"Life, Truth, and Love constitute the triune God, or triply divine

Principle. They represent a trinity in unity, three in one--the same in

essence, though multiform in office: God the Father; Christ the type of

Sonship; Divine Science, or the Holy Comforter. . .

"The Holy Ghost, or Spirit, reveals this triune Principle, and (the Holy

Ghost) is expressed in Divine Science, which is the Comforter, leading

into all Truth, and revealing the divine Principle of the universe

--universal and perpetual harmony."

I will cite another passage. Speaking of Jesus--

"His students then received the Holy Ghost. By this is meant, that by

all they had witnessed and suffered they were roused to an enlarged

understanding of Divine Science, even to the spiritual interpretation . .

. . . of His teachings," etc.

Also, page 579, in the chapter called the Glossary:

"HOLY GHOST. Divine Science; the developments of Life, Truth, and Love."

The Holy Ghost reveals the massed spirit of the fused trinity; this

massed spirit is expressed in Divine Science, and is the Comforter;

Divine Science conveys to men the "spiritual interpretation" of the

Saviour's teachings. That seems to be the meaning of the quoted

passages.

Divine Science is Christian Science; the book "Science and Health" is a

"revelation" of the whole spirit of the Trinity, and is therefore "The

Holy Ghost"; it conveys to men the "spiritual interpretation" of the

Bible's teachings and therefore is "the Comforter."

I do not find this analyzing work easy, I would rather saw wood; and a

person can never tell whether he has added up a Science and Health sum

right or not, anyway, after all his trouble. Neither can he easily find

out whether the texts are still on the market or have been discarded from

the Book; for two hundred and fifty-eight editions of it have been

issued, and no two editions seem to be alike. The annual changes--in

technical terminology; in matter and wording; in transpositions of

chapters and verses; in leaving out old chapters and verses and putting

in new ones--seem to be next to innumerable, and as there is no index,

there is no way to find a thing one wants without reading the book

through. If ever I inspire a Bible-Annex I will not rush at it in a

half-digested, helter-skelter way and have to put in thirty-eight years

trying to get some of it the way I want it, I will sit down and think it

out and know what it is I want to say before I begin. An inspirer cannot

inspire for Mrs. Eddy and keep his reputation. I have never seen such

slipshod work, bar the ten that interpreted for the home market the "sell

all thou hast." I have quoted one "spiritual" rendering of the Lord's

Prayer, I have seen one other one, and am told there are five more. Yet

the inspirer of Mrs. Eddy the new Infallible casts a complacent critical

stone at the other Infallible for being unable to make up its mind about

such things. Science and Health, edition 1899, page 33:

"The decisions, by vote of Church Councils, as to what should and should

not be considered Holy Writ, the manifest mistakes in the ancient

versions: the thirty thousand different readings in the Old Testament and

the three hundred thousand in the New--these facts show how a mortal and

material sense stole into the divine record, darkening, to some extent,

the inspired pages with its own hue."

To some extent, yes--speaking cautiously. But it is nothing, really

nothing; Mrs. Eddy is only a little way behind, and if her inspirer lives

to get her Annex to suit him that Catholic record will have to "go 'way

back and set down," as the ballad says. Listen to the boastful song of

Mrs. Eddy's organ, the Christian Science Journal for March, 1902, about

that year's revamping and half-soling of Science and Health, whose

official name is the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, and who is now the

Official Pastor and Infallible and Unerring Guide of every Christian

Science church in the two hemispheres, hear Simple Simon that met the

pieman brag of the Infallible's fallibility:

"Throughout the entire book the verbal changes are so numerous as to

indicate the vast amount of time and labor Mrs. Eddy has devoted to this

revision. The time and labor thus bestowed is relatively as great as

that of--the committee who revised the Bible.... Thus we have

additional evidence of the herculean efforts our beloved Leader has made

and is constantly making for the promulgation of Truth and the

furtherance of her divinely bestowed mission," etc.

It is a steady job. I could help inspire if desired; I am not doing much

now, and would work for half-price, and should not object to the country.

PRICE OF THE PASTOR-UNIVERSAL

The price of the Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, called in Science

literature the Comforter--and by that other sacred Name--is three

dollars in cloth, as heretofore, six when it is finely bound, and shaped

to imitate the Testament, and is broken into verses. Margin of profit

above cost of manufacture, from five hundred to seven hundred per cent.,

as already noted In the profane subscription-trade, it costs the

publisher heavily to canvass a three-dollar book; he must pay the general

agent sixty per cent. commission--that is to say, one dollar and

eighty-cents. Mrs. Eddy escapes this blistering tax, because she owns

the Christian Science canvasser, and can compel him to work for nothing.

Read the following command--not request--fulminated by Mrs. Eddy, over

her signature, in the Christian Science Journal for March, 1897, and

quoted by Mr. Peabody in his book. The book referred to is Science and

Health:

"It shall be the duty of all Christian Scientists to circulate and to

sell as many of these books as they can."

That is flung at all the elect, everywhere that the sun shines, but no

penalty is shaken over their heads to scare them. The same command was

issued to the members (numbering to-day twenty-five thousand) of The

Mother-Church, also, but with it went a threat, of the infliction, in

case of disobedience, of the most dreaded punishment that has a place in

the Church's list of penalties for transgressions of Mrs. Eddy's edicts

--excommunication:

"If a member of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, shall fail to obey

this injunction, it will render him liable to lose his membership in this

Church. MARY BAKER EDDY."

It is the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition.

None but accepted and well established gods can venture an affront like

that and do it with confidence. But the human race will take anything

from that class. Mrs. Eddy knows the human race; knows it better than

any mere human being has known it in a thousand centuries. My confidence

in her human-beingship is getting shaken, my confidence in her godship is

stiffening.

SEVEN HUNDRED PER CENT.

A Scientist out West has visited a bookseller--with intent to find fault

with me--and has brought away the information that the price at which

Mrs. Eddy sells Science and Health is not an unusually high one for the

size and make of the book. That is true. But in the book-trade--that

profit-devourer unknown to Mrs. Eddy's book--a three-dollar book that is

made for thirty-five or forty cents in large editions is put at three

dollars because the publisher has to pay author, middleman, and

advertising, and if the price were much below three the profit accruing

would not pay him fairly for his time and labor. At the same time, if he

could get ten dollars for the book he would take it, and his morals would

not fall under criticism.

But if he were an inspired person commissioned by the Deity to receive

and print and spread broadcast among sorrowing and suffering and poor men

a precious message of healing and cheer and salvation, he would have to

do as Bible Societies do--sell the book at a pinched margin above cost to

such as could pay, and give it free to all that couldn't; and his name

would be praised. But if he sold it at seven hundred per cent. profit

and put the money in his pocket, his name would be mocked and derided.

Just as Mrs. Eddy's is. And most justifiably, as it seems to me.

The complete Bible contains one million words. The New Testament by

itself contains two hundred and forty thousand words.

My '84 edition of Science and Health contains one hundred and twenty

thousand words--just half as many as the New Testament.

Science and Health has since been so inflated by later inspirations that

the 1902 edition contains one hundred and eighty thousand words--not

counting the thirty thousand at the back, devoted by Mrs. Eddy to

advertising the book's healing abilities--and the inspiring continues

right along.

If you have a book whose market is so sure and so great that you can give

a printer an everlasting order for thirty or forty or fifty thousand

copies a year he will furnish them at a cheap rate, because whenever

there is a slack time in his press-room and bindery he can fill the idle

intervals on your book and be making something instead of losing. That

is the kind of contract that can be let on Science and Health every year.

I am obliged to doubt that the three-dollar Science and Health costs Mrs.

Eddy above fifteen cents, or that the six dollar copy costs her above

eighty cents. I feel quite sure that the average profit to her on these

books, above cost of manufacture, is all of seven hundred per cent.

Every proper Christian Scientist has to buy and own (and canvass for)

Science and Health (one hundred and eighty thousand words), and he must

also own a Bible (one million words). He can buy the one for from three

to six dollars, and the other for fifteen cents. Or, if three dollars is

all the money he has, he can get his Bible for nothing. When the Supreme

Being disseminates a saving Message through uninspired agents--the New

Testament, for instance--it can be done for five cents a copy, but when

He sends one containing only two-thirds as many words through the shop of

a Divine Personage, it costs sixty times as much. I think that in

matters of such importance it is bad economy to employ a wild-cat agency.

Here are some figures which are perfectly authentic, and which seem to

justify my opinion.

"These [Bible] societies, inspired only by a sense of religious duty, are

issuing the Bible at a price so small that they have made it the cheapest

book printed. For example, the American Bible Society offers an edition

of the whole Bible as low as fifteen cents and the New Testament at five

cents, and the British Society at sixpence and one penny, respectively.

These low prices, made possible by their policy of selling the books at

cost or below cost," etc.--New York Sun, February 25, 1903.

CHAPTER IX

We may now make a final footing-up of Mrs. Eddy, and see what she is, in

the fulness of her powers. She is

The Massachusetts Metaphysical College

Pastor Emeritus;

President;

Board of Directors;

Board of Education;

Board of Lectureships;

Future Board of Trustees,

Proprietor of the Publishing-House and Periodicals;

Treasurer;

Clerk;

Proprietor of the Teachers;

Proprietor of the Lecturers;

Proprietor of the Missionaries;

Proprietor of the Readers;

Dictator of the Services; sole Voice of the Pulpit;

Proprietor of the Sanhedrin;

Sole Proprietor of the Creed. (Copyrighted.);

Indisputable Autocrat of the Branch Churches, with their life and death

in her hands;

Sole Thinker for The First Church (and the others);

Sole and Infallible Expounder of Doctrine, in life and in death;

Sole permissible Discoverer, Denouncer, Judge, and Executioner of

Ostensible Hypnotists;

Fifty-handed God of Excommunication--with a thunderbolt in every hand;

Appointer and Installer of the Pastor of all the Churches--the Perpetual

Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, "the Comforter."

CHAPTER X

There she stands-painted by herself. No witness but herself has been

allowed to testify. She stands there painted by her acts, and decorated

by her words. When she talks, she has only a decorative value as a

witness, either for or against herself, for she deals mainly in

unsupported assertion; and in the rare cases where she puts forward a

verifiable fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses to furnish

to anybody else. Also, when she talks, she is unstable, she wanders, she

is incurably inconsistent; what she says to-day she contradicts tomorrow.

But her acts are consistent. They are always faithful to her, they never

misinterpret her, they are a mirror which always reflects her exactly,

precisely, minutely, unerringly, and always the same, to date, with only

those progressive little natural changes in stature, dress, complexion,

mood, and carriage that mark--exteriorly--the march of the years and

record the accumulations of experience, while--interiorly--through all

this steady drift of evolution the one essential detail, the commanding

detail, the master detail of the make-up remains as it was in the

beginning, suffers no change and can suffer none; the basis of the

character; the temperament, the disposition, that indestructible iron

framework upon which the character is built, and whose shape it must

take, and keep, throughout life. We call it a person's nature.

The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally--with his

hands; but not with his heart. The man born kind and compassionate can

have that disposition crushed down out of sight by embittering

experience; but if it were an organ the post-mortem would find it still

in his corpse. The man born ambitious of power and glory may live long

without finding it out, but when the opportunity comes he will know, will

strike for the largest thing within the limit of his chances at the

time-constable, perhaps--and will be glad and proud when he gets it, and

will write home about it. But he will not stop with that start; his

appetite will come again; and by-and-by again, and yet again; and when he

has climbed to police commissioner it will at last begin to dawn upon him

that what his Napoleon soul wants and was born for is something away

higher up--he does not quite know what, but Circumstance and Opportunity

will indicate the direction and he will cut a road through and find out.

I think Mrs. Eddy was born with a far-seeing business-eye, but did not

know it; and with a great organizing and executive talent, and did not

know it; and with a large appetite for power and distinction, and did not

know it. I think the reason that her make did not show up until middle

life was that she had General Grant's luck--Circumstance and Opportunity

did not come her way when she was younger. The qualities that were born

in her had to wait for circumstance and opportunity--but they were there:

they were there to stay, whether they ever got a chance to fructify or

not. If they had come early, they would have found her ready and

competent. And they--not she--would have determined what they would set

her at and what they would make of her. If they had elected to

commission her as second-assistant cook in a bankrupt boarding-house,

I know the rest of it--I know what would have happened. She would have

owned the boarding-house within six months; she would have had the late

proprietor on salary and humping himself, as the worldly say; she would

have had that boarding-house spewing money like a mint; she would have

worked the servants and the late landlord up to the limit; she would have

squeezed the boarders till they wailed, and by some mysterious quality

born in her she would have kept the affections of certain of the lot

whose love and esteem she valued, and flung the others down the back

area; in two years she would own all the boarding-houses in the town, in

five all the boarding-houses in the State, in twenty all the hotels in

America, in forty all the hotels on the planet, and would sit at home

with her finger on a button and govern the whole combination as easily as

a bench-manager governs a dog-show.

It would be a grand thing to see, and I feel a kind of disappointment

--but never mind, a religion is better and larger; and there is more to

it. And I have not been steeping myself in Christian Science all these

weeks without finding out that the one sensible thing to do with a

disappointment is to put it out of your mind and think of something

cheerfuler.

We outsiders cannot conceive of Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science Religion as

being a sudden and miraculous birth, but only as a growth from a seed

planted by circumstances, and developed stage by stage by command and

compulsion of the same force. What the stages were we cannot know, but

are privileged to guess. She may have gotten the mental-healing idea

from Quimby--it had been experimented with for ages, and was no one's

special property. [For the present, for convenience' sake, let us

proceed upon the hypothesis that that was all she got of him, and that

she put up the rest of the assets herself. This will strain us, but let

us try it.] In each and all its forms and under all its many names,

mental healing had had limits, always, and they were rather narrow ones

--Mrs. Eddy, let us imagine, removed the fence, abolished the frontiers.

Not by expanding mental-healing, but by absorbing its small bulk into the

vaster bulk of Christian Science--Divine Science, The Holy Ghost, the

Comforter--which was a quite different and sublimer force, and one which

had long lain dormant and unemployed.

The Christian Scientist believes that the Spirit of God (life and love)

pervades the universe like an atmosphere; that whoso will study Science

and Health can get from it the secret of how to inhale that transforming

air; that to breathe it is to be made new; that from the new man all

sorrow, all care, all miseries of the mind vanish away, for that only

peace, contentment and measureless joy can live in that divine fluid;

that it purifies the body from disease, which is a vicious creation of

the gross human mind, and cannot continue to exist in the presence of the

Immortal Mind, the renewing Spirit of God.

The Scientist finds this reasonable, natural, and not harder to believe

than that the disease germ, a creature of darkness, perishes when exposed

to the light of the great sun--a new revelation of profane science which

no one doubts. He reminds us that the actinic ray, shining upon lupus,

cures it--a horrible disease which was incurable fifteen years ago, and

had been incurable for ten million years before; that this wonder,

unbelievable by the physicians at first, is believed by them now; and so

he is tranquilly confident that the time is coming when the world will be

educated up to a point where it will comprehend and grant that the light

of the Spirit of God, shining unobstructed upon the soul, is an actinic

ray which can purge both mind and body from disease and set them free and

make them whole.

It is apparent, then, that in Christian Science it is not one man's mind

acting upon another man's mind that heals; that it is solely the Spirit

of God that heals; that the healer's mind performs no office but to

convey that force to the patient; that it is merely the wire which

carries the electric fluid, so to speak, and delivers the message.

Therefore, if these things be true, mental-healing and Science-healing

are separate and distinct processes, and no kinship exists between them.

To heal the body of its ills and pains is a mighty benefaction, but in

our day our physicians and surgeons work a thousand miracles--prodigies

which would have ranked as miracles fifty years ago--and they have so

greatly extended their domination over disease that we feel so well

protected that we are able to look with a good deal of composure and

absence of hysterics upon the claims of new competitors in that field.

But there is a mightier benefaction than the healing of the body, and

that is the healing of the spirit--which is Christian Science's other

claim. So far as I know, so far as I can find out, it makes it good.

Personally I have not known a Scientist who did not seem serene,

contented, unharassed. I have not found an outsider whose observation of

Scientists furnished him a view that differed from my own. Buoyant

spirits, comfort of mind, freedom from care these happinesses we all

have, at intervals; but in the spaces between, dear me, the black hours!

They have put a curse upon the life of every human being I have ever

known, young or old. I concede not a single exception. Unless it might

be those Scientists just referred to. They may have been playing a part

with me; I hope they were not, and I believe they were not.

Time will test the Science's claim. If time shall make it good; if time

shall prove that the Science can heal the persecuted spirit of man and

banish its troubles and keep it serene and sunny and content--why, then

Mrs. Eddy will have a monument that will reach above the clouds. For if

she did not hit upon that imperial idea and evolve it and deliver it, its

discoverer can never be identified with certainty, now, I think. It is

the giant feature, it is the sun that rides in the zenith of Christian

Science, the auxiliary features are of minor consequence [Let us still

leave the large "if" aside, for the present, and proceed as if it had no

existence.]

It is not supposable that Mrs. Eddy realized, at first, the size of her

plunder. (No, find--that is the word; she did not realize the size of

her find, at first.) It had to grow upon her, by degrees, in accordance

with the inalterable custom of Circumstance, which works by stages, and

by stages only, and never furnishes any mind with all the materials for a

large idea at one time.

In the beginning, Mrs. Eddy was probably interested merely in the

mental-healing detail, and perhaps mainly interested in it pecuniary,

for she was poor.

She would succeed in anything she undertook. She would attract pupils,

and her commerce would grow. She would inspire in patient and pupil

confidence in her earnestness, her history is evidence that she would not

fail of that.

There probably came a time, in due course, when her students began to

think there was something deeper in her teachings than they had been

suspecting--a mystery beyond mental-healing, and higher. It is

conceivable that by consequence their manner towards her changed little

by little, and from respectful became reverent. It is conceivable that

this would have an influence upon her; that it would incline her to

wonder if their secret thought--that she was inspired--might not be a

well-grounded guess. It is conceivable that as time went on the thought

in their minds and its reflection in hers might solidify into conviction.

She would remember, then, that as a child she had been called, more than

once, by a mysterious voice--just as had happened to little Samuel.

(Mentioned in her Autobiography.) She would be impressed by that ancient

reminiscence, now, and it could have a prophetic meaning for her.

It is conceivable that the persuasive influences around her and within

her would give a new and powerful impulse to her philosophizings, and

that from this, in time, would result that great birth, the healing of

body and mind by the inpouring of the Spirit of God--the central and

dominant idea of Christian Science--and that when this idea came she

would not doubt that it was an inspiration direct from Heaven.

CHAPTER XI

[I must rest a little, now. To sit here and painstakingly spin out a

scheme which imagines Mrs. Eddy, of all people, working her mind on a

plane above commercialism; imagines her thinking, philosophizing,

discovering majestic things; and even imagines her dealing in

sincerities--to be frank, I find it a large contract But I have begun it,

and I will go through with it.]

CHAPTER XII

It is evident that she made disciples fast, and that their belief in her

and in the authenticity of her heavenly ambassadorship was not of the

lukewarm and half-way sort, but was profoundly earnest and sincere.

Her book was issued from the press in 1875, it began its work of

convert-making, and within six years she had successfully launched a new

Religion and a new system of healing, and was teaching them to crowds of

eager students in a College of her own, at prices so extraordinary that

we are almost compelled to accept her statement (no, her guarded

intimation) that the rates were arranged on high, since a mere human

being unacquainted with commerce and accustomed to think in pennies

could hardly put up such a hand as that without supernatural help.

From this stage onward--Mrs. Eddy being what she was--the rest of the

development--stages would follow naturally and inevitably.

But if she had been anybody else, there would have been a different

arrangement of them, with different results. Being the extraordinary

person she was, she realized her position and its possibilities; realized

the possibilities, and had the daring to use them for all they were

worth.

We have seen what her methods were after she passed the stage where her

divine ambassadorship was granted its executer in the hearts and minds of

her followers; we have seen how steady and fearless and calculated and

orderly was her march thenceforth from conquest to conquest; we have seen

her strike dead, without hesitancy, any hostile or questionable force

that rose in her path: first, the horde of pretenders that sprang up and

tried to take her Science and its market away from her--she crushed them,

she obliterated them; when her own National Christian Science Association

became great in numbers and influence, and loosely and dangerously

garrulous, and began to expound the doctrines according to its own

uninspired notions, she took up her sponge without a tremor of fear and

wiped that Association out; when she perceived that the preachers in her

pulpits were becoming afflicted with doctrine-tinkering, she recognized

the danger of it, and did not hesitate nor temporize, but promptly

dismissed the whole of them in a day, and abolished their office

permanently; we have seen that, as fast as her power grew, she was

competent to take the measure of it, and that as fast as its expansion

suggested to her gradually awakening native ambition a higher step she

took it; and so, by this evolutionary process, we have seen the gross

money-lust relegated to second place, and the lust of empire and glory

rise above it. A splendid dream; and by force of the qualities born in

her she is making it come true.

These qualities--and the capacities growing out of them by the nurturing

influences of training, observation, and experience seem to be clearly

indicated by the character of her career and its achievements. They seem

to be:

A clear head for business, and a phenomenally long one;

Clear understanding of business situations;

Accuracy in estimating the opportunities they offer;

Intelligence in planning a business move;

Firmness in sticking to it after it has been decided upon;

Extraordinary daring;

Indestructible persistency;

Devouring ambition;

Limitless selfishness;

A knowledge of the weaknesses and poverties and docilities of human

nature and how to turn them to account which has never been surpassed, if

ever equalled;

And--necessarily--the foundation-stone of Mrs. Eddy's character is a

never-wavering confidence in herself.

It is a granite character. And--quite naturally--a measure of the talc

of smallnesses common to human nature is mixed up in it and distributed

through it. When Mrs. Eddy is not dictating servilities from her throne

in the clouds to her official domestics in Boston or to her far-spread

subjects round about the planet, but is down on the ground, she is kin to

us and one of us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical,

incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable,

inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly

self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the

commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass

god with clay legs.

CHAPTER XIII

In drawing Mrs. Eddy's portrait it has been my purpose to restrict myself

to materials furnished by herself, and I believe I have done that. If I

have misinterpreted any of her acts, it was not done intentionally.

It will be noticed that in skeletonizing a list of the qualities which

have carried her to the dizzy summit which she occupies, I have not

mentioned the power which was the commanding force employed in achieving

that lofty flight. It did not belong in that list; it was a force that

was not a detail of her character, but was an outside one. It was the

power which proceeded from her people's recognition of her as a

supernatural personage, conveyer of the Latest Word, and divinely

commissioned to deliver it to the world. The form which such a

recognition takes, consciously or unconsciously, is worship; and worship

does not question nor criticize, it obeys. The object of it does not

need to coddle it, bribe it, beguile it, reason with it, convince it--it

commands it; that is sufficient; the obedience rendered is not reluctant,

but prompt and whole-hearted. Admiration for a Napoleon, confidence in

him, pride in him, affection for him, can lift him high and carry him

far; and these are forms of worship, and are strong forces, but they are

worship of a mere human being, after all, and are infinitely feeble, as

compared with those that are generated by that other worship, the worship

of a divine personage. Mrs. Eddy has this efficient worship, this massed

and centralized force, this force which is indifferent to opposition,

untroubled by fear, and goes to battle singing, like Cromwell's soldiers;

and while she has it she can command and it will obey, and maintain her

on her throne, and extend her empire.

She will have it until she dies; and then we shall see a curious and

interesting further development of her revolutionary work begin.

CHAPTER XIV

The President and Board of Directors will succeed her, and the government

will go on without a hitch. The By-laws will bear that interpretation.

All the Mother-Church's vast powers are concentrated in that Board. Mrs.

Eddy's unlimited personal reservations make the Board's ostensible

supremacy, during her life, a sham, and the Board itself a shadow. But

Mrs. Eddy has not made those reservations for any one but herself--they

are distinctly personal, they bear her name, they are not usable by

another individual. When she dies her reservations die, and the Board's

shadow-powers become real powers, without the change of any important

By-law, and the Board sits in her place as absolute and irresponsible a

sovereign as she was.

It consists of but five persons, a much more manageable Cardinalate than

the Roman Pope's. I think it will elect its Pope from its own body, and

that it will fill its own vacancies. An elective Papacy is a safe and

wise system, and a long-liver.

CHAPTER XV

We may take that up now.

It is not a single if, but a several-jointed one; not an oyster, but a

vertebrate.

1. Did Mrs. Eddy borrow from Quimby the Great Idea, or only the little

one, the old-timer, the ordinary mental-healing-healing by "mortal" mind?

2. If she borrowed the Great Idea, did she carry it away in her head, or

in manuscript?

3. Did she hit upon the Great Idea herself? By the Great Idea I mean,

of course, the conviction that the Force involved was still existent, and

could be applied now just as it was applied by Christ's Disciples and

their converts, and as successfully.

4. Did she philosophize it, systematize it, and write it down in a book?

5. Was it she, and not another, that built a new Religion upon the book

and organized it?

I think No. 5 can be answered with a Yes, and dismissed from the

controversy. And I think that the Great Idea, great as it was, would

have enjoyed but a brief activity, and would then have gone to sleep

again for some more centuries, but for the perpetuating impulse it got

from that organized and tremendous force.

As for Nos. 1, 2, and 4, the hostiles contend that Mrs. Eddy got the

Great Idea from Quimby and carried it off in manuscript. But their

testimony, while of consequence, lacks the most important detail; so far

as my information goes, the Quimby manuscript has not been produced. I

think we cannot discuss No. 1 and No. 2 profitably. Let them go.

For me, No. 3 has a mild interest, and No. 4 a violent one.

As regards No. 3, Mrs. Eddy was brought up, from the cradle, an

old-time, boiler-iron, Westminster-Catechism Christian, and knew her

Bible as well as Captain Kydd knew his, "when he sailed, when he sailed,"

and perhaps as sympathetically. The Great Idea had struck a million

Bible-readers before her as being possible of resurrection and

application--it must have struck as many as that, and been cogitated,

indolently, doubtingly, then dropped and forgotten--and it could have

struck her, in due course. But how it could interest her, how it could

appeal to her--with her make this a thing that is difficult to

understand.

For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful: the power,

through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and

pains and grief--all--with a word, with a touch of the hand! This power

was given by the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the converted.

All--every one. It was exercised for generations afterwards. Any

Christian who was in earnest and not a make-believe, not a policy

--Christian, not a Christian for revenue only, had that healing power,

and could cure with it any disease or any hurt or damage possible to

human flesh and bone. These things are true, or they are not. If they

were true seventeen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago it would be

difficult to satisfactorily explain why or how or by what argument that

power should be nonexistent in Christians now.

To wish to exercise it could occur to Mrs. Eddy--but would it?

Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money,

power, glory--vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent,

pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate,

shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably

selfish--

Of course the Great Idea could strike her, we have to grant that, but why

it should interest her is a question which can easily overstrain the

imagination and bring on nervous prostration, or something like that, and

is better left alone by the judicious, it seems to me--

Unless we call to our help the alleged other side of Mrs. Eddy's make and

character the side which her multitude of followers see, and sincerely

believe in. Fairness requires that their view be stated here. It is the

opposite of the one which I have drawn from Mrs. Eddy's history and from

her By-laws. To her followers she is this:

Patient, gentle, loving, compassionate, noble hearted, unselfish,

sinless, widely cultured, splendidly equipped mentally, a profound

thinker, an able writer, a divine personage, an inspired messenger whose

acts are dictated from the Throne, and whose every utterance is the Voice

of God.

She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their

lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and

flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has

no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with a

break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into

eternity as fancies of the waking day melt into the dreams of sleep.

They believe it is a Christianity that is in the New Testament; that it

has always been there, that in the drift of ages it was lost through

disuse and neglect, and that this benefactor has found it and given it

back to men, turning the night of life into day, its terrors into myths,

its lamentations into songs of emancipation and rejoicing.

There we have Mrs. Eddy as her followers see her. She has lifted them

out of grief and care and doubt and fear, and made their lives beautiful;

she found them wandering forlorn in a wintry wilderness, and has led them

to a tropic paradise like that of which the poet sings:

"O, islands there are on the face of the deep

Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep."

To ask them to examine with a microscope the character of such a

benefactor; to ask them to examine it at all; to ask them to look at a

blemish which another person believes he has found in it--well, in their

place could you do it? Would you do it? Wouldn't you be ashamed to do

it? If a tramp had rescued your child from fire and death, and saved its

mother's heart from breaking, could you see his rags? Could you smell

his breath? Mrs. Eddy has done more than that for these people.

They are prejudiced witnesses. To the credit of human nature it is not

possible that they should be otherwise. They sincerely believe that Mrs.

Eddy's character is pure and perfect and beautiful, and her history

without stain or blot or blemish. But that does not settle it. They

sincerely believe she did not borrow the Great Idea from Quimby, but hit

upon it herself. It may be so, and it could be so. Let it go--there is

no way to settle it. They believe she carried away no Quimby

manuscripts. Let that go, too--there is no way to settle it. They

believe that she, and not another, built the Religion upon the book, and

organized it. I believe it, too.

Finally, they believe that she philosophized Christian Science, explained

it, systematized it, and wrote it all out with her own hand in the book

Science and Health.

I am not able to believe that. Let us draw the line there. The known

and undisputed products of her pen are a formidable witness against her.

They do seem to me to prove, quite clearly and conclusively, that

writing, upon even simple subjects, is a difficult labor for her: that

she has never been able to write anything above third-rate English; that

she is weak in the matter of grammar; that she has but a rude and dull

sense of the values of words; that she so lacks in the matter of literary

precision that she can seldom put a thought into words that express it

lucidly to the reader and leave no doubts in his mind as to whether he

has rightly understood or not; that she cannot even draught a Preface

that a person can fully comprehend, nor one which can by any art be

translated into a fully understandable form; that she can seldom inject

into a Preface even single sentences whose meaning is uncompromisingly

clear--yet Prefaces are her specialty, if she has one.

Mrs. Eddy's known and undisputed writings are very limited in bulk; they

exhibit no depth, no analytical quality, no thought above school

composition size, and but juvenile ability in handling thoughts of even

that modest magnitude. She has a fine commercial ability, and could

govern a vast railway system in great style; she could draught a set of

rules that Satan himself would say could not be improved on--for

devilish effectiveness--by his staff; but we know, by our excursions

among the Mother-Church's By-laws, that their English would discredit the

deputy baggage-smasher. I am quite sure that Mrs. Eddy cannot write well

upon any subject, even a commercial one.

In the very first revision of Science and Health (1883), Mrs. Eddy wrote

a Preface which is an unimpeachable witness that the rest of the book was

written by somebody else. I have put it in the Appendix along with a

page or two taken from the body of the book, and will ask the reader to

compare the labored and lumbering and confused gropings of this Preface

with the easy and flowing and direct English of the other exhibit, and

see if he can believe that the one hand and brain produced both.

And let him take the Preface apart, sentence by sentence, and searchingly

examine each sentence word by word, and see if he can find half a dozen

sentences whose meanings he is so sure of that he can rephrase them--in

words of his own--and reproduce what he takes to be those meanings.

Money can be lost on this game. I know, for I am the one that lost it.

Now let the reader turn to the excerpt which I have made from the chapter

on "Prayer" (last year's edition of Science and Health), and compare that

wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of work with the

aforesaid Preface, and with Mrs. Eddy's poetry concerning the gymnastic

trees, and Minerva's not yet effete sandals, and the wreaths imported

from Erudition's bower for the decoration of Plymouth Rock, and the

Plague-spot and Bacilli, and my other exhibits (turn back to my Chapters

I. and II.) from the Autobiography, and finally with the late

Communication concerning me, and see if he thinks anybody's affirmation,

or anybody's sworn testimony, or any other testimony of any imaginable

kind would ever be likely to convince him that Mrs. Eddy wrote that

chapter on Prayer.

I do not wish to impose my opinion on any one who will not permit it, but

such as it is I offer it here for what it is worth. I cannot believe,

and I do not believe, that Mrs. Eddy originated any of the thoughts and

reasonings out of which the book Science and Health is constructed; and I

cannot believe, and do not believe that she ever wrote any part of that

book.

I think that if anything in the world stands proven, and well and solidly

proven, by unimpeachable testimony--the treacherous testimony of her own

pen in her known and undisputed literary productions--it is that Mrs.

Eddy is not capable of thinking upon high planes, nor of reasoning

clearly nor writing intelligently upon low ones.

Inasmuch as--in my belief--the very first editions of the book Science

and Health were far above the reach of Mrs. Eddy's mental and literary

abilities, I think she has from the very beginning been claiming as her

own another person's book, and wearing as her own property laurels

rightfully belonging to that person--the real author of Science and

Health. And I think the reason--and the only reason--that he has not

protested is because his work was not exposed to print until after he was

safely dead.

That with an eye to business, and by grace of her business talent, she

has restored to the world neglected and abandoned features of the

Christian religion which her thousands of followers find gracious and

blessed and contenting, I recognize and confess; but I am convinced that

every single detail of the work except just that one--the delivery of the

Product to the world--was conceived and performed by another.

APPENDIX A

ORIGINAL FIRST PREFACE TO SCIENCE AND HEALTH

There seems a Christian necessity of learning God's power and purpose to

heal both mind and body. This thought grew out of our early seeking Him

in all our ways, and a hopeless as singular invalidism that drugs

increased instead of diminished, and hygiene benefited only for a season.

By degrees we have drifted into more spiritual latitudes of thought, and

experimented as we advanced until demonstrating fully the power of mind

over the body. About the year 1862, having heard of a mesmerist in

Portland who was treating the sick by manipulation, we visited him; he

helped us for a time, then we relapsed somewhat. After his decease, and

a severe casualty deemed fatal by skilful physicians, we discovered that

the Principle of all healing and the law that governs it is God, a divine

Principle, and a spiritual not material law, and regained health.

It was not an individual or mortal mind acting upon another so-called

mind that healed us. It was the glorious truths of Christian Science

that we discovered as we neared that verge of so-called material life

named death; yea, it was the great Shekinah, the spirit of Life, Truth,

and Love illuminating our understanding of the action and might of

Omnipotence! The old gentleman to whom we have referred had some very

advanced views on healing, but he was not avowedly religious neither

scholarly. We interchanged thoughts on the subject of healing the sick.

I restored some patients of his that he failed to heal, and left in his

possession some manuscripts of mine containing corrections of his

desultory pennings, which I am informed at his decease passed into the

hands of a patient of his, now residing in Scotland. He died in 1865 and

left no published works. The only manuscript that we ever held of his,

longer than to correct it, was one of perhaps a dozen pages, most of

which we had composed. He manipulated the sick; hence his ostensible

method of healing was physical instead of mental.

We helped him in the esteem of the public by our writings, but never knew

of his stating orally or in writing that he treated his patients

mentally; never heard him give any directions to that effect; and have it

from one of his patients, who now asserts that he was the founder of

mental healing, that he never revealed to anyone his method. We refer to

these facts simply to refute the calumnies and false claims of our

enemies, that we are preferring dishonest claims to the discovery and

founding at this period of Metaphysical Healing or Christian Science.

The Science and laws of a purely mental healing and their method of

application through spiritual power alone, else a mental argument against

disease, are our own discovery at this date. True, the Principle is

divine and eternal, but the application of it to heal the sick had been

lost sight of, and required to be again spiritually discerned and its

science discovered, that man might retain it through the understanding.

Since our discovery in 1866 of the divine science of Christian Healing,

we have labored with tongue and pen to found this system. In this

endeavor every obstacle has been thrown in our path that the envy and

revenge of a few disaffected students could devise. The superstition and

ignorance of even this period have not failed to contribute their mite

towards misjudging us, while its Christian advancement and scientific

research have helped sustain our feeble efforts.

Since our first Edition of Science and Health, published in 1875, two of

the aforesaid students have plagiarized and pirated our works. In the

issues of E. J. A., almost exclusively ours, were thirteen paragraphs,

without credit, taken verbatim from our books.

Not one of our printed works was ever copied or abstracted from the

published or from the unpublished writings of anyone. Throughout our

publications of Metaphysical Healing or Christian Science, when writing

or dictating them, we have given ourselves to contemplation wholly apart

from the observation of the material senses: to look upon a copy would

have distracted our thoughts from the subject before us. We were seldom

able to copy our own compositions, and have employed an amanuensis for

the last six years. Every work that we have had published has been

extemporaneously written; and out of fifty lectures and sermons that we

have delivered the last year, forty-four have been extemporaneous. We

have distributed many of our unpublished manuscripts; loaned to one of

our youngest students, R. K--------y, between three and four hundred pages,

of which we were sole author--giving him liberty to copy but not to

publish them.

Leaning on the sustaining Infinite with loving trust, the trials of

to-day grow brief, and to-morrow is big with blessings.

The wakeful shepherd, tending his flocks, beholds from the mountain's top

the first faint morning beam ere cometh the risen day. So from Soul's

loftier summits shines the pale star to prophet-shepherd, and it

traverses night, over to where the young child lies, in cradled

obscurity, that shall waken a world. Over the night of error dawn the

morning beams and guiding star of Truth, and "the wise men" are led by it

to Science, which repeats the eternal harmony that it reproduced, in

proof of immortality. The time for thinkers has come; and the time for

revolutions, ecclesiastical and civil, must come. Truth, independent of

doctrines or time-honored systems, stands at the threshold of history.

Contentment with the past, or the cold conventionality of custom, may no

longer shut the door on science; though empires fall, "He whose right it

is shall reign." Ignorance of God should no longer be the stepping-stone

to faith; understanding Him, "whom to know aright is Life eternal," is

the only guaranty of obedience.

This volume may not open a new thought, and make it at once familiar. It

has the sturdy task of a pioneer, to hack away at the tall oaks and cut

the rough granite, leaving future ages to declare what it has done. We

made our first discovery of the adaptation of metaphysics to the

treatment of disease in the winter of 1866; since then we have tested the

Principle on ourselves and others, and never found it to fail to prove

the statements herein made of it. We must learn the science of Life, to

reach the perfection of man. To understand God as the Principle of all

being, and to live in accordance with this Principle, is the Science of

Life. But to reproduce this harmony of being, the error of personal

sense must yield to science, even as the science of music corrects tones

caught from the ear, and gives the sweet concord of sound. There are

many theories of physic and theology, and many calls in each of their

directions for the right way; but we propose to settle the question of

"What is Truth?" on the ground of proof, and let that method of healing

the sick and establishing Christianity be adopted that is found to give

the most health and to make the best Christians; science will then have a

fair field, in which case we are assured of its triumph over all opinions

and beliefs. Sickness and sin have ever had their doctors; but the

question is, Have they become less because of them? The longevity of our

antediluvians would say, No! and the criminal records of today utter

their voices little in favor of such a conclusion. Not that we would

deny to Caesar the things that are his, but that we ask for the things

that belong to Truth; and safely affirm, from the demonstrations we have

been able to make, that the science of man understood would have

eradicated sin, sickness, and death, in a less period than six thousand

years. We find great difficulties in starting this work right. Some

shockingly false claims are already made to a metaphysical practice;

mesmerism, its very antipodes, is one of them. Hitherto we have never,

in a single instance of our discovery, found the slightest resemblance

between mesmerism and metaphysics. No especial idiosyncrasy is requisite

to acquire a knowledge of metaphysical healing; spiritual sense is more

important to its discernment than the intellect; and those who would

learn this science without a high moral standard of thought and action,

will fail to understand it until they go up higher. Owing to our

explanations constantly vibrating between the same points, an irksome

repetition of words must occur; also the use of capital letters, genders,

and technicalities peculiar to the science. Variety of language, or

beauty of diction, must give place to close analysis and unembellished

thought. "Hoping all things, enduring all things," to do good to our

enemies, to bless them that curse us, and to bear to the sorrowing and

the sick consolation and healing, we commit these pages to posterity.

MARY BAKER G. EDDY.

APPENDIX B

The Gospel narratives bear brief testimony even to the life of our great

Master. His spiritual noumenon and phenomenon, silenced portraiture.

Writers, less wise than the Apostles, essayed in the Apocryphal New

Testament, a legendary and traditional history of the early life of

Jesus. But Saint Paul summarized the character of Jesus as the model of

Christianity, in these words: "Consider Him who endured such

contradictions of sinners against Himself. Who for the joy that was set

before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at

the right hand of the throne of God."

It may be that the mortal life battle still wages, and must continue till

its involved errors are vanquished by victory-bringing Science; but this

triumph will come! God is over all. He alone is our origin, aim, and

Being. The real man is not of the dust, nor is he ever created through

the flesh; for his father and mother are the one Spirit, and his brethren

are all the children of one parent, the eternal Good.

Any kind of literary composition was excessively difficult for Mrs. Eddy.

She found it grinding hard work to dig out anything to say. She

realized, at the above stage in her life, that with all her trouble she

had not been able to scratch together even material enough for a child's

Autobiography, and also that what she had secured was in the main not

valuable, not important, considering the age and the fame of the person

she was writing about; and so it occurred to her to attempt, in that

paragraph, to excuse the meagreness and poor quality of the feast she was

spreading, by letting on that she could do ever so much better if she

wanted to, but was under constraint of Divine etiquette. To feed with

more than a few indifferent crumbs a plebeian appetite for personal

details about Personages in her class was not the correct thing, and she

blandly points out that there is Precedent for this reserve. When Mrs.

Eddy tries to be artful--in literature--it is generally after the

manner of the ostrich; and with the ostrich's luck. Please try to find

the connection between the two paragraphs.--M. T.

APPENDIX C

The following is the spiritual signification of the Lord's Prayer:

Principle, eternal and harmonious,

Nameless and adorable Intelligence,

Thou art ever present and supreme.

And when this supremacy of Spirit shall appear, the dream of matter will

disappear.

Give us the understanding of Truth and Love.

And loving we shall learn God, and Truth will destroy all error.

And lead us unto the Life that is Soul, and deliver us from the errors of

sense, sin, sickness, and death,

For God is Life, Truth, and Love for ever.

--Science and Health, edition of 1881.

It seems to me that this one is distinctly superior to the one that was

inspired for last year's edition. It is strange, but to my mind plain,

that inspiring is an art which does not improve with practice.--M. T.

APPENDIX D

"For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain,

Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in

his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come

to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you,

What things soever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them,

and ye shall have them.

"Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him."

--CHRIST JESUS.

The prayer that reclaims the sinner and heals the sick, is an absolute

faith that all things are possible to God--a spiritual understanding of

Him--an unselfed love. Regardless of what another may say or think on

this subject, I speak from experience. This prayer, combined with

self-sacrifice and toil, is the means whereby God has enabled me to

do what I have done for the religion and health of mankind.

Thoughts unspoken are not unknown to the divine Mind. Desire is prayer;

and no less can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may

be moulded and exalted before they take form in audible word, and in

deeds.

What are the motives for prayer? Do we pray to make ourselves better, or

to benefit those that hear us; to enlighten the Infinite, or to be heard

of men? Are we benefited by praying? Yes, the desire which goes forth

hungering after righteousness is blessed of our Father, and it does not

return unto us void.

God is not moved by the breath of praise to do more than He has already

done; nor can the Infinite do less than bestow all good, since He is

unchanging Wisdom and Love. We can do more for ourselves by humble

fervent petitions; but the All-loving does not grant them simply on the

ground of lip-service, for He already knows all.

Prayer cannot change the Science of Being, but it does bring us into

harmony with it. Goodness reaches the demonstration of Truth. A request

that another may work for us never does our work. The habit of pleading

with the divine Mind, as one pleads with a human being, perpetuates the

belief in God as humanly circumscribed--an error which impedes spiritual

growth.

God is Love. Can we ask Him to be more? God is Intelligence. Can we

inform the infinite Mind, or tell Him anything He does not already

comprehend? Do we hope to change perfection? Shall we plead for more at

the open fount, which always pours forth more than we receive? The

unspoken prayer does bring us nearer the Source of all existence and

blessedness.

Asking God to be God is a "vain repetition." God is "the same yesterday,

and to-day, and forever"; and He who is immutably right will do right,

without being reminded of His province. The wisdom of man is not

sufficient to warrant him in advising God.

Who would stand before a blackboard, and pray the principle of

mathematics to work out the problem? The rule is already established,

and it is our task to work out the solution. Shall we ask the divine

Principle of all goodness to do His own work? His work is done; and we

have only to avail ourselves of God's rule, in order to receive the

blessing thereof.

The divine Being must be reflected by man--else man is not the image and

likeness of the patient, tender, and true, the one "altogether lovely";

but to understand God is the work of eternity, and demands absolute

concentration of thought and energy.

How empty are our conceptions of Deity! We admit theoretically that God

is good, omnipotent, omnipresent, infinite, and then we try to give

information to this infinite Mind; and plead for unmerited pardon, and a

liberal outpouring of benefactions. Are we really grateful for the good

already received? Then we shall avail ourselves of the blessings we

have, and thus be fitted to receive more. Gratitude is much more than a

verbal expression of thanks Action expresses more gratitude than speech.

If we are ungrateful for Life, Truth, and Love, and yet return thanks to

God for all blessings, we are insincere; and incur the sharp censure our

Master pronounces on hypocrites. In such a case the only acceptable

prayer is to put the finger on the lips and remember our blessings.

While the heart is far from divine Truth and Love, we cannot conceal the

ingratitude of barren lives, for God knoweth all things.

What we most need is the prayer of fervent desire for growth in grace,

expressed in patience, meekness, love, and good deeds. To keep the

commandments of our Master and follow his example, is our proper debt to

Him, and the only worthy evidence of our gratitude for all He has done.

Outward worship is not of itself sufficient to express loyal and

heartfelt gratitude, since He has said: "If ye love Me, keep My

Commandments."

The habitual struggle to be always good, is unceasing prayer. Its

motives are made manifest in the blessings they bring--which, if not

acknowledged in audible words, attest our worthiness to be made partakers

of Love.

Simply asking that we may love God will never make us love Him; but the

longing to be better and holier--expressed in daily watchfulness, and in

striving to assimilate more of the divine character--this will mould and

fashion us anew, until we awake in His likeness. We reach the Science of

Christianity through demonstration of the divine nature; but in this

wicked world goodness will "be evil spoken of," and patience must work

experience.

Audible prayer can never do the works of spiritual understanding, which

regenerates; but silent prayer, watchfulness, and devout obedience,

enable us to follow Jesus' example. Long prayers, ecclesiasticism, and

creeds, have clipped the divine pinions of Love, and clad religion in

human robes. They materialize worship, hinder the Spirit, and keep man

from demonstrating his power over error.

Sorrow for wrong-doing is but one step towards reform, and the very

easiest step. The next and great step required by Wisdom is the test of

our sincerity--namely, reformation. To this end we are placed under the

stress of circumstances. Temptation bids us repeat the offence, and woe

comes in return for what is done. So it will ever be, till we learn that

there is no discount in the law of justice, and that we must pay "the

uttermost farthing." The measure ye mete "shall be measured to you

again," and it will be full "and running over."

Saints and sinners get their full award, but not always in this world.

The followers of Christ drank His cup. Ingratitude and persecution

filled it to the brim; but God pours the riches of His love into the

understanding and affections, giving us strength according to our day.

Sinners flourish "like a green bay-tree"; but, looking farther, the

Psalmist could see their end--namely, the destruction of sin through

suffering.

Prayer is sometimes used, as a confessional to cancel sin. This error

impedes true religion. Sin is forgiven, only as it is destroyed by

Christ-Truth and Life If prayer nourishes the belief that sin is

cancelled, and that man is made better by merely praying, it is an evil.

He grows worse who continues in sin because he thinks himself forgiven.

An apostle says that the Son of God (Christ) came to "destroy the works

of the devil." We should follow our divine Exemplar, and seek the

destruction of all evil works, error and disease included. We cannot

escape the penalty due for sin. The Scriptures say, that if we deny

Christ, "He also will deny us."

The divine Love corrects and governs man. Men may pardon, but this

divine Principle alone reforms the sinner. God is not separate from the

wisdom He bestows. The talents He gives we must improve. Calling on Him

to forgive our work, badly done or left undone, implies the vain

supposition that we have nothing to do but to ask pardon, and that

afterwards we shall be free to repeat the offence.

To cause suffering, as the result of sin, is the means of destroying sin.

Every supposed pleasure in sin will furnish more than its equivalent of

pain, until belief in material life and sin is destroyed. To reach

heaven, the harmony of Being, we must understand the divine Principle of

Being.

"God is Love." More than this we cannot ask; higher we cannot look;

farther we cannot go. To suppose that God forgives or punishes sin,

according as His mercy is sought or unsought, is to misunderstand Love

and make prayer the safety-valve for wrong-doing.

Jesus uncovered and rebuked sin before He cast it out. Of a sick woman

He said that Satan had bound her; and to Peter He said, "Thou art an

offense unto me." He came teaching and showing men how to destroy sin,

sickness, and death. He said of the fruitless tree, "It is hewn down."

It is believed by many that a certain magistrate, who lived in the time

of Jesus, left this record: "His rebuke is fearful." The strong language

of our Master confirms this description.

The only civil sentence which He had for error was, "Get thee behind Me,

Satan." Still stronger evidence that Jesus' reproof was pointed and

pungent is in His own words--showing the necessity for such forcible

utterance, when He cast out devils and healed the sick and sinful. The

relinquishment of error deprives material sense of its false claims.

Audible prayer is impressive; it gives momentary solemnity and elevation

to thought; but does it produce any lasting benefit? Looking deeply into

these things, we find that "a zeal . . . not according to knowledge,"

gives occasion for reaction unfavorable to spiritual growth, sober

resolve, and wholesome perception of God's requirements. The motives for

verbal prayer may embrace too much love of applause to induce or

encourage Christian sentiment.

Physical sensation, not Soul, produces material ecstasy, and emotions.

If spiritual sense always guided men at such times, there would grow out

of those ecstatic moments a higher experience and a better life, with

more devout self-abnegation, and purity. A self-satisfied ventilation of

fervent sentiments never makes a Christian. God is not influenced by

man. The "divine ear" is not an auditorial nerve. It is the

all-hearing and all-knowing Mind, to whom each want of man is always

known, and by whom it will be supplied.

The danger from audible prayer is, that it may lead us into temptation.

By it we may become involuntary hypocrites, uttering desires which are

not real, and consoling ourselves in the midst of sin, with the

recollection that we have prayed over it--or mean to ask forgiveness at

some later day. Hypocrisy is fatal to religion.

A wordy prayer may afford a quiet sense of self-justification, though it

makes the sinner a hypocrite. We never need despair of an honest heart,

but there is little hope for those who only come spasmodically face to

face with their wickedness, and then seek to hide it. Their prayers are

indexes which do not correspond with their character. They hold secret

fellowship with sin; and such externals are spoken of by Jesus as "like

unto whited sepulchres . . . full of all uncleanness."

If a man, though apparently fervent and prayerful, is impure, and

therefore insincere, what must be the comment upon him? If he had

reached the loftiness of his prayer, there would be no occasion for such

comment. If we feel the aspiration, humility, gratitude, and love which

our words express--this God accepts; and it is wise not to try to deceive

ourselves or others, for "there is nothing covered that shall not be

revealed." Professions and audible prayers are like charity in one

respect--they "cover a multitude of sins." Praying for humility, with

whatever fervency of expression, does not always mean a desire for it.

If we turn away from the poor, we are not ready to receive the reward of

Him who blesses the poor. We confess to having a very wicked heart, and

ask that it may be laid bare before us; but do we not already know more

of this heart than we are willing to have our neighbor see?

We ought to examine ourselves, and learn what is the affection and

purpose of the heart; for this alone can show us what we honestly are.

If a friend informs us of a fault, do we listen to the rebuke patiently,

and credit what is said? Do we not rather give thanks that we are "not

as other men?" During many years the author has been most grateful for

merited rebuke. The sting lies in unmerited censure--in the falsehood

which does no one any good.

The test of all prayer lies in the answer to these questions: Do we love

our neighbor better because of this asking? Do we pursue the old

selfishness, satisfied with having prayed for something better, though we

give no evidence of the sincerity of our requests by living consistently

with our prayer? If selfishness has given place to kindness, we shall

regard our neighbor unselfishly, and bless them that curse us; but we

shall never meet this great duty by simply asking that it may be done.

There is a cross to be taken up, before we can enjoy the fruition of our

hope and faith.

Dost thou "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy

soul, and with all thy mind?" This command includes much--even the

surrender of all merely material sensation, affection, and worship. This

is the El Dorado of Christianity. It involves the Science of Life, and

recognizes only the divine control of Spirit, wherein Soul is our master,

and material sense and human will have no place.

Are you willing to leave all for Christ, for Truth, and so be counted

among sinners? No! Do you really desire to attain this point? No!

Then why make long prayers about it, and ask to be Christians, since you

care not to tread in the footsteps of our dear Master? If unwilling to

follow His example, wherefore pray with the lips that you may be

partakers of His nature? Consistent prayer is the desire to do right.

Prayer means that we desire to, and will, walk in the light so far as we

receive it, even though with bleeding footsteps, and waiting patiently on

the Lord, will leave our real desires to be rewarded by Him.

The world must grow to the spiritual understanding of prayer. If good

enough to profit by Jesus' cup of earthly sorrows, God will sustain us

under these sorrows. Until we are thus divinely qualified, and willing

to drink His cup, millions of vain repetitions will never pour into

prayer the unction of Spirit, in demonstration of power, and "with signs

following." Christian Science reveals a necessity for overcoming the

world, the flesh and evil, and thus destroying all error.

Seeking is not sufficient. It is striving which enables us to enter.

Spiritual attainments open the door to a higher understanding of the

divine Life.

One of the forms of worship in Thibet is to carry a praying-machine

through the streets, and stop at the doors to earn a penny by grinding

out a prayer; whereas civilization pays for clerical prayers, in lofty

edifices. Is the difference very great, after all?

Experience teaches us that we do not always receive the blessings we ask

for in prayer.

There is some misapprehension of the source and means of all goodness and

blessedness, or we should certainly receive what we ask for. The

Scriptures say: "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye

may consume it upon your lusts." What we desire and ask for it is not

always best for us to receive. In this case infinite Love will not grant

the request. Do you ask Wisdom to be merciful and not punish sin? Then

"ye ask amiss." Without punishment, sin would multiply. Jesus' prayer,

"forgive us our debts," specified also the terms of forgiveness. When

forgiving the adulterous woman He said, "Go, and sin no more."

A magistrate sometimes remits the penalty, but this may be no moral

benefit to the criminal; and at best, it only saves him from one form of

punishment. The moral law, which has the right to acquit or condemn,

always demands restitution, before mortals can "go up higher." Broken

law brings penalty, in order to compel this progress.

Mere legal pardon (and there is no other, for divine Principle never

pardons our sins or mistakes till they are corrected) leaves the offender

free to repeat the offense; if, indeed, he has not already suffered

sufficiently from vice to make him turn from it with loathing. Truth

bestows no pardon upon error, but wipes it out in the most effectual

manner. Jesus suffered for our sins, not to annul the divine sentence

against an individual's sin, but to show that sin must bring inevitable

suffering.

Petitions only bring to mortals the results of their own faith. We know

that a desire for holiness is requisite in order to gain it; but if we

desire holiness above all else, we shall sacrifice everything for it. We

must be willing to do this, that we may walk securely in the only

practical road to holiness. Prayer alone cannot change the unalterable

Truth, or give us an understanding of it; but prayer coupled with a

fervent habitual desire to know and do the will of God will bring us into

all Truth. Such a desire has little need of audible expression. It is

best expressed in thought and life.

APPENDIX E

Reverend Heber Newton on Christian Science:

To begin, then, at the beginning, Christian Science accepts the work of

healing sickness as an integral part of the discipleship of Jesus Christ.

In Christ it finds, what the Church has always recognized, theoretically,

though it has practically ignored the fact--the Great Physician. That

Christ healed the sick, we none of us question. It stands plainly upon

the record. This ministry of healing was too large a part of His work to

be left out from any picture of that life. Such service was not an

incident of His career--it was an essential element of that career. It

was an integral factor in His mission. The Evangelists leave us no

possibility of confusion on this point. Co-equal with his work of

instruction and inspiration was His work of healing.

The records make it equally clear that the Master laid His charge upon

His disciples to do as He had done. "When He had called unto Him His

twelve disciples, He gave them power over unclean spirits, to cast them

out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease." In

sending them forth, "He commanded them, saying, . . . As ye go,

preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse

the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons."

That the twelve disciples undertook to do the Master's work of healing,

and that they, in their measure, succeeded, seems beyond question. They

found in themselves the same power that the Master found in Himself, and

they used it as He had used His power. The record of The Acts of the

Apostles, if at all trustworthy history, shows that they, too, healed the

sick.

Beyond the circle of the original twelve, it is equally clear that the

early disciples believed themselves charged with the same mission, and

that they sought to fulfil it. The records of the early Church make it

indisputable that powers of healing were recognized as among the gifts of

the Spirit. St. Paul's letters render it certain that these gifts were

not a privilege of the original twelve, merely, but that they were the

heritage into which all the disciples entered.

Beyond the era of the primitive Church, through several generations, the

early Christians felt themselves called to the same ministry of healing,

and enabled with the same secret of power. Through wellnigh three

centuries, the gifts of healing appear to have been, more or less,

recognized and exercised in the Church. Through those generations,

however, there was a gradual disuse of this power, following upon a

failing recognition of its possession. That which was originally the

rule became the exception. By degrees, the sense of authority and power

to heal passed out from the consciousness of the Church. It ceased to be

a sign of the indwelling Spirit. For fifteen centuries, the recognition

of this authority and power has been altogether exceptional. Here and

there, through the history of these centuries, there have been those who

have entered into this belief of their own privilege and duty, and have

used the gift which they recognized. The Church has never been left

without a line of witnesses to this aspect of the discipleship of Christ.

But she has come to accept it as the normal order of things that what was

once the rule in the Christian Church should be now only the exception.

Orthodoxy has framed a theory of the words of Jesus to account for this

strange departure of His Church from them. It teaches us to believe that

His example was not meant to be followed, in this respect, by all His

disciples. The power of healing which was in Him was a purely

exceptional power. It was used as an evidence of His divine mission. It

was a miraculous gift. The gift of working miracles was not bestowed

upon His Church at large. His original disciples, the twelve apostles,

received this gift, as a necessity of the critical epoch of Christianity

--the founding of the Church. Traces of the power lingered on, in

weakening activity, until they gradually ceased, and the normal condition

of the Church was entered upon, in which miracles are no longer possible.

We accept this, unconsciously, as the true state of things in

Christianity. But it is a conception which will not bear a moment's

examination. There is not the slightest suggestion upon record that

Christ set any limit to this charge which He gave His disciples. On the

contrary, there are not lacking hints that He looked for the possession

and exercise of this power wherever His spirit breathed in men.

Even if the concluding paragraph of St. Mark's Gospel were a later

appendix, it may none the less have been a faithful echo of words of the

Master, as it certainly is a trustworthy record of the belief of the

early Christians as to the thought of Jesus concerning His followers. In

that interesting passage, Jesus, after His death, appeared to the eleven,

and formally commissioned them, again, to take up His work in the world;

bidding them, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every

creature." "And these signs," He tells them, "shall follow them that

believe"--not the apostles only, but "them that believe," without limit

of time; "in My name they shall cast out devils . . . they shall lay

hands on the sick and they shall recover." The concluding discourse to

the disciples, recorded in the Gospel according to St. John, affirms the

same expectation on the part of Jesus; emphasizing it in His solemn way:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me, the works that

I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do."

APPENDIX F

Few will deny that an intelligence apart from man formed and governs the

spiritual universe and man; and this intelligence is the eternal Mind,

and neither matter nor man created this intelligence and divine

Principle; nor can this Principle produce aught unlike itself. All that

we term sin, sickness, and death is comprised in the belief of matter.

The realm of the real is spiritual; the opposite of Spirit is matter; and

the opposite of the real is unreal or material. Matter is an error of

statement, for there is no matter. This error of premises leads to error

of conclusion in every statement of matter as a basis. Nothing we can

say or believe regarding matter is true, except that matter is unreal,

simply a belief that has its beginning and ending.

The conservative firm called matter and mind God never formed. The

unerring and eternal Mind destroys this imaginary copartnership, formed

only to be dissolved in a manner and at a period unknown. This

copartnership is obsolete. Placed under the microscope of metaphysics

matter disappears. Only by understanding there are not two, matter and

mind, is a logical and correct conclusion obtained by either one.

Science gathers not grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. Intelligence

never produced non-intelligence, such as matter: the immortal never

produced mortality, good never resulted in evil. The science of Mind

shows conclusively that matter is a myth. Metaphysics are above physics,

and drag not matter, or what is termed that, into one of its premises or

conclusions. Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts, and exchanges

the objects of sense for the ideas of Soul. These ideas are perfectly

tangible and real to consciousness, and they have this advantage--they

are eternal. Mind and its thoughts comprise the whole of God, the

universe, and of man. Reason and revelation coincide with this

statement, and support its proof every hour, for nothing is harmonious or

eternal that is not spiritual: the realization of this will bring out

objects from a higher source of thought; hence more beautiful and

immortal.

The fact of spiritualization produces results in striking contrast to the

farce of materialization: the one produces the results of chastity and

purity, the other the downward tendencies and earthward gravitation of

sensualism and impurity.

The exalting and healing effects of metaphysics show their fountain.

Nothing in pathology has exceeded the application of metaphysics.

Through mind alone we have prevented disease and preserved health. In

cases of chronic and acute diseases, in their severest forms, we have

changed the secretions, renewed structure, and restored health; have

elongated shortened limbs, relaxed rigid muscles, made cicatrized joints

supple; restored carious bones to healthy conditions, renewed that which

is termed the lost substance of the lungs; and restored healthy

organizations where disease was organic instead of functional.

MRS. EDDY IN ERROR

I feel almost sure that Mrs. Eddy's inspiration--works are getting out of

repair. I think so because they made some errors in a statement which

she uttered through the press on the 17th of January. Not large ones,

perhaps, still it is a friend's duty to straighten such things out and

get them right when he can. Therefore I will put my other duties aside

for a moment and undertake this helpful service. She said as follows:

"In view of the circulation of certain criticisms from the pen of Mark

Twain, I submit the following statement:

"It is a fact, well understood, that I begged the students who first gave

me the endearing appellative 'mother' not to name me thus. But, without

my consent, that word spread like wildfire. I still must think the name

is not applicable to me. I stand in relation to this century as a

Christian discoverer, founder, and leader. I regard self-deification as

blasphemous; I may be more loved, but I am less lauded, pampered,

provided for, and cheered than others before me--and wherefore? Because

Christian Science is not yet popular, and I refuse adulation.

"My visit to the Mother-Church after it was built and dedicated pleased

me, and the situation was satisfactory. The dear members wanted to greet

me with escort and the ringing of bells, but I declined, and went alone

in my carriage to the church, entered it, and knelt in thanks upon the

steps of its altar. There the foresplendor of the beginnings of truth

fell mysteriously upon my spirit. I believe in one Christ, teach one

Christ, know of but one Christ. I believe in but one incarnation, one

Mother Mary, and know I am not that one, and never claimed to be. It

suffices me to learn the Science of the Scriptures relative to this

subject.

"Christian Scientists have no quarrel with Protestants, Catholics, or any

other sect. They need to be understood as following the divine Principle

God, Love and not imagined to be unscientific worshippers of a human

being.

"In the aforesaid article, of which I have seen only extracts, Mark

Twain's wit was not wasted In certain directions. Christian Science

eschews divine rights in human beings. If the individual governed human

consciousness, my statement of Christian Science would be disproved, but

to understand the spiritual idea is essential to demonstrate Science and

its pure monotheism--one God, one Christ, no idolatry, no human

propaganda. Jesus taught and proved that what feeds a few feeds all.

His life-work subordinated the material to the spiritual, and He left

this legacy of truth to mankind. His metaphysics is not the sport of

philosophy, religion, or Science; rather it is the pith and finale of

them all.

"I have not the inspiration or aspiration to be a first or second

Virgin-Mother--her duplicate, antecedent, or subsequent. What I am

remains to be proved by the good I do. We need much humility, wisdom,

and love to perform the functions of foreshadowing and foretasting heaven

within us. This glory is molten in the furnace of affliction."

She still thinks the name of Our Mother not applicable to her; and she is

also able to remember that it distressed her when it was conferred upon

her, and that she begged to have it suppressed. Her memory is at fault

here. If she will take her By-laws, and refer to Section 1 of Article

XXII., written with her own hand--she will find that she has reserved

that title to herself, and is so pleased with it, and so--may we say

jealous?--about it, that she threatens with excommunication any sister

Scientist who shall call herself by it. This is that Section 1:

"The Title of Mother. In the year 1895 loyal Christian Scientists had

given to the author of their text-book, the Founder of Christian Science,

the individual, endearing term of Mother. Therefore, if a student of

Christian Science shall apply this title, either to herself or to others,

except as the term for kinship according to the flesh, it shall be

regarded by the Church as an indication of disrespect for their Pastor

Emeritus, and unfitness to be a member of the Mother-Church."

Mrs. Eddy is herself the Mother-Church--its powers and authorities are in

her possession solely--and she can abolish that title whenever it may

please her to do so. She has only to command her people, wherever they

may be in the earth, to use it no more, and it will never be uttered

again. She is aware of this.

It may be that she "refuses adulation" when she is not awake, but when

she is awake she encourages it and propagates it in that museum called

"Our Mother's Room," in her Church in Boston. She could abolish that

institution with a word, if she wanted to. She is aware of that. I will

say a further word about the museum presently.

Further down the column, her memory is unfaithful again:

"I believe in . . . but one Mother Mary, and know I am not that one,

and never claimed to be."

At a session of the National Christian Science Association, held in the

city of New York on the 27th of May, 1890, the secretary was "instructed

to send to our Mother greetings and words of affection from her assembled

children."

Her telegraphic response was read to the Association at next day's

meeting:

"All hail! He hath filled the hungry with good things and the sick hath

He not sent empty away.--MOTHER MARY."

Which Mother Mary is this one? Are there two? If so, she is both of

them; for, when she signed this telegram in this satisfied and

unprotesting way, the Mother-title which she was going to so strenuously

object to, and put from her with humility, and seize with both hands, and

reserve as her sole property, and protect her monopoly of it with a stern

By-law, while recognizing with diffidence that it was "not applicable" to

her (then and to-day)--that Mother--title was not yet born, and would not

be offered to her until five years later. The date of the above "Mother

Mary" is 1890; the "individual, endearing title of Mother" was given her

"in 1895"--according to her own testimony. See her By-law quoted above.

In his opening Address to that Convention of 1890, the President

recognized this Mary--our Mary-and abolished all previous ones. He said:

"There is but one Moses, one Jesus; and there is but one Mary."

The confusions being now dispersed, we have this clarified result:

Were had been a Moses at one time, and only one; there had been a Jesus

at one time, and only one; there is a Mary and "only one." She is not a

Has Been, she is an Is--the "Author of Science and Health; and we cannot

ignore her."

1. In 1890, there was but one Mother Mary. The President said so.

2. Mrs. Eddy was that one. She said so, in signing the telegram.

3. Mrs. Eddy was not that one for she says so, in her Associated Press

utterance of January 17th.

4. And has "never claimed to be that one"--unless the signature to the

telegram is a claim.

Thus it stands proven and established that she is that Mary and isn't,

and thought she was and knows she wasn't. That much is clear.

She is also "The Mother," by the election of 1895, and did not want the

title, and thinks it is not applicable to her, end will excommunicate any

one that tries to take it away from her. So that is clear.

I think that the only really troublesome confusion connected with these

particular matters has arisen from the name Mary. Much vexation, much

misunderstanding, could have been avoided if Mrs. Eddy had used some of

her other names in place of that one. "Mother Mary" was certain to stir

up discussion. It would have been much better if she had signed the

telegram "Mother Baker"; then there would have been no Biblical

competition, and, of course, that is a thing to avoid. But it is not too

late, yet.

I wish to break in here with a parenthesis, and then take up this

examination of Mrs. Eddy's Claim of January 17th again.

The history of her "Mother Mary" telegram--as told to me by one who ought

to be a very good authority--is curious and interesting. The telegram

ostensibly quotes verse 53 from the "Magnificat," but really makes some

pretty formidable changes in it. This is St. Luke's version:

"He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent

empty away."

This is "Mother Mary's" telegraphed version:

"He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the sick hath He not

sent empty away."

To judge by the Official Report, the bursting of this bombshell in that

massed convention of trained Christians created no astonishment, since it

caused no remark, and the business of the convention went tranquilly on,

thereafter, as if nothing had happened.

Did those people detect those changes? We cannot know. I think they

must have noticed them, the wording of St. Luke's verse being as

familiar to all Christians as is the wording of the Beatitudes; and I

think that the reason the new version provoked no surprise and no comment

was, that the assemblage took it for a "Key"--a spiritualized explanation

of verse 53, newly sent down from heaven through Mrs. Eddy. For all

Scientists study their Bibles diligently, and they know their Magnificat.

I believe that their confidence in the authenticity of Mrs. Eddy's

inspirations is so limitless and so firmly established that no change,

however violent, which she might make in a Bible text could disturb their

composure or provoke from them a protest.

Her improved rendition of verse 53 went into the convention's report and

appeared in a New York paper the next day. The (at that time) Scientist

whom I mentioned a minute ago, and who had not been present at the

convention, saw it and marvelled; marvelled and was indignant--indignant

with the printer or the telegrapher, for making so careless and so

dreadful an error. And greatly distressed, too; for, of course, the

newspaper people would fall foul of it, and be sarcastic, and make fun of

it, and have a blithe time over it, and be properly thankful for the

chance. It shows how innocent he was; it shows that he did not know the

limitations of newspaper men in the matter of Biblical knowledge. The

new verse 53 raised no insurrection in the press; in fact, it was not

even remarked upon; I could have told him the boys would not know there

was anything the matter with it. I have been a newspaper man myself, and

in those days I had my limitations like the others.

The Scientist hastened to Concord and told Mrs. Eddy what a disastrous

mistake had been made, but he found to his bewilderment that she was

tranquil about it, and was not proposing to correct it. He was not able

to get her to promise to make a correction. He asked her secretary if he

had heard aright when the telegram was dictated to him; the secretary

said he had, and took the filed copy of it and verified its authenticity

by comparing it with the stenographic notes.

Mrs. Eddy did make the correction, two months later, in her official

organ. It attracted no attention among the Scientists; and, naturally,

none elsewhere, for that periodical's circulation was practically

confined to disciples of the cult.

That is the tale as it was told to me by an ex-Scientist. Verse 53

--renovated and spiritualized--had a narrow escape from a tremendous

celebrity. The newspaper men would have made it as famous as the

assassination of Caesar, but for their limitations.

To return to the Claim. I find myself greatly embarrassed by Mrs. Eddy's

remark: "I regard self-deification as blasphemous." If she is right

about that, I have written a half-ream of manuscript this past week which

I must not print, either in the book which I am writing, or elsewhere:

for it goes into that very matter with extensive elaboration, citing, in

detail, words and acts of Mrs. Eddy's which seem to me to prove that she

is a faithful and untiring worshipper of herself, and has carried

self-deification to a length which has not been before ventured in ages.

If ever. There is not room enough in this chapter for that Survey, but I

can epitomize a portion of it here.

With her own untaught and untrained mind, and without outside help, she

has erected upon a firm and lasting foundation the most minutely perfect,

and wonderful, and smoothly and exactly working, and best safe-guarded

system of government that has yet been devised in the world, as I

believe, and as I am sure I could prove if I had room for my documentary

evidences here.

It is a despotism (on this democratic soil); a sovereignty more absolute

than the Roman Papacy, more absolute than the Russian Czarship; it has

not a single power, not a shred of authority, legislative or executive,

which is not lodged solely in the sovereign; all its dreams, its

functions, its energies, have a single object, a single reason for

existing, and only the one--to build to the sky the glory of the

sovereign, and keep it bright to the end of time.

Mrs. Eddy is the sovereign; she devised that great place for herself, she

occupies that throne.

In 1895, she wrote a little primer, a little body of autocratic laws,

called the Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and put those

laws in force, in permanence. Her government is all there; all in that

deceptively innocent-looking little book, that cunning little devilish

book, that slumbering little brown volcano, with hell in its bowels. In

that book she has planned out her system, and classified and defined its

purposes and powers.

MAIN PARTS OF THE MACHINE

A Supreme Church. At Boston.

Branch Churches. All over the world

One Pastor for the whole of them: to wit, her book, Science and Health.

Term of the book's office--forever.

In every C.S. pulpit, two "Readers," a man and a woman. No talkers, no

preachers, in any Church-readers only. Readers of the Bible and her

books--no others. No commentators allowed to write or print.

A Church Service. She has framed it--for all the C.S. Churches

--selected its readings, its prayers, and the hymns to be used, and has

appointed the order of procedure. No changes permitted.

A Creed. She wrote it. All C.S. Churches must subscribe to it. No

other permitted.

A Treasury. At Boston. She carries the key.

A C.S. Book--Publishing House. For books approved by her. No others

permitted.

Journals and Magazines. These are organs of hers, and are controlled by

her.

A College. For teaching C.S.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE MACHINE'S POWERS AND DIGNITIES

Supreme Church.

Pastor Emeritus--Mrs. Eddy.

Board of Directors.

Board of Education.

Board of Finance.

College Faculty.

Various Committees.

Treasurer.

Clerk.

First Members (of the Supreme Church).

Members of the Supreme Church.

It looks fair, it looks real, but it is all a fiction.

Even the little "Pastor Emeritus" is a fiction. Instead of being merely

an honorary and ornamental official, Mrs. Eddy is the only official in

the entire body that has the slightest power. In her Manual, she has

provided a prodigality of ways and forms whereby she can rid herself of

any functionary in the government whenever she wants to. The officials

are all shadows, save herself; she is the only reality. She allows no

one to hold office more than a year--no one gets a chance to become

over-popular or over-useful, and dangerous. "Excommunication" is the

favorite penalty-it is threatened at every turn. It is evidently the pet

dread and terror of the Church's membership.

The member who thinks, without getting his thought from Mrs. Eddy before

uttering it, is banished permanently. One or two kinds of sinners can

plead their way back into the fold, but this one, never. To think--in

the Supreme Church--is the New Unpardonable Sin.

To nearly every severe and fierce rule, Mrs. Eddy adds this rivet: "This

By-law shall not be changed without the consent of the Pastor Emeritus."

Mrs. Eddy is the entire Supreme Church, in her own person, in the matter

of powers and authorities.

Although she has provided so many ways of getting rid of unsatisfactory

members and officials, she was still afraid she might have left a

life-preserver lying around somewhere, therefore she devised a rule to

cover that defect. By applying it, she can excommunicate (and this is

perpetual again) every functionary connected with the Supreme Church, and

every one of the twenty-five thousand members of that Church, at an

hour's notice--and do it all by herself without anybody's help.

By authority of this astonishing By-law, she has only to say a person

connected with that Church is secretly practicing hypnotism or mesmerism;

whereupon, immediate excommunication, without a hearing, is his portion!

She does not have to order a trial and produce evidence--her accusation

is all that is necessary.

Where is the Pope? and where the Czar? As the ballad says:

"Ask of the winds that far away

With fragments strewed the sea!"

The Branch Church's pulpit is occupied by two "Readers." Without them

the Branch Church is as dead as if its throat had been cut. To have

control, then, of the Readers, is to have control of the Branch Churches.

Mrs. Eddy has that control--a control wholly without limit, a control

shared with no one.

1. No Reader can be appointed to any Church in the Christian Science

world without her express approval.

2. She can summarily expel from his or her place any Reader, at home or

abroad, by a mere letter of dismissal, over her signature, and without

furnishing any reason for it, to either the congregation or the Reader.

Thus she has as absolute control over all Branch Churches as she has over

the Supreme Church. This power exceeds the Pope's.

In simple truth, she is the only absolute sovereign in all Christendom.

The authority of the other sovereigns has limits, hers has none, none

whatever. And her yoke does not fret, does not offend. Many of the

subjects of the other monarchs feel their yoke, and are restive under it;

their loyalty is insincere. It is not so with this one's human property;

their loyalty is genuine, earnest, sincere, enthusiastic. The sentiment

which they feel for her is one which goes out in sheer perfection to no

other occupant of a throne; for it is love, pure from doubt, envy,

exaction, fault-seeking, a love whose sun has no spot--that form of love,

strong, great, uplifting, limitless, whose vast proportions are

compassable by no word but one, the prodigious word, Worship. And it is

not as a human being that her subjects worship her, but as a supernatural

one, a divine one, one who has comradeship with God, and speaks by His

voice.

Mrs. Eddy has herself created all these personal grandeurs and

autocracies--with others which I have not (in this article) mentioned.

They place her upon an Alpine solitude and supremacy of power and

spectacular show not hitherto attained by any other self-seeking enslaver

disguised in the Christian name, and they persuade me that, although she

may regard "self-deification as blasphemous," she is as fond of it as I

am of pie.

She knows about "Our Mother's Room" in the Supreme Church in Boston

--above referred to--for she has been in it. In a recently published

North American Review article, I quoted a lady as saying Mrs. Eddy's

portrait could be seen there in a shrine, lit by always-burning lights,

and that C.S. disciples came and worshiped it. That remark hurt the

feelings of more than one Scientist. They said it was not true, and

asked me to correct it. I comply with pleasure. Whether the portrait

was there four years ago or not, it is not there now, for I have

inquired. The only object in the shrine now, and lit by electrics--and

worshiped--is an oil-portrait of the horse-hair chair Mrs. Eddy used to

sit in when she was writing Science and Health! It seems to me that

adulation has struck bottom, here.

Mrs. Eddy knows about that. She has been there, she has seen it, she has

seen the worshippers. She could abolish that sarcasm with a word. She

withholds the word. Once more I seem to recognize in her exactly the

same appetite for self-deification that I have for pie. We seem to be

curiously alike; for the love of self-deification is really only the

spiritual form of the material appetite for pie, and nothing could be

more strikingly Christian-Scientifically "harmonious."

I note this phrase:

"Christian Science eschews divine rights in human beings."

"Rights" is vague; I do not know what it means there. Mrs. Eddy is not

well acquainted with the English language, and she is seldom able to say

in it what she is trying to say. She has no ear for the exact word, and

does not often get it. "Rights." Does it mean "honors?" "attributes?"

"Eschews." This is another umbrella where there should be a torch; it

does not illumine the sentence, it only deepens the shadows. Does she

mean "denies?" "refuses?" "forbids?" or something in that line? Does she

mean:

"Christian Science denies divine honors to human beings?" Or:

"Christian Science refuses to recognize divine attributes in human

beings?" Or:

"Christian Science forbids the worship of human beings?"

The bulk of the succeeding sentence is to me a tunnel, but, when I emerge

at this end of it, I seem to come into daylight. Then I seem to

understand both sentences--with this result:

"Christian Science recognizes but one God, forbids the worship of human

beings, and refuses to recognize the possession of divine attributes by

any member of the race."

I am subject to correction, but I think that that is about what Mrs. Eddy

was intending to convey. Has her English--which is always difficult to

me--beguiled me into misunderstanding the following remark, which she

makes (calling herself "we," after an old regal fashion of hers) in her

preface to her Miscellaneous Writings?

"While we entertain decided views as to the best method for elevating the

race physically, morally, and spiritually, and shall express these views

as duty demands, we shall claim no especial gift from our divine organ,

no supernatural power."

Was she meaning to say:

"Although I am of divine origin and gifted with supernatural power, I

shall not draw upon these resources in determining the best method of

elevating the race?"

If she had left out the word "our," she might then seem to say:

"I claim no especial or unusual degree of divine origin--"

Which is awkward--most awkward; for one either has a divine origin or

hasn't; shares in it, degrees of it, are surely impossible. The idea of

crossed breeds in cattle is a thing we can entertain, for we are used to

it, and it is possible; but the idea of a divine mongrel is unthinkable.

Well, then, what does she mean? I am sure I do not know, for certain.

It is the word "our" that makes all the trouble. With the "our" in, she

is plainly saying "my divine origin." The word "from" seems to be

intended to mean "on account of." It has to mean that or nothing, if

"our" is allowed to stay. The clause then says:

"I shall claim no especial gift on account of my divine origin."

And I think that the full sentence was intended to mean what I have

already suggested:

"Although I am of divine origin, and gifted with supernatural power, I

shall not draw upon these resources in determining the best method of

elevating the race."

When Mrs. Eddy copyrighted that Preface seven years ago, she had long

been used to regarding herself as a divine personage. I quote from Mr.

F. W. Peabody's book:

"In the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, when it was her

property, and published by her, it was claimed for her, and with her

sanction, that she was equal with Jesus, and elaborate effort was made to

establish the claim."

"Mrs. Eddy has distinctly authorized the claim in her behalf, that she

herself was the chosen successor to and equal of Jesus."

The following remark in that April number, quoted by Mr. Peabody,

indicates that her claim had been previously made, and had excited

"horror" among some "good people":

"Now, a word about the horror many good people have of our making the

Author of Science and Health 'equal with Jesus.'"

Surely, if it had excited horror in Mrs. Eddy also, she would have

published a disclaimer. She owned the paper; she could say what she

pleased in its columns. Instead of rebuking her editor, she lets him

rebuke those "good people" for objecting to the claim.

These things seem to throw light upon those words, "our [my] divine

origin."

It may be that "Christian Science eschews divine rights in human beings,"

and forbids worship of any but "one God, one Christ"; but, if that is the

case, it looks as if Mrs. Eddy is a very unsound Christian Scientist,

and needs disciplining. I believe she has a serious malady

--"self-deification"; and that it will be well to have one of the

experts demonstrate over it.

Meantime, let her go on living--for my sake. Closely examined,

painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the

planet, and, in several ways, as easily the most extraordinary woman that

was ever born upon it.

P.S.--Since I wrote the foregoing, Mr. McCrackan's article appeared (in

the March number of the North American Review). Before his article

appeared--that is to say, during December, January, and February--I had

written a new book, a character-portrait of Mrs. Eddy, drawn from her own

acts and words, and it was then--together with the three brief articles

previously published in the North American Review--ready to be delivered

to the printer for issue in book form. In that book, by accident and

good luck, I have answered the objections made by Mr. McCrackan to my

views, and therefore do not need to add an answer here. Also, in it I

have corrected certain misstatements of mine which he has noticed, and

several others which he has not referred to. There are one or two

important matters of opinion upon which he and I are not in disagreement;

but there are others upon which we must continue to disagree, I suppose;

indeed, I know we must; for instance, he believes Mrs. Eddy wrote Science

and Health, whereas I am quite sure I can convince a person unhampered by

predilections that she did not.

As concerns one considerable matter I hope to convert him. He believes

Mrs. Eddy's word; in his article he cites her as a witness, and takes her

testimony at par; but if he will make an excursion through my book when

it comes out, and will dispassionately examine her testimonies as there

accumulated, I think he will in candor concede that she is by a large

percentage the most erratic and contradictory and untrustworthy witness

that has occupied the stand since the days of the lamented Ananias.

CONCLUSION

Broadly speaking, the hostiles reject and repudiate all the pretensions

of Christian Science Christianity. They affirm that it has added nothing

new to Christianity; that it can do nothing that Christianity could not

do and was not doing before Christian Science was born.

In that case is there no field for the new Christianity, no opportunity

for usefulness, precious usefulness, great and distinguished usefulness?

I think there is. I am far from being confident that it can fill it, but

I will indicate that unoccupied field--without charge--and if it can

conquer it, it will deserve the praise and gratitude of the Christian

world, and will get it, I am sure.

The present Christianity makes an excellent private Christian, but its

endeavors to make an excellent public one go for nothing, substantially.

This is an honest nation--in private life. The American Christian is a

straight and clean and honest man, and in his private commerce with his

fellows can be trusted to stand faithfully by the principles of honor and

honesty imposed upon him by his religion. But the moment he comes

forward to exercise a public trust he can be confidently counted upon to

betray that trust in nine cases out of ten, if "party loyalty" shall

require it.

If there are two tickets in the field in his city, one composed of honest

men and the other of notorious blatherskites and criminals, he will not

hesitate to lay his private Christian honor aside and vote for the

blatherskites if his "party honor" shall exact it. His Christianity is

of no use to him and has no influence upon him when he is acting in a

public capacity. He has sound and sturdy private morals, but he has no

public ones. In the last great municipal election in New York, almost a

complete one-half of the votes representing 3,500,000 Christians were

cast for a ticket that had hardly a man on it whose earned and proper

place was outside of a jail. But that vote was present at church next

Sunday the same as ever, and as unconscious of its perfidy as if nothing

had happened.

Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are

true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them

all, and do it without shame; because honor to party is above honor to

themselves. It is an accepted law of public life that in it a man may

soil his honor in the interest of party expediency--must do it when

party expediency requires it. In private life those men would bitterly

resent--and justly--any insinuation that it would not be safe to leave

unwatched money within their reach; yet you could not wound their

feelings by reminding them that every time they vote ten dollars to the

pension appropriation nine of it is stolen money and they the marauders.

They have filched the money to take care of the party; they believe it

was right to do it; they do not see how their private honor is affected;

therefore their consciences are clear and at rest. By vote they do

wrongful things every day, in the party interest, which they could not be

persuaded to do in private life. In the interest of party expediency

they give solemn pledges, they make solemn compacts; in the interest of

party expediency they repudiate them without a blush. They would not

dream of committing these strange crimes in private life.

Now then, can Christian Science introduce the Congressional Blush? There

are Christian Private Morals, but there are no Christian Public Morals,

at the polls, or in Congress or anywhere else--except here and there and

scattered around like lost comets in the solar system. Can Christian

Science persuade the nation and Congress to throw away their public

morals and use none but their private ones henceforth in all their

activities, both public and private?

I do not think so; but no matter about me: there is the field--a grand

one, a splendid one, a sublime one, and absolutely unoccupied. Has

Christian Science confidence enough in itself to undertake to enter in

and try to possess it?

Make the effort, Christian Science; it is a most noble cause, and it

might succeed. It could succeed. Then we should have a new literature,

with romances entitled, How To Be an Honest Congressman Though a

Christian; How To Be a Creditable Citizen Though a Christian.

End of Project Gutenberg's Christian Science, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN

CHAPTER I

Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a little

anxious. Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that time, like

a comet. LIKE a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the lot of them! Of

course there warn't any of them going my way, as a steady thing, you

know, because they travel in a long circle like the loop of a lasso,

whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart for the Hereafter; but I

happened on one every now and then that was going my way for an hour or

so, and then we had a bit of a brush together. But it was generally

pretty one-sided, because I sailed by them the same as if they were

standing still. An ordinary comet don't make more than about 200,000

miles a minute. Of course when I came across one of that sort--like

Encke's and Halley's comets, for instance--it warn't anything but just a

flash and a vanish, you see. You couldn't rightly call it a race. It

was as if the comet was a gravel-train and I was a telegraph despatch.

But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I used to flush a

comet occasionally that was something LIKE. WE haven't got any such

comets--ours don't begin. One night I was swinging along at a good round

gait, everything taut and trim, and the wind in my favor--I judged I was

going about a million miles a minute--it might have been more, it

couldn't have been less--when I flushed a most uncommonly big one about

three points off my starboard bow. By his stern lights I judged he was

bearing about northeast-and-by-north-half-east. Well, it was so near my

course that I wouldn't throw away the chance; so I fell off a point,

steadied my helm, and went for him. You should have heard me whiz, and

seen the electric fur fly! In about a minute and a half I was fringed

out with an electrical nimbus that flamed around for miles and miles and

lit up all space like broad day. The comet was burning blue in the

distance, like a sickly torch, when I first sighted him, but he begun to

grow bigger and bigger as I crept up on him. I slipped up on him so fast

that when I had gone about 150,000,000 miles I was close enough to be

swallowed up in the phosphorescent glory of his wake, and I couldn't see

anything for the glare. Thinks I, it won't do to run into him, so I

shunted to one side and tore along. By and by I closed up abreast of his

tail. Do you know what it was like? It was like a gnat closing up on

the continent of America. I forged along. By and by I had sailed along

his coast for a little upwards of a hundred and fifty million miles, and

then I could see by the shape of him that I hadn't even got up to his

waistband yet. Why, Peters, WE don't know anything about comets, down

here. If you want to see comets that ARE comets, you've got to go

outside of our solar system --where there's room for them, you

understand. My friend, I've seen comets out there that couldn't even lay

down inside the ORBITS of our noblest comets without their tails hanging

over.

Well, I boomed along another hundred and fifty million miles, and got up

abreast his shoulder, as you may say. I was feeling pretty fine, I tell

you; but just then I noticed the officer of the deck come to the side and

hoist his glass in my direction. Straight off I heard him sing

out--"Below there, ahoy! Shake her up, shake her up! Heave on a hundred

million billion tons of brimstone!"

"Ay-ay, sir!"

"Pipe the stabboard watch! All hands on deck!"

"Ay-ay, sir!"

"Send two hundred thousand million men aloft to shake out royals and

sky-scrapers!"

"Ay-ay, sir!"

"Hand the stuns'ls! Hang out every rag you've got! Clothe her from stem

to rudder-post!"

"Ay-ay, sir!"

In about a second I begun to see I'd woke up a pretty ugly customer,

Peters. In less than ten seconds that comet was just a blazing cloud of

red-hot canvas. It was piled up into the heavens clean out of sight--the

old thing seemed to swell out and occupy all space; the sulphur smoke

from the furnaces--oh, well, nobody can describe the way it rolled and

tumbled up into the skies, and nobody can half describe the way it smelt.

Neither can anybody begin to describe the way that monstrous craft begun

to crash along. And such another powwow--thousands of bo's'n's whistles

screaming at once, and a crew like the populations of a hundred thousand

worlds like ours all swearing at once. Well, I never heard the like of

it before.

We roared and thundered along side by side, both doing our level best,

because I'd never struck a comet before that could lay over me, and so I

was bound to beat this one or break something. I judged I had some

reputation in space, and I calculated to keep it. I noticed I wasn't

gaining as fast, now, as I was before, but still I was gaining. There

was a power of excitement on board the comet. Upwards of a hundred

billion passengers swarmed up from below and rushed to the side and begun

to bet on the race. Of course this careened her and damaged her speed.

My, but wasn't the mate mad! He jumped at that crowd, with his trumpet in

his hand, and sung out--

"Amidships! amidships, you! {1} or I'll brain the last idiot of you!"

Well, sir, I gained and gained, little by little, till at last I went

skimming sweetly by the magnificent old conflagration's nose. By this

time the captain of the comet had been rousted out, and he stood there in

the red glare for'ard, by the mate, in his shirt-sleeves and slippers,

his hair all rats' nests and one suspender hanging, and how sick those

two men did look! I just simply couldn't help putting my thumb to my

nose as I glided away and singing out:

"Ta-ta! ta-ta! Any word to send to your family?"

Peters, it was a mistake. Yes, sir, I've often regretted that--it was a

mistake. You see, the captain had given up the race, but that remark was

too tedious for him--he couldn't stand it. He turned to the mate, and

says he--

"Have we got brimstone enough of our own to make the trip?"

"Yes, sir."

"Sure?"

"Yes, sir--more than enough."

"How much have we got in cargo for Satan?"

"Eighteen hundred thousand billion quintillions of kazarks."

"Very well, then, let his boarders freeze till the next comet comes.

Lighten ship! Lively, now, lively, men! Heave the whole cargo

overboard!"

Peters, look me in the eye, and be calm. I found out, over there, that a

kazark is exactly the bulk of a HUNDRED AND SIXTY-NINE WORLDS LIKE OURS!

They hove all that load overboard. When it fell it wiped out a

considerable raft of stars just as clean as if they'd been candles and

somebody blowed them out. As for the race, that was at an end. The

minute she was lightened the comet swung along by me the same as if I was

anchored. The captain stood on the stern, by the after-davits, and put

his thumb to his nose and sung out--

"Ta-ta! ta-ta! Maybe YOU'VE got some message to send your friends in the

Everlasting Tropics!"

Then he hove up his other suspender and started for'ard, and inside of

three-quarters of an hour his craft was only a pale torch again in the

distance. Yes, it was a mistake, Peters--that remark of mine. I don't

reckon I'll ever get over being sorry about it. I'd 'a' beat the bully

of the firmament if I'd kept my mouth shut.

But I've wandered a little off the track of my tale; I'll get back on my

course again. Now you see what kind of speed I was making. So, as I

said, when I had been tearing along this way about thirty years I begun

to get uneasy. Oh, it was pleasant enough, with a good deal to find out,

but then it was kind of lonesome, you know. Besides, I wanted to get

somewhere. I hadn't shipped with the idea of cruising forever. First

off, I liked the delay, because I judged I was going to fetch up in

pretty warm quarters when I got through; but towards the last I begun to

feel that I'd rather go to--well, most any place, so as to finish up the

uncertainty.

Well, one night--it was always night, except when I was rushing by some

star that was occupying the whole universe with its fire and its

glare--light enough then, of course, but I necessarily left it behind in

a minute or two and plunged into a solid week of darkness again. The

stars ain't so close together as they look to be. Where was I? Oh yes;

one night I was sailing along, when I discovered a tremendous long row of

blinking lights away on the horizon ahead. As I approached, they begun

to tower and swell and look like mighty furnaces. Says I to myself--

"By George, I've arrived at last--and at the wrong place, just as I

expected!"

Then I fainted. I don't know how long I was insensible, but it must have

been a good while, for, when I came to, the darkness was all gone and

there was the loveliest sunshine and the balmiest, fragrantest air in its

place. And there was such a marvellous world spread out before me--such

a glowing, beautiful, bewitching country. The things I took for furnaces

were gates, miles high, made all of flashing jewels, and they pierced a

wall of solid gold that you couldn't see the top of, nor yet the end of,

in either direction. I was pointed straight for one of these gates, and

a-coming like a house afire. Now I noticed that the skies were black

with millions of people, pointed for those gates. What a roar they made,

rushing through the air! The ground was as thick as ants with people,

too--billions of them, I judge.

I lit. I drifted up to a gate with a swarm of people, and when it was my

turn the head clerk says, in a business-like way--

"Well, quick! Where are you from?"

"San Francisco," says I.

"San Fran--WHAT?" says he.

"San Francisco."

He scratched his head and looked puzzled, then he says--

"Is it a planet?"

By George, Peters, think of it! "PLANET?" says I; "it's a city. And

moreover, it's one of the biggest and finest and--"

"There, there!" says he, "no time here for conversation. We don't deal

in cities here. Where are you from in a GENERAL way?"

"Oh," I says, "I beg your pardon. Put me down for California."

I had him AGAIN, Peters! He puzzled a second, then he says, sharp and

irritable--

"I don't know any such planet--is it a constellation?"

"Oh, my goodness!" says I. "Constellation, says you? No--it's a State."

"Man, we don't deal in States here. WILL you tell me where you are from

IN GENERAL--AT LARGE, don't you understand?"

"Oh, now I get your idea," I says. "I'm from America,--the United States

of America."

Peters, do you know I had him AGAIN? If I hadn't I'm a clam! His face

was as blank as a target after a militia shooting-match. He turned to an

under clerk and says--

"Where is America? WHAT is America?"

The under clerk answered up prompt and says--

"There ain't any such orb."

"ORB?" says I. "Why, what are you talking about, young man? It ain't an

orb; it's a country; it's a continent. Columbus discovered it; I reckon

likely you've heard of HIM, anyway. America--why, sir, America--"

"Silence!" says the head clerk. "Once for all, where--are--you--FROM?"

"Well," says I, "I don't know anything more to say--unless I lump things,

and just say I'm from the world."

"Ah," says he, brightening up, "now that's something like! WHAT world?"

Peters, he had ME, that time. I looked at him, puzzled, he looked at me,

worried. Then he burst out--

"Come, come, what world?"

Says I, "Why, THE world, of course."

"THE world!" he says. "H'm! there's billions of them! . . . Next!"

That meant for me to stand aside. I done so, and a sky-blue man with

seven heads and only one leg hopped into my place. I took a walk. It

just occurred to me, then, that all the myriads I had seen swarming to

that gate, up to this time, were just like that creature. I tried to run

across somebody I was acquainted with, but they were out of acquaintances

of mine just then. So I thought the thing all over and finally sidled

back there pretty meek and feeling rather stumped, as you may say.

"Well?" said the head clerk.

"Well, sir," I says, pretty humble, "I don't seem to make out which world

it is I'm from. But you may know it from this--it's the one the Saviour

saved."

He bent his head at the Name. Then he says, gently--

"The worlds He has saved are like to the gates of heaven in number --none

can count them. What astronomical system is your world in? --perhaps

that may assist."

"It's the one that has the sun in it--and the moon--and Mars"--he shook

his head at each name--hadn't ever heard of them, you see --"and

Neptune--and Uranus--and Jupiter--"

"Hold on!" says he--"hold on a minute! Jupiter . . . Jupiter . . . Seems

to me we had a man from there eight or nine hundred years ago--but people

from that system very seldom enter by this gate." All of a sudden he

begun to look me so straight in the eye that I thought he was going to

bore through me. Then he says, very deliberate, "Did you come STRAIGHT

HERE from your system?"

"Yes, sir," I says--but I blushed the least little bit in the world when

I said it.

He looked at me very stern, and says--

"That is not true; and this is not the place for prevarication. You

wandered from your course. How did that happen?"

Says I, blushing again--

"I'm sorry, and I take back what I said, and confess. I raced a little

with a comet one day--only just the least little bit--only the tiniest

lit--"

"So--so," says he--and without any sugar in his voice to speak of.

I went on, and says--

"But I only fell off just a bare point, and I went right back on my

course again the minute the race was over."

"No matter--that divergence has made all this trouble. It has brought

you to a gate that is billions of leagues from the right one. If you had

gone to your own gate they would have known all about your world at once

and there would have been no delay. But we will try to accommodate you."

He turned to an under clerk and says--

"What system is Jupiter in?"

"I don't remember, sir, but I think there is such a planet in one of the

little new systems away out in one of the thinly worlded corners of the

universe. I will see."

He got a balloon and sailed up and up and up, in front of a map that was

as big as Rhode Island. He went on up till he was out of sight, and by

and by he came down and got something to eat and went up again. To cut a

long story short, he kept on doing this for a day or two, and finally he

came down and said he thought he had found that solar system, but it

might be fly-specks. So he got a microscope and went back. It turned

out better than he feared. He had rousted out our system, sure enough.

He got me to describe our planet and its distance from the sun, and then

he says to his chief--

"Oh, I know the one he means, now, sir. It is on the map. It is called

the Wart."

Says I to myself, "Young man, it wouldn't be wholesome for you to go down

THERE and call it the Wart."

Well, they let me in, then, and told me I was safe forever and wouldn't

have any more trouble.

Then they turned from me and went on with their work, the same as if they

considered my case all complete and shipshape. I was a good deal

surprised at this, but I was diffident about speaking up and reminding

them. I did so hate to do it, you know; it seemed a pity to bother them,

they had so much on their hands. Twice I thought I would give up and let

the thing go; so twice I started to leave, but immediately I thought what

a figure I should cut stepping out amongst the redeemed in such a rig,

and that made me hang back and come to anchor again. People got to eying

me --clerks, you know--wondering why I didn't get under way. I couldn't

stand this long--it was too uncomfortable. So at last I plucked up

courage and tipped the head clerk a signal. He says--

"What! you here yet? What's wanting?"