|Mrs. Eddy has banished all freedom of thought from her Church, as
Luther and Calvin did from theirs. Christian Science is as distinctly
hostile to the liberty of teaching as were the dogmatists of the
Reformation.
In the _Christian Science Quarterly_ Bible Lessons definite instructions
are given to read the following explanatory note before reciting the
lesson-sermon:--
_Friends,--The Bible and the Christian Science Text-book are our only
preachers... The canonical writings, together with the word of our
text-book, corroborating and explaining the Bible texts in their
spiritual import and application to all ages, past, present, and future,
constitute a sermon undivorced from Truth, uncontaminated and unfettered
by human hypotheses, and divinely authorized._
It is absolutely necessary to repeat this at every Sunday meeting. It
will be seen from the formula imposed upon her followers that only Mrs.
Eddy's voice is tolerated in Christian Science churches. But does she
not also permit the reading of the Bible? Only as _she_ interprets it,
no other interpretation being allowed, which makes the Bible nothing
more than a medium for Mrs. Eddy's thought. Outside of her book all is
contamination. _Science and Health_ and the book to which it is the key
are alone Divine, everything else being "human hypotheses" which enslave
and corrupt. Has the intellect of man ever been subjected to a greater
pinch than that?
"He who does not believe my doctrine is sure to be damned," said Luther
(Professor E.M. Hulme, _The Renaissance_, p. 363). Will Mrs. Eddy admit
that there is any salvation outside her church, or that there is any
other infallible guide than her own _Science and Health_? And just as
both John Calvin and Martin Luther called upon the civil authorities to
draw the sword against heretics, so Mrs. Eddy repeatedly summoned
the State to punish "mental assassins." Where there is no freedom
persecution is inevitable, since there is no other effective way
to suppress freedom. It was the great Swiss reformer, Beza, who
congratulated Calvin on the burning of Servetus: "To claim that heretics
ought not to be punished is the same as saying that those who murder
father and mother ought not to be punished, seeing that heretics are
infinitely worse than they." Mrs. Eddy, nearly four hundred years
later, appealed to the courts in the United States to punish one Richard
Kennedy, a former disciple of hers, for _malicious animal magnetism_,
and called upon the police to avenge the death of her husband by
arresting the culprit who administered poison to him "mentally."
"Oh, why does not somebody kill him?" Mrs. Eddy was heard to exclaim
when she imagined herself the victim of the malpractice of one of her
rivals. In _Science and Health_, chap. vi, p. 38, 1881 edition, Mrs.
Eddy, writing of another of her dissenting disciples with all the
theological fury of the Dark Ages, calls him the "Nero of to-day... he
is robbing, committing adultery, and killing," etc. And on page 2, in
the same chapter, she calls Kennedy a "moral leper," to be "shunned as
the most prolific cause of sickness and sin." Listen to this language of
Love:--
_Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the sunshine
of earth, that would sever friends, destroy virtue, put out truth, and
murder in secret the innocent, befouling thy track with the trophies of
thy guilt._
Then she predicts "a hailstorm of doom upon the guilty head" of Daniel
Spoffard, another of her former students (_Science and Health_, 1878
edition).
Christian Science shows many of the symptoms of the early stages of the
Protestant Reformation. "Justification by faith alone" was the slogan
of Luther and his associates. Good works were not necessary at all.
Salvation was a divine gift, and all that the sinner had to do was to
accept it. Doing was a deadly thing.
Mrs. Eddy, like another Martin Luther, preached the doctrine of
salvation and health by faith alone. "Quit trying to get well by your
own efforts and trust in Divine Mind" was her ultimatum. Mrs. Eddy
had no more use for sanitary measures or for self-help than the German
reformers had for good works. And just as Mrs. Eddy taught that to
resort to material means destroyed the patient's chances of being
healed by Christian Science, the Lutherans declared that good works
were prejudicial to salvation because they made man self-confident and
boastful.
Another resemblance between Luther and Mrs. Eddy is to be found in
their common contempt for human science. To Luther the intellect was the
devil's bride. When he used stronger language he denounced reason as
a whore. He had no use for the universities, and prayed to see them
pulverized. More than once he boasted openly that there was not a dogma
of Christianity that did not offend human reason. But what is human
reason worth? What is it but, as Mrs. Eddy would reply, "mortal mind"?
The founder of Christian Science showed even less respect for human
intellect than did the reformers of the sixteenth century.
The words of Erasmus, the distinguished scholar of Holland, "The triumph
of the Lutherans is the death of good learning," could also be said
of the followers of Mrs. Eddy. The cause of culture, of intellectual
achievements, of discovery, of political and physical advancement, is
sure to be, and is, neglected by people who are too eager to demonstrate
the wonders of metaphysics. Any movement which does not include the
entire field of human knowledge is bound to be both narrow and sterile.
Goethe believed that the Lutheran doctrine, which confined the world
to one book, upon the meaning of which no two interpreters agreed,
postponed the emancipation of the human intellect for a thousand years.
Luther led the world out of the Catholic darkness into the Protestant
fog. Of Mrs. Eddy it could be said that she has brought her people out
of the land of Egypt into a pathless wilderness.