NOTES TO LECTURE VI
1. Intermediate positions are, of course, possible in the abstract, in which the cure is ascribed both to faith and to God acting reinforcingly or supplementarily. But these possible abstract points of view may be safely left out of account.
it would without doubt appear that the treatment of disease through what seems to be mental influences has prevailed in one form or another ever since man began to realize that certain illnesses are curable."
4. How little they can be ascribed to it has been shown by R. J. Ryle, in an article entitled "The Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing," in The Hibbert Journal, vol. V, April, 1907, pp. 572-586.
5. Sir William Osier, The Treatment of Disease, 1909, speaks of the necessity in all cases of "suggestion in one of its varied forms — whether the negation of disease and pain, the simple trust in Christ of the Peculiar People, or the sweet reasonableness of the psychotherapist." Cf. especially William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, '^'^ 191 ij PP- 712 ff.; Stephen Paget, The Faith and Works of Christian Science, 1909, pp. 204 ff.; Henry H. Goddard. The American Journal of Psychology, vol. X, 1898-1899, p. 481. That this is not the account given by the practitioners themselves lies in the nature of the case. Consult, e. g., C. H. Lea, A Plea for... Christian Science,^ 1915, PP> xv, 70 ff., who appeals to "an ever-operative principle of good, or spiritual law, underljdng all hfe which is here and now available for all mankind." For that matter consult Elwood Worcester, Religion and Medicine, p. 72; on pp. 67 ff. Worcester speaks quite in the spirit of the Spiritual Healers spoken of above.
6. Samuel McComb, The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, 1909, p. 117: "It does not believe that its cures are due to any miraculous agency..."; Religion and Medicine, 1908, p. 311: "We dare not pray to God to work a miracle, that is, to violate one of those general laws by which He rules the physical world."
8. The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 39. The remedy which Wesley proposed, however, was not that the minister should turn physician, but that the physician should become Christian: "It follows," he writes, "that no man can be a thorough physician without being an experienced Christian."
9. McComb says expressly, The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 92: "In many instances it does not matter what the object of the faith may be; it is not the object but the faith that heals." The matter is more fully stated in Religion and Medicine, p. 293: "Faith simply as a psychical process, or mental attitude... has healing virtue"; "Faith as a mere mental state has this power" — in accordance with Feuchterleben's saying, "Confidence acts like a real force." Elwood Worcester, p. 57, agrees with his colleague. Of course it is allowed that if we are seeking moral as well as physical effects it is better that the faith employed should have God rather than Mumbo-jumbo for its object. The plane on which McComb's chapter on "Prayer and Its Therapeutic Value" {Religion and Medicine, pp. 302-319) moves is the same. The therapeutic value of prayer resides in its subjective effects. As it is clearly stated in a leading article in the British Medical Journal for June 18, 1910: ''Prayer inspired by a living faith is a force acting within the patient, which places him in the most favorable condition for the stirring of the pool of hope that lies, still and hidden it may be, in the depths of human nature." McComb does not utterly exclude the prayer of desire or deny that it has an effect on God; even, if it be a desire in behalf of others, an effect on them. We are organically related to God, he says: "We exist in Him spiritually somewhat as thoughts exist in the mind," and "a strong desire in our soul communicates itself to Him and engages His attention just as a thought in our soul engages ours." God may resist this desire of ours, thus entering His consciousness; but "the stronger the thought, the more frequently it returns, the more likely it is to be acted upon." If now we have a desire in behalf of others, "our soul not only acts on that soul," telepathically we suppose, "but our prayer arising to the mind of God directs His will more powerfully and more constantly to the soul for which we pray." This is very ingenious and very depressing. We hope there is no truth in it.
10. The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 10. The leaders of the Emmanuel Movement are very insistent that the Christianity which they employ is that of the "critical interpretation" of the New Testament.
11. It seems almost as difficult for clerics to recognize frankly the limits of their functions as spiritual guides with respect to medicine, as with respect to the state. They repeatedly show a tendency not only to intrude into but to seek to dominate the one alien sphere as the other. Andrew D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 1896, II, p. 37, recounts how the mediaeval church sought to secure that physicians should always practise their art in conjunction with ecclesiastics. Pius V ordered "that all physicians before administering treatment should call in *a physician of the soul,' on the ground, as he declares, that 'bodily infirmity frequently arises from sin.'" Clear differentiation of functions — "division of labor" the economists call it — lies in the line of advance.
12. The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. gp. See above, note 7.
13. These citations are derived from Medicine and the Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 1910, pp. 35, 64, 73. Cf. what Stephen Paget says on the general question in The Faith and Works of Christian Science, igog, pp. 180-190.
14. The primary hterature on the Emmanuel Movement is comprised in the two books by its founders: Elwood Worcester, Samuel McComb, Isador H. Coriat, Religion and Medicine, the Moral Control of Nervous Disorders, 1908; and Elwood Worcester, Samuel McComb, The Christian Religion as a Healing Power: A Defense and Exposition of the Emmanuel Movement, 1909. See also Robert MacDonald, Mind, Religion and Health, with an Appreciation of the Emmanuel Movement, igog; C. R. Brown, Faith and Health, igio. A very good criticism of the movement will be found in the article by Doctor Henry Rutgers Marshall, on "Psychotherapeutics and Religion," in The Hibbert Journal, January, 1909, vol. Ill, pp. 295-313. The most recent literature includes: Loring W. Batten, The Relief of Pain by Mental Suggestion, 1917; Isador H. Coriat, What is Psychoanalysis? igi7.
15. Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. V, p. 700b. He has explained himself more at large in his book Spiritual Healing, London, igi4, and quite in this sense. But a certain amount of ambiguity in this matter is not unnatural, and may be met with in many writers. Elwood Worcester, for example, gives expression occasionally to a mystical theory which assimilates him to the theory of spiritual healing described by Cobb (e. g., Religion and Medicine, pp. 67 ff.). On the other hand, Percy Dearmer {Body and Soul,^ igi2, p. 318), who also holds to a mystical theory of the universe, must be classed distinctly as an advocate of "Mindcure"; although he lays all the stress on religion, and refers everything to God as the ultimate actor, he yet is thoroughly naturalistic
in his analysis. "All power is of God," he says, " — whether it be electricity or neurokym, or grace; and to him who does not believe in God, all power must be left unexplained. On the other hand, the high power of religion can quite fairly be called mental; no one would be less ready to deny this than the Christian for whom, as I have said, the very operations of the Spirit of God, his gifts and his fruits, are mental phenomena which are habitually obtained in a lower form without the special aid of religion. There is no ultimate barrier then between what is sacred and what is secular, since all things come of God and of his own do we give him; the difference is one of degree and not of kind."
i6. Two other important movements, tracing their impulse back to P. P. Quimby, deserve mention here — the "Mind-cure Movement," the best representative of which is probably Warren F. Evans; and the "New Thought Movement," the best representative of which is probably Horatio W. Dresser. WUliam James, The Varieties of Religious Experience,'''^ iQii; PP- 94 ff-, gives an adequate account of the "New Thought Movement"; a good brief account of both streams of development will be found in Frank Podmore, Mesmerism and Christian Science, 1909, pp. 255 fif. Some details of W. F. Evans's career may be found in McClure's Magazine, vol. XXX, pp. 390 ff. A useful bibliography of out-ofthe-way books on "New Thought" is given in The New Schaff- Herzog Encyclopedia, vol. VIII, p. 148, but the best books are missed. See, especially, Horatio W. Dresser, Handbook of New Thought, 191 7.
17. "The truth, therefore, about Christian Science," says W. F. Cobb (Mysticism and the Creed, 1914, p. 316), "seems to be that the power displayed in the cures which it indubitably performs is not peculiar to it, that is, is not Christian Science at all, but that which is its peculiar glory is the bad philosophy by which it seeks to set forth the power which comes from the Spirit, and is under the guardianship of religion."
18. "Many imagine," she says. Science and Health, i6ist ed., 1899, p. xi, "that the phenomena of physical heahng in Christian Science only present a phase of the action of the human mind, which, in some unexplained way, results in the cure of sickness." This, she declares, is by no means the case. She condemns the several books "on mental healing" which have come under her notice as wrong and misleading, precisely because " they regard the human mind as a heaUng agent, whereas this mind is not a factor in the Principle of Christian Science" (p. x). The phrase "human mind" in passages like this probably is to be read as equivalent to "mortal mind," a cant phrase in the system, as, for example, on p. 303: "History teaches that the popular and false notions about the Divine Being and character have originated in the human mind. As there really is no mortal mind, this wrong notion about God must have originated in a false supposition, not in immortal Mind." This "mortal mind," we are told (p. 45), "claims to govern every organ of the mortal body," but the claim is false; "the Divine Mind" is the true governor. There "really is no mortal mind." Of course this distinction between mind-cure and Mind-cure is not maintained, and endless confusion results. Thus the Christian Science writer quoted in the American Journal of Psychology, X, p. 433, in the same breath repudiates the ascription of their healings to a "material, mental or bodily cause," and afErms that "the onlyagency ever effective in curing diseases is some faculty of mind."
19. Science and Health, 1899, p. xi; cf. p. 5: "Christian Science is natural but not physical. The true Science of God and man is no more supernatural than is the science of numbers"; p. 249: " Miracles are impossible in Science." Even the resurrection of Christ was not supernatural: "Can it be called supernatural for the God of nature to sustain Jesus, in his proof of man's truly derived power? It was a method of surgery beyond material art, but it was not a supernatural act. On the contrary, it was a distinctly natural act..." (p. 349). "Mary Baker Eddy," says a writer in the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, "has worked out before us as on a blackboard every point in the temptations and demonstrations— or so-called Miracles — of Jesus, showing us how to meet and overcome the one, and how to perform the other." All is natural in Mrs. Eddy's universe.
20. The Christian Religion as a Healing Power, p. 19,
22. On "the pedigree of Christian Science," see the admirable article under that title by Frank Podmore in The Contemporary Revieiv for January, 1909, vol. XCV, pp. 37-49; and, of course, more at large, Frank Podmore, Mesmerism and Christian Science: a Short History of Mental Healing, 1909.
23. Mrs. Eddy herself speaks with contempt of Faith-Healing as "one belief casting out another — a belief in the unknown casting out a belief in disease," "It is not Truth itself which does this," she declares; "nor is it the human understanding of the divine healing Principle" (Science and Health, 1899, p. 317).
24. These admissions are greatly modified in Science and Health, 1899, p. 397. Here it is taught, as the Index puts it, that faithcure "often soothes but only changes the form of the aUment." "Faith removes bodily ailments for a season; or else it changes those ills into new and more difficult forms of disease, until at length the Science of Mind comes to the rescue and works a radical cure."
25. Christian Science Healing, its Principles and Practice, 1888,
the year 1866 I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science. God had been graciously preparing me during many years for the reception of this final revelation of the absolute divine Principle of scientific mental healing."
28. Mrs. Eddy's relations to P. P. Quimby have been made quite clear and placed on a firm basis by Georgine Milmine in a series of articles published in McClure's Magazine for 1907-1908, and afterward in book form, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science, 1909; and by Lyman P. Powell, Christian Science, the Faith and its Founder, 1907; see also Frank Podmore, Mesmerism and Christian Science, 1909, chap, xrv, "The Rise of Mental Healing," and Annetta Gertrude Dresser, The Philosophy of P. P. Quiynhy, 1895. Quimby's fundamental principle is summed up in his conviction that the cause and cure of disease lie in mental states. His practice was to talk with his patients about their diseases, to explain to them that disease is an error, and to "establish the truth in its place, which, if done, was the cure." "I give no medicines," he says, "I simply sit by the patient's side and explain to him what he thinks is his disease, and my explanation is the cure;... the truth is the cure." "My way of curing," he writes in 1862, the year in which Mrs. Eddy went to him as a patient, "convinces him (the patient) that he has been deceived; and, if I succeed, the patient is cured." The Pantheistic background appears to have been less prominently thrust forward by Quimby than by Mrs. Eddy, and it would seem that her "discovery" consists wholly in this possible change of emphasis.
29. This is sufficiently characteristic to deserve emphasis. Mrs. Eddy (who describes herself as "the tireless toiler for the truth's new birth") ever assumed the r61e of thinker and teacher rather than of healer; the healing she delegated to her pupils. "I have never made a specialty of treating disease," she writes, "but healing has accompanied all my efforts to introduce Christian Science." By taking the course she did, she understood herself to be assuming the more difficult task: "Healing," she said, "is easier than teaching, if the teaching is faithfully done" {Science and Health, 1899, p. 372). She was accustomed to print at the end of the preface to Science and Health this: "Note. — The author takes no patients and declines medical consultation." Nevertheless, in a by-law of 1903, she declares "healing better than teaching" {Mc- Clure's Magazine, May, 1908, p. 28).
30. The Christian Scientist writer quoted in the American Journal of Psychology, vol. X, p. 436, declares with great emphasis: "The only text-book of genuine, unadulterated Christian Science is Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, by Rev. Mary Baker Eddy." Mr. Bailey, editor of the Christian Science Journal, wrote that he considered " the Bible and Science and Health as one book — the sacred Scriptures."
32. Christian Science Journal, January, igoi: cf. Miscellaneous Writings, p. 311: "The words I have written on Christian Science contain absolute Truth.... I was a scribe under orders, and who can refrain from transcribing what God indites?"
33. In the Christian Science Journal, April, 1895, Mrs. Eddy abolished preaching and ordained that the service should be as here described. "In 1895," she says, "I ordained the Bible and Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, as the Pastor, on this planet, of all the churches of the Christian Science denomination" {McClure's Magazine, May, 1908, p. 25).
34. This was not the original order, but was subsequently introduced.
35. Mrs. Eddy says in the Christian Science Journal for March, 1897: "The Bible, Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, and my other published works are the only proper instructions for this hour. It shall be the duty of all Christian Scientists to circulate and to sell as many of these books as they can."
36. G. C. Mars, The Interpretation of Life, in which is shown the relation of Modern Culture and Christian Science, 1908. It is related that Mrs. Eddy herself, with, no doubt, a rare display of humor, said once that Bronson Alcott, on reading Science and Health, pronounced that no one but a woman or a fool could have written it {McClure^s Magazine, August, 1897, p. 47).
39. So say many of the readers of the book with serio-comic emphasis; see three such expositions of the effect of trying to read it given in Stephen Paget's The Faith and Works of Christian Science, pp. 205 ff.
41. God, says Mrs. Eddy, in Science and Health, ed. 1875, "is Principle, not Person"; God, she says, in ed. 1881, I, p. 167; II, p. 97, "is not a person, God is Principle"; God, she says still in No and Yes, 1906, "is Love, and Love is Principle, not person." In later editions of Science and Health the asperity of the assertion is somewhat softened without any change of meaning, e. g., ed. 1899, p. 10: "If the term personality applied to God means infinite personality, then God is personal Being — in this sense, but not in the lowest sense," i. e., in the sense of individuality {cf. what is said on the supposition that God should be spoken of as person on p.
510). The entry in the Index referring to this passage (p. 10) is phrased simply, "Person, God is not"; and throughout the text God is represented not as "Person" but as "Principle." To approach God in the prayer of petition is to "humanize" Him. "Prayer addressed to a person prevents our letting go of personality for the impersonal Spirit to whom all things are possible" (ed. 1875). The whole foundation of Mrs. Eddy's theory and practice alike was denial of the personality of God; see the curious deposition printed in McClure's Magazine, 1907, p. 103, bearing that this denial was made by Mrs. Eddy the condition of entrance into her classes. "There is really nothing to understand in Science and Health," says Wiggin truly, "except that God is all." That is the beginning and middle and end of Mrs. Eddy's philosophy. Accordingly, the writer in the Christian Science Sentinel for September 25, 1907, p. 57, quoted by Powell, Christian Science, p. 242, is quite right when she declares: "principle and not personality is the only foundation upon which we can build safely,"
49. It is these "cross currents," we are told, which fonn the chief difficulty in the way of Christian Science practice. Mrs. Carrie Snider even reports in The Journal of Christian Science (McClure's Magazine, 1907, pp. 692-693) the case of her husband, who, being "under the treatment of two healers, whose minds were not in accord," was caught in this cross current and died, or, as Mrs. Eddy would express it, "showed the manifestation of the death symptoms" ("symptoms" themselves being "shadows of belief"). "The thought from the one," explains Miss Milmine, "confused thought from the other, leaving him to die in the crossfire." The interested reader will find the precepts of Elwood Worcester on "Suggestion" {Religion and Medicine, p. 64) running very closely parallel to Mrs. Eddy's on all such matters: "It is necessary as far as possible to guard against counter-suggestions";
"suggestions... contained in books are often of great curative value"; "in order to avoid the danger of opposition and countersuggestion some practitioners prefer to treat the patient silently."
50. Medicine and the Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 19 10,
51. Sin is, of course, in Mrs. Eddy's system, like disease, an illusion; there is no such thing. "The belief" of it is in the beginning "an unconscious error" (ed. 1899, p. 81), it "exists only so long as the material illusion remains" (p. 207), and what "must die" is "not the sinful soul" but "the sense of sin" {ibid.). It is amusing to observe as we read Science and Health, how often, in the preoccupation with sickness as the thing from which we look to Christian Science for reUef, sin comes in as an afterthought. The book itself, it is to be noticed, is a treatise on " Science and Health"; and what the author professes to have discovered is "the adaptation of Truth to the treatment of disease" — to which is added, plainly as an afterthought, "as well as of sin." "The question of What is Truth," she adds in the next paragraph, "is answered by demonstration— by healing disease" — "and sin" she adds again as an afterthought. Consequently she goes on to say, "This shows that Christian healing confers the most health," "and," she adds weakly, "makes the best men." This preoccupation with sickness rather than sin is grounded, no doubt, in part, in the historical genesis of the system and of the book in which it is presented. It was not as a religious leader but as a healer that Mrs. Eddy came forward, treading in the footsteps of Quimby, who was not a reUgious leader but a healer. Her theories were religious only because, pushing Quimby's suggestions into express declarations, she found his "all is mind" completing itself in "all mind is God." Her reHgion, in other words, existed for its healing value, and her interest in it was as a curative agent. Sickness and healing were the foci around which the eUipse of her thought was thrown. Christian Scientists, therefore, teach that there is no such thing as sin; and sin, like disease, is to be treated by denial. C. H. Lea, A Plea for... Christian Science,^ 191 5, P- 29, says that God, being perfect, all His creations must also be perfect; "consequently that He did not and could not create a sinful man, or even a man that could become sinful." We can never be separated from God; "the apparent separation of man from God is, according to Christian Science teaching, due to the false human consciousness or mortal's sense of sin" (p. 39).
52. One gains the impression that Mrs. Eddy was even exceptionally troubled by sickness. In the Christian Science Journal for
June, 1902 (McClure's Magazine, February, 1908, p. 399), a contributor very sensibly writes: "Do not Scientists make a mistake in conveying the impression, or, what is the same thing, letting an impression go uncorrected, that those in Science are never sick, that they never have any ailments or troubles to contend with? There is no Scientist who at all times is wholly exempt from aches and pains or from trials of some kind." The " Scientists, " of course, are between the two horns of a dilemma, for how can they "deny" sickness without "denying" it! A physician gives this account of an experience of his own with this stoicism of denial {The New Church
Review, 1908, vol. XV, p. 419): "I was called to a Christian Scientist who was supposed to be sick. I found her hard at work in the kitchen, for she was a boarding-house keeper. I asked her where she felt sick, and she said 'nowhere.' I asked her if she had any pain, and she replied, 'none,' and that she felt as well as usual. I found her carrying a high fever and both lungs becoming solid with pneumonia. I called her husband aside and told him she was probably nearly through, but that she ought to go to bed and be cared for. She insisted upon remaining up and making some biscuit for supper, and did so. She soon lapsed into unconsciousness, and passed away. Just before her consciousness left her, she told me she did have pains and did feel sick, but was taught not to say so, and what was more, to persuade herself it was not so, and that her disease was only an illusion." And then this physician adds: "I speak frankly, as the need is, but I have seen those of this belief with heart disease, saying they were well, yet suffering week after week, till death released them. I have seen them with malignant growths becoming steadily worse, but as I inquired about them I was told they were getting better, and the growth was disappearing; but only for the undertaker to inform me a little later of their loathsome condition. I have seen children... hurried down to an untimely grave with appendicitis, while being told practically that there was nothing the matter with them."
53. Observe the case of permitting a baby to die, reprinted in McClure's Magazine, October, 1907, pp. 693 ff., from the Christian Science Journal of March, 1889, p. 637; but most people will be satisfied if they will but glance over the sixty-eight cases of Christian Science treatments collected by Stephen Paget in pp. 151-180 of his The Faith and Works of Christian Science. He closes with a scathing arraignment based on what he, as a physician, finds in
them (p. 180): "Of course, to see the full iniquity of these cases, the reader should be a doctor, or should go over them with a doctor. But everybody, doctor or not, can feel the cruelty, born of
fear of pain, in some of these Scientists — the downright madness threatening not a few of them — and the appalling self-will. They bully dying women, and let babies die in pain; let cases of paralysis tumble about and hurt themselves; rob the epileptic of their bromide, the syphilitic of their iodide, the angina cases of their amylnitrate, the heart cases of their digitalis; let appendicitis go on to septic peritonitis, gastric ulcer to perforation of the stomach, nephritis to ursemic convulsions, and strangulated hernia to the miserere mei of gangrene; watch day after day, while a man or a woman slowly bleeds to death; compel them who should be kept still to take exercise; and withhold from all cases of cancer all hope of cure. To these works of the devil they bring their one gift, wilful and complete ignorance; and their 'nursing' would be a farce if it were not a tragedy. Such is the way of Christian Science, face to face, as she loves to be, with bad cases of organic disease." For
the legal questions involved, see William A. Purrington, Christian Science, an Exposition of Mrs. Eddy's wonderful Discovery, including the Legal Aspects: a Plea for Children and other helpless Sick, 1900.
62. Marcus Aurelius says: "Do not suppose you are hurt and your complaint ceases. Cease your complaint and you are not hurt."
72. Science and Health, ed. 1891, p. 529, and subsequent editions up to and including 1906.
cerned and the union of male and female apprehended in its soul sense, this rite should continue"; ed. iSgg, p. 274: "Until it is learned that generation rests on no sexual basis, let marriage continue."
74. On this whole subject, see especially Powell, op. cit., chap, viii; Podmore, op. cit., pp. 294 fl.; Paget, op. cit., pp. 18 ff. When it is declared in the later editions of Science and Health, e. g., 1907, p. 68, that Mrs. Eddy does not believe in "agamogenesis," that must be understood as consistent with teaching asexual generation, or else taken merely for "the present distress"; in these same editions she teaches asexual generation for the better time to come. Cf. the commentators already mentioned.
75. The materiality of Mrs. Eddy's golden age seems to be made very clear from the teaching that not sin and disease merely but death itself is non-existent, and will finally cease on due "demonstration." When Miss Milmine says that "a sensationless body" is, according to Mrs. Eddy, the ultimate hope of Christian Science {McClure's Magazine, June, 1908, p. 184), she apparently accurately expresses the fact. It seems that we are never to be without a body. It is, though illusion, nevertheless projected with inevitable certainty by "mortal mind." But it is to be a perfect body in the end, free from all the defects with which it is unfortunately now projected. The excitement which Mrs. Eddy manifested, and her manner of speech at Mr. Eddy's death, show her point of view very clearly. " My husband," she wrote to the Boston Post, June 5, 1882 {McClure^s Magazine, September, 1907, p. 570), "never spoke of death as something we are to meet, but only as a phase of mortal being."
79. This is the conventional mode of speech among Christian Scientists, and may be read afresh any day. Thus Margaret Wright, answering some inquiries in the New York Evening Sun of
October 17, 1916, quite simply writes: "As to eating, if one feels hungry and can get good food, the sensible thing to do is eat. If they did not do so Christian Scientists would be thought sillier than they already are. Also, if one can't see without eyeglasses one must have them until one's understanding of truth enables one to dispense with them. That is practical, and Christian Scientists are a practical people, or should be." Cf. note 85 on p. 325.
472-476, in which a hundred consecutive "testimonies" published in the Christian Science Journal are analyzed from the physician's point of view; and Stephen Paget, The Faith and Works of Christian Science, 1909, pp. 99-129, in which two hundred consecutive "testimonies" are brought together; also A. T. and F. W. H. Myers, "Mind-Cure, Faith-Cure and the Miracles of Lourdes," in the Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research, vol. IX (1893), pp. 160-176.
85. The natural embarrassment of Mrs. Eddy in the presence cf physical need is equally amusingly illustrated by a story told by Miss Milmine of the days of her earlier teaching in Boston (1878). "Occasionally," she says (McClure's Magazine, August, 1907, p.
456), "a visitor would ask Mrs. Eddy why she used glasses instead of overcoming the defect in her eyesight by mind. The question usually annoyed her, and on one occasion she replied sharply that she 'wore glasses- because of the sins of the world,' probably meaning that the belief in failing eyesight (due to age) had become so firmly estabUshed throughout the ages, that she could not at once overcome it." This, too, was concession to "mortal mind." Com-
86. The Treatment of Disease, 1909, quoted by H. G. G. Mackensie, in Medicine and the Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 1910,
87. Charlotte Lilias Ramsay, who writes the article "Christian Science," in Hastings's Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. Ill, pp. 576-579, in lieu of adding the ordinary "Literature" to the article, informs us that "there is no authorized Christian Science literature except that which issues from the Christian Science Publishing House in Boston, Mass." "The Student of Christian Science," she adds, "must be warned not to accept any other as genuine." Nevertheless, she gives us, here, this brief sketch. Lewis Clinton Strang gives us a similar one in The New Schaf-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, vol. X, pp. 288-291, which would appear to be even more authoritative, as bearing at its head this "Note,"
signed by Mrs. Eddy: "I have examined this article, edited it, and now approve it." The New Schaf-Herzog article is rendered more valuable by the adjunction to it of two others, a "Judicial Estimate of the System," by Lyman P. Powell, and a "Critical View of the Doctrines," by J. F. Carson— the whole closing with an extensive bibliography. There is nevertheless added at vol. XII, p. 550, as a "Statement from the Christian Science Committee on PubUcation of the First Church, Boston," a biographical article on Mrs. Eddy, signed by Eugene R. Cox. Mrs. Eddy's Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, is, of course, the source-book for the system of teaching. First issued in 1875 (pp. 564) it has gone through innumerable editions; the first edition of the text revised by J. H. Wiggin was published in 1885; but the book has undergone much minor revision since. According to the trust-deed by which the site of "the Mother Church" in Boston is held, all the editions, since at least the seventy-first, are equally authoritative. We have used chiefly the one hundred and sixty-first (1899, pp. 663). Besides the suggestions given by C. Lilias Ramsay, a list of Mrs. Eddy's writings and of the "PubUcations of the Christian Science PubUshing Society" may be found in Appendix H to C. H. Lea's A Plea for the Thorough and Unbiased Investigation of Christian Science, and a Challenge to its Critics, second edition, 1915. A good classified bibliography is prefixed to Lyman P. Powell's Christian Science: the Faith and its Founder, 1907. The authorized life of Mrs. Eddy is Sibyl Wilbur's Life of Mary Baker Eddy, 1908. Georgine Milmine's Life of Mary Baker Eddy and History of Christiart Science, first published in McChire's Magazine for 1907-1908, was issued in book form in 1909; it gives the ascertained facts, and forms the foundation for a critical study of the movement. The books which, along with it, we have found, on the whole, most useful, are Powell's, Podmore's, and Paget's; but the literature is very extensive and there are many excellent guides to the study of the system. Even fiction has been utilized, Clara Louise Burnham's The Right Princess (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1902), for example, is a very attractive plea for Christian Science; and Edward Eggleston's The Faith Doctor (a story of New York), 1891, is a strong presentation of the social situation created by it. An interesting episode in the history of Christian Science may be studied in two books published through G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, by Augusta E. Stetson, entitled respectively: Reminiscences, Sermons, and Correspondence Proving Adherence to the Principles of Christian Science as Taught by Mary Baker Eddy, and Vital Issues in Christian Science, a Record, etc. A good recent discussion of the inner meaning of Christian Science will be found in the article by L. W. Snell, entitled "Method of Christian Science," in The Hibbert Journal for April, 191 5, pp. 620-629. Walter S. Harris, Christian Science and tlie Ordinary Man, 191 7, seeks to argue afresh the fundamental question. Among the most recent books, see also: George M. Searle (a Paulist Father), The Truth about Christian Science, 1916; and W. McA. Goodwin (a " Christian Science Practitioner, Teacher, and Lecturer"), A Lecture entitled The Christian Science Church, 1916.