The Fiction of God’s Authorship
God, we are told, is without variableness or shadow of turning,
and yet, if He were the author of Mrs. Eddy’s book, He would be
as changeable as a weathercock, for the book, throughout its
numerous editions, has in the past thirty-five years undergone
continuous change and revision at the hands of the literary
expert, and the final product is so unlike the original as to be
almost unrecognizable. Chapters have been dropped, chapters have
been added and chapters have been shifted about from one place to
another, and the book has been as coherent at the end as at the
beginning of the process. Early editions, with compromising
contents, have been suppressed at great expense, and the book, as
now published, is Mrs. Eddy’s work only in part. She says herself
that read backward it has, in part, as much meaning as read
forward; and those of you, who have attempted to read it forward,
have discovered that, so read, it has precisely as little meaning
as if read backward.
James Henry Wiggin, an ex-Unitarian minister, recently deceased,
was for years Mrs. Eddy’s literary expert, putting all her
productions, including her book, into good English, and into as
coherent a form as she would permit. He wrote a sermon for Mrs.
Eddy to preach, which she preached as her own, and subsequently
incorporated, with some easily perceptible additions that
conspicuously marred Mr. Wiggin’s work, in her God-inspired book,
as a chapter entitled “Wayside Hints.” This chapter is left out
of the latest editions, but it was given to the world with the
rest in the “thirty-sixth” edition, as of God’s authorship.
Mr. Wiggin’s story of the manner in which a sermon of his became
a part of her inspired volume is not a little amusing.
While acting as Mrs. Eddy’s literary friend and guide and helper,
an edition of “Science and Health” was prepared for publication,
completely written and completely set up in type and
electrotyped; but as it contained a chapter that Mr. Wiggin
regarded as in the nature of a libel upon several living persons,
who were referred to and attacked by name, he endeavored to
prevent the publication until that chapter had been eliminated.
As the whole book had been electrotyped, the fifteen pages
composing this chapter could not be taken out, unless fifteen
others were inserted in their place, without involving new plates
of all the succeeding pages, and a large consequent expense. So
the publication was withheld, until in some manner fifteen pages
could be furnished in substitution for the objectionable chapter.
Just at this time it happened that Mr. Wiggin prepared a sermon
for Mrs. Eddy to preach. He attended the service at which the
sermon was delivered by Mrs. Eddy as her own composition,
although she read it from a manuscript furnished by him. As Mrs.
Eddy attempted to read without spectacles, which she never used
in public and always used in her private intercourse with Mr.
Wiggin, her rendering of the sermon was, in Mr. Wiggin’s opinion,
halting and ineffective, and it irritated him not a little that a
production of his should be subjected to such handling in public.
But after the service was over, Mr. Wiggin, walking down the
aisle to speak with Mrs. Eddy, on every hand heard exclamations
of approval in more or less superlative terms. “Wasn’t it grand!
Wasn’t she inspired today! How beautiful her sermons are!” and so
on, until Mr. Wiggin’s irritation was quite allayed, and he
concluded Mrs. Eddy had not done badly after all. Reaching the
platform, Mrs. Eddy leaned over and whispered, “How did it go
off?” “Splendidly,” said Mr. Wiggin, “I have an idea.” “What is
it?” inquired Mrs. Eddy. “This sermon is just what we need for
those fifteen pages. All of these people have heard you preach it
today, it will be assumed that you wrote it, and it will just
about fill the space we want to fill in the book, and the
publication need be no longer delayed.” “Fine idea!” said the
preacher of Mr. Wiggin’s sermon. “Will you make it fit in those
fifteen pages, so it can just take their place?” He said he
would. He did, and it appeared as a chapter entitled “Wayside
Hints,” in the thirty-sixth and some later editions.
Many a time have I heard Mr. Wiggin say, with a chuckle of
amusement, that it was a source of much mirth to him to hear from
time to time Mrs. Eddy’s devotees exclaim, with pious
earnestness, that the chapter he had written, at so much per
word, was the very most divinely-inspired portion of the divine
volume.
Mrs. Eddy does not hesitate to declare herself the authorized
interpreter of the Bible, authorized expressly by Christ himself.
The rules of the Christian Science organization and the “Mother
Church” were all formulated by Mrs. Eddy as under divine
guidance, and she reaches so far into the proceedings of the
so-called branch churches all over the land as to dictate every
detail of the religious services, and has required that every
so-called sermon in a Christian Science church shall be preceded
by the following declaration: “The canonical writings, together
with the word of our text-book [her book “Science and Health”],
corroborating and explaining the Bible texts in their spiritual
import and application to all ages, past, present and future,
constitute a sermon undivorced from truth, uncontaminated and
unfettered by human hypotheses, and _authorized by Christ_.”
That is either true or false. If it is true, all mankind should
know it. If it is false, it is as wicked a falsehood as was ever
told.
Having lectured to immense crowds upon Christian Science from one
end of this country to the other, I have repeatedly had occasion
to demand of official Christian Scientists in the audience,
especially first readers, so called, in Mrs. Eddy’s churches, who
as such had read the declaration I have just quoted, standing
face to face with them, that they arise and give some scintilla
of warrant or authority for the making of the declaration that
Mrs. Eddy’s book was “authorized by Christ” as an interpretation
of the Bible; but I have never had the slightest response, for
the reason, of course, that no evidence can in any form be
produced of the truth of this declaration falsely formulated and
by her sacrilegiously required to be publicly read at every
Sunday service in every Christian Science Church. All of these
official Christian Scientists know that this declaration is
without warrant, all of them know it is utterly false; and Mrs.
Eddy herself makes it, deliberately knowing it to be untrue,
knowing that she has and can produce no scrap of any kind of
warrant for it, and she makes it and compels its repetition in
her churches only to carry out her fraud and imposition that
there is a sacred character to, and a Christian warrant for, her
utterly bogus “religion.”
This, I think, is one of the most audacious things this utterly
unprincipled woman in her whole career has dared to do; and I
cannot conceive of any real Christian entertaining toward her,
because of it, feelings other than those of pronounced resentment
and indignation.
Nothing but an insane mind, a degenerate mind or a mind possessed
of an overmastering passion to perpetrate a monstrous fraud upon
the human race could, with the aid of the literary expert, have
written “Science and Health,” and then have declared God to be
its author; and no one but an utterly irreligious, irreverent,
wicked person could invent the fiction of Christ’s authorization
and compel its promulgation at “religious” services. But Mrs.
Eddy has done precisely these things and her followers believe
her irreverent and audacious claims.
Truly, “The absurdity the human race can’t swallow, hasn’t been
invented _yet!_”
After Eddyism it may be assumed, I think, that man’s greatest
ingenuity is unequal to the invention of an absurdity so immense
as to exceed human gulpability. The more monstrous it is, the
more eagerly it is clutched; and the more unintelligible it is,
the greater is the certainty that it must have emanated from the
All-wise.
But let me do Mrs. Eddy full justice. I think I have read
everything she has written, and one sentence does indeed stand
out vividly by itself, a solitary and perfect star of purest ray
serene. Apropos of her basic contention (upon which the whole
Christian Science superstructure rests, and without which it
would fall to the ground) that there is no sensation in matter,
she deprecates the spanking of children, because, she wisely
says, “the use of the rod is virtually a declaration to the
child’s mind, that sensation belongs to matter.”
Impossible as I have found it to reach the understanding of
Christian Scientists by arguments addressed to their
intelligence, I strongly incline to the idea that the spanking
process would be likely to induce more or less vague impressions
that sensation does actually reside in the material of which
these living bodies are composed; and I respectfully submit that
it would seem to follow that the most effective way of reaching
Mrs. Eddy’s childish followers and curing them of their strange
distemper would be the considerate, not too vigorous,
application, all around, after the manner of the old woman who
lived in a shoe, of the corrective maternal slipper.