The Religio-Medical Masquerade
A Complete Exposure of Christian Science
By
FREDERICK W. PEABODY, LL.B.
OF THE BOSTON BAR
THE HANCOCK PRESS
BOSTON, MASS.
Copyright, 1910
BY
Frederick W. Peabody
The price of this book is $1.00.
Mailed to any address upon receipt of price and eight cents in
stamps for postage.
The Hancock-Press, Post-Office Box 2789, Boston, Mass.
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. The Sacrifice of Children
II. The Detached Heart
III. Pretended Equality with Jesus
IV. The Faked “Revelation”
V. The Fiction of God’s Authorship
VI. A Sham “Religion”
VII. A Bogus Healing System
VIII. Immeasurable Greed
IX. The Eddy Autocracy
X. The “String” on the Gifts
XI. The Eddy Ban on Marriage
XII. Christian Science Witchcraft
Introduction
Christian Science is the most shallow and sordid and wicked
imposture of the ages. Upon a substratum of lies a foundation of
false pretense has been laid, upon which has been built a
superstructure of outward beauty in which multitudes of credulous
people gather to glorify the founder as God’s chief anointed.
Never before has the world witnessed a masquerade like that of
Christian Science. Being everything that Christianity is not, it
puts on the garb of Christianity and seizes the name of Christ
the better to attract and the more strongly to hold people of
shallow mind, but sincere heart. Having nothing in it remotely
worthy of the name of science, it meaninglessly appropriates
scientific terms and phrases in order to parade before the world
with an air of learning.
The founder of this pretended religion, this bogus healing
system, audaciously and irreligiously professing equality of
character and of power with Jesus, has, throughout her whole long
life, been in every particular precisely antithetical to Christ.
Sordid, mercenary, unprincipled, the consuming passion of her
life has been the accumulation of money, and she has stopped at
no falsehood, no fraud and no greater wickedness that seemed to
put her in the way of adding to her accumulations, or overcoming
her supposed enemies.
Jesus condemned nothing so forcefully as the mercenary spirit.
With a whip he scourged the money changers from the Temple, and
in language that burned as flaming fire he denounced the
hypocrites and liars of his time as “like unto whited sepulchers
that are indeed beautiful outward, but within are full of dead
men’s bones and all uncleanness.”
If the language of this book seem severe, if its denunciations
are emphatic, if things are called by their right names and facts
handled without the least equivocation, if contrasts are drawn
between the founder of Christianity and the founder of Christian
Science that seem to border upon the irreverent, let it not be
assumed that there is in the heart of the author the slightest
particle of personal animosity, or in his attitude toward real
Christianity and Christ anything but the most complete reverence.
It is time the plain facts should be stated in plain terms, that
the hand of truth should ruthlessly tear away the mask of
falsehood from the face of hypocrisy and expose to the horrified
gaze of mankind the hideous lineaments upon which are indelibly
and unmistakably written the craft and insincerity of utter
selfishness and monstrous greed, and the hardness of a cruelty
almost unbelievable.
Without egotism, I may say that no other man knows, as I know,
the true inwardness of Christian Science, because no other man
has come face to face with it again and again on so many
occasions as I have, and no other has been in the position I have
to force from the lips of reluctant witnesses, under the sanction
of an oath, unwilling and discrediting testimony.
Ten years ago I knew nothing and cared less about Christian
Science, assuming it to be a sincere, but deluded, manifestation
of the childish credulity to which the human race is prone. But
ten years of investigations and repeated professional
employments, in which it became my duty as a lawyer to get at the
actual facts with the aid of legal process, have qualified me, as
no other not having had my experience can be qualified, to set
forth the amazing story in utter nakedness. In order that it may
appear that I am talking from a basis of knowledge, and not of
rumor or gossip or speculation, let me briefly narrate the
professional experiences above referred to.
My first encounter with Christian Science came about through an
employment by the Arena Company, publishers of the _Arena_
magazine, in 1899. In the May number of the magazine for that
year an article by Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury, that was in the
nature of an _exposé_ of Christian Science, was published, and
instead of bringing suit against Mrs. Woodbury or the magazine
for the statements contained in the article, an endeavor was
made, in Mrs. Eddy’s interest, to suppress the magazine by a suit
in equity to restrain its publication based upon the
incorporation in the article of a photograph of Mrs. Eddy said to
have been copyrighted. The Arena Company retained me to represent
its interests in the litigation, and during that employment I was
brought in contact with the author of the article, and from her
got my first inkling of the real character of Mrs. Mary Baker G.
Eddy, and her religio-medical-commercial system.
Mrs. Woodbury had been a Christian Scientist for many years,
during a long portion of which time she enjoyed Mrs. Eddy’s
confidence as one of her leading lieutenants. She had accumulated
many letters from Mrs. Eddy, and all her published utterances,
whether in book or pamphlet form, from the beginning of the
movement down to that time. Mrs. Woodbury was a woman of
forceful, dominating personality, of much greater culture than
Mrs. Eddy and the rank and file of her following, and in course
of time she attracted to herself a personal popularity and
influence that so threatened Mrs. Eddy’s, that it became
important, if her ascendency was to be maintained unimpaired,
that Mrs. Woodbury be cast into outer darkness and her influence
wholly destroyed. Occasion was readily found for this and, in due
time, without warning, without a notice of the charges made
against her, and without an opportunity to be heard, Mrs.
Woodbury was excommunicated from the Boston Christian Science
Church and cut off from fellowship with the faithful. This placed
her in a position where rational reflection was forced upon her,
and she speedily came to the necessary conclusion that she had
been duped.
Arriving at this conclusion, with a courage much to be admired
Mrs. Woodbury wrote and published in the _Arena_ magazine the
article to which I have referred, and in unmeasured terms laid
open the sinister and sordid quality of the whole movement, and
exposed the consummate selfishness and greed in the heart of its
“founder.” The article went forth in the _Arena_, and
Christian-Sciencedom was up in arms. Mr. Septimus J. Hanna, then
editor of the _Christian Science Journal_, Mrs. Eddy’s organ,
hastened to Concord, New Hampshire, to confer with Mrs. Eddy
regarding ways and means of meeting it, and the method of
squaring the account with Mrs. Woodbury was considered and
determined.
Let it be remembered that the article in the _Arena_ was
published in the May, 1899, number. Almost immediately after the
appearance of the article, Mrs. Woodbury’s husband, to whom she
had been much devoted, died and pæans of rejoicing went up from
the Christian Scientists that the Judge of all the world had thus
righteously punished one who had dared to assail the sanctified
personality of “God’s voice to this age.”
Mrs. Eddy’s personal opportunity came in the month of June, 1899,
when, in her annual message to the “Mother Church” in Boston, she
undertook to dispose once and for all of Mrs. Woodbury. In
language, seldom or never before equaled for cruelty and
brutality, Mrs. Eddy assailed Mrs. Woodbury. Pretending, herself,
to be the woman “clothed with the sun,” spoken of in the Book of
Revelation, Mrs. Eddy denounced Mrs. Woodbury as the Babylonish
woman there referred to. She said:
“The doom of the Babylonish woman referred to in Revelation is
being fulfilled. This woman, drunken with the blood of the
saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, drunk of the
wine of her fornication, would enter even the church and
retaining the heart of the harlot and the purpose of the
destroying angel … poison such as drink of the living water.”
And further: “And a voice was heard saying, come out of her my
people and hearken not to her lies that ye receive not her
plagues, for her sins have reached unto Heaven and God hath
remembered her iniquities. Double unto her double, according to
her work: in the cup which she hath filled, fill to her double.
For she saith in her heart I am no widow.… Therefore shall her
plague come in one day, death, mourning and famine: for strong
is the Lord God who judgeth her. That which the revelator saw
in spiritual vision will be accomplished. The Babylonish woman
is fallen: and who shall mourn over the widowhood of lust, of
her that hath become the habitation of devils, and the hold of
every foul spirit and the cage of every unclean bird.”
I make no defense of Mrs. Woodbury’s absurdities when she was a
Christian Scientist. She went the limit. Nothing could have
exceeded her confidence in Mrs. Eddy’s teachings and her zeal for
the cause; but I am absolutely certain that there was nothing in
Mrs. Woodbury’s life in the slightest degree justifying the
reflections upon her chastity, and Mrs. Eddy’s attack was utterly
baseless and wanton and purely vengeful.
Immediately upon publication of this message and its public
reading in the “Mother Church” in Boston, all Christian
Scientists recognized the person thus assailed. Either from
native shrewdness, or by advice of friends or perhaps of lawyers,
Mrs. Eddy had abstained from using Mrs. Woodbury’s name in the
message; but no Christian Scientists anywhere had any doubt that
Mrs. Woodbury was the subject of Mrs. Eddy’s attack and, on every
hand, Christian Scientists openly expressed their gratification
that Mrs. Woodbury had thus been finally suppressed. The next day
after the publication, I asked a Christian Scientist with whom I
was intimately acquainted, whom Mrs. Eddy referred to in the
passage quoted from her message. The unhesitating response was,
“Why, that vile Mrs. Woodbury, of course.”
The acquaintance, begun with Mrs. Woodbury through my employment
by the Arena Company, developed into the relationship of attorney
and client after the publication of Mrs. Eddy’s message; and it
was determined to bring suit against Mrs. Eddy for this attack
and against other Christian Science officials responsible for its
publication. Before beginning, I advised Mrs. Woodbury that, as
she was not named in the article, her identity at the trial could
only be established by persons who understood her to be referred
to, and I asked her if she believed that prominent Christian
Scientists, who had openly avowed such an understanding, could be
relied upon to tell the truth upon the witness stand. She assured
me of her confident belief that they could and that none of them
would go upon the witness stand and deliberately commit perjury;
but at the time of the trial, having called as witnesses only
those close to Mrs. Eddy who had made avowal of their
understanding that Mrs. Woodbury was the subject of Mrs. Eddy’s
attack, none of them admitted that, at the time of the
publication, they had any such understanding. As the language was
wholly unintelligible to any one but Christian Scientists, the
suit necessarily failed; but it would not have failed if, at that
time, I had had the familiarity I now have with Mrs. Eddy’s
private correspondence; for I should have been able to introduce
in evidence letters of hers clearly showing that Mrs. Woodbury
was the Babylonish woman of her message.
In the course of the preparation for the trial of this case, all
of Mrs. Woodbury’s letters from Mrs. Eddy and all of Mrs. Eddy’s
published utterances from the beginning down to that time,
including every edition of her book, “Science and Health,” and
every number of the _Christian Science Journal_, were turned over
to me by my client and studied with most thorough and painstaking
care. Then it was I learned that Christian Science was a
deliberate fraud foisted upon mankind by Mrs. Eddy in the name of
religion for the mere purpose of extorting money from credulous
people. Since that time I have been intensely interested in
following the matter up and adding to my store of facts, until
now I am confident that no man can read this book, no man and no
woman who has not parted with every scrap of sanity and who
retains elemental decency in his or her heart, and not be in
entire accord with my conclusions.
Some time after the Woodbury-Eddy litigation, I was retained by
Rev. Minot J. Savage, then of New York City, to collect for him,
and at his expense, in legally evidential form, the facts showing
unmistakably Mrs. Eddy’s false pretense and fraud, and in
pursuance of this employment I examined numerous individuals and
took their statements under oath for Mr. Savage. Later, when
_McClure’s_ magazine undertook the publication of the facts of
Mrs. Eddy’s career, I was employed to procure the sworn
statements of many individuals in support of the magazine’s
story, and shortly thereafter I was retained by Mrs. Eddy’s two
sons, George W. Glover, born to her by her first husband, and
Edward J. Foster, her son by adoption, to cooperate with their
other lawyers, Hon. William E. Chandler, Ex-United States Senator
from New Hampshire being senior counsel, in the prosecution in
the courts of New Hampshire of a suit in equity for the
appointment of a receiver to have charge of their mother’s large
estate for her benefit, upon the ground that, through old age
mental weakness and delusions, if not actual insanity, she was
incompetent to have the care of it. This litigation never reached
a determination in the courts, but the family controversy was
ultimately settled by a family settlement in which the two sons
were paid approximately $300,000 for a relinquishment of their
prospective interest in their mother’s estate and an agreement
not to contest any will or other instrument disposing of her
property.
As the Massachusetts attorney in this litigation, it became my
duty in the City of Boston to examine, under oath, many of Mrs.
Eddy’s most intimate friends, and the highest officials of
organized Christian Science, who, by legal process, were
compelled to produce many hundreds of personal letters received
by them from her. This last professional experience completed my
understanding of Christian Science, and the facts herein set
forth are, almost without exception, based, either upon Mrs.
Eddy’s own published utterances, her private correspondence, the
sworn testimony of witnesses, or the admissions under oath of her
most confidential friends and followers; and I give my book to
the world with a full understanding of the responsibility I
assume and a complete willingness to justify in any legal
tribunal every statement I make.
Let it not be supposed, however, that I am presenting the
spectacle of a cowardly man attacking a weak and unprotected
woman. Mrs. Eddy is the head and front of a powerful and rich
organization, the leader of a movement that numbers many
thousands of adherents, amongst them some thousands of more or
less masculine men. She _is_ Christian Science, and Christian
Science _is_ Mrs. Eddy. Anything that money can buy or fanaticism
give is constantly at her disposal, and back of her, as behind
the greatest and the humblest, stands the sovereign law. Whoever
offends another, is accountable to the law; and if anything I say
offend against her right to enjoy the reputation warranted by her
life, I can and should be called to speedy and strict account. If
the contents of this book are not true, I, myself, proclaim that
the severest legal penalty would inadequately punish me for its
publication. If, on the other hand, what I say be true, as I am
confident there can be no doubt in any honest mind that follows
me to the end, then decent people, men or women, can no longer
afford to give the slightest countenance to Mary Baker G. Eddy
and her impostures, be they called by the name of religion, or be
they pretended cure-alls for the ills to which our human flesh is
heir.
I challenge Mrs. Eddy and the whole Christian Science combination
to dare to prosecute me for libel, and I affirm and shall
continue to affirm that their omission so to do is an
acknowledgment of the truth of every statement I make. She knows
I am telling nothing but the truth, and that the whole truth, to
be brought out upon a judicial investigation, would be more
damning than the truth as I have presented it. The whole truth
cannot be told outside of a judicial tribunal.
In presenting the substance of this book in the form of a lecture
to the people of the country, from one ocean to the other, the
only response has been slander and defamation of me, the last
resort of the accused who can make no defense; but nobody has met
my facts with anything like evidence, or undertaken in any
serious manner to disprove the truth of my most damaging charges.
I beg every one who reads this book not to be diverted from the
facts by any personal abuse of me that may follow its
publication. It is the only response that has been or can be made
to my presentation, and I am accustomed to it from the paid
spokesmen of a cult that, so far as its ruling spirits are
concerned, more resembles an organization of outlaws banded
together for plunder, than a religious establishment based upon
the sublime teachings of the Man of Sorrows.
The knowledge I possess I could not suppress without making
myself a party to one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated
against the human race; and I will not, by my silence, permit
myself to become an ally with Mrs. Eddy and her associates in
that crime.
History is but repeated in Christian Science. “We have seen,”
said Macaulay, “an old woman with no talents beyond the cunning
of a fortune teller, and with the education of a scullion,
exalted into a prophetess and surrounded by tens of thousands of
devoted followers, many of whom were, in station and in
knowledge, immeasurably her superiors, and all this in the
nineteenth century, and all this in London.”
Marveling as he thus did at the success of Joanna Southcott’s
parody upon religion in the early part of the last century, what
would Macaulay have thought of Mary Baker G. Eddy’s utterly
unintelligible hodge-podge, which she falsely calls both a
discovery and a revelation, a science and a religion, and what
would he have thought of her following?
Mrs. Eddy is in no respect superior to Miss Southcott in the
matter of origin and education. One was as obscure and as
unlearned as the other. In one respect at least the Southcott
woman was superior to the Eddy woman. The former was at least
honest; she believed in her mission. There is no evidence that
she built up a pretended religion upon a foundation of lies. She
was, at the worst, an unbalanced creature with a form of
religious mania. She did not grow rich out of her followers. She
did not use her supposed revelation as a business asset and sell
it for what it would bring. She did not take out a copyright on
her “religion,” and monopolize its sale for extraordinary profit.
There was no taint of commercialism about her frenzies. She died
poor.
The founder of Christian Science, on the contrary, is everything
that Joanna Southcott was not. She is mercenary, insincere,
shameless, and bold to a degree surpassing that of all other
persons who have duped mankind. Upon theft and falsehood she has
laid the foundations of the “religion” by the sale of which she
has accumulated a fortune.
F. W. P.
The Religio-Medical Masquerade
Chapter I
The Sacrifice of Children
At the very outset of a candid consideration of Christian
Science, I feel the necessity, if not of an apology, at least of
an explanation. I shall with entire freedom discuss a woman and a
combined religio-medical-commercial system of which she is the
founder. I shall handle the one and the other without the least
regard for anything but the truth. Mary Baker G. Eddy is the
woman, and Christian Science, so called, is the system; but they
are inseparable, identical. They have arisen and they will go
down together, and I predict that they will go down much more
rapidly than they have ascended.
I am going to hold up for the inspection of mankind the soul of a
woman, of a woman eighty-eight years of age, and I am going to do
it without regard to the fact that she is feminine and aged.
There is no other way to present Christian Science in its true
aspect. It rests exclusively upon Mrs. Eddy’s representations and
Mrs. Eddy’s character. If everything she has claimed regarding
herself and Christian Science as a religion and healing system be
absolutely false, then there is no justification for the
existence of Christian Science as a religion, or a healing
system, every church erected in its honor is but a monument to
the “Queen of frauds and hypocrites,” and every worshiper at its
shrines the dupe of a designing old woman who has laughed in her
sleeves at the ease with which she has gulled them.
While this is unmistakably true, it is, notwithstanding, most
distasteful to a man, if he be half a man, publicly to assail the
character of a woman, and nothing under heaven can justify it, if
she be in private life and not putting forth nor seeking to put
forth an influence upon the lives of others; but if she have
constituted herself sponsor for a religion of lies and a medical
system that is a fraud and a shame, if she profess God imparted
knowledge of everything needful for human bodies and souls, if
she reach out her influence to all parts of the land and seek to
govern hundreds of thousands of people in every detail of their
daily lives, and if her influence be harmful and only harmful, it
is the duty of a man, who knows the facts, to make them public,
regardless of sex or age or anything whatever but the public
good. And so I ask my readers to believe that while for Mrs.
Eddy, the feeble and palsied old woman tottering on the very
verge of the grave, I have feelings only of compassion; for Mrs.
Eddy, the charlatan and adventuress, for Mrs. Eddy, the impious
pretender to equality with Jesus, the fraudulent claimant of
exclusive and immediate revelation from God, for Mrs. Eddy, upon
whose altar of greed have been sacrificed the harmony and
happiness of marriage, the natural love and tenderness of parents
and the sweet lives of God only knows how many children, for Mrs.
Eddy, the heartless and avaricious despot of multitudes of
despoiled and demented dupes, for that woman, as there is no
sympathy in my heart, so there shall be no charity in my speech.
Now, who is Mrs. Eddy, and what is this strange thing called
Christian Science?
As I understand her, Mrs. Eddy is the inventor and sole
proprietor of the greatest get-rich-quick concern ever conceived.
Her business—there is no religion about it, and her writings may
be searched from end to end without finding a line about the
worship of God—her business converts into cash the very highest
emotions of the human soul by an appeal to religious feeling and
extorts huge sums of money from multitudes of credulous people
for healing them of nothing but the delusion that there is
something the matter with them. Christian Science never cured any
one of anything but imaginary illness; it never relieved any one
of any real evil—but his money.
Mrs. Eddy, boldly professing to have received a revelation from
God, and to be the equal of Jesus Christ, has made upwards of a
million and a half dollars out of her enterprise that she calls
Christian Science since she reached sixty years of age; and, if
some be inclined to infer therefrom the possession by her of
extraordinary genius, I cannot agree with them. Mrs. Eddy has
succeeded, not because of her greatness, but because of the
avidity with which unreasoning people swallow the most monstrous
absurdities, the shamelessness with which men and women will
intellectually prostrate themselves before the coarsest vulgarity
and the most patent fraud.
Let me illustrate this, if I can. It is no part of my undertaking
to account for Mrs. Eddy’s following. The fact that she has some
thousands of followers does not, of itself, prove the truth of
any of her teachings or pretensions. There was never any
religious pretender yet, who could not, with slight effort,
obtain a hearing and a following. I recently observed, in one of
our daily papers, an account of an amusing incident of this
character in Oklahoma. A man, believing himself to be the
incarnation of Almighty God, started out to convert the world to
his belief, and considered it to be his mission, in the first
instance, to persuade mankind to divest themselves of clothes.
The first man he encountered was his next-door neighbor and the
first woman his next-door neighbor’s wife, and they were easily
persuaded of the man’s divine mission, and that it was God’s wish
that they should revert to primitive nakedness. So the three
doffed the attire of civilization and perambulated into the
adjoining town, naked as they came into the world. A police
officer, who encountered them upon the street, with averted eyes
hustled them into a van and carted them off to the nearest police
station, where they were compelled to assume at least the outward
garb of decency and sanity. This only shows how true it is that
the religious impostor has no difficulty in making converts, and
that the first person he converts is usually the first he
encounters.
I am continually met with the inquiry, “If Christian Science is
an absolute fraud, how do you account for the fact that so many
intelligent people are Christian Scientists?”
In the first place, many people may be intelligent enough about
the ordinary affairs of life, and utterly imbecile upon religious
matters. History has again and again shown that in no respect are
people so easily credulous and so readily victimized as in
respect to religious things. Doubtless there are intelligent
people in Christian Science; but the whole cult is not numerous,
and the intelligent minority is a negligible quantity.
In the latest bulletin of religious statistics, published by the
Federal Government in 1909, the total number of Christian
Scientists is given as 85,717; but it is stated that a large
portion, at least half, of the membership of the “Mother Church”
in Boston is counted twice in this estimate; for the 41,634
membership of this Boston church is largely composed of
non-residents, who are also members of other churches. So at
least 20,000 must be deducted from the total of 85,717 in order
to get at anything like an accurate estimate, which cannot be far
from 65,000. These are the government’s figures for 1906,
although Mrs. Eddy definitely stated that there were a million
Christian Scientists as long ago as 1883.
Now, admitting that amongst this 65,000 people there are
intelligent persons, I make the affirmation boldly that not one
of them ever went into Christian Science _because_ of his
intelligence but notwithstanding and in _spite_ of it. Let me
make plain this non-intelligent attitude of its devotees toward
Christian Science.
The religious service in a Christian Science church contains no
original utterance from the pulpit. There is no preacher
connected with any Christian Science church, and the individuals
officiating from the platform are called readers, the first
reader being a man, who reads from Mrs. Eddy’s book, and the
second reader being a woman, who reads from the Bible. The sermon
consists exclusively of the alternate reading, by the second
reader of passages from the Bible, and by the first reader of
alleged interpretative passages from Mrs. Eddy’s book, “Science
and Health,” which is called by her, “The Key to the Scriptures.”
Mr. Arthur G. Frisbie of Cleveland, Ohio, an absolutely sincere
and honest man, was for many years the first reader of the
leading Christian Science church in that city. He became,
however, convinced, as every sincere and honest person, who
retains any remnant of analytical power sooner or later must,
that the thing was a monstrous fraud, and he now denounces it in
no less unmeasured terms than my own. Mr. Frisbie tells me that
during all the time he was officiating as first reader in the
church and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book, try as hard as he might he
could discover no slightest relation between the Bible passages
read by the second reader and the “Science and Health”
interpretative passages read by himself. Any one who cares to
make the experiment may demonstrate this for himself if he will
get a copy of the _Christian Science Quarterly_ in which the
so-called Sermon Lessons are outlined. Such a test will show that
there is no more connection between the Biblical passages and
those selected and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book than there would be
if “Mother Goose” or “Robinson Crusoe” were used as interpreters
of the Scriptures. And yet I have sat in a Christian Science
church and seen thousands of the faithful, with nothing less than
ecstatic expressions upon their countenances, listening to
readings that were absolutely unintelligible to both readers and
hearers. So I say that the only possible way to be a Christian
Scientist is to completely subordinate intelligence to feeling
and approximate as nearly as possible the ideal condition
pictured by Mrs. Eddy when she says, “The less mind there is
manifested in matter, the better.”
Before passing from this point, I can’t refrain from
incorporating here, for the benefit of mankind, the sage summary
of a man whom I regard as the very wisest of living estimators of
human qualities. I refer, of course, to Mark Twain. His opinion
of why Mrs. Eddy has so many followers is most informing. In a
letter to me some few years ago, Mr. Clemens said:
“Have I given you the impression that I was combating Xn
Science? or that I am caring how the Xn Scientists ‘hail’ my
articles? Relieve yourself of those errors. I wrote the
articles to please MYSELF; and it had not occurred to me to
care what the ‘Scientists’ might think of them. I am not
combating Xn Science—I haven’t a thing in the world against it.
Making fun of that shameless old swindler, Mother Eddy, is the
only thing about it I take any interest in. At bottom I suppose
I take a private delight in seeing the human race making an ass
of itself again—which it has always done whenever it had a
chance. That’s its affair—it has the right—and it will sweat
blood for it a century hence, and for many centuries
thereafter.
“It distresses me a little to hear you talk about ‘sanity in
the affairs of men.’ So far as I know, men have never shown any
noticeable degree of sanity in their affairs, and to me it
seems rather large flattery to intimate that they are capable
of it.
“See them get down and worship that old creature. A century
hence, they’ll all be at it. Sanity—in the human race! This is
really fulsome.”
There is no other possible explanation than this of Mrs. Eddy’s
success. It is based, as Mark Twain says, upon the irresistible
propensity of the human race to make an ass of itself every time
it gets a chance. It is astounding, but it is a fact, that by
many thousands of people in the United States in the year of
grace 1910 this aged, illiterate, unprincipled, vulgar woman is
regarded as the agent and representative of the Almighty God. I
do not know how many times I have been told that because I have
endeavored to make the people of the country understand that
Christian Science is based wholly upon Mrs. Eddy’s falsehoods, I
am therefore irreverently assailing the Almighty upon His throne.
I confess I am not much disturbed by this particular criticism,
because I feel that, if it be a fact, the Almighty will deal with
me indulgently, knowing the integrity of my motives, and that,
however aggressive I may become, the Almighty is in no danger.
The more I have studied and learned of the life of this strange
creature and the more closely I have observed her effect upon the
lives of those who come under her sway, the more strongly I am
convinced of the harmfulness of her influence. It is literally
derationalizing thousands of people, it is turning multitudes
from the pursuit of knowledge and steeping them in a superstition
worse than that of the Middle Ages. It is remorselessly
separating husband and wife, parent and child. It is the mother
and promoter of a new-old witchcraft which has so taken
possession of the minds and lives of people that they live in
constant terror of its supposed baneful work. This Christian
Science witchcraft has reached the proportion amongst the
faithful almost of panic, and of it more hereafter. But of all of
the harmful influences of this alleged medical science, which is
an unmitigated nonsense or deviltry, and of this alleged religion
which, so far as its founder is concerned, is the very
quintessence of irreverence and hypocrisy, of all of the evil
consequences of the life and work of this monumental imposture,
the unrelieved suffering of helpless children is the worst.
Mrs. Eddy teaches and her followers believe that God has revealed
to her, as absolute truth, that sickness, pain and suffering do
not in reality exist, and many are the deluded mothers upon whom
this belief has taken so fast a hold that they permit their
helpless children to suffer and to die without the slightest
effort to alleviate the suffering, and with the continued
iteration and reiteration of the insane notion that the child
cannot be sick and cannot suffer, because sickness and suffering
are unreal. Meantime the sickness of the child is real, the
suffering terribly real, and after protracted suffering it dies
without the turning of a hand to relieve its pain or to save its
life. Those sane parents who have endured the anguish of seeing
their child suffer, say from abscess in the ear, or from any one
of the other forms of torture with which nature stretches our
little ones upon beds of pain, will appreciate the enormity of
this crime.
I recently talked with a lady who had been visiting her Christian
Science sister whose little boy, eight or ten years of age,
became sick during my friend’s visit. He went to his mother and
said, “Mother, I have a terrible pain and feel very sick, and
think I ought to have a doctor.”
What did the Christian Science mother do? Did she coddle the
little fellow, take off his clothes and put him to bed and tell
him the good doctor would soon be there and that he would be all
well again very shortly? Nothing of the kind. “Richard,” she
said, “it is very wrong of you to talk that way, when you have
that error of belief. You know you are not sick, Richard, and
cannot be sick; you know how to treat yourself when you have that
false belief. Treat yourself, run away and play, and don’t bother
me any more.”
Little Richard turned from his Christian Science mother and
resumed his play, so long as he could stagger about on his little
feet and keep up the sad pretense. And when he could not keep on
his feet any longer, he sat down upon the floor with his toys
about him, moaning with pain and holding his hand upon his side.
Meantime his Christian Science mother busied herself about her
family duties, totally ignoring him.
The time came when little Richard could not any longer sit up and
completely lost interest in his toys; and then he fell over upon
the floor, and died—died with his clothes on, died with his toys
about him, died absolutely neglected by his mother in his
extremity, died without the slightest sane endeavor to save his
life.
And so it is everywhere in Christian Science families throughout
the length and breadth of this land. Nothing but the employment
of a fool-man or a fool-woman, called a Christian Science healer,
to administer a Christian Science treatment, which consists only
of the inaudible repetition of Mrs. Eddy’s meaningless jargon,
can be done by a Christian Science parent to save the life of his
child without repudiating Mrs. Eddy’s fundamental teaching that
sickness is unreal and giving the lie to her “inspired” insanity
that there are no such things as pain and death.
Who has not, for years past, read such items as these in the
daily papers? “Christian Science parent arrested. Mr. and Mrs.
Goodwin’s twelve years’ old child died without medical
attendance.”
Again: “Jail term for Christian Scientist Brine, who let his
six-year-old child die without medical attendance.”
Again: “No medicine for dying boy. Public prosecutor to take up
case of year-old son of Frank A. Black, who died on Saturday
without medical attendance.”
Again: “Mr. and Mrs. Edwin M. Watson, Christian Scientists,
convicted of voluntary manslaughter for failure to provide
medical attendance for their seven-year-old child, Granville.”
Again: “Little Esther Quimby, the seven-year-old daughter of Mr.
and Mrs. Quimby, Christian Scientists, allowed to die of
malignant diphtheria without attendance of a doctor.”
There was in this country in the neighborhood of 5,000
advertising Christian Science healers, so called, and their
patients are largely women and children. If each of them has but
one patient a day, there are over a million and a half lives
annually placed under their senseless and impotent ministrations.
As they doubtless average many more than one a day, their
patients are in the aggregate many millions a year, largely
women, still more largely children. There are no statistics
showing the mortality of such patients, for it is the practice of
these healers to conceal their operations by calling in a
physician at the last moment to qualify him to give the necessary
death certificate, in order that there may be no investigation of
their criminal practices. It cannot be doubted, however, that the
sacrifice of child life to this stupid and cruel monster runs up
into the hundreds, if not the thousands, annually. Could anything
be more hideous?
But what, may I ask, does Mary Baker G. Eddy care about the
sacrifice of children, so only that her bank account continue to
grow and grow and grow?
Her concern for children generally may be somewhat judged by her
regard for the only child she ever brought into the world. Mrs.
Eddy, when she was Mrs. Glover, in September, 1844, gave birth to
her only child, a son, whom she named after his father, George
Washington Glover. As a young infant, George lived at his aunt’s
house with his mother, who, however, frequently sent him on long
visits to the family of John Varney, the hired man (in whose lap
it was her custom, when a young widow, to be rocked to sleep at
night), and also to Mahala Sanborn, who had attended her at the
boy’s birth.
When he was seven years old, Miss Sanborn, who had become Mrs.
Cheeney, took him, at his mother’s request, permanently to live
with her in North Groton, New Hampshire, where he was from 1851
to 1857, when the Cheeneys moved to Enterprise, Minnesota, taking
George with them. During the larger part of his life in North
Groton, Mrs. Eddy lived in the same town, but she seldom saw him,
and did nothing for him. She abandoned him, in other words, to an
entirely illiterate person who had lived as a servant in her
father’s family. As her father said, she acted “just like an old
ewe sheep that would not own its lamb.”
Mrs. Eddy now pretends that she was obliged to give up her child
because her second husband, Patterson, would not have him in the
house. This seems to me a poor reason for a woman to abandon her
infant child, but it is not true in Mrs. Eddy’s case, because she
did not acquire Mr. Patterson until years after she had
permanently abandoned her child. So complete was her neglect, so
utter her abandonment of him that at the age of sixty-five this
man, born of New England parents, can neither read nor write! A
mother who is so unmotherly as Mrs. Eddy was toward her only
child when it was little more than a baby, cannot be expected to
give herself great concern over the sacrifice of the children of
strangers that is incidental to the accumulation of her fortune.
If the adult prefer foolishness to wisdom, if he prefer suicide
to life, by the Christian Science or any other method, he may
enjoy his preference. It is no business of mine to come between
him and the grave; but no man and no woman has any right,
whatever be the motive or the relation, to stand silently by and
permit a child needlessly to suffer and needlessly to die. The
laws of the land should provide, as they do in some States, for
the punishment of such cruel offences; and to the extent that my
opposition and my protest may avail, no man and no woman shall be
permitted to murder little children by a wilful neglect that is
based upon an insane belief in the wicked teachings of a wicked
woman, in her cruel, greedy fraud, in her brazen, murderous lies.
If any one be disposed to feel that my language sounds
extravagant thus early in the narrative, I beg that judgment may
be suspended until I have concluded, when the moderation of my
speech will, I think, be cause for wonder.