her name.

* How strange, how wonderful !

4 1 will quote her own words, from her " Key to the
Scriptures : " " The twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse has a
special suggestiveness in connection with this nineteenth century"
There do you note that ? Think note it well.

But what does it mean ?

Listen, and you will know. I quote her inspired words
again : " In the opening of the Sixth Seal, typical of six
thousand years since Adam, there is one distinctive feature
which has special reference to the present age. Thus :

"Revelation xii. I. And there appeared a great
wonder in heaven a woman clothed with the sun, and the
moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve
stars."

That is our Head, our Chief, our Discoverer of
Christian Science nothing can be plainer, nothing surer.
And note this :



AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY 105

* " Revelation xii. 6. And the woman fled into the
wilderness, where she had a place prepared of God."

That is Boston.

4 1 recognise it, madam. These are sublime things and
impressive ; I never understood these passages before ; please
go on with the with the proofs.

1 Very well. Listen :

1 " 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 had in his hand a little book"

A little book, merely a little book could words be
modester ? Yet how stupendous its importance ! Do you
know what book that was ?

< Was it

I hold it in my hand " Christian Science " !

Love, Livers, Lights, Bones, Truth, Kidneys, one of a
series, alone and without equal it is beyond imagination
for wonder !

Hear our Founder s eloquent words : " Then will a
voice from harmony cry, Go and take the little book ;
take it and eat it up, and it shall make thy belly bitter ; but
it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. Mortal, obey
the heavenly evangel. Take up Divine Science. Read it
from beginning to end. Study it, ponder it. It will be
indeed sweet at its first taste, when it heals you ; but murmur
not over Truth, if you find its digestion bitter." You now
know the history of our dear and holy Science, sir, and that
its origin is not of this earth, but only its discovery. I will
leave the book with you and will go, now, but give yourself
no uneasiness I will give you absent treatment from now
till I go to bed.



io6 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

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 quite swiftly.
My body was diligently straining and stretching, this
way and that, to accommodate the processes of restoration,
and every minute or two I heard a dull click inside and
knew that the two ends of a fracture had been successfully
joined. This muffled clicking and gritting and grinding
and rasping continued during the next three hours, and
then stopped the connections had all been made. All
except dislocations ; there were only seven of these : hips,
shoulders, knees, neck ; so that was soon over ; one after
another they slipped into their sockets with a sound like
pulling a distant cork, and I jumped up as good as new, as
to framework, and sent for the horse-doctor.

I was obliged to do this because I had a stomach-ache
and a cold in the head, and I was not willing to trust these
things any longer in the hands of a woman whom I did
not know, and in whose ability to successfully treat mere
disease I had lost all confidence. My position was justified
by the fact that the cold and the ache had been in her
charge from the first, along with the fractures, but had
experienced not a shade of relief ; and indeed the ache was
even growing worse and worse, and more and more bitter,
now, probably on account of the protracted abstention from
food and drink.

The horse-doctor came, a pleasant man and full of hope
and professional interest in the case. In the matter or
smell he was pretty aromatic, in fact quite horsey, and I tried
to arrange with him for absent treatment, but it was not in



AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY 107

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 favourable to energetic measures ;
therefore he would give me something to turn the stomach
ache into the botts and the cold in the head into the blind
staggers ; then he should be on his own beat and would
know what to do. He made up a bucket of bran-mash,
and said a dipperful of it every two hours, alternated with a
drench with turpentine and axle-grease in it, would either
knock my ailments out of me in twenty-four hours or so
interest me in other ways as to make me forget they were
on the premises. He administered my first dose himself,
then took his leave, saying I was free to eat and drink
anything I pleased and in any quantity I liked. But I was
not hungry any more, and did not care for food.

I took up the Christian Scientist book and read half of
it, then took a dipperful of drench and read the other half.
The resulting experiences were full of interest and adven
ture. All through the rumblings and grindings and quak-
ings and eflervescings accompanying the evolution of the
ache into the botts and the cold into the blind staggers I
could note the generous struggle for mastery going on
between the mash and the drench and the literature ; and
often I could tell which was ahead, and could easily
distinguish the literature from the others when the others
were separate, though not when they were mixed ; for
when a bran-mash and an eclectic drench are mixed together

O

they look just like the Apodictical Principle out on a lark,
and no one can tell it from that. The finish was reached
at last, the evolutions were complete and a fine success ;
but I think that this result could have been achieved with
fewer materials. I believe the mash was necessary to the
conversion of the stomach-ache into the botts, but I think



io8 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

one could develop the blind staggers out of the literature
by itself; also, that blind staggers produced in this way
would be of a better quality and more lasting than any
produced by the artificial processes of a horse-doctor.

For of all the strange, and frantic, and incomprehensible,
and uninterpretable books which the imagination of man
has created, surely this one is the prize sample. It is
written with a limitless confidence and complacency, and
with a dash and stir and earnestness which often compel
the effects of eloquence, even when the words do not
seem to have any traceable meaning. There are plenty
of people who imagine they understand the book ; I
know this, for I have talked with them ; but in all cases
they were people who also imagined that there were no
such things as pain, sickness, and death, and no realities
in the world ; nothing actually existent but Mind. It seems
to me to modify the value of their testimony. When
these people talk about Christian Science they do as Mrs.
Fuller did ; they do not use their own language, but the
book s ; they pour out the book s showy incoherences, and
leave you to find out later that they were not originating,
but merely quoting ; they seem to know the volume by
heart, and to revere it as they would a Bible another
Bible, perhaps I ought to say. Plainly the book was
written under the mental desolations of the Third Degree,
and 1 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 instru
ment which is making a noise which it thinks is a tune,
but which to persons not members of the band is only the



AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY 109

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. Without ever presenting
anything which may rightfully be called by the strong
name of Evidence, and sometimes without even mentioning
a reason for a deduction at all, it thunders out the startling
words, I have Proved so and so ! It takes the Pope and
all the great guns of his church in battery assembled to
authoritatively settle and establish the meaning of a sole and
single unclarified passage of Scripture, and this at vast cost
of time and study and reflection, but the author of this
work is superior to all that : she finds the whole Bible in
an unclarified condition, and at small expense of time and
no expense of mental effort she clarifies it from lid to lid,
reorganises and improves the meanings, then authoritatively
settles and establishes them with formulas which you cannot
tell from Let there be light ! and Here you have it !
It is the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that a
Voice has gone crashing through space with such placid and
complacent confidence and command.

IV

A word upon a question of authorship. Not that
quite ; but, rather, a question of emendation and revision.
We know that the Bible-Annex was not written by
Mrs. Eddy, but was handed down to her eighteen hundred
years ago by the Angel of the Apocalypse ; but did she
translate it alone, or did she have help ? There seems to



no CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

be evidence that she had help. For there are four several
copyrights on it 1875, 1885, 1890, 1894. It did not
come down in English, for in that language it could not
have acquired copyright there were no copyright laws
eighteen centuries ago, and in my opinion no English
language at least up there. This makes it substantially
certain that the Annex is a translation. Then, was not the
first translation complete ? If it was, on what grounds
were the later copyrights granted ?

I surmise that the first translation was poor ; and that
a friend or friends of Mrs. Eddy mended its English three
times, and finally got it into its present shape, where the
grammar is plenty good enough, and the sentences are
smooth and plausible though they do not mean anything.
I think I am right in this surmise, for Mrs. Eddy cannot
write English to-day, and this is argument that she never
could. I am not able to guess who did the mending, but
I think it was not done by any member of the Eddy Trust,
nor by the editors of the Christian Science Journal, for
their English is not much better than Mrs. Eddy s.

However, as to the main point : it is certain that
Mrs. Eddy did not doctor the Annex s English herself.
Her original, spontaneous, undoctored English furnishes
ample proof of this. Here are samples from recent articles
from her unappeasable pen ; double columned with them
are a couple of passages from the Annex. It will be seen
that they throw light. The italics are mine :

i. What plague spot, * Therefore the efficient

or bacilli were (sic) gnawing remedy is to destroy the

(sic) at the heart of this patient s unfortunate belief,

metropolis . . . and bring- by both silently and audibly

ing it on bended knee ? arguing the opposite facts in

Why, it was an institute that regard to harmonious being



AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY in



had entered its vitals (sic]
that, among other things,
taught games^ et cetera. (P.
670, C. S. Journal^ article
entitled A Narrative by
Mary Baker G. Eddy. }

2. Parks sprang up (sic]
. . . electric street cars run
(sic) merrily through several
streets, concrete sidewalks
and macadamised roads dot
ted (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.}



representing man as
healthful instead of diseased,
and showing that it is im
possible for matter to suffer,
to feel pain or heat, to be
thirsty or sick. (P. 375,
Annex.}

Man is never sick ; for
Mind is not sick, and matter
cannot be. A false belief
is both the tempter and the
tempted, the sin and the
sinner, the disease and its
cause. It is well to be calm
in sickness ; to be hopeful is
still better ; but to under
stand that sickness is not
real, and that Truth can
destroy it, is best of all, for
it is the universal and perfect
remedy. (Chapter xii. y An
nex. )



You notice the contrast between the smooth, plausible,
elegant, addled English of the doctored Annex and the
lumbering, ragged, ignorant output of the translator s
natural, spontaneous, and unmedicated penwork. The
English of the Annex has been slicked up by a very
industrious and painstaking hand but it was not Mrs.
Eddy s.

If Mrs. Eddy really wrote or translated the Annex, her
original draft was exactly in harmony with the English of
her 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. And it bore little or no



ii2 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

resemblance to the book as we have it now now that the
salaried polisher has holystoned all of the genuine Eddyties
out of it.

Will the plague-spot article go into a volume just as it
stands ? I think not. I think the polisher will take off his
coat and vest and cravat and demonstrate over it a couple
of weeks and sweat it into a shape something like the follow
ing and then Mrs. Eddy will publish it and leave people to
believe that she did the polishing herself :

1. What injurious influence was it that was affecting the
city s morals ? It was a social club which propagated an
interest in idle amusements, disseminated a knowledge of
games, et cetera.

2. By the magic of the new and nobler influences the
sterile spaces were transformed into wooded parks, the merry
electric car replaced the melancholy bus, smooth concrete
the tempestuous plank sidewalk, the macadamised road the
primitive corduroy, et cetera.

3. Its pleasant suburbs gone, there was little left to
admire save the wrecked graveyard with its uncanny ex
posures.

The Annex contains one sole and solitary humorous
remark. There is a most elaborate and voluminous Index,
and it is preceded by this note :

* This Index will enable the student to find any thought
or idea contained in the book.*

V

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



AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY 113

educated physician, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist have
made use of the client s imagination to help them in their
work. They have all recognised the potency and availability
of that force. Physicians cure many patients with a bread
pill ; they know that where the disease is only a fancy, the
patient s confidence in the doctor will make the bread pill
effective.

Faith in the doctor. Perhaps that is the entire thing. It
seems to look like it. In old times the King cured the

O

king s evil by the touch of the royal hand. He frequently
made extraordinary cures. Could his footman have done it ?
No not in his own clothes. Disguised as the King, could
he have done it ? I think we may not doubt it. I think
we may feel sure that it was not the King s touch that made
the cure in any instance, but the patient s faith in the efficacy
of a King s touch. Genuine and remarkable cures have

O

been achieved through contact with the relics of a saint. Is
it not likely that any other bones would have done as well
if the substitution had been concealed from the patient ?
When I was a boy, a farmer s wife who lived five miles from
our village, had great fame as a faith-doctor that was what
she called herself. Sufferers came to her from all around,
and she laid her hand upon them and said, Have faith it
is all that is necessary, and they went away well of their
ailments. She was not a religious woman, and pretended to
no occult powers. She said that the patient s faith in her
did the work. Several times I saw her make immediate
cures of severe toothaches. My mother was the patient.
In Austria there is a peasant who drives a great trade in this
sort of industry and has both the high and the low for
patients. He gets into prison every now and then for prac
tising without a diploma, but his business is as brisk as ever
when he gets out, for his work is unquestionably successful

I



ii4 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

and keeps his reputation high. In Bavaria there is a man
who performed so many great cures that he had to retire
from his profession of stage-carpentering in order to meet the
demand of his constantly increasing body of customers. He
goes on from year to year doing his miracles, and has become
very rich. He pretends to no religious helps, no super
natural aids, but thinks there is something in his make-up
which inspires the confidence of his patients, and that it is
this confidence which does the work and not some mysterious
power issuing from himself.

Within, the last qtrarter of a century, in America, several
sects of curei s 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 wi di the same old powerful instrument the patient s
imagination. Differing names, but no difference in the
process.. But they dcr 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 Faftii Cure and the Prayer Cure probably do no
harm when they do no good, since they do not forbid the
patient to help out the cure, with medicines if he wants to ;
but the others bar medicines, and claim ability to cure every
conceivable human ailment through the application of their
mental forces alone. They claim ability to cure malignant
cancer, and other affections which have never been cured
in the history of the race. There would seem to be an
element of danger here. It has the look of claiming too
much, I think. Public confidence would probably be in
creased if less were claimed,



AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY 115

I believe it might be shown that all the c mind sects
except Christian Science have lucid intervals ; intervals in
which they betray some diffidence, and in effect confess that
they are not the equals of the Deity ; but if the Christian
Scientist even stops with being merely the equal of the Deity,
it is not clearly provable by his Christian-Science Amended
Bible. In the usual Bible the Deity recognises pain, disease,
and death as facts, but the Christian Scientist knows better.
Knows better, and is not diffident about saying so.

The Christian Scientist was not able to cure my
stomach-ache and my cold ; but the horse-doctor did it.
This convinces me that Christian Science claims too much.
In my opinion it ought to let diseases alone and confine
itself to surgery. There it would have everything its own
way.

The horse-doctor charged me thirty kreutzers, and I
paid him ; in fact I doubled it and gave him a shilling.
Mrs. Fuller brought in an itemised bill for a crate of broken

O

bones mended in two hundred and thirty-four places
one dollar per fracture.

Nothing exists but Mind ?

O

1 Nothing, she answered. All else is substanceless, all
else is imaginary.

I gave her an imaginary cheque, and now she is suing
me for substantial dollars. It looks inconsistent.



VI

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will
explain us to each other, it will unriddle many riddles, it
will make clear and simple many things which are involved
in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

Those of us who are not in the asylum, and not demon-

I 2



ii6 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

strably due there, are nevertheless no doubt insane in one
or two particulars I think we must admit this ; but I
think that we are otherwise healthy-minded. I think that
when we all see one thing alike, it is evidence that as
regards that one thing, our minds are perfectly sound.
Now there are really several things which we do all see
alike ; things which we all accept, and about which we do
not dispute. For instance, we who are outside of the
asylum all agree that water seeks its level ; that the sun
gives light and heat ; that fire consumes ; that fog is damp ;
that 6 times 6 are thirty-six ; that 2 from 10 leave eight ;
that 8 and 7 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 infal
lible standard of sanity. Whosoever accepts them we know
to be substantially sane ; sufficiently sane ; in the working
essentials, sane. Whoever disputes a single one of them we
know to be wholly insane, and qualified for the asylum.

Very well, the man who disputes none of them we
concede to be entitled to go at large but that is concession
enough ; we cannot go any further than that ; for we
know that in all matters of mere opinion that same man is
insane just as insane as we are ; just as insane as Shake
speare was, just as insane as the Pope is. We know exactly
where to put our finger upon his insanity : / / is where his
opinion differs from ours.

That is a simple rule, ande asy to remember. When
I, a thoughtful and unbiassed Presbyterian, examine the
Koran, I know that beyond any question every Moham
medan is insane ; not in all things, but in religious matters.
When a thoughtful and unbiassed Mohammedan examines
the Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any
question I am spiritually insane. I cannot prove to him



AND THE BOOK OF MRS. EDDY 117



that he is insane, because you never can prove anything to
a lunatic for that is a part of his insanity and the evidence
of it. He cannot prove to me that I am insane, for my
mind has the same defect that afflicts his. All democrats
are insane, but not one of them knows it ; none but the
republicans and mugwumps know it. All the republicans
are insane, but only the democrats and mugwunps can
perceive it. The rule is perfect : /;/ all matters of opinion our
adversaries are insane. When I look around me I am often
troubled to see how many people are mad. To mention
only a few :

The Atheist,

The Infidel,

The Agnostic,

The Baptist,

The Methodist,

The Catholic, and the other

115 Christian sects, the

Presbyterian excepted,
The 72 Mohammedan sects,



Oliphant



The Buddhist,

The Blavatsky-Buddhist,

The Nationalist,

The Confucian,

The Spiritualist,

The 2,000 East Indian

sects,

The Peculiar People,
The Swedenborgians,



The Shakers,
The Millcrites,
The Mormons,
The Laurence

Harrisites,

The Grand Lama s people,
The Monarchists,
The Imperialists,
The Democrats,
The Republicans (but not

the Mugwumps),
The Mind-Curists,
The Faith-Curists,
The Mental Scientists,
The Allopaths,
The Homoeopaths,
The Electropaths,



The but there s no end to the list ; there arc millions of
them ! And all insane ; each in his own way ; insane as
to his pet fad or opinion, but otherwise sane and rational.



ii8 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

This should move us to be charitable toward one
another s lunacies. I recognise that in his special belief the
Christian Scientist is insane, because he does not believe as
I do ; but I hail him as my mate and fellow because I am
as insane as he insane from his point of view, and his
point of view is as authoritative as mine and worth as much.
That is to say, worth a brass farthing. Upon a great
religious or political question the opinion of the dullest head
in the world is worth the same as the opinion of the
brightest head in the world a brass farthing. How do we
arrive at this ? It is simple : The affirmative opinion of a
stupid man is neutralised by the negative opinion of his
stupid neighbour no decision is reached ; the affirmative
opinion of the intellectual giant Gladstone is neutralised by
the negative opinion of the intellectual giant Cardinal
Newman no decision is reached, Opinions that prove