The Lord of Glory; Counterfeit Miracles; Revelation and Inspiration

America through the last half-century. And it turns out that not only was Mrs. Eddy's fundamental idea, but the characteristic language in which she expresses her idea, Quimby's before it was hers.^^

First as openly a disciple of Quimby, and then, progressively with more and more strength and even violence of assertion of independence of him, Mrs. Eddy gradually set her doctrine afloat. She was already teaching it in 1867. Her advertisement as a teacher is found in the Spiritualistic paper, The Banner of Light, in 1868. In 1870 she is firmly established and greatly prospering at Lynn, in partnership with one of her pupils, Richard Kennedy, as a firm of healers on the basis of Quimby — Kennedy doing the healing while she taught.^ ^ Meanwhile she was writing. In 1870 her first pamphlet was copyrighted, although its issue was delayed for another six years. At length, in 1875, appeared her magnum opus — Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures — which, revised, and rerevised, and rerevised again — when it had reached its 440th edition in 1907 the editions ceased to be numbered — remains the sole text-book of Christian Science; or, if we prefer to think of Mrs. Eddy's followers from that point of view, the Second Bible of the Church of Christ, Scientist.^*^

Christian Science, above all other religions called bookreligions, is a religion of a book. This book is, of course, represented as written under divine inspiration, and as carrying with it divine authority. "No human tongue or pen," says Mrs. Eddy in its opening pages, "taught me the Science contained in this book, Science and Health, and neither tongue nor pen can ever overthrow it." ^^ She would blush, she tells us, to write of her book in the strain she uses toward it, "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." ^^ The book is received in the spirit in which it is given.

"The Bible and the Christian Science text-book," writes Irving C. Tomlinson, in the Christian Science Bible Quarterly Lessons, "are our only preachers. As the discourses are made up wholly of passages from the Bible and the Christian Science text-book, they contain nothing of human opinion; they are devoid of man-made theories. They voice the eternal fact, concerning the everlasting Truth. They set forth the realities of being; they inform, instruct, and enlighten concerning the verities of God and man." When

Tomlinson says that the Bible and Science and Health are the only preachers which the Christian Scientists have, he is declaring the literal fact. There are no sermons delivered in Christian Science churches. Whenever and wherever Christian Scientists meet together for worship the service is the same. A passage is read from the Bible and a passage is read from Science and Health. Some hymns are sung. The only prayer used is the Lord's Prayer, followed line by line by Mrs. Eddy's adaptation of it to her system of teaching. That is all.^^ The passage from the Bible, it should be noted, is read by the official called the Second Reader, and that from Science and Health by the First Reader.^'* The place given to Science and Health in the private life of Christian Scientists is comparable to that given it in the public services. Every one is expected to purchase and read it; and not only to read it but to pore over it. It is intended that it shall dominate the whole life.3^

When we open the book thus sent out into the world as divine in origin and contents, we receive a painful shock. It is hopelessly confused and obscure whether in matter or in style. Even Mrs. Eddy's disciples sometimes are frank enough to admit that *'the first reading of her

chief work. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, leaves the impression, in spite of much that is strikingly beautiful and true, that there is a prevailing tone of incoherence, contradiction, illogicality, and arbitrary, die-

tatorial assertion, with no regard for evident fact either in the realm of objective nature or history," ^^ To go to the

opposite extreme, a high dignitary of the Roman Catholic church, Robert Hugh Benson, declares^ '^ that "it is impos-

sible to describe the confusion of mind that falls upon the student of Science and Healthy ''The quasi-philosophical phraseology of the book, the abuse of terms, the employment of ambiguous words at crucial points, the character of the exegesis, the broken-backed paradoxes, the astonishing language, the egotism — all these things and many more end by producing in the mind a symptom resembling that which neuritis produces in the body, namely the sense that an agonizing abnormality is somewhere about, whether in the writings or in the reader is uncertain." He is al-

most incHned to look upon the fact that Christian Science has been actually propagated by such a book as a proof of its divine origin. This phenomenon is far more remarkable, he intimates, than any miracle of heaHng Mrs. Eddy claims to have performed: ''for she has done more than mend broken tissues by the application of mind, she has mended minds by the appKcation of nonsense." Another writer slyly suggests that it is by the very fact that the book is sheer nonsense that its effect is produced.^^ If we would only say with the King in Alice in Wonderland, "If there's no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, as we needn't try to find any" — it would be all up with it. The mischief comes from trying to find a meaning in it. "Given the will to believe by, say, the cure of a friend, the perusal of the book, by its general unintelligibility, produces a kind of mental coma, such as is induced by staring fixedly at a single bright spot." It hypnotizes us, in short.^^ It is barely possible, of course, that some of the obscurity of the book is intentional, designed to produce just this effect. The Unitarian clergyman, James Henry Wiggin, who served for some years as jMrs. Eddy's literary adviser, and in that capacity revised the text of the book (from 1885 on), sug-

Christian Science people thought her earlier editions much better, because they sounded more like Mrs. Eddy. The truth is that she does not care to have her paragraphs clear, and dehghts in so expressing herself that her words may have various readings and meanings. Really, that is one of the tricks of the trade. You know, Sibyls have always been thus oracular, to 'keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope.' " Allow this theory, however,

the fullest application, and the book nevertheless remains hopelessly incompetent. Wiggui puts his finger on the true cause when he adds: "Quimby had definite ideas but Mrs. Eddy has not understood them." Her abiHty lay in other spheres than in that of philosophic thought and literary expression.

Mrs. Eddy's pantheism deprived her, of course, of a personal God, and she insisted on the impersonality of God with the utmost vigor.^^ But she rightly found what she calls "the leading factor in Mind-Science," in the consequent proposition that "Mind" (with a capital "M") "is all, and matter is naught"; or as she otherwise expresses it, that "the only realities are the divine mind and its ideas'';^" "nothing possesses reality and existence except God." ^^ She sums up her entire teaching in four fundamental propositions which she declares to be self-evident, and so true that they are still true if they are read backwards: (i) God is all in all; (2) God is good; Good is Mind; (3) God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter; and (4) Life, God, omnipotent good, deny death, evil, sin, disease." ^* More at large she expounds her system thus: "God is

supreme; is mind; is principle, not person; includes all and is reflected by all that is real and eternal; is Spirit and Spirit is infinite; is the only substance; is the only life. Man was and is the idea of God; therefore mind can never be in man. Divine Science shows that matter and mortal body are the illusions of human belief, which seem to ap-

pear and disappear to mortal sense alone. When this belief changes as in dreams, the material body changes with it, going wherever we wish, and becoming whatever belief may decree.... Besiege sickness and death with these principles and all will disappear."

Frances Lord says the first lesson we must learn, accordingly, is that "in the universe there is only the all and the nothing." "God is all." "Since God is all, and God is good, the all is the good; whatever is not good is not real and may be proclaimed so." The power of proclamation is so great that if we train ourselves to deny that an evil is, and to affirm that it is not — it is not. "We could teach ourselves Denial," she explains, "using any error to deny away; but we deny Disease because we have set ourselves this particular task." ^^ "Mind," she says in further ex-

planation, "in its thinking faculty is pure understanding. Understanding casts a shadow; this shadow is Intellect. Intellect beHeves things and has opinions. Intellectual behef casts a shadow; this shadow is the human body." ^^ "If the body shows forth a bruise, the shadow is showing forth as a defective shadow. Then the substance, or wouldbe substance, must be defective. But we have just said it is intellectual behef that plays the part of substance to the shadow we call the body. Then the defect must be in some intellectual behef: it must consist in some mistaken opinion or notion which the thinking mind holds.... Yes, the bruise pictures out some mistaken ideas." ^^ "What is the harm of a shadow?" she continues. "There is no harm whatever in a shadow, provided it knows it is a shadow; the harm of error comes in when it forgets this and claims independence. What is the proper way to handle a shadow? Shall we argue with it, talk to it, coax it? No." This is the essential teaching of the whole

school. Only Frances Lord goes a step further in this shadow-dance. She beHeves also in Karma: that is, shortly, in Inheritance. If the cause of illness hes further back than this life, ''it is incurable, except the patient can be led to realize in so deep a sense the meaning of the words, 'There is no power in evil,'" that he is Ufted above even "the old shadows of former lives and thoughts." ^^

Now, if bodily disease is only "an appearance, a sensuous seeming, an empty show," an illusion only — as Mrs. Eddy says, "You will call it neuralgia, but I call it Illusion"— all that is necessary to cure disease is to dissipate the illusion, that is to say, to change the mind. No knowledge of anatomy is necessary; no medicament, no regimen, no anything except the projection of a healthy image of body. We are sick because we think ourselves sick; we are well whenever we change our minds and say we are well until we believe it. There is only one possibility of failure. Suppose you are thinking yourself well, but others persist in thinking that you are sick. This is unfortunate: for as fast as you project yourself a well body, they project you a sick one. You must get all about you to think with you to insure success. Nay, you must get the whole world to do so— unless you can persuade the world to forget you utterly, which should do just as well.^^

If we survey the system of Christian Science as a whole, with an active desire to discover in it elements of value, it is quite possible to fix upon characteristics which, viewed in the abstract, may seem admirable. There is its uncompromising idealism, for example; the emphasis which it places on spirit as distinguished from matter. There is the high value it attaches to Truth, as over against other forms — emotional or voKtional — of human activity. And there is its constant inculcation of contentment and serenity, the quiet optimism of its outlook on Hfe, which must tend, one would think, to the production of a demeanor, at least, if not a character, full of attractiveness. These things occur in the actual system, however, not in the abstract but in very concrete forms; and the concrete forms in which they occur in the system do not seem, upon being frankly looked in the face, very beautiful.

It is easy immediately on perceiving the idealistic presuppositions of Christian Science to go off into laudations of idealism in general, in contrast with the sordid materialism of our age. But it is our own idealism we are lauding, not Mrs. Eddy's. Her idealism is a sheer pantheism, involving a complete acosmism, which sinks, not the material universe only, but the world of individual spirits as well, in the ocean of undifferentiated Being. If it be said that Mrs. Eddy does not v/ork her pantheistic assumption out consistently, that is true in one sense and quite untrue in another and much more important sense. It is true that she is constantly making assertions quite inconsistent with it; that lq her attempts to expound it, she cannot maintain her consistency three sentences at a time, but everywhere presents us, as Miss Sturge puts it,^*^ "with such a tangle of incoherent, inconsistent, confused statements, contradictory to each other, as has, perhaps, never been seriously given to the world before." But with all her inability in expounding the details of her thought to keep in view its fundamental pantheistic postulate, Mrs. Eddy does not fail to make this pantheistic postulate consistently fundamental to her system, or to press it explicitly to its extremest implications. Her system is precisely acosmic pantheism, that, all that, and nothing but that.

From another point of \dew also it is absurd to speak in terms of praise of Mrs. Eddy's idealism. It is but a sorry ideahsm at the best. It does not take its starting-point from the vision of the spiritual, from an enlarged mental outlook and a soaring sense of the value of spiritual things — but from a cringing fear of the evils of life, as Hfe is and must be lived by creatures of sense. It makes all the difference whether we begin by affirming spirit and draw the inference thence to the relative nothingness of the material; or begin by shirking the material and inferring only thence that spirit is all. The centre of gravity of the two attitudes, though they be described in identical language, is antipodal; their reactions on Hfe — expressed in thought, feeling and doing — are so completely contrasting as to be in point of fact directly contradictory. Mrs. Eddy's beginning lay in the denial of matter, that the suffering and trials of Hfe might be, if they could not be escaped, yet as far as possible circumvented. Her attitude is that of flight, flight from the evils of hfe. There is nothing heroic about it; nothing elevated or elevating. We fear that we must say that it looks from without rather sordid. Her idealism is a sham idealism; merely a mechanical device for the eluding of Hfe, a Hfe which must be Hved in a world of suffering (of which Mrs. Eddy has the keenest sense) and sin (of which she appears to have no sense at aU).^^ Of course the device is as vain as it is mechanical. To deny the evils of Hfe, however stoutly, unfortunately does not aboHsh them. Mrs. Eddy herself suffered from disease and weakness; she too grew old and died.^^ Her ideaHsm is as false to all the facts of experience as it is mean in its origin. And we must add that it is as cruel as it is false and mean. We see it in its fuU enormity only when we see it at work on helpless sufferers — on those too ill to speak for themselves, on tortured infancy. The annals of the practice of Christian Science on sick and suffering babies belongs to the history of atrocities.^^

Similarly, when we are tempted to praise Christian Science for the honor which it does to Truth, we are bound to stop and ask, not only materially, what this Truth is to which it gives honor, but also, formally, whether it can be commended for the functions which it assigns to Truth in its system. What it caUs " Truth," when it speaks honoringly of Truth, is just its pantheistic theory of Being — that all is mind, and mind is God, and besides God there is nothing. To this "Truth" as such — that is to say, to its mere apprehension as true — it ascribes aU heaHng power.