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 en-
ables 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 re-
member 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 bowlder 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 bowlders?"
"Yes."
"That accounts for it; she is thinking of the
bowlders. 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 se-
ries 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 preci-
pices herself and brings to the aid of abstract
science the confirmations of personal experi-
ence?"
"Bitte?"
It was too large a contract for the Stuben-
madchen'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 des-
perate 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 ar-
ranged 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 mid-
dle-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 de-
gree, and her name was Fuller. I was eager to
get to business and find relief, but she was dis-
tressingly deliberate. She unpinned and un-
hooked 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 con-
nection was broken; but she detected the apol-
ogy before I could word it, and indicated by a
negative tilt of her head that the pulse was an-
other 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; more-
over, 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 contradic-
tion. 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 un-
real; 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 con-
cede that you are ill, nor permit others to talk
about disease or pain or death or similar non-
existences in your presence. Such talk only
encourages the mind to continue its empty
imaginings." Just at that point the Stuben-
mädchen 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; with-
out 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 com-
pensated the cat with some kind of a mysteri-
ous 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 Chris-
tian 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 un-
comfortable 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 ex-
istence; 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 funda-
mental propositions of Christian Science ex-
plain 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
backward.
"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 marvellous
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—un—"
"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—any-
way, 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 immedi-
ate object of understanding. There it is—the
whole sublime Arcana of Christian Science in a
nutshell. Do you find a weak place in it any-
where?"
"Well—no; it seems strong."
"Very well. There is more. Those three
constitute the Scientific Definition of Immor-
tal Mind. Next, we have the Scientific Defini-
tion of Mortal Mind. Thus. First Degree:
Depravity. 1. Physical—Passions and appe-
tites, fear, depraved will, pride, envy, deceit,
hatred, revenge, sin, disease, death."
"Phantasms, madam—unrealities, as I un-
derstand it."
"Every one. Second Degree: Evil Disap-
pearing. 1. Moral—Honesty, affection, com-
passion, hope, faith, meekness, temperance.
Is it clear?"
"Crystal."
"Third Degree: Spiritual Salvation. 1.
Spiritual—Faith, wisdom, power, purity, un-
derstanding, health, love. You see how search-
ingly 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 exhaust-
ive 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 Sec-
ond 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 re-
markable 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 sys-
tematic duality to incidental deflection?"
"Christian Science reverses the seeming rela-
tion 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, un-
changeable and eternal; and man coexists with
and reflects Soul, for the All-in-all is the Alto-
gether, 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 dis-
appeared. The things themselves had never
existed; therefore, as soon as it was perceived
that there were no such things, they were ea-
sily 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 Dis-
ciples. 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 remem-
ber 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 in-
spired 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 to-
gether, 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 circum-
stances 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 Sci-
ence 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 sov-
ereign 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 eye-
sight 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 concern-
ing 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 con-
nection 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. 1. 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, Kid-
neys, 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 heav-
enly 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 proc-
esses 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 stom-
ach-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
in whose ability to successfully treat mere dis-
ease 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 pro-
tracted 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 aro-
matic—in fact, quite horsy—and I tried to ar-
range 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; there-
fore 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 him-
self, 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 experi-
ences were full of interest and adventure. All
through the rumblings and grindings and quak-
ings and effervescings accompanying the evolu-
tion 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 dis-
tinguish 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 com-
plete, 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 pro-
duced by the artificial processes of the horse-
doctor.
For of all the strange and frantic and incom-
prehensible 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 mean-
ing. 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 ex-
istent 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 desola-
tions 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 merely 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. With-
out ever presenting anything which may right-
fully be called by the strong name of Evidence,
and sometimes without even mentioning a rea-
son 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
condition, 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 Crea-
tion that a Voice has gone crashing through
space with such placid and complacent con-
fidence and command.1
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 Spitz-
ka 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 En-
cephalic 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 (Lat-
eral 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. Dor-
sally, the fissure bifurcates, embracing the gyre indented by the
caudal limb of the paracentral. The caudal limb of the post-
central 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 ex-
cited and incoherent over a tranquil subject like En-
cephalic 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 imagi-
nation 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 dis-
ease 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 en-
tire 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 extraor-
dinary 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 re-
markable 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 farm-
er'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. Sev-
eral times I saw her make immediate cures of
severe toothaches. My mother was the pa-
tient. 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 prac-
tising without a diploma, but his business is as
brisk as ever when he gets out, for his work is
unquestionably successful and keeps his repu-
tation 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.1
January, 1903. I have personal and intimate knowl-
edge of the "miraculous" cure of a case of paralysis which
had kept the patient helpless in bed during two years, in
spite of all that the best medical science of New York
could do. The travelling "quack" (that is what they
called him), came on two successive mornings and lifted
the patient out of bed and said "Walk!" and the patient
walked. That was the end of it. It was forty-one years
ago. The patient has walked ever since.—M. T.
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 pa-
tient'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 pa-
tient 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 men-
tal forces alone. There would seem to be an
element of danger here. It has the look of
claiming too much, I think. Public confi-
dence would probably be increased if less were
claimed.1
February, 1903. I find that Christian Science claims
that the healing-force which it employs is radically differ-
ent from the force used by any other party in the healing
business. I shall talk about this towards the end of this
work.—M. T.
The Christian Scientist was not able to cure
my stomach-ache and my cold; but the horse-
doctor did it. This convinces me that Chris-
tian 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 mend-
ed in two hundred and thirty-four places—one
dollar per fracture.
"Nothing exists but Mind?"
"Nothing," she answered. "All else is sub-
stanceless, all else is imaginary."
I gave her an imaginary check, and now she
is suing me for substantial dollars. It looks
inconsistent.
the Cosmopolitan Magazine, about three years ago.—
M. T.
chapter v
Let us consider that we are all partially in-
sane. 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 ob-
scurities 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 dis-
pute. 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 dis-
putes 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 in-
sane—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 unbiassed Presbyte-
rian, 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 unbiassed Mohammedan ex-
amines the Westminster Catechism, he knows
that beyond any question I am spiritually in-
sane. I cannot prove to him that he is in-
sane, 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 de-
fect that afflicts his. All Democrats are in-
sane, but not one of them knows it; none but
the Republicans and Mugwumps know it. All
the Republicans are insane, but only the Dem-
ocrats and Mugwumps can perceive it. The
rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our ad-
versaries 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 Infidel,The Agnostic,The Baptist,The Methodist,The Christian Scien-
tist.The Theosophists,The Swedenborgians,The Shakers,The Millerites,The Mormons,The Laurence Oliphant
Harrisites.
The Catholic, and the
115 Christian sects,
the Presbyterian
excepted,The 72 Mohammedan
sects,The Buddhist,The Blavatsky-Budd-
hist,The Nationalist,The Confucian,The Spiritualist,The 2000 East Indian
sects,The Peculiar People,The Grand Lama's peo-
ple,The Monarchists,The Imperialists,The Democrats,The Republicans (but
not the Mugwumps),The Mind-Curists,The Faith-Curists,The Mental Scien-
tists,The Allopaths,The Homœopaths,The Electropaths,The ——
But there's no end to the list; there are mill-
ions 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 in-
sane 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 neutral-
ized by the negative opinion of his stupid
neighbor—no decision is reached; the affirma-
tive opinion of the intellectual giant Gladstone
is neutralized by the negative opinion of the in-
tellectual giant Newman—no decision is reach-
ed. 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 follows 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 sub-
jects are brass-farthing opinions.
It is a mere plain, simple fact—as clear and
as certain as that eight and seven make fif-
teen. 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 in-
sane. There there is but one religion, one be-
lief; 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 impor-
tant 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 in-
sanity 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.!1
February, 1903. This has been disputed by novices.
It is not possible that the copy possessed by me could have
cost above thirty-seven and a half cents. I have been a
printer and book-maker myself. I shall go into some par-
ticulars concerning this matter in a later chapter.—M. T.
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 or-
igin 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 Scien-
tism through the Protestant dominions of the
planet.
chapter vi"Hungry ones throng to hear the Bible read in con-
nection 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.1
February, 1903. There is a dispute about that pict-
ure. I will render justice concerning it in the new half of
this book.—M. T.
picturesque? How long do you think it will be
before the Christian Scientist will be worship-
ping 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?2
This suggestion has been scorned. I will examine the
matter in the new half of the book.—M. T.
ciples 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-can-
vases—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 Reve-
lation—a verse which Mrs. Eddy says (in her
Annex to the Scriptures) has "one distinctive
feature which has special reference to the pres-
ent 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 Scien-
tism is destined to make the most formidable
show that any new religion has made in the
world since the birth and spread of Moham-
medanism, and that within a century from
now it may stand second to Rome only, in num-
bers 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 Chris-
tian-Science "boom," proper, is not yet five
years old; yet already it has two hundred and
fifty churches.1
February, 1903. Through misinformation I doubled
those figures when I wrote this chapter four years ago.—
M. T.
It has its start, you see, and it is a phenom-
enally good one. Moreover, it is latterly spread-
ing 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 philos-
ophy, it must be a religion; also, that it must
not claim entire originality, but content itself
with passing for an improvement on an exist-
ing 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 priv-
ileged to ask questions or find fault.
Next, as before remarked, it must bait its
hook with some new and attractive advan-
tages over the baits offered by its compet-
itors.
A new movement equipped with some of
these endowments—like spiritualism, for in-
stance—may count upon a considerable suc-
cess; 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 de-
tail 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 an-
other 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 equip-
ment since the world began, until now: a new
personage to worship.1
That has been disputed by a Christian-Science friend.
This surprises me. I will examine this detail in the new
half of the book.—M. T.
Saviour, but at first and for generations it lack-
ed money and concentrated power. In Mrs.
Eddy, Christian Science possesses the new per-
sonage for worship, and in addition—here in
the very beginning—a working equipment that
has not a flaw in it. In the beginning, Mo-
hammedanism had no money; and it has never
had anything to offer its client but heaven—
nothing here below that was valuable. In ad-
dition 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" ap-
peal? 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 imag-
inations 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 regis-
tered in his magazine, The Christian Science
Journal—October number, 1898. First, a Bap-
tist clergyman gives us this true picture of "the
average orthodox Christian"—and he could
have added that it is a true picture of the aver-
age (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 in-
come 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.1
February, 1903. In a letter to me, a distinguished
New York physician finds fault with this notion. If four-
fifths of our pains and diseases are not the result of un-
wholesome fears and imaginings, the Science has a smaller
field than I was guessing; but I still think four-fifths is a
sound guess.—M. T.
In this October number many of the redeem-
ed 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 tes-
tifies 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 forebod-
ings" which he had been accustomed to em-
ploy in conjuring up ailments. And so he was
a healthy and cheerful man, now, and aston-
ished.
But I am not astonished, for from other
sources I know what must have been his meth-
od 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 ail-
ments 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! Per-
fectly sound, perfectly well! I have no pain;
there's no such thing as pain! I have no dis-
ease; there's no such thing as disease! Noth-
ing 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 relig-
ious spirit a powerful reinforcement in his
case.
The second witness testifies that the Sci-
ence banished "an old organic trouble," which
the doctor and the surgeon had been nurs-
ing 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 some-
times obtrudes itself which claims to be an ail-
ment but isn't.
This witness offers testimony for a clergy-
man 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 prop-
erly be waste - basketed, since there is evi-
dently no lack of definite ones procurable;
but this C. S. magazine is poorly edited,
and so mistakes of this kind must be ex-
pected.
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 thosejoints,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 Scien-
tist and took an hour's treatment and went
home painless. Two days later, he "began to
eat like a well man." Then "the claims van-
ished—some at once, others more gradually";
finally, "they have almost entirely disappear-
ed." 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 Scien-
tist-Church specialty. And, indeed, one may
go further and assert with little or no exaggera-
tion 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 wit-
ness bulletins his claims, declares their prompt
abolishment, and gives Mrs. Eddy's Discovery
the praise. Milk-leg is cured; nervous prostra-
tion is cured; consumption is cured; and St.
Vitus's dance is made a pastime. Even with-
out 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 fic-
tion which masquerades under the name of Chil-
blains." 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." Some-
times they are cured of their little claims by the
professional healer, and sometimes more ad-
vanced 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 rock-
pile. She saved herself from disaster by re-
membering 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 cir-
cumstances. 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 re-
cited "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-his-
tory, 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 an-
æsthetics." 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 to-
gether 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 no-
ticed him stop in his play, take the book care-
fully 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—Chris-
tian-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, ex-
cept the Annex. "It he took in both hands,
slowly raised it to his lips, then removed it care-
fully, 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 lit-
tle 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 sensa-
tion 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 recog-
nize 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 Sci-
entific 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 an-
swer. 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 sol-
dier 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 sub-
ject 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-manufact-
ured disease, it may plausibly claim that in his
person it has saved three hundred lives. Mean-
time, 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 edu-
cated 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 vii1
Written in Europe in 1899, but not hitherto published
in book form.—M. T.
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 i), giv-
ing 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 Ad-
vent. She is already worshipped, and we must
expect this feeling to spread, territorially, and
also to deepen in intensity.2
After raising a dead child to life, the disciple who did it
writes an account of her performance to Mrs. Eddy, and
closes it thus: "My prayer daily is to be more spiritual,
that I may do more as you would have me do, … and
may we all love you more, and so live it that the world
may know that the Christ is come."—Printed in the Con-
cord, N. H., Independent Statesman, March 9, 1899. If
this is not worship, it is a good imitation of it.—M. T.
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 fetich 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 ad-
vertisements that reality is eagerly and per-
sistently 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 cred-
it. Many, many precious Christian - Science
things are to be had there—for cash: Bible Les-
sons; 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 Bible-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
extortions, 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 high-
wayman's rates, some of them in "leatherette
covers," some of them in "pebbled 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.1
February, 1903. I applied last month, but they re-
turned my money, and wouldn't play. We are not on
speaking terms now.—M. T.
The Trust has still other sources of income.
Mrs. Eddy is president (and proprietor) of the
Trust's Metaphysical College in Boston, where
the student of C. S. healing learns the game by
a three weeks' course, and pays one hundred
dollars for it.2
An error. For one hundred, read three hundred. That
was for twelve brief lessons. But this cheapness only
lasted until the end of 1888—fourteen years ago. [I am
making this note in December, 1902]. Mrs. Eddy—over
her own signature—then made a change; the new terms
were three hundred dollars for seven lessons. See Chris-
tian Science Journal for December, 1888.—M. T.
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST, BOSTON, MASS.,
KNOWN AS THE MOTHER-CHURCH
From a stereograph, copyright 1906, by H. C. White Co., N. Y.
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 practise the game
unless he possesses a copy of that book. That
means a large and constantly augmenting in-
come for the Trust. No C. S. family would
consider itself loyal or pious or pain-proof with-
out 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 Chris-
tian - Scientist church can acquire and retain
membership in the Mother - Church unless he
pay "capitation tax" (of "not less than a dol-
lar," 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 million1
Written in 1899. It is intended to include men, wom-
en, and children. Although the calculation was based
upon inflated statistics, I believe to-day that it is not far
out.—M. T.
entists, 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 formi-
dable, 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;2
It can be put stronger than that and still be true.—
M. T.
graph, and the subsidized newspaper, better
facilities for watching and managing his em-
pire 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 organiza-
tion, 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 col-
lect 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 mill-
ions of the human race,1
In that day by force; it is voluntary now. In the
new half of this book the reader will perceive that all
imaginable compulsions are possible under the Mother-
Church's body of Laws. To-day more is expected than the
one dollar. This is indicated in the wording of the By
Law. Much more comes, from many members.—M. T.
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 Chris-
tian - Science Dollar (payable in advance)—
purchases of consecrated glass beads, candles,
memorial spoons, aureoled chromo - portraits
and bogus autographs of Mrs. Eddy; cash
offerings at her shrine—no crutches of cured
cripples received, and no imitations of miracu-
lously 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 hand-
ling of it. In that day, the Trust will monop-
olize 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 tax-
es to pay, and no charities to support. That
last detail should not be lightly passed over
by the reader; it is well entitled to atten-
tion.
No charities to support. No, nor even to con-
tribute to. One searches in vain the Trust's
advertisements and the utterances of its or-
gans for any suggestion that it spends a penny
on orphans, widows, discharged prisoners, hos-
pitals, ragged schools, night missions, city mis-
sions, libraries, old people's homes, or any other
object that appeals to a human being's purse
through his heart.1
In two years (1898-99) the membership of the Es-
tablished Church in England gave voluntary contribu-
tions amounting to seventy-three millions of dollars to the
Church's benevolent enterprises. Churches that give have
nothing to hide.—M. T.
I have hunted, hunted, and hunted, by cor-
respondence 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 dis-
covers 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 defen-
sive ammunition in the voice of supplication.
A reply does at last come—to this effect: "We
must have faith in Our Mother, and rest con-
tent in the conviction that whatever She1
I may be introducing the capital S a little early—still
it is on its way.—M. T.
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 con-
cerned. His mind is satisfied with that answer;
he gets down his Annex and does an incanta-
tion 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 chari-
ties?" the answer from an authoritative source
was: "No, not in the sense usually conveyed by
this word." (The italics are mine.) That an-
swer is cautious. But definite, I think—utter-
ly 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 ask-
ing, 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 ob-
jects 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 prin-
ciples and its sly and furtive and shifty
ways.1
February, 1903. A letter has come to me, this month,
from a lady who says that while she was living in Boston,
a few years ago, she visited the Mother-Church and offices
and had speech with Judge Septimius J. Hanna, the
"first reader," who "stated positively that the Church, as
a body, does no philanthropic work whatever."—M. T.
Sly? Deep? Judicious? The Trust under-
stands 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 disci-
ples find out. All it says is, that the matter
has been "demonstrated over." Now and
then a lay Scientist says, with a grateful exul-
tation, 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 can-
cels 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 ad-
vance." 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.1
February, 1903. If I seem to be charging any one out-
side of the Trust with an exaggerated appetite for money,
I have not meant to do it. The exactions of the ordinary
C. S. "healer" are not exorbitant. If I have prejudices
against the Trust—and I do feel that I have—they do
not extend to the lay membership. "The laborer is
worthy of his hire." And is entitled to receive it, too,
and charge his own price (when he is laboring in a lawful
calling). The great surgeon charges a thousand dollars,
and no one is justified in objecting to it. The great
preacher and teacher in religion receives a large salary,
and is entitled to it; Henry Ward Beecher's was twenty
thousand dollars. Mrs. Eddy's Metaphysical College was
chartered by the State, and she had a legal right to
charge amazing prices, and she did it. She allows only
a few persons to teach Christian Science. The calling of
these teachers is not illegal. Mrs. Eddy appoints the
sum their students must pay, and it is a round one; but
that is no matter, since they need not come unless they
want to.
But when we come to the C. S. "healer," the practi-
tioner, that is another thing. He exists by the hundred;
his services are prized by his C. S. patient, they are pre-
ferred above all other human help, and are thankfully
paid for. As I have just remarked, his prices are not
large. But there is hardly a State wherein he can lawfully
practise his profession. In the name of religion, of mor-
als, and of Christ—represented on the earth by Mrs. Eddy
—he enters upon his trade a commissioned law-breaker.
A law-breaker. It is curious, but if the Second Advent
should happen now, Jesus could not heal the sick in the
State of New York. He could not do it lawfully; there-
fore He could not do it morally; therefore He could not do
it at all.—M. T.
March 12, 1903. While I am reading the final proofs
of this book, the following letter has come to me. It is
not marked private, therefore I suppose I may without
impropriety insert it here, if I suppress the signature:
"Dear Sir,—In the North American Review for Janu-
ary is the statement, in effect, that Christian Scientists
give nothing to charities. It has had wide reading and is
doubtless credited. To produce a true impression, it seems
as if other facts should have been stated in connection.
"With regret for adding anything to the burden of
letters from strangers, I am impelled to write what I
know from a limited acquaintance in the sect. I am not
connected with it myself.
"The charity freely given by individual practitioners,
so far as I know it, is at least equal to that of regular
physicians. Charges are made with much more than
equal consideration of the means of the patient. Of
course druggists' bills and the enormous expenses in-
volved in the employment of a trained nurse, exist in
small degree or not at all.
"As to organized charities: It is hard to find one where
the most intelligent laborers in it feel that they are reach-
ing the root of an evil. They are putting a few plasters
on a body of disease. Complaint is made, too, that the
machinery, by which of necessity systematic charity must
be administered, prevents the personal friendliness and
sympathy which should pervade it throughout.
"Christian Science claims to be able to abolish the need
for charity. The results of drunkenness make great de-
mands upon the charitable. But the principle of Chris-
tian Science takes away the desire for strong drink. If
sexual propensities were dominated, not only by reason,
but by Christian love for both the living and the unborn
—Christian Science is emphatic on this subject—many
existing charitable societies would have no reason to be.
So far as Christian Science prevents disease, the need for
hospitals is lessened. Not only illness, but poverty, is a
subject for the practice of Christian Science. If this evil
were prevented there would be no occasion to alleviate
its results.
"The faith, hope, and love which the few Christian
Scientists I have known have lived and radiated, made
conditions needing organized charity vanish before them.
"With renewed apology for intrusion upon one whose
own 'Uncle Silas' was 'loved back' to sanity,
"I am, etc., etc.
"Woburn, Mass., ""March 10, 1903."
The Trust seems to be a reincarnation. Ex-
odus 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 sin-
cerity is always entitled to honor and respect,
let the inspiration of the sincerity be what it
may. Zeal and sincerity can carry a new re-
ligion further than any other missionary except
fire and sword, and I believe that the new re-
ligion 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 per-
haps 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 stu-
pendous equipment—and final salvation added
—cannot win half the Christian globe, I must
be badly mistaken in the make-up of the hu-
man 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 culti-
vates them; and if he is one of these very wise
people, he is quite likely to scoff at the benef-
icent half of the force and deny its existence.
And so, to heal or help that man, two imagina-
tions are required: his own and some outsider's.
The outsider, B, must imagine that his incanta-
tions 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 ef-
fected, and that is the main thing. The out-
sider's work is unquestionably valuable; so
valuable that it may fairly be likened to the es-
sential 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 en-
gineer be named Jim, or Bob, or Tom, it is all
one—his services are necessary, and he is en-
titled 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 ex-
actly the same trade as the other engineers, yet
he out-prospers the whole of them put together.1
February, 1903. As I have already remarked in a
foot-note, the Scientist claims that he uses a force not
used by any of the others.—M. T.
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 pros-
perity lies elsewhere.
The Christian Scientist has organized the
business. Now that was certainly a gigantic
idea. Electricity, in limitless volume, has ex-
isted 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 compe-
tent 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 or-
ganized it, and backed the business with capi-
tal, and concentrated it at Boston headquar-
ters 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 con-
ducted in the loose and disconnected fashion
customary with such things, it would achieve
but little more than the modest prosperity usu-
ally 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 chap-
ters.1
That is to say, in 1898.
I was assured by the wise that Chris-tian 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 move-
ment 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 con-
fident. 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 equiva-
lent of saying:
"There is no money in tinware; there is noth-
ing 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 flour-
ish and live, and then blandly offering it as a
reason why it should sicken and die.
That reason was furnished me by the com-
placent 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 pains-
taking 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 mak-
ing such an examination. They are not ca-
pable, for the reason that their minds, howso-
ever 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 suc-
cessful 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 busi-
ness, and many of them believe they have act-
ually 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 know-
ing it. In a church assemblage of five hundred
persons, there will be a man or two whose train-
ed 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 ver-
dict upon the scheme which cannot be flippant-
ly 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 edu-
cational 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 educa-
tional 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 truck, 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 black-
smithing, 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 com-
petently examine either a religious plan or a
political one. A scattering few of them do ex-
amine both—that is, they think they do. With
results as precious as when I examine the neb-
ular theory and explain it to myself.
If the four hundred and ninety got their re-
ligion 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 overwhelm-
ing bulk of it through their environment.
Environment is the chief thing to be con-
sidered when one is proposing to predict the
future of Christian Science. It is not the abil-
ity 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 extraor-
dinary 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 pro-
duce Catholic families or other religious brands,
it produces its own kind; and not by intellect-
ual 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 intel-
lectual fence, that fertile womb whence has
sprung every great religion that exists. In-
cluding 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 success-
ful trade in its line of goods had been condi-
tioned 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 Mo-
hammedan 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 Chris-
tianity 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 prop-
er for regular Christianity to do the old way,
the 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 contri-
butions of recruits to Churches are ever made
on a large scale—by the puissant forces of per-
sonal contact and association. Each family is
an agency for the Cause, and makes converts
among the neighbors, and starts some more fac-
tories.
Four years ago there were six Christian Sci-
entists 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 fren-
zied 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 "re-
stricted" 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 ordi-
nary stature, and had the ordinary aspects; yet in him
were hidden such strange contradictions and dispropor-
tions! He was majestically fearless and heroic; he had
the strength of thirty men and the daring of thirty
thousand; handling armies, organizing states, admin-
istering 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 jeal-
ousy, 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 derided 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 doc-
trine 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 inter-
pret 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 peace-
fully 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 any-
thing 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 com-
pared with the achievements of others in his
special line of business—there is no other
way. Measured by this standard, it is thir-
teen hundred years since the world has pro-
duced 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 sur-
prisingly 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 inau-
guration of our era. I grant that after saying
these strong things, it is necessary that I offer
some details calculated to satisfactorily demon-
strate the proportions which I have claimed
for her. I will do that presently; but before
exhibiting the matured sequoia gigantea, I be-
lieve it will be best to exhibit the sprout from
which it sprang. It may save the reader from
making miscalculations. The person who im-
agines 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 common-
place.
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 treacher-
ous 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 autobi-
ographical 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 per-
suade 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 lectur-
ing 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 naïve 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 with-
out 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 intro-
duction of them profanely confers upon them
the holy name of "poetry." Sample:
"And laud the land whose talents rockThe cradle of her power,And wreaths are twined round Plymouth RockFrom erudition's bower."
"Minerva's silver sandals stillAre 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 sev-
enty 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 to-
gether 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 bears1
Meaning bares? I think so.—M. T.
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 gal-
loping 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 ap-
peared 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 overlook-
ing the one to whom Sir William Wallace gave
"a heavy sword encased in a brass scabbard,"
and naïvely explaining which Sir William Wal-
lace it was, lest we get the wrong one by the
hassock;1
I am in some doubt as to what a hassock is, but any
way it sounds good.—M. T.
ism and bravery comes that heart-stirring air,
'Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.'" Hannah
More was related to her ancestors. She ex-
plains who Hannah More was.
Whenever a person informs us who Sir Will-
iam 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 pas-
sage, 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 Gram-
mar as with the Westminster Catechism; and
the latter I had to repeat every Sunday. My
favorite studies were Natural Philosophy, Log-
ic, and Moral Science. From my brother Al-
bert 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 Grand-
father Baker, General Henry Knox, of Revo-
lutionary 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 grand-
parents "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 grand-
mother "was John Macneill, the New Hamp-
shire general, who fought at Lundy's Lane and
won distinction in 1814 at the battle of Chip-
pewa," 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 touch-
ing 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 fadeless 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 communi-
cation 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, persist-
ent training; and in all arts it is training that
brings the art to perfection. We are now con-
fronted with one of the most teasing and baf-
fling 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 dur-
ing forty years, has always collapsed back to its
original flint-lock estate the moment the hunt-
ress 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 discov-
ered 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 cas-
ualty—victim not known.
The context thinks it explains who the vic-
tim 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 suf-
fered 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 near-
ly 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 phys-
ical 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 su-
premacy of Spirit and yields obedience there-
to."
In the latest revision of Science and Health
(1902), the perfected gun furnishes the follow-
ing. 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 im-
mortality? If the departed are in rapport with
mortality, or matter, they are not spiritual, but
must still be mortal, sinful, suffering, and dy-
ing. Then wherefore look to them—even were
communication possible—for proofs of immor-
tality 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. Com-
pare also with the alleged Poems already
quoted. The prominent characteristic of the
Poems is affectation, artificiality; their make-
up is a complacent and pretentious outpour of
false figures and fine writing, in the sopho-
moric 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:
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, con-
crete 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 Eng-
lish. But it is fifteen-year-old English, and has
not grown a month since the same mind pro-
duced the Poems. The standard of the Poems
and of the plague-spot-and-bacilli effort is ex-
actly 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 ele-
phant? 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 re-
quiring 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,1
See Appendix A for it.—M. T.
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 com-
pels a doubt that she wrote Science and Health.
She is guilty of little awkwardnesses of expres-
sion in the Autobiography which a practised
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
offences against third-class English. I think
that that placidity was born of that very un-
awareness, so to speak. I will cite a few in-
stances from the Autobiography. The italics
are mine:
"I remember reading in my childhood cer-
tain 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 crip-
ples 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 awk-
wardness, for she is talking about a building,
not about a religious society.
"Marriage and Parentage" [Chapter-head-
ing. 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—Mar-
riage 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 argu-
ment 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: psycho-
superintangibly—electroincandescently—oli-
garcheologically—sanchrosynchrostereoptical-
ly—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 real-
ize that noumenon is a daisy; and I will not
deny that I shall use it whenever I am in a com-
pany 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 can-
not 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, bat-
tles are waged. Mrs. Eddy has one very curi-
ous and interesting peculiarity: whenever she
notices that she is chortling along without say-
ing anything, she pulls up with a sudden "God
is over us all," or some other sounding irrele
vancy, 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 hope-
fully after her, thinking you are going to get
something this time; but as soon as she has led
you far enough away from her turkeylet she
takes to a tree. Whenever she discovers that
she is getting pretty disconnected, she couples-
up with an ostentatious "But" which has noth-
ing 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, usu-
ally—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.1
See Appendix B.—M. T.
"I beheld with ineffable awe our great Mas-
ter's marvellous skill in demanding neither
obedience to hygienic laws nor," etc. Page 41.
The word is loosely chosen—skill. She
probably meant judgment, intuition, penetra-
tion, 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 "die-
tion," she would have scored.
"… its written expression increases in per-
fection under the guidance of the great Mas-
ter." Page 43.
It is an error. Not even in those advanta-
geous 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 Something-
ness vindicates the Divine Principle and im-
proves 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 min-
ute 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 go-
ing 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 im-
possible.
She generally makes us uneasy when she be-
gins 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 com-
plexion, 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 'pren-
tice-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 jour-
neyman 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 ob-
servant reader perceived the game, and en-
joyed 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 offences disappear. In these two-
thirds of the booklet I find only one such of-
fence, 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 obscu-
rities 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 con-
victions of one sort and another concerning a
scribbler's limitations; and these are so strong
that when I am familiar with a literary per-
son'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 cour-
teously, 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 differ-
ence between his style and Dooley's is argu-
ment 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 diffi-
cult 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 com-
posing and phrasing these things was so slight
as to be inconsequential. Where she puts her
literary foot down, her trail across her paid pol-
isher'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 strong-
ly distinctive features observable in the virgin
passages from her pen already quoted by me:
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 Writ-
ings 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 fif-
teen 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 pros-
pectus. 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 humor-
ous 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 ini-
tiated come upon her first erudite allusion, or
upon any one of her other stage-properties,
they can shut their eyes and tell what will fol-
low. She usually throws off an easy remark
all sodden with Greek or Hebrew or Latin learn-
ing; 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 stran-
ger, 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 Meta-
phor. 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 appear-
ing 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 fore-
saw the ordeal of a perfect Christianity, hated
by sinners.
"To kindle all minds with a gleam of grati-
tude, 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. Good-
ness 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 can-
not 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 al-
ways feel sure about the intention.
[Page 56.] "Even the Scripture gave no
direct interpretation of the Scientific basis for
demonstrating the spiritual Principle of heal-
ing, 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 under-
stand; 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 commun-
ion, 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" be-
ing a theological term identical with our com-
mercial 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 near-
ness. God's nearness to his "little one." Near-
ness, 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 aug-
mented by the testimony of Rev. George Tom-
kins, 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 Lect-
ureship 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 prop-
erty of Mrs. Eddy. (By - laws, p. 22.) Mr.
Tomkins did not make that statement with-
out authorization from headquarters. He nec-
essarily 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 indi-
cates three things:
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 fur-
nished 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 meta-
phors instead of in plain, straightforward sta-
tistics, 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 percent-
ages and claim only the eight per cent. for her
self. I quote from Mr. Peabody's book (Eddy-
ism, or Christian Science. Boston: 15 Court
Square, price twenty-five cents):
"Speaking of this book, Mrs. Eddy, in Jan-
uary 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 con-
nection 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 in-
vent 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 stenog-
rapher. 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. Pea-
body has quoted in the above paragraph. It
will be found in Mrs. Eddy's organ, the Chris-
tian 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 sen-
tence explain Who it was that did the dictating.
It was done by
"the divine power of Truth and Love, in-
finitely 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:
language."2. God furnished the ideas and the language.
It is a great comfort to have the matter au-
thoritatively 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 sig-
nificant procession three Personages:
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 Naza-
reth. No person can take the place of the au-
thor 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 Im-
portance 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 re-
garded by the Church as an indication of disre-
spect 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 Pro-
cession 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 espe-
cial 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:
I am not playing with Christian Science and
its founder, I am examining them; and I am do-
ing it because of the interest I feel in the in-
quiry. 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 mis-
cellaneous literary efforts have convinced me
of several things:
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 por-
trait. 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 com-
placent, 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 sum-
mit of earthly grandeur attainable by man—
where she sits serene to-day, beloved and wor-
shipped by a multitude of human beings of as
good average intelligence as is possessed by
those that march under the banner of any com-
peting cult. This is not intended to flatter the
competing cults, it is merely a statement of cold
fact.
That a commonplace person should go climb-
ing aloft and become a god or a half-god or a
quarter-god and be worshipped 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 ap-
peared, and by the time the last one—in that
inconceivably remote future—shall have per-
formed 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 æons 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, noth-
ing 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 pro-
vide 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 ma-
terials 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 vent-
ure 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. Reck-
lessness does not reflect, it plunges fearlessly in
with a hurrah, and takes the risks, whatever
they may be, regardless of expense. Reckless-
ness 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 def-
inite character, definite aims, and a name which
was a challenge, and defied all comers. It
was "a Mind-healing Church." It was "with-
out 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 char-
ter members. Mrs. Eddy was at once installed
as its pastor.
The other venture, above referred to, was
Mrs. Eddy's Massachusetts Metaphysical Col-
lege, 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 hun-
dred 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 thou-
sand 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 pri-
mary student three hundred dollars for twelve
lessons she was not content with this tidy as-
sessment, but had other ways of plundering
him. By advertisement she offered him priv-
ileges 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 thou-
sand. 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 stu-
dents 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 bear
healing to the sick"1
Mrs. Eddy's Introduction to Science and Health.
that Mrs. Eddy is workingthe game. She sends the healing to them out-
side.
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,2
"There is no disease"; "sickness is a belief only."—
Science and Health, vol. ii., page 173, edition of 1884.—M. T.
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 con-
sistent, she is always Mrs. Eddy, in her English:
it is always and consistently confused and crip-
pled 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 candi-
dates for that lofty place. When she says stu-
dents 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.
chapter vii
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 Immor-
tal 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 ex-
amination 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 inspira-
tion of God.
It is a Church "without a creed." Still, it
has one. Mrs. Eddy draughted it—and copy-
righted it. In her own name. You cannot be-
come 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.
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, Sci-
ence and Health, to be pastor-universal. Mrs.
Eddy did not disconnect herself from the office
entirely, when she retired, but appointed her-
self Pastor Emeritus. It is a misleading title,
and belongs to the family of that phrase "with-
out a creed." It advertises her as being a
merely honorary official, with nothing to do
and no authority. The Czar of Russia is Em-
peror Emeritus on the same terms. Mrs. Eddy
was Autocrat of the Church before, with limit-
less 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 encroach-
ments upon her planned autocracy, and barred
the way against them, in the By-laws which
she framed and copyrighted—under the guid-
ance of the Supreme Being.
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 pas-
tor, the ornamental pastor, the functionless pas-
tor, 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 can-
didates 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 dan-
ger, 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
commerical head, an organizing head, a head
for government.
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 Tues-
day 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 sud-
denness that can be unpleasant to them. It
goes without saying that the Treasurer man-
ages 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 "impera-
tive 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 im-
portant function of his office," certain majestic
and unshirkable solemnities must follow: a spe-
cial 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 tin-
sel 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 naïvely vain of all that little ances-
tral 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 con-
siderable 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 Trus-
tees. Mrs. Eddy has foreseen that probability
—for she is a woman with a long, long look
ahead, the longest look ahead that ever a wom-
an had—and she has provided for that emer-
gency. 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
Clerk; and futureBoard 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.
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 ser-
vice."
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 over-
sizes and outclasses the best business-idea yet
invented for the safe-guarding and perpetuat-
ing 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 in-
terpretations 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 ex-
planations, 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 bor-
rowed 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 to-
gether. One must respect the business-brain
that produced it—the splendid pluck and im-
pudence that ventured to promulgate it, any-
way.
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-
tor Emeritus of the names of candidates for
Readers before they are elected, and if she ob-
jects 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 record-
ing 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 pul-
pit; 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 every-
thing she does, and everything she thinks she
does, and everything she thinks, and every-
thing 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.
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 "impor-
tant 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 candi-
dates. That is, for Church membership. But
its work is cut out for it beforehand, by Sec.
2, 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 per-
sonal property of Mrs. Eddy. She has abso-
lute control of the elections.
Also it must "transact any Church business
that may properly come before it."
"Properly" is a thoughtful word. No im-
portant 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 ad-
mission 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 func-
tions, 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
Treasurer;Clerk;Future Board of Trustees;Proprietor of the Priesthood;Dictator of the Services;Proprietor of the Sanhedri.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 per-
son 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 govern-
ment 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 as-
sume an interest in his eyes which it lacked be-
fore. In time this interest can grow into de-
sire. Mrs. Eddy knows that when you cannot
get a man to try—free of cost—a new and effec-
tive 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.1
I offered to cure of his passion—gratis—a victim of the
drinking habit, by a simple and (as it seemed to me) not
difficult intellectual method which I had successfully tried
upon the tobacco habit. I failed to get him interested.
I think my proposition couldn't rouse him, couldn't
strongly appeal to him, could not electrify him, because it
offered a thing so easy to get, and which could be had for
nothing. Within a month afterwards a famous Drink-
Cure opened, and at my suggestion he willingly went there,
at once, and got himself (temporarily) cured of his habit.
Because he had to pay one hundred and fifty dollars.
One values a thing when one can't afford it.—M. T.
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 member-
ship 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 appli-
cations for membership:
"Applications of students of the Metaphys-
ical 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 in-
vited 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 chal-
lenged and obstructed, and tell us who is au-
thorized 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 shall 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.
andsome english required
Mrs. Eddy is very particular as regards one
detail—curiously so, for her, all things con-
sidered. 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 chap-
ter 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 com-
munication 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 By-
law was not the offspring of a forecast, an
intuition, it was certainly born of a sorrow-
ful 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 mo-
ment. 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 liter-
ary 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 proclama-
tion that she was author of the Bible, and that
she was thinking of discharging some Scriptural
sonnets and other enigmas upon the congrega-
tion. It could lose him his place, but it would
not be fair, if it happened before the edict about
"Understanding Communications" was pro-
mulgated.
"readers" again
The By-law book makes a showy pretence
of orderliness and system, but it is only a pre-
tence. 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 slov-
enliness, 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 Chris-
tian 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 mid-
dle of China:
"In any Church. Sec. 2. The Pastor Emer-
itus of the Mother-Church shall have the right
(through a letter addressed to the individual
and Church of which he is the Reader) to re-
move a Reader from this office in any Church
of Christ, Scientist, both in America and in for-
eign 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, care-
less, 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 approach-
ing 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 be-
lieve.
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 them-
selves 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 evi-
dence 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, Direc-
tor, 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 ab-
solute command over the most formidable force
and influence existent in the Christian Science
kingdom outside of herself, and it does this un-
conditionally 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 Emer-
itus."
Let some one with a wild and delirious fancy
try and see if he can imagine her furnishing
that consent.
Very properly, the first qualification for mem-
bership 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 con-
tained 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 in-
struct 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 elucida-
tors of the Bible and Science and Health—for-
ever. 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 shud-
der at the thought of such temerity, such pro-
fanity; he would be haled to the Inquisition
and thence to the public square and the stake
if he should be caught studying into text-mean-
ings 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 un-
derrate the magnificence of this long - headed
idea, one must not underestimate its giant pos-
sibilities in the matter of hooping 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 cen-
turies, stage by stage, and has not yet reached.
The matter of the Immaculate Conception of
the Virgin Mary was not authoritatively set-
tled until the days of Pius IX.—yesterday, so
to speak.
As already noticed, the Protestants are bro-
ken up into a long array of sects, a result of
disputes about the meanings of texts, disputes
made unavoidable by the absence of an infalli-
ble authority to submit doubtful passages to.
A week or two ago (I am writing in the middle
of January, 1903), the clergy and others here-
abouts 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 un-
settled.
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 some-
thing 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 fol-
lowers 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, be-
cause 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 argu-
ments 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 op-
posite 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 with-
draw from communions to which they belonged
and set up a sect of their own. The list—ac-
companied by various Church statistics for
1902, compiled by Rev. Dr. H. K. Carroll—was
published, January 8, 1903, in the New York
Christian Advocate:
ies),Baptists (13 bodies),Brethren (Plymouth)
(4 bodies),Brethren (River) (3
bodies),Catholics (8 bodies),Catholic Apostolic,Christadelphians,Christian Connection,Christian Catholics
(Dowie),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 congre-
gations.Jews (2 bodies),Latter-day Saints (2
bodies),Lutherans (22 bod-
ies),Mennonites (12 bod-
ies),Methodists (17 bodies),Moravians,Presbyterians (12 bod-
ies),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. Car-
roll'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.
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 mem-
ber 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 per-
centage; 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 de-
clare any dividend; but if she says "all" means
all, then all it is, to the end of time, and no fol-
lower 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 ex-
egesis, is privileged to exploit the Spiral Twist.1
That is a technicality—that phrase. I got it of an
uncle of mine. He had once studied in a theological cem-
etery, he said, and he called the Department of Biblical
Exegesis the Spiral Twist "for short." He said it was al-
ways difficult to drive a straight text through an unac-
commodating cork, but that if you twisted it it would go.
He had kept bar in his less poetical days.—M. T.
The Christian world has two Infallibles now.
Of equal power? For the present only.
When Leo XIII. passes to his rest another In-
fallible will ascend his throne;1
It has since happened.—M. T.
others, and yetothers, and still others will follow him, and be
as infallible as he, and decide questions of doc-
trine 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 re-
peat and reverently praise and adore her in-
fallibilities, 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 In-
fallible—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 mem-
ber 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 gen-
erosity 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 in-
ordinate 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."
of much value at the time, but it is very valu-
able now.2. Her people built the Mother-Church edi-
fice 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 Di-
rectors 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 re-
convey forthwith said lot of land with the build-
ing 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 an-
other 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 her-
self large concern about only one interest—her
power and glory, and the perpetuation and wor-
ship 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 in-
stincts 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 estab-
lish 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 dis-
play. 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 noticing1
This is a reference to her public note of January 17th.
See Appendix.—M. T.
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
worshipped by earls, and get a comet's atten-
tion 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 her-
self. 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 with-
out 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.
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 fol-
lows:
"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 af-
fections. And infinite Love is reflected in love.
And Love leadeth us not into temptation, but
delivereth from sin, disease, and death.How can one be led into non existant things? For
God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and
Love."1
For the latest version, see Appendix.—M. T.
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 carpen-
tering 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 en-
titled to salvation. They did not even stop
there, but let out all the unbaptized American
infants we had been accumulating for two hun-
dred years and more. There are some that be-
lieve 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 ad-
vantageous 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 immedi-
ately 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 offences, 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 an-
nulled, except by unanimous vote of all the First
Members."
The same being Mrs. Eddy. It is naïvely 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 sen-
tence just quoted, its English would protect it.
None but she would have shovelled that com-
ically 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 with-
out Our Mother's permission act upon his think,
the same shall be cut off from the Church for-
ever."
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.
There is a By-law which forbids Members to
practise hypnotism; the penalty is excommuni-
cation.
titioner—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 sal-
vation, 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 practising 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 edi-
tions, page 16:
"I possess a spiritual sense of what the ma-
licious 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 marvellous woman; with a hunger for pow-
er such as has never been seen in the world be-
fore. No thing, little or big, that contains any
seed or suggestion of power escapes her avari-
cious 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 re-
moved his thinker, she goes on wrapping need-
less 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 her-
self. Although we have seen that she has ab-
solute and irresponsible command over her
spectral Boards and over every official and ser-
vant of her Church, at home and abroad, over
every minute detail of her Church's govern-
ment, 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 irre-
sponsible power. Here we have one Accuser,
one Witness, one Judge, one Headsman—and
all four bunched together in Mrs. Eddy, the In-
spired of God, His Latest Thought to His Peo-
ple, 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 fault-
less 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 perfec-
tions? 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 in-
sides—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 Inquisi-
tion 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 trust-
worthy prophet. History is always repeating
itself, because conditions are always repeating
themselves. Out of duplicated conditions his-
tory 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 tri-
fle 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, excom-
munication follows. Considering who it is that
draughted this law, there is a certain amount
of humor in it.
Here follow the titles of some more By-laws
whose infringement is punishable by excom-
munication:
ence?)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 member-
ship. 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-protectionsThe 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 thought-
ful, 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 compul-
sion. We all know how wearisome the sweet-
est 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 in-
stance, 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 four-
teen, and then it would sound like the multipli-
cation table, and would cease to save. The
congregation would be perfectly sure to get
tired; in fact, did get tired—hence the compul-
sory By-law. It is a measure born of experi-
ence, 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 charita-
ble 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 proclaim-
ing the authorship, unless persuaded by a By-
law, 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 an-
nually. 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.
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 Plat-
form 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 ser-
vants 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 ex-
amined 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 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 sev-
eral other repetitions of prohibitions in the book
that could be spared—they only take up room
for nothing.
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.
I can understand why Mrs. Eddy copyrighted
the early editions and revisions of Science and
Health, and why she had a mania for copy-
righting every scrap of every sort that came
from her pen in those jejune days when to be
in print probably seemed a wonderful distinc-
tion 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 can-
not explain to myself. And particularly as re-
gards Science and Health. She knows, now,
that that Annex is going to live for many cen-
turies; 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 per-
version of privilege on the part of the law-
making power the Bible has perpetual copy-
right 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 Con-
gress of ours—
But how short-sighted I am. Mrs. Eddy has
thought of it long ago. She thinks of every-
thing. 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, in-
complete, 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 copy-
righting 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 dis
agreeable 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 demon-
strated 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 con-
trary 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 ad-
vance-subscriptions paid for the Journal and
the "Series," the which goods Mrs. Eddy had
not delivered. And couldn't, very well, per-
haps, on a Metaphysical College income of but
a few thousand dollars a day, or a week, or
whatever it was in those magnificently flourish-
ing times. The struggling Journal had swal-
lowed 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 Chris-
tian 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 publica-
tions, 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 ac-
count of it in the Christian Science Journal, and
of how she had already made some other hand-
some gifts—to her Church—and others to—to
her Cause—besides "an almost countless num-
ber of private charities" of cloudy amount and
otherwise indefinite. This landslide of gener-
osities overwhelmed one of her literary do-
mestics. 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-sac-
rifice that appeal to our deepest sense of
gratitude, even while surpassing our compre-
hension."
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 busi-
ness 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 periodi-
cals 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 ex-
amine 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 am-
bitions.
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 Uni-
versal is that she desires and intends to devote
them to the purpose just suggested—the up-
building 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 usu-
ally 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 com-
mittees, and Boards of Direction, of Educa-
tion, of Lectureship, and so on—geldings, every
one, shadows, spectres, apparitions, wax - fig-
ures: 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 irrele-
vant 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 dras-
tically 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 con-
trolled by no other church."
It has a most pious and deceptive give-and-
take air of perfect fairness, unselfishness, mag-
nanimity—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 con-
trol of other churches—branch churches. We
examine the other By-laws, and they answer
some important questions for us:
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 fur-
nished 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 Read-
ers—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 conse-
crated Christian Science functionaries. Her fac-
tory 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 priv-
ileged 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 abol-
ished 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 indis-
putable sovereignty and control over every branch
Church in the earth; and yet says, in that sugary,
naïve, 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 lib-
erties of a branch Christian Science Church are
but very, very few in number, and are these:
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 lib-
erties, none that give them an important voice
in their own affairs. Those are all locked up,
and Mrs. Eddy has the key. "Local Self-Gov-
ernment" 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 West-
ern 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 po-
sition 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 imi-
tate the Mother-Church and set up an aristoc-
racy. 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 state-
ly and exclusive One Hundred, her college of
functionless cardinals, her Sanhedrin of Priv-
ileged 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 Eng-
lish and perceive that they must then necessar-
ily 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.
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 pre-
vious 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—per-
sons 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 an-
other. 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 fur-
nish 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.
There is but one human Pastor in the whole
Christian Science world; she reserves that ex-
alted place to herself.
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.1
Even that ideal representative of irresponsible power,
the General of the Jesuits, is not in the running with
Mrs. Eddy. He is authentically described as follows:
"The Society of Jesus has really but one head, the Gen-
eral. He must be a professed Jesuit of the four vows, and it
is the professed Jesuits of the four vows only who take part
in his election, which is by secret ballot. He has four 'assist-
ants' to help him, and an 'admonisher,' elected in the same
way as himself, to keep him in, or, if need be, to bring him
back to the right path. The electors of the General have
the right of deposing him if he is guilty of a serious fault."
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.
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 Jeru-
salem, 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 copyright-
able. The new feature is self worship—exhib-
ited 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 com-
pany. 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 hap-
pened. 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 re-
tract 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 re-
sulted. 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 descrip-
tion of the shrine as it appeared to a recent vis-
itor, 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 ad-
mittance 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 ex-
ceedingly commonplace-looking table with a
pile of manuscript, an ink-bottle, and pen con-
spicuously 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 hun-
dred breasts of eider-down ducks, and the toilet-
room you see in the corner is of the latest de-
sign, with gold-plated drain-pipes; the painted
windows are from the Mother's poem, "Christ
and Christmas," and that case contains com-
plete copies of all the Mother's books.' The
chairs upon which the sacred person of the
Mother had reposed were protected from sacri-
legious 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 pa-
tient waiters at the door."
Now, then, I hope the wound is healed. I
am willing to relinquish the portrait, and com-
promise 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 interest-
ing 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 be-
lieve 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 "man-
tel-piece of pure onyx," and say reproachful
things about the golden drain-pipes of the lava-
tory, 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 con-
secrated chairs. What He would do with the
painted windows we can better conjecture when
we come presently to examine their peculiar-
ities.
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 occu-
pancy 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 repre-
sent 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 Prin-
ciple 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 devel-
opments 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 interpre-
tation" 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 inter-
pretation" of the Bible's teachings, and there-
fore 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 read-
ing 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.1
See a second rendering in Appendix. (Lord's Prayer.)
—M. T.
of Mrs. Eddy the new Infallible casts a compla-
cent 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 boast-
ful 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 de-
voted 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 ef-
forts our beloved Leader has made and is con-
stantly 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 de-
sired; I am not doing much now, and would
THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST, CENTRAL PARK
WEST AND 96TH STREET, NEW YORK
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 Com-
forter and by that other sacred Name—is
three dollars in cloth, as heretofore, six when it
is finely bound, and shaped to imitate the Testa-
ment, 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 blister-
ing tax, because she owns the Christian Science
canvasser, and can compel him to work for noth-
ing. 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 (num-
bering 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 trans-
gressions of Mrs. Eddy's edicts—excommuni-
cation:
"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 any-
thing from that class. Mrs. Eddy knows the
human race; knows it better than any mere
human being has known it in a thousand cen-
turies. 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 book-
seller—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 pub-
lisher has to pay author, middleman, and ad-
vertising, 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 commis-
sioned by the Deity to receive and print and
spread broadcast among sorrowing and suffer-
ing and poor men a precious message of heal-
ing 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 con-
tains one hundred and twenty thousand
words—just half as many as the New Testa-
ment.
Science and Health has since been so inflated
by later inspirations that the 1902 edition con-
tains 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 unin-
spired 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 Per-
sonage, 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 perfect-
ly 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 Amer-
ican Bible Society offers an edition of the whole
Bible as low as fifteen cents and the New Testa-
ment at five cents, and the British Society at six-
pence 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
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 Hyp-
notists;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 deco-
rated 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 unsup-
ported 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 un-
stable; she wanders, she is incurably inconsist-
ent; what she says to-day she contradicts to-
morrow.
But her acts are consistent. They are al-
ways 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 pro-
gressive 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—in-
teriorly—through all this steady drift of evo-
lution the one essential detail, the commanding
detail, the master detail of the make-up re-
mains 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 compas-
sionate 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 com-
missioner 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 board-
ing-house within six months; she would have
had the late proprietor on salary and hump-
ing 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 gov-
erns 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 find-
ing 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 can-
not 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 pro-
ceed 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 lim-
its, 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 uni-
verse 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, content-
ment 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 pres-
ence 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 ex-
posed to the light of the great sun—a new rev-
elation 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 de-
livers 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 physi-
cians and surgeons work a thousand miracles—
prodigies which would have ranked as miracles
fifty years ago—and they have so greatly ex-
tended 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 fur-
nished 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 excep-
tion. 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 be-
lieve 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 im-
perial idea and evolve it and deliver it, its dis-
coverer 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 cus-
tom 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 pecuniarily,
for she was poor.
She would succeed in anything she under-
took. She would attract pupils, and her com-
merce would grow. She would inspire in pa-
tient 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 rev-
erent. 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 mys-
terious voice—just as had happened to little
Samuel. (Mentioned in her Autobiography.)
She would be impressed by that ancient remi-
niscence, now, and it could have a prophetic
meaning for her.
It is conceivable that the persuasive influ-
ences around her and within her would give a
new and powerful impulse to her philosophiz-
ings, 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 cen-
tral 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 sin-
cerities—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 pro-
foundly earnest and sincere. Her book was is-
sued 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 al-
most compelled to accept her statement (no,
her guarded intimation) that the rates were ar-
ranged on high, since a mere human being un-
acquainted 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 extraordi-
nary 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 ambassa-
dorship was granted its exequatur 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 Na-
tional 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 tre-
mor 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 abol-
ished their office permanently; we have seen
that, as fast as her power grew, she was compe-
tent 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:
enally 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 sur-
passed, 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 nat-
urally—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, un-
grammatical, incomprehensible, affected, vain
of her little human ancestry, unstable, incon-
sistent, unreliable in statement, and naïvely
and everlastingly self-contradictory—oh, triv-
ial and common and commonplace as the com-
monest of us just a Napoleon as Madame de
Rémusat 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 fur-
nished 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 command-
ing 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 proceed-
ed from her people's recognition of her as a su-
pernatural personage, conveyer of the Latest
Word, and divinely commissioned to deliver it
to the world. The form which such a recog-
nition takes, consciously or unconsciously, is
worship; and worship does not question nor
criticise, 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 suffi-
cient; 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 wor-
ship, this massed and centralized force, this
force which is indifferent to opposition, un-
troubled by fear, and goes to battle singing,
like Cromwell's soldiers; and while she has it
she can command and it will obey, and main-
tain 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 de-
velopment of her revolutionary work begin.
chapter xiv
The President and Board of Directors will
succeed her, and the government will go on with-
out a hitch. The By-laws will bear that inter-
pretation. All the Mother-Church's vast powers
are concentrated in that Board. Mrs. Eddy's un-
limited 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 vacan-
cies. 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.
Great Idea, or only the little one, the old-timer,
the ordinary mental-healing—healing by "mor-
tal" 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 con-
viction that the Force involved was still exist-
ent, and could be applied now just as it was
applied by Christ's Disciples and their con-
verts, 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 im-
pulse it got from that organized and tremen-
dous force.
As for Nos. 1, 2, and 4, the hostiles contend
that Mrs. Eddy got the Great Idea from Quim-
by 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 prof-
itably. 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, West-
minster - 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 pos-
sible of resurrection and application—it must
have struck as many as that, and been cogi-
tated, 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—is a
thing that is difficult to understand.
For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and
beautiful: the power, through loving merciful-
ness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and
pains and griefs—all—with a word, with a
touch of the hand! This power was given by
the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the con-
verted. 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 possi-
ble to human flesh and bone. These things are
true, or they are not. If they were true sev-
enteen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago
it would be difficult to satisfactorily explain why
or how or by what argument that power should
be non-existent in Christians now.1
See Appendix.—M. T.
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, immeas-
urably 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 prostra-
tion, 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 fol-
lowers 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 dis-
use 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.1
For a clear understanding of the two claims of Chris-
tian Science, read the novel The Life Within, published by
Lothrops, Boston.—M. T.
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 trop-
ic paradise like that of which the poet sings:
"O, islands there are on the face of the deepWhere 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 her-
self. 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 Re-
ligion upon the book, and organized it. I be-
lieve 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 liter
ary 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 can-
not 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 uncompro-
misingly 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 magni-
tude. 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 Appendix1
See Appendix A.—M. T.
along with a pageor two taken from the body of the book,2
Appendix B.—M. T.
andwill 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 sen-
tence 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"3
See Appendix.—M. T.
(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 afore-
said Preface, and with Mrs. Eddy's poetry con-
cerning 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 Ba-
cilli, and my other exhibits (turn back to my
Chapters I. and II.) from the Autobiography,
and finally with the late Communication con-
cerning me,1
See Appendix. This reference is to the article "Mrs.
Eddy in Error," in the North American Review for April,
1903.—M. T.
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 con-
structed; and I cannot believe, and do not be-
lieve 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 unim-
peachable testimony—the treacherous testi-
mony of her own pen in her known and undis-
puted literary productions—it is that Mrs.
Eddy is not capable of thinking upon high
planes, nor of reasoning clearly nor writing in-
telligently 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 fol-
lowers 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.