. Eddy is a very unsound Christian
+Scientist, and needs disciplining. I believe she has a serious
+malady--“self-deification”; and that it will be well to have one of the
+experts demonstrate over it.
+
+Meantime, let her go on living--for my sake. Closely examined,
+painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the
+planet, and, in several ways, as easily the most extraordinary woman
+that was ever born upon it.
+
+
+P.S.--Since I wrote the foregoing, Mr. McCrackan's article appeared
+(in the March number of the North American Review). Before his article
+appeared--that is to say, during December, January, and February--I had
+written a new book, a character-portrait of Mrs. Eddy, drawn from her
+own acts and words, and it was then--together with the three brief
+articles previously published in the North American Review--ready to
+be delivered to the printer for issue in book form. In that book, by
+accident and good luck, I have answered the objections made by Mr.
+McCrackan to my views, and therefore do not need to add an answer here.
+Also, in it I have corrected certain misstatements of mine which he has
+noticed, and several others which he has not referred to. There are
+one or two important matters of opinion upon which he and I are not
+in disagreement; but there are others upon which we must continue to
+disagree, I suppose; indeed, I know we must; for instance, he believes
+Mrs. Eddy wrote Science and Health, whereas I am quite sure I can
+convince a person unhampered by predilections that she did not.
+
+As concerns one considerable matter I hope to convert him. He believes
+Mrs. Eddy's word; in his article he cites her as a witness, and takes
+her testimony at par; but if he will make an excursion through my book
+when it comes out, and will dispassionately examine her testimonies as
+there accumulated, I think he will in candor concede that she is by a
+large percentage the most erratic and contradictory and untrustworthy
+witness that has occupied the stand since the days of the lamented
+Ananias.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+Broadly speaking, the hostiles reject and repudiate all the pretensions
+of Christian Science Christianity. They affirm that it has added nothing
+new to Christianity; that it can do nothing that Christianity could not
+do and was not doing before Christian Science was born.
+
+In that case is there no field for the new Christianity, no opportunity
+for usefulness, precious usefulness, great and distinguished usefulness?
+I think there is. I am far from being confident that it can fill it,
+but I will indicate that unoccupied field--without charge--and if it can
+conquer it, it will deserve the praise and gratitude of the Christian
+world, and will get it, I am sure.
+
+The present Christianity makes an excellent private Christian, but its
+endeavors to make an excellent public one go for nothing, substantially.
+
+This is an honest nation--in private life. The American Christian is a
+straight and clean and honest man, and in his private commerce with his
+fellows can be trusted to stand faithfully by the principles of honor
+and honesty imposed upon him by his religion. But the moment he comes
+forward to exercise a public trust he can be confidently counted upon
+to betray that trust in nine cases out of ten, if “party loyalty” shall
+require it.
+
+If there are two tickets in the field in his city, one composed of
+honest men and the other of notorious blatherskites and criminals, he
+will not hesitate to lay his private Christian honor aside and vote for
+the blatherskites if his “party honor” shall exact it. His Christianity
+is of no use to him and has no influence upon him when he is acting in
+a public capacity. He has sound and sturdy private morals, but he has no
+public ones. In the last great municipal election in New York, almost
+a complete one-half of the votes representing 3,500,000 Christians were
+cast for a ticket that had hardly a man on it whose earned and proper
+place was outside of a jail. But that vote was present at church next
+Sunday the same as ever, and as unconscious of its perfidy as if nothing
+had happened.
+
+Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are
+true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate
+them all, and do it without shame; because honor to party is above honor
+to themselves. It is an accepted law of public life that in it a man
+may soil his honor in the interest of party expediency--must do it when
+party expediency requires it. In private life those men would bitterly
+resent--and justly--any insinuation that it would not be safe to leave
+unwatched money within their reach; yet you could not wound their
+feelings by reminding them that every time they vote ten dollars to the
+pension appropriation nine of it is stolen money and they the marauders.
+They have filched the money to take care of the party; they believe it
+was right to do it; they do not see how their private honor is affected;
+therefore their consciences are clear and at rest. By vote they do
+wrongful things every day, in the party interest, which they could not
+be persuaded to do in private life. In the interest of party expediency
+they give solemn pledges, they make solemn compacts; in the interest
+of party expediency they repudiate them without a blush. They would not
+dream of committing these strange crimes in private life.
+
+Now then, can Christian Science introduce the Congressional Blush? There
+are Christian Private Morals, but there are no Christian Public Morals,
+at the polls, or in Congress or anywhere else--except here and there
+and scattered around like lost comets in the solar system. Can Christian
+Science persuade the nation and Congress to throw away their public
+morals and use none but their private ones henceforth in all their
+activities, both public and private?
+
+I do not think so; but no matter about me: there is the field--a grand
+one, a splendid one, a sublime one, and absolutely unoccupied. Has
+Christian Science confidence enough in itself to undertake to enter in
+and try to possess it?
+
+Make the effort, Christian Science; it is a most noble cause, and it
+might succeed. It could succeed. Then we should have a new literature,
+with romances entitled, How To Be an Honest Congressman Though a
+Christian; How To Be a Creditable Citizen Though a Christian.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Christian Science, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
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