"Science and Health" is offered, among other things, as a key to the
Scriptures, and along with her interpretation of both the Old and the
New Testaments in terms of her peculiar philosophy Mrs. Eddy rewrites
the great articles of the Christian creeds. A careful student of Mrs.
Eddy's mental processes is able in this region to understand them better
than she understood them herself. She had, to begin with, an inherited
reverence for the Bible as an authority for life and she shared with
multitudes of others a difficulty to which reference has already been
more than once made. For what one may call the typical Protestant
consciousness the Bible is the final revelation of God, governing, if
only we can come to understand it, both our faith and our conduct of
life, but the want of a true understanding of it and, above all, the
burdening of it with an inherited tradition has clouded its light for
multitudes of devout souls.
_Science and Health Offered as a Key to the Scriptures_
Such as these have been almost pathetically eager to accept any
interpretation, no matter how capricious, which seemed to read an
intelligible meaning into its difficult passages, or reconcile its
contradictions, or make it a more practical guide in the conduct of
life. Any cult or theory, therefore, which can seem to secure for itself
the authority of the Bible has obtained directly an immense
reinforcement in its appeal to the devout and the perplexed, and Mrs.
Eddy has taken full advantage of this. Her book is veined with Scripture
references; two of her chapters are expositions of Biblical books
(Genesis and Revelation); and other chapters deal with great doctrines
of the Church.
_It Ignores All Recognized Canons of Biblical Interpretation.
Illustrations_
Mrs. Eddy naturally sought the authority for her philosophy between the
covers of the Scriptures. Beyond debate her teachings have carried much
farther than they otherwise would, in that she claims for them a
Scriptural basis, and they must be examined in that light. Now there are
certain sound and universally recognized rules governing the scholarly
approach to the Old and New Testaments. Words must be taken in their
plain sense; they must be understood in their relation to their context.
A book is to be studied also in the light of its history; the time and
place and purpose of its composition, as far as these are known, must be
considered; no changes made in the text save through critical
emendation, nor any translations offered not supported by accepted
texts, nor any liberties be taken with grammatical constructions. By
such plain tests as these Mrs. Eddy's use of the Scriptures will not
bear examination. She violates all recognized canons of Biblical
interpretation on almost every page.[42]
[Footnote 42: This is a brief--and a Christian Scientist may protest--a
summary dismissal of the claim of "Science and Health" to be a "key to
the Scriptures." But nothing is gained--save of the unnecessary
lengthening of this chapter--in going into a detailed examination of her
method and conclusions. She has insight, imagination, boundless
allegorical resource, but the whole Bible beneath her touch becomes a
plastic material to be subdued to her peculiar purpose by omissions,
read-in meanings and the substantial and constant disregard of plain
meanings. To the student the whole matter is important only as revealing
the confusion of the popular mind which receives such a method as
authoritative.]
Her method is wholly allegorical and the results achieved are
conditioned only by the ingenuity of the commentator. It would require a
body of citation from the pages of "Science and Health," not possible
here, to follow through Mrs. Eddy's peculiar exegesis. One needs only to
open the book at random for outstanding illustrations. For example,
Genesis 1:6, "And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the
waters and let it divide the waters from the waters." The word
"firmament" has its own well established connotation gathered from a
careful study of all its uses. We can no more understand the earlier
chapters of Genesis without an understanding of Hebrew cosmogony than we
can understand Dante without a knowledge of medieval cosmogony. But,
given this knowledge which is the common possession of all sound
scholarship, we can at least understand what the passage means, even
though we have long left behind us the naive conception of the vaulted
skies to which it refers.
All this is a commonplace not worth repeating at the cost of the white
paper upon which it is printed, save as the ignoring of it leads to such
an interpretation of the passage as that which Mrs. Eddy offers:
"spiritual understanding by which human conception material mind is
separated from Truth is the firmament. The Divine Mind, not matter,
creates all identities and they are forms of Mind, the ideas of Spirit
apparent only as Mind, never as mindless matter nor the so-called
material senses" (page 505). Comment is not only difficult but
impossible in the face of a method like this. If such an interpretation
were an exception it might seem the unfair use of a hypercritical temper
to quote this particular expression of Mrs. Eddy's mind. But her whole
treatment of Scripture suffers from the same method.
Everything means something else. The Ark is "the idea, or reflection of
truth, proved to be as immortal as its Principle." Babel is
"self-destroying error"; baptism is "submergence in Spirit"; Canaan is
"a sensuous belief"; Dan (Jacob's son) is "animal magnetism"; the dove
is "a symbol of divine Science"; the earth is "a type of eternity and
immortality"; the river Euphrates is "divine Science encompassing the
universe and man"; evening "the mistiness of mortal thought"; flesh "an
error, a physical belief"; Ham (Noah's son) is "corporeal belief";
Jerusalem "mortal belief and knowledge obtained from the five corporeal
senses"; night, "darkness; doubt; fear"; a Pharisee, "corporeal and
sensuous belief"; river is "a channel of thought"; a rock is "a
spiritual foundation"; sheep are "innocence"; a sword "the idea of
Truth."[43]
[Footnote 43: Glossary, p. 579--passim.]
Mrs. Eddy does not hesitate to make such textual modifications of
passages as suit her purpose and even when she is not dealing with her
texts in such ways as these, she is constantly citing for her proofs
passages which cannot by any recognized canon of interpretation possibly
be made to mean what she says they mean. Beneath her touch simple things
become vague, the Psalms lose their haunting beauty, even the Lord's
Prayer takes a form which we may reverently believe the author of it
would not recognize.
"Our Father: Mother God, all harmonious, Adorable One, Thy kingdom
is come; Thou art ever present. Enable us to know--as in heaven, so
on earth--God is omnipotent, supreme. Give us grace for to-day;
feed the famished affections; and love is reflected in love; and
God leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth us from sin,
disease and death. For God is Infinite, all Power, all Life, Truth,
Love, over all and All."
_Its Conception of God_
It was quite as inevitable that she should undertake to fit her
speculations into the fabric of the theology in which she and most of
her followers had been trained, as that she should try to secure for her
speculation the weight of the authority of the Bible. She would have to
take for her point of departure the centrality of Christ, the
outstanding Christian doctrines, markedly the Incarnation and the
Atonement and she would need somehow to dispose of the Sacraments. All
this is inevitably implied in the persistent designation of her whole
system as a Christian system.
The chapter headings in "Science and Health" and the sequence of
chapters are the key to the movement of her mind; they are determined by
her association of interests. Marriage is on the same level with Prayer,
Atonement and the Eucharist, and Animal Magnetism with Science, Theology
and Medicine. It is hard to know where to begin in so confused a region.
She is handicapped, to begin with, by the rigidity of her idealism and
actually by her limitation both of the power and personality of God.
This statement would probably be as sharply contradicted by Mrs. Eddy's
apologists as anything in this study, but it is not hastily made.
Philosophically He is for Mrs. Eddy only an exalted ideality into
relation with which we may think ourselves by a change in our system of
belief. Actually, as we shall see, this conception yields to emotional
and devotional needs--it is bound to--but in theory it is unyielding.
Now the accepted Christian conception of God is entirely different. Both
the Old and New Testaments conceive a God who is lovingly and justly
conscious of all our need, who is constantly drawing near to us in
manifold appeals and approaches and who has, above all, in the
Incarnation made a supreme and saving approach to humanity. He is no
more rigid than love is rigid; His attitude toward us, His children,
changes as the attitude of a father toward the changing tempers of a
child. Now all this may be true or it may be only the dream of our
strangely sensitive personalities, but whether it be true or not, it is
the Christian conception and any denial of this or any radically
different substitution for it cannot call itself Christian save as it
writes into the word Christian connotations to which it has heretofore
been utterly strange.
_Mrs. Eddy's Interpretation of Jesus Christ_
Mrs. Eddy begins, therefore, with the handicap of a philosophy which can
be adjusted to Christian theology only through fundamental modifications
of that theology. It is hard to systematize the result. Mrs. Eddy
distinguishes between Jesus and Christ. Her conception of Jesus is
reasonably clear whether it be historically true or not, but her
conception of the Christ is vague and fluctuating. Jesus was apparently
the first Christian Scientist, anticipating, though not completely, its
philosophy and demonstrating its practices. His teachings are so
interpreted as to be made to yield a Christian Science content. When He
urged the commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" what He
really meant was, "Thou shalt have no belief of Life as mortal; thou
shalt not know evil, for there is one Life."[44] "He proved by His deeds
that Christian Science destroys sickness, sin and death. Our Master
taught no mere theory, doctrine or belief; it was the divine Principle
of all real being which He taught and practiced."[45] "He taught His
followers the healing power of Truth and Love"[46] and "the proofs of
Truth, Life and Love which Jesus gave by casting out error and healing
the sick, completed His earthly mission."[47] "The truth taught by Jesus
the elders scoffed at because it demanded more than they were willing to
practice."[48] They, therefore, crucified Him and He seemed to die, but
He did not. Apparently He was not dead when He was entombed and His
three days in the tomb gave Him "a refuge from His foes, a place in
which to solve the great problem of being." In other words He
demonstrated His own healing in the tomb. "He met and mastered, on the
basis of Christian Science, the power of mind over matter, all the
claims of medicine, surgery and hygiene. He took no drugs to allay
inflammation; He did not depend upon food or pure air to resuscitate
wasted energies; He did not require the skill of a surgeon to heal the
torn palms and bind up the wounded side and lacerated feet, that He
might use those hands to remove the napkin and winding sheet and that He
might employ His feet as before."[49]
[Footnote 44: Page 19. All citations from last edition.]
[Footnote 45: Page 26.]
[Footnote 46: Page 31.]
[Footnote 47: Page 41.]
[Footnote 48: Page 41.]
[Footnote 49: Page 44.]
"His disciples believed Jesus to be dead while He was hidden in the
sepulchre, whereas He was alive, demonstrating within the narrow tomb
the power of the spirit to overrule mortal, material sense." His
ascension was a final demonstration in which He "rose above the physical
knowledge of His disciples and the material senses saw Him no more." He
attained this perfection of demonstration only gradually and He left
behind Him an incomplete revelation which was to wait for its full
illumination for the coming of Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science. Perhaps
more justly He left behind Him, according to Mrs. Eddy and her
followers, a body of teaching which could not be clearly understood
until she came to complete the revelation. At any rate, Christian
Science is really His second coming.
_Christian Science His Second Coming_
In an advertisement printed in the New York _Tribune_ on January 23,
1921, Augusta E. Stetson says: "Christ in Christian Science is come to
the understanding of those who looked for His reappearing." And if
certain sentences which follow mean anything, they mean that, in the
thought of Mrs. Eddy's followers, she completes what Jesus began and
fulfills the prophecy of His reappearing. "Her earthly experience runs
parallel with that of her Master; understood in a small degree only by
the few who faintly see and accept the truth, she stood during her
earthly mission and now stands on the mount of spiritual illumination
toward whose heights no feet but those of the blessed Master have so
directly toiled, first in agony and finally, like Jesus Christ the
masculine representative of the Fatherhood of God, she as the feminine
representative of the motherhood of God, will appear in triumphant
demonstration of divine power and glory as the combined ideal man in
God's image and likeness."
And, indeed, there are not wanting intimations in "Science and Health"
which give to Mrs. Eddy a certainty in this region which Jesus Himself
did not possess. He falters where she firmly trod. No need to dwell
upon the significant omissions which such an interpretation of the
historic Jesus as this demands. The immensely laborious and painstaking
scholarship which has sought, perplexedly enough it must be confessed,
to discover behind the Gospel narratives the fundamental facts and
realities of His life, is entirely ignored. Mrs. Eddy has no place for
the social aspects of the teachings of Christ, indeed His whole system
of ethic could be "blacked out"; as far as her teaching is concerned it
would make absolutely no difference.
Mrs. Eddy distinguishes, in theory at least though there is no
consistency in her use of terms, between Jesus and the Christ. "Jesus is
the human man, and Christ is the divine idea; hence the duality of
Jesus, the Christ" (page 473). "Jesus is the name of the man who, more
than all other men, has presented Christ, the true idea of God, healing
the sick and the sinning and destroying the power of death" (page 473).
"In an age of ecclesiastical despotism, Jesus introduced the teaching
and practice of Christianity ... but to reach His example and test its
unerring Science according to His rule, ... a better understanding of
God as divine Principle, Love, rather than personality or the man Jesus,
is required" (page 473).
It is difficult enough to know just what this means, but as one stands
far enough back from it all it seems to reduce Jesus historically to the
first outstanding Christian Science teacher and healer. "Jesus
established what He said by demonstration, thus making His acts of
higher importance than His words. He proved what He taught. This is the
Science of Christianity. Jesus _proved_ the Principle, which heals the
sick and casts out error, to be divine" (page 473). He is, therefore,
historically of chiefest value as the demonstrator of Christian Science,
the full philosophy of which apparently awaited a later revelation.
"Christ is the ideal Truth, that comes to heal sickness and sin through
Christian Science, and attributes all power to God" (page 473). "He
unveiled the Christ, the spiritual idea of divine Love" (page 38). The
Christ of Christian Science, then, is an ideal Truth, a spiritual idea,
apparently an abstraction. But Mrs. Eddy is not consistent in her use of
these two names. On one page Christ is "the spiritual idea of divine
Love"; on the next page "we need Christ and Him crucified" (page 39),
though how an ideal truth or a spiritual idea could possibly be
crucified we are not told. In many of her passages Mrs. Eddy uses the
familiar phrase, Jesus Christ, in apparently its ordinary connotations.
_The Incarnation: Christian Theology and Christian Science Belong Really
to Different Regions_
The Incarnation is disposed of in the same vague way. "Those instructed
in Christian Science have reached the glorious perception that God is
the only author of man. The virgin mother conceived this idea of God and
gave to her ideal the name of Jesus."[50] "The illumination of Mary's
spiritual sense put to silence material law and its order of generation,
and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth. The Holy Ghost,
or divine Spirit, overshadowed the pure sense of the Virgin-mother with
the full recognition that being is Spirit."[51] "Jesus was the offspring
of Mary's self-conscious communion with God."[52] Now all this is
neither honest supernaturalism nor the honest acceptance of the normal
methods of birth. It is certainly not the equivalent of the Gospel
account whether the Gospel account be accepted or rejected. To use a
phrase which has come into use since "Science and Health" was written,
this is a "smoke screen" under cover of which Mrs. Eddy escapes the
necessity of either accepting or denying the testimony of the Gospels.
[Footnote 50: Page 29.]
[Footnote 51: Page 29.]
[Footnote 52: Page 30.]
Something of this, one must confess, one may find in not a little
religious teaching old and new, but it is doubtful if there is anywhere
so outstanding an instance of what one may call the smoke screen method
in the consideration of the Incarnation, as in the passages just quoted.
As a matter of fact all this is simply the attempt to fit the idealistic
dualism, which is the real philosophic basis of Christian Science and
which, in so far as it is capable of explanation at all, can be as
easily explained in two pages as two hundred, into the theology in which
Mrs. Eddy was nurtured and which was a background common to both herself
and her disciples. Christian Science would carry far less weight in the
race it is running if it frankly cut itself clear of a theology with
which it has fundamentally no affinity. This indoctrination of an
idealistic dualism with a content of Christian theology probably
heightens the appeal of the system to those who are most at home in a
new faith as they discover there the familiar phrases of their older
faith, but it weakens the fundamental Christian Science apologetic. I
think, however, we ought justly to recognize this as simply an
inevitable aspect in the transition of Christian Science from the
orthodox faith and experience of historic Christianity to a faith and
experience of its own.
Seen as a curious half-truth development made possible by a whole group
of forces in action at the end of the nineteenth century, Christian
Science is reasonably intelligible, but as a system of doctrine built
upon the hitherto accepted bases of Christian fact and teaching, it is
not intelligible at all and the long controversy between the Christian
theologian and the Christian Science lecturer would best be ended by
recognizing that they have so little in common as to make attack and
counter-attack a movement in two different dimensions. The one thing
which they have in common is a certain set of words and phrases, but
these words and phrases have such entirely different meanings on the one
side and the other as to make the use of them hopelessly misleading.
_The Atonement. The Cross of Christian Science and the Cross of
Theology_
There are passing references to the Cross in "Science and Health," but
the word is used generally in a figurative and sentimental way. Mrs.
Eddy's cross is simply the pain of being misunderstood and criticised in
the preaching and practice of Christian Science, though indeed the Cross
of Jesus was also the outcome of hostilities and misunderstandings and a
final and terribly fierce method of criticism. One feels that mainly she
is thinking of her own cross as a misunderstood and abused woman and for
such suggestion she prefers the Cup as a figure to the Cross. As for the
Atonement "every pang of repentance and suffering, every effort for
reform, every good thought and deed will help us to understand Jesus'
Atonement for sin and aid its efficacy."[53] "Wisdom and Love require
many sacrifices of self to save us from sin." All this seems to be in
line with the moral theory of the atonement until we see that in such a
line as this there is no recognition of the fact that again and again we
suffer and that largely for others, and when she adds that "Its [the
atonement] scientific explanation is that suffering is an error of
sinful sense which Truth destroys, and that eventually both sin and
suffering will fall at the feet of everlasting love" (page 23), those
passages cancel one another, for if suffering be "an error of sinful
sense" it is hard to see how any pang of it can help us to understand
Jesus' atonement unless His suffering be also "an error of sinful
sense," and this is to reduce the atonement to a like error.
[Footnote 53: Page 19.]
In another connection Mrs. Eddy finds the efficacy of the Crucifixion
"in the practical affection and goodness it demonstrated for mankind."
But this turns out to be nothing more than that the Crucifixion offers
Christ a needed opportunity for the instruction of His disciples to
triumph over the grave. But since in another connection we are told He
never died at all (chapter Atonement and Eucharist, paragraph "Jesus in
the tomb") even this dissolves into unreality. Moreover the "eternal
Christ in His spiritual selfhood never suffered."[54] Whichever road she
takes here Mrs. Eddy reaches an impasse. It ought to be said, in justice
to Mrs. Eddy, that her treatment of the atonement reflects the
difficulty she found in the theology in which she had been trained as a
girl and that there are many true insights in her contentions. She was
at least seeking a vital and constructive interpretation and doubtless
her observations, confused as they are, have been for her followers a
real way out of a real difficulty. Here, as in so many other regions,
"Science and Health" is best understood by its backgrounds.
[Footnote 54: A curious and far-off echo of early Docetism which also in
its own way reduced Christ's suffering to a simple seeming to suffer.]
As a matter of fact there is in Christian Science absolutely no soil in
which to plant the Cross as the Cross is understood in Christian
theology. There is no place in Christian Science for vicarious
atonement, whether by God or man; there is little place in Christian
Science for redemptive suffering; there is a rather narrow region in
which suffering may be considered as instructive, a guide, perhaps, to
lead us out of unhappy or shadowed regions into the regions of physical
and, maybe, spiritual and moral well-being, and to quench the love of
sin.[55] Mrs. Eddy sometimes speaks of Christ as the Saviour but if her
system be pressed to a logical conclusion she must empty the word of all
the associations which it has hitherto had and make it simply the
equivalent of a teacher or demonstrator.
[Footnote 55: Page 36. But this is to recognize the reality of
suffering. Mrs. Eddy is here on the threshold of a great truth--that
suffering is an aspect of education--but she goes no further.]
_Sin an Error of Mortal Mind_
Sin along with sickness and death are the projections of mortal error,
the creations of mortal mind; sin, sickness and death are to be
classified as effects of error. Christ came "to destroy the belief of
sin." All this is to root sin simply in the mind. No intimation at all
here of the part which a perverted will may play in the entanglements of
life; no intimation of the immense force of the emotional side of life;
no intimation here of the immense part which sheer selfishness plays.
Mrs. Eddy's sin is far too simple. There is, once more, a sound reason
for that. Mrs. Eddy is twice-born, if you will, but the struggle from
which she finally emerged with whatever measure of victory she attained
was not fought out with conscience as the field of battle, or in the
final reconciliation of a divided self finding unity and peace on some
high level.
If Mrs. Eddy's true struggle was of the soul and not of complaining
nerves she has left no record of it anywhere. It was rather the reaction
of a speculative mind against the New England theology. Her experience
is strangely remote from the experience of Saul of Tarsus, or Augustine,
or John Bunyan. This is not to deny that in the practical outcome of
Christian Science as evidenced in the life of its adherents there is not
a very real power of helpful moral adjustment, but the secret of that
must be sought in something else than either its philosophy or its
theology. Christian theologians themselves have been by no means agreed
as to what sin really is. Under their touch it became too often a
theological abstraction rather than entanglement of personality caught
in manifold urgencies and pulled this way and that by competing forces
battling in the will and flaming in passion and desire. But a sin which
has no reality save through a mistaken belief in its existence is
certainly as far from the fact of a world like ours as is a sin which is
only one factor in a scheme of redemption.
But at any rate, if sin have no reality except our mistaken persuasion
that it be true and if we are delivered from it directly we cease to
believe in it and affirm in the stead of it the reality of love and
goodness, then while there may be in such a faith as this both the need
and possibility of the recasting of our personal lives, there is in it
neither need nor possibility of the Christian doctrine of the atonement.
Naturally since man is incapable of sin, sickness and death, he is
unfallen, nor is "his capacity or freedom to sin any part of the divine
plan." "A mortal sinner is not God's man. Mortals are the counterfeits
of immortals; they are the children of the wicked one, or the one evil
which declares that man begins in dust or as a material embryo" (page
475).
Here also is an echo from an early time and a far-off land. It is not
likely that Mrs. Eddy ever heard of Mani or Manicheeism, or knew to what
a travail of soul St. Augustine was reduced when he fought his way
through just a kindred line of teaching which, to save God from any
contact with or responsibility for evil, affirmed our dual genesis and
made us on one side children of darkness and on the other the children
of light, without ever really trying to achieve in a single personality
any reconciliation of two natures drawn from two entirely different
sources. Nor does Mrs. Eddy know that one Eusebius, finding much
evidence of this faith in the Christianity of the fourth century,
dismissed it briefly enough as "an insane heresy." Heresy it certainly
was for all those who were fighting their way out of their paganism into
an ordered Christian faith and whether it be insane or no, it is of all
the explanations which have been offered for the presence of evil in a
world supposedly ruled by the love and goodness of God, the one which
will least bear examination. It has been dead and buried these thousand
years.
We may deny, if we are so minded, any freedom of the will at all, so
involving ourselves in an inevitable sequence of cause and effect as to
make us also simply weather-vanes driven east or west by winds of
inheritance and environment which we have no power to deflect and to
which we can only choose to respond. But to deny us the freedom to sin
and so to shut us up to a determinism of goodness is no more in accord
with the facts than to deny us the power to be good and shut us up to a
determinism of sin. If we are free at all we are free in all directions.
_The Sacraments Disappear. Mrs. Eddy's Theology a Reaction from the
Rigid Evangelicism of Her Youth_
"Science and Health" deals in the same radical way with the sacraments.
Nothing at all, apparently, is made of baptism save that Mrs. Eddy says
our baptism is a purification from all error. In her account of the Last
Supper the cup is mostly dwelt upon and that only as showing forth the
bitter experience of Jesus. The bread "is the great truth of spiritual
being, healing the sick" and the breaking of it the "explaining" it to
others. More is made of what is called the last spiritual breakfast with
the Disciples by Lake Galilee than of the Last Supper in the upper room.
"This spiritual meeting with our Lord in the dawn of a new light is the
morning meal which Christian Scientists commemorate" (page 35). "Our
bread," she says, "which cometh down from heaven, is Truth; our wine,
the inspiration of Love" (page 35). All this is of a piece with the
general allegorical use of the Old and New Testaments in "Science and
Health," but it is a marked departure from the sacrament of the Lord's
Supper even in the simple memorial way in which it is kept by
non-liturgical churches.
Mrs. Eddy's theology, then, is in part a reaction from the hard phrasing
of the evangelical doctrines in which she was trained and it is indeed
in part a reaching out toward the interpretation of these doctrines in
terms of life and experience, but as a theology it is extraordinarily
loose and even though the familiar phrases of Protestant and Catholic
faiths are employed, what is left is wholly out of the current of the
main movement of Christian theology heretofore. The central articles of
the historic creeds practically disappear under Mrs. Eddy's treatment.
Here, then, is a philosophy which will not bear examination, a use of
Scripture which can possibly have no standing in any scholarly
fellowship, and a theology which empties the central Christian doctrines
of the great meanings which have heretofore been associated with them.
And yet in spite of all this, Christian Science gets on and commends
itself to so considerable a number of really sincere people as to make
it evident enough that it must have some kind of appealing and
sustaining power. Where, then, is the hiding of its power? Partly, of
course, in its spaciousness. There are times when a half-truth has a
power which the whole truth does not seem to possess. Half truths can be
accepted unqualifiedly; they are capable of a more direct appeal and if
they be skillfully directed toward needs and perplexities they are
always sure of an acceptance; they make things too simple, that is one
secret of their hold upon us. This, of course, is more largely true
among the spiritually undisciplined and the mentally untrained, but even
the wisest folk find it easier upon occasion to accept a half truth
which promises an easy satisfaction or deliverance than a whole truth
which needs to be wrestled with and may be agonized over before it
brings us into some better estate.
_The Real Power of Christian Science is in Neither Its Philosophy Nor
Its Theology_
We have already seen what predisposing influences there were in the
breaking down of what we have called the accepted validations of
historic Christianity--due, as we have seen also, to many contributing
causes--to offer unusual opportunity to any new movement which promised
deliverance. But one must seek the conditions which have made possible
so many strange cults and movements in America, not only in the
breakdown of the historic faiths, but also in the state of popular
education. Democracy tends, among other things, to lead us to value a
movement by the number of people whom it is able to attract. We are,
somehow, persuaded that once a majority has accepted anything, what they
have accepted must be true and right. Even a strong minority always
commands respect. Any movement, therefore, which succeeds in attracting
a considerable number of followers is bound to attract others also, just
because it has already attracted so many. One has only to listen to the
current comment on Christian Science to feel that this is a real factor
in its growth.
Democracy believes in education, but has not commonly the patience to
make education thoroughgoing. Its education is very much more likely to
be a practical or propaganda education than such training as creates
the analytical temper and supplies those massive backgrounds by which
the departures of a day are always to be tested. In America particularly
there is an outstanding want of background. It needs history,
philosophy, economic understanding and a wealth of racial experience to
give to any people either the power to quickly discriminate between the
truth and the half-truth, or to carry itself with poise through a
transitional period. But one may not dispose of the distinct hold of
Christian Science upon its followers by such generalizations. The real
inwardness of no religion can ever be known from its theology. A sincere
devotion may attend a most deficient theology and we need to be
charitable in judging the forms which other people's faith takes. What
seems unreasonable to one may seem quite right to another and whatever
carries a sincere faith deepening into a positive spiritual experience
accomplishes for the moment its purpose. These studies of Christian
Science are severe--for one must deal with it as honestly as he knows
how--but the writer does not mean that they should fail in a due
recognition of the spiritual sincerity of Christian Scientists. We must
therefore go in to what is most nearly vitally central in the system to
find the real secret of its powers. It continues and grows as a system
of healing and a religion.