A Bogus Healing System
Of course the successor to and equal of Jesus must perform
miracles, and Mrs. Eddy has a stock of miracles on hand suited to
the large, the very large, the extraordinarily large, swallowing
capacity of those who ache for something real hard to take in and
digest. Nothing could be too hard for her worshipers, and she
gives free rein to her inventive faculty in suiting the miracle
to the need.
Mrs. Eddy has ever been noted for her modesty, her retiring
disposition and proneness to underestimate herself and her
powers. “Has Mrs. Eddy lost her power to heal?” she asks, and
with characteristic bashfulness and self-depreciation she
replies, “Has the sun forgotten to shine and the planets to
revolve around it?” Sooner shall the light of the sun pale,
sooner the planets fly from their orbits, than Mrs. Eddy part
with her power to heal!
So great was the healing influence that radiated from her
personality that she sometimes healed unconsciously.
“It was not an uncommon occurrence in my own church,” she says,
“for the sick to be healed by my sermons. Many pale cripples
went into the church leaning on crutches, who went out carrying
them on their shoulders.”
What an inestimable blessing it would be, if a person possessing
such power should make a visit to the hospital in Boston for
crippled children, and preach a little sermon there to the young
unfortunates! Mrs. Eddy has but to step into her automobile and
in twenty minutes she may be at this hospital, and by putting
forth the power she says she has and healing the pale little
cripples, as she says she has healed others, bring the whole
world to her feet.
In a letter to a friend written in March, 1896, she says over her
autograph, but speaking of herself, as she often does, in the
third person:
“While Mrs. Eddy was in a suburban town of Boston she brought
out one apple blossom on an apple tree in January, when the
ground was covered with snow; and in Lynn demonstrated in the
floral line some such small things.”
That isn’t so remarkable as if an orange blossom had been brought
out on the apple tree (as it would doubtless have been if Mrs.
Eddy had thought of it), but it was quite an accomplishment,
nevertheless. Mrs. Eddy’s “treatment,” probably of the “absent”
variety, sent a summer’s warmth through the earth’s frozen
surface and tingling with animation the sap in the roots sent it
by leaps and bounds through the trunk into the ice-laden
branches, and, presto! a tender, pink-white blossom, pushing its
way through the ice, appeared.
Mrs. Eddy is too reticent and too diffident. Why does she not
tell us of the other equally well authenticated occasion upon
which she brought out a few stars in the sky when the sun was at
high noon, and “demonstrated” in the astronomical line some such
large things.
I have called certain of Mrs. Eddy’s representations lies, and
the word “lie” is a very disagreeable word. It is bad enough to
have to use it in characterization of the utterances of a man;
but it is still worse to apply it in all its brutality to a
woman. I have endeavored to find another word, meaning precisely
the same thing, that isn’t so intrinsically offensive; but there
is no other word that suits my purpose and the occasion as does
this word “lie,” and so I am compelled to adhere to it, even at
the risk of being charged with lack of gallantry in my attitude
toward a woman. Gallantry really has nothing to do with my
undertaking. Truth and lies are sexless, and the only question
is, has Mrs. Eddy told the truth?
But further word about lies. There are some lies that are not so
bad as other lies, and there have been lies that have called
forth commendation. I recall in that wonderful story, Victor
Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” the incident of the lie told by the
Sister Superior of the convent in order to save from the brutal
grasp of the law incarnate, as represented by Javert, the sublime
personality of the transformed ex-convict, and Hugo’s beautiful
eulogy of that lie and that woman:
“Oh, holy woman, it is many years since you were upon this
earth; you have rejoined in the light you sister, the virgins,
and your brothers, the angels; may that falsehood be placed to
your credit in Paradise!”
There are lies arising merely out of a tactful wish to spare
people’s feelings, and there are the little white lies of social
life that nobody especially reprobates; but there are lies that
are intrinsically of an infamous character, and I can conceive of
no falsehood more infamous than that which, proceeding from a
wholly mercenary motive, is deliberately planned and put forth in
order to alienate people from a religion in which is the hope of
salvation and immortality, and from a scientific medical system
in which is the hope of bodily health and life. These are the
precise kind of lies of which this woman is most prolific, and
which she distributes most lavishly.
The passage I am now to quote is taken from a communication
signed by Mrs. Eddy and published by her in the New York _Sun_
for December 16, 1898, and it contains the boldest and wickedest
of these most bold and most wicked lies.
In this letter Mrs. Eddy said:
“I challenge the world to disprove what I hereby declare. After
my discovery of Christian Science, I healed consumption in its
last stages, that the M.D.’s, by verdict of the stethoscope and
the schools, declared incurable, the lungs being mostly
consumed. I healed malignant tubercular diphtheria and carious
bones that could be dented by the finger, saving them when the
surgeon’s instruments were lying on the table ready for their
amputation. I have healed at one visit a cancer that had so
eaten the flesh of the neck as to expose the jugular vein so
that it stood out like a cord.”
She manufactured new lungs, offhand. She healed carious bones,
instantaneously. She put forth the divine power God had conferred
upon her, and at one visit healed that most frightful of all
diseases, a malignant cancer.
This statement is either true or false. If it is true, the whole
world should know it, for its truth would prove Mrs. Eddy to have
the power to triumph over death, and when the king, or the queen,
of death shall come to earth, all knees will touch the ground. No
one can love another very much and not be willing to go upon his
knees before the man or the woman who can protect that loved one
forever from the hand of death; and I should want to be the very
first to prostrate myself in all humility and gratitude before
the conqueror of death. And if, on the other hand, Mrs. Eddy’s
statement is false, absolutely false, a fiction made out of whole
cloth, then it is important that such falsity should be clearly
shown, and shown throughout the world that all mankind may know
the wickedness of her falsification. I affirm, and shall show, it
to be false in every particular.
Mrs. Eddy’s statement gives no names, dates, localities, nor any
substantial thing to enable any one to investigate any of these
professed miracles, and every effort to induce her to
particularize ended, as always, in failure. There would have been
as much, and as little, sense in a challenge to the world to
disprove the green-cheese hypothesis of the structural
composition of the moon.
In the issue of the _Sun_ of January 1, 1899, Dr. Charles A. L.
Reed, a prominent physician of Cincinnati, published a challenge
to Mrs. Eddy to prove the truth of her miraculous cures. He
offered to furnish her cases identical with those she said she
had healed, and he said that, if she would heal any one of them,
he would proclaim her omnipotence from the housetops; and if she
would cure all or half of them, he would cheerfully crawl upon
his knees that he might but touch the hem of her garment.
But dumbness possessed Mrs. Eddy from that time forth. Probably
she didn’t want to be glorified from the _housetops;_ she didn’t
wish to have any mere _medical_ man crawling at her feet.
As Mrs. Eddy furnishes no specifications, it is impossible, of
course, to meet her allegations in the ordinary way; but I
purpose, nevertheless, to satisfy every intelligent mind that
there is not an atom of truth in her professed miracles.
If you have the power over life and death here claimed by Mrs.
Eddy, when do you employ it? You employ it, do you not, when some
one you greatly love is suffering, when some one dear to you is
approaching the grave? If you have the power to save human life,
you save the life, first of all, of those whom you most love; and
if you know those you dearly love to be suffering torture from
frightful disease and that, if the progress of the disease is not
stopped, the hand of death will inevitably snatch them, if you
know these things and put forth no particle of power, make no
effort to allay the suffering or stay the progress of the
disease, then it becomes clear that you have no such power, or
that you are a monster of inhumanity, does it not?
This is the case with Mrs. Eddy. If she has had the power she
claims, she has the most unfeeling heart that ever beat in a
human breast; for she has never put forth the power to save those
she most loved as they stood on the very edge of the grave.
In the summer of 1902, there died in the city of Boston, after
seven years of illness, Mrs. Mary Ann Baker, the widow of Mrs.
Eddy’s deceased brother, Samuel Baker. The relations between the
sisters-in-law had, for years, been most cordial, and I have seen
and read Mrs. Eddy’s autograph letters in which she professed,
only a few days before her sister’s death, the greatest affection
for her.
Mrs. Baker’s disease, of which Mrs. Eddy from the beginning to
the end was fully informed, was cancer of the breast, and her
suffering during the seven years of illness from that awful
disease may be better imagined than described.
At Mrs. Eddy’s request, Mrs. Baker had submitted to Christian
Science “treatment,” the healer selected by Mrs. Eddy being Mrs.
Janette E. Weller, a close friend of Mrs. Eddy and her
confidential representative in Boston; but Mrs. Baker derived no
benefit from it whatever, and died in the care of Dr. H. S.
Dearing of Boston.
From one end of the country to the other I have asked Christian
Scientists this question:
If Mrs. Eddy, for hire, had healed, at one sitting, a cancer that
had so eaten into the neck of a stranger that the jugular vein
stood out like a cord, why, I ask, why in the name of God, did
she not, for her love’s sake, stay the progress of the loathsome
disease that for seven years ate into the breast of the sister
she loved? Until Mrs. Eddy or one of her professed disciples has
answered that question, let her not look for followers amongst
people who know of this incident and have hearts; for she hadn’t
the power or she hadn’t the wish to save her sister, and the want
of power would prove the baseness of her falsehoods, as the want
of a wish would prove the adamantine quality of her heart.
If Mrs. Eddy possessed this miraculous power, why did she permit
her third husband to die of heart disease by her side, when one
treatment of hers would have saved him? Why did she not reach out
her all-powerful hand and save her own granddaughter, the child
of her only son, when piteous appeal to her was made by the
child’s father? Why, instead of putting forth the slightest
personal effort, did she recommend the employment of a Boston
healer, so called, a retired sea captain, one Joseph Eastaman by
name, to give absent treatment in Boston to the poor girl dying
in South Dakota? Imagine a retired sea captain sitting in his
office in Boston, closing his eyes, placing his aged hand upon
his vacant forehead and trying to think health and life into Mrs.
Eddy’s granddaughter nearly two thousand miles away! If Mrs. Eddy
could have saved her own flesh and blood and did not, what must
have been the condition of that thing Mrs. Eddy calls her heart?
Who that has human feeling in his heart would not give his life
for his child or his grandchild? and this woman, posing as the
successor to and as like unto Him who said, “Suffer little
children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the
kingdom of Heaven,” and claiming to have performed miracles equal
to any ascribed to Him in the Gospels, did absolutely nothing to
save the life of her granddaughter!
If Mrs. Eddy had been the miracle worker she claims to have been,
why did she turn poor, devoted Mrs. Leonard, herself a renowned
healer of the cult, who had slaved in her household for years,
and had for months and years been dying of diabetes under her
very eyes—why did Mrs. Eddy turn Mrs. Leonard out of the house at
Concord, New Hampshire, shortly before her death of that
distressing disease? Was it because Mrs. Eddy didn’t wish the
striking discredit of her professed powers that would follow Mrs.
Leonard’s death upon the Eddy premises? Having the power to save
her life, as she claims, all Mrs. Eddy did for Mrs. Leonard was
to ask her, when death became imminent, to be so good as to go
away and die elsewhere.
Mrs. Eddy estimates values in terms of dollars and cents, and
yet, possessing the mastery over death, she put forth no effort
to save the life of Joseph Armstrong, her close friend of many
years, a director in her church from its foundation, her personal
business manager who had made a fortune for her, and yet departed
this life of pleurisy with effusion in the summer or fall of
1907. If Mrs. Eddy could save any human life, she would have
saved this one, so pecuniarily precious above all other lives to
her.
If she had such marvelous power, why did she allow her personal
coachman, the man who had sat on the seat of her carriage as she
took her daily drive, to die in her house of a disease of which
he had been “completely cured” by Christian Science? Why did she
let her close, personal friend, her leading lecturer and
proselyter, Edward E. Kimball, die in the prime of life and at
the height of his usefulness to her cause? Why has she turned a
deaf ear to the prayers that have been addressed to her by
broken-hearted parents who have so often journeyed to her home to
beg her to exert her God-like power to save from the grave their
dying child? Why has she for thirty years and more refused to
even try to heal any one, to attempt to allay any pain however
fearful, or save any human life however beautiful and however
precious?
If Mary Baker G. Eddy has the power she boldly claims to have,
and if she has wrought the miracles she says she has wrought, she
has that power, then, I say, she has the heart of a very fiend;
for not once in thirty years has she consented to try, out of
ordinary humanity, to prevent suffering or to save life.
The truth is, Mrs. Eddy’s miraculous cures are all frauds, every
one of them, and the failure of attempted healings would prove
them to be frauds, and she does not wish to so discredit herself.
She never healed any one of any serious disease. She never in her
life had any curative power whatever, and she has been wise
indeed not to advertise the fact by attempting to cure. Her man,
Alfred Farlow, the official, highly paid and carefully coached
spokesman of her cult, and its leading press agent, admitted, in
response to my questioning and when testifying recently under
oath and subject to cross examination, that he did not know of
any cure ever having been made by Mrs. Eddy of any organic
disease in her life, but stiff leg; and he said that, in his
understanding as a high practitioner of the Christian Science art
of healing, a stiff leg is an organic disease.
When I entered upon my investigation of the matter, I believed in
the reality of some of the professed cures of Christian Science,
even of organic disease, but closer acquaintance with the subject
has satisfied me that they are, without exception, false
pretensions or honest delusions. I have known of the most honest,
but erroneous, belief in cure by Christian Science, I have known
people so resolutely to deny to themselves the reality of
disease, that they have come to believe in its unreality; and one
case has come to my notice of a poor woman’s insistence with her
dying breath that she had been healed of an incurable disease and
was then perfectly well, while her death within a few hours was
the sad witness to the delusive character of her “cure.”
Perhaps the most impressive case of this delusive cure of
incurable disease is that of the Earl of Dunmore. He was
Christian Science’s show convert. His personality was always in
the foreground, he always sat in the front row upon the platform
and his name was always in the papers.
In March, 1907, he published in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_ an
account of his conversion to Christian Science, which was due, he
said, to his having been healed by it of a disease an eminent
London surgeon had pronounced incurable. The Earl of Dunmore,
when he published that article, doubtless believed it was true.
He was perfectly sincere, but his death, within a few weeks after
the publication of his conversion through cure, his death of the
very disease pronounced incurable by the London doctor, was
pathetic and convincing testimony to his mistaken opinion that he
had been cured and to the accuracy of the medical diagnosis that
his disease was incurable.
Again and again the most persistent effort has been made to
induce Christian Science healers to give some reasonable proof of
their powers; but they as persistently refuse to submit any
alleged cures to anything like scientific scrutiny. There has
never been a scientifically established Christian Science cure.
The “healers” confess that they are, nay even boast that they
are, incompetent to diagnose disease. If they can’t determine the
presence of disease, how then can they determine its cure? Mrs.
Eddy herself goes so far as to say that ignorance of all
departments of the science of medicine is an aid in the cure of
disease, according to her system. What value then is to be
attached to anything any of them say about disease, if they are
completely ignorant concerning it? And it being a fundamental
article of their faith to deny the reality of disease, how can
they admit its reality, however manifest in their patients,
without stultifying themselves? Is it not superlatively absurd to
be in the slightest degree influenced by anything any of these
monomaniacs, or fakers, can possibly say upon a subject of which
they openly profess to know, and boast that they know, absolutely
nothing?
Besides, and let me emphasize this statement, there is not a
Christian Science healer, in good and regular standing anywhere
in the world, who tells the truth, or tries to tell the truth, or
could tell the truth if he tried. They know that suffering is
real, they know disease is real, they know that death is the most
positive of all realities, and yet they perpetually affirm the
unreality of all these things. Every former healer, who has
reformed, or recovered his sanity and given up pretending to heal
by denying the reality of a condition he is attempting to change,
will tell you he lied perpetually when practising so-called
Christian Science; for to admit the reality of disease or
suffering or death, however confident of its existence, is to
deny the faith and pronounce Mrs. Eddy to be a fraud.
Let me here, parenthetically, call attention to another phase of
this thing. Not only are these unrealities proclaimed, but the
reality of sin is in like manner denied. If sin is unreal, to
commit sin is nothing, and no iniquity is so great as to be
morally reprehensible. There is no such thing as morality or
immorality, if sin is unreal; and any one who proclaims the
unreality of sin, if he have any influence in the community, is
about as harmful a member of society as can exist.
The denial of suffering and death, the denial of poverty and sin,
have had a markedly observable effect in Christian Science
circles in drying up the springs of the sweetest and tenderest of
human feelings. If none of these things really exist, there can
be no occasion for charity, for compassion, for sympathy, and to
give expression to any of these sentiments is to admit the
reality of the things Mrs. Eddy affirms to be unreal. One cannot
be a Christian Scientist and have in his heart the Christ-like
emotions of sympathy and charity and compassion. It is said that
the faces of Christian Scientists wear a perpetual smile. It is
the stereotyped smile of affected cheerfulness and it covers a
heart from which the most humane and attractive qualities have
been, as nearly as may be, rooted out. But to return to the
healers.
I know a woman who was a successful healer for fifteen years and
as conscientious as any of them, and she is now frank enough to
say that she never healed any one of any real disease or serious
indisposition in all that time, and doesn’t know of any other
healer who did. They simply fool themselves and their patients by
denying the reality of disease so long as there is breath in the
body, and when death occurs and actually confronts them, they
deny the reality of death. Could absurdity further go?
Perhaps it is due to their belief in the unreality of death, that
they permit no funerals in their churches; perhaps, also, it may
be due to their unwillingness, from a business standpoint, to
admit that Christian Scientists, young and old, die just as do
the benighted people who have not bowed down to Mrs. Eddy.
Surely, if the healings of Christian Scientists were realities,
once a convert would mean always a convert; but it is a fact that
people are coming out of Christian Science as rapidly as they are
going in, and the more intelligence they have the more quickly
they abandon the thing when they come to understand what it is.
If you are all right in the region of the brain and all right in
the region of the heart, you won’t tarry very long in the
Christian Science camp. I know many ex-Christian Scientists who
denounce it as roundly as I do and declare it to be a fraud in
all its aspects. I could name hundreds of people, formerly
zealous followers of Mrs. Eddy, who now repudiate her with scorn
and contumely. Would they do this if she were in fact the miracle
worker she claims to be, and if Christian Science were in fact
the sovereign antidote to sickness, sin and death?
The following is taken from a letter recently received from a
gentleman of exceptional intelligence:
“I have been connected with that church for five years and have
lately had my eyes opened to the most cold-blooded _skin game_
conceivable under the guise of a religion. Having conducted a
Christian Science sanitarium for three years, I am in
possession of facts unknown to any but Christian Scientists,
and to only a few of the inner circle of _grafters_. I was a
student of medicine at Harvard in the 70s, am a B.A. of the
University of New Brunswick, Canada, and ought to have known
better—_but there are others_.”
Christian Science is a “skin game” and the powers that be in
Christian Science are the “inner circle of grafters”! Strange
language this to be applied to a “religion” and its leading
officials by a former believer; but it is precisely as former
Christian Scientists, men and women, speak of the thing and the
people they have repudiated.
Cures of real or imaginary illness are sometimes effected in very
extraordinary ways. Being recently in San Francisco, I talked
with a friend, a lawyer, there who had gone through the
experience of the earthquake. The house in which he was born and
in which he lived was burned to the ground after its contents had
been dragged out and heaped up upon a vacant lot, and he turned
from his law office, his library shelves crowded with books, no
one of which he had an opportunity to save from the devastating
flames. The experience was an intensely distressing and
exhausting one. For two days and two nights he did not get a wink
of sleep. Prior to the earthquake and fire, he had been a
constant sufferer from the most excruciating headaches. Not a
headache has he had since! Cured by earthquake!
I talked with another gentleman, and he told me that his
mother-in-law had been bedridden for five years, and not once in
that time had put her foot upon the floor. She had not attempted
to walk because she was positive she was unable to walk and her
death was daily expected. As the flames approached the region of
her residence, my friend and his wife started off in different
directions to find some form of conveyance to carry their mother
to a place of safety, and when they returned, in about an hour,
she had vanished. Unaided, she had gotten up, dressed herself,
and walked between two and three miles! Cured by conflagration!
Marvelous cures these, almost in the nature of miracles; and yet
even a Christian Scientist would smile disdainfully if earthquake
and conflagration were seriously prescribed for headache and
paralysis.
No doubt people have recovered of illness while under Christian
Science treatment; just as they have when under no treatment; but
the Christian Science inane treatment was no more the _cause_ of
the recovery than was the absence of treatment of any kind.
There is a great deal of delusive sickness, which is easily cured
by a putting away of the delusion, and there was never yet any,
but a delusive, cure by Christian Science of an organic disease—
not one. Will Mrs. Eddy and all her healers and followers
throughout the world be able to add one moment, one breath, to
the life of Mrs. Eddy herself, when the hour of her death has
arrived? No, deny the reality of disease and death as they may,
it comes to them one and all, just as to others, when the angel
of death approaches and beckons from the darkness that closes
upon their drooping eyes.
I am sure that there can be no doubt in any honest,
clear-thinking mind that has followed me thus far, that all of
these monstrous and irreverent pretensions of the leader and
founder of Christian Science are wholly false, and I am equally
confident that I shall establish in the mind of those who go with
me to the end of my showing, that Mrs. Eddy’s frauds have had
their incentive in a purely mercenary motive; that she has
claimed to have received a revelation from God and equality with
Jesus and the performance of miracles for the purpose alone of
fooling people into placing an extraordinary value upon her
valueless teachings for which she has made extortionate charges;
that she has claimed to be the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy,
“the woman clothed with the sun,” and that her book, “Science and
Health,” was the little book held in the hand of the angel, that
she is herself the feminine impersonation, as Jesus was the
masculine impersonation, of the immaculate idea, and that, not
she, but God was the author of her book, solely and only that she
might build up a powerful organization and a large fortune. Money
and power are the explanations of Mrs. Eddy’s frauds, her lies,
her blasphemies, I will even say of her crimes, for when crime
could, as she believed, be accomplished through mental effort,
maliciously employed for the destruction of her enemies, she has
not hesitated so to seek its accomplishment, and her whole
career, for thirty or forty years past, has been the crime of
obtaining money by false pretenses.