|Morality, too, as a scientific study, will be banished from the schools
under Eddyism. In the Infinite there is no more room for sin than there
is for disease, and, since man is but the image of the Infinite, he is
as free from sin as he is from disease. Mrs. Eddy practically denies the
possibility of sin in Christian Science.
At the age of fifty-six, on January 1, 1877, Mrs. Eddy contracted a new
marriage, this time with Mr. Asa G. Eddy, giving her age as forty, as
shown by her marriage licence. With a gesture Mrs. Eddy swept aside the
charge that she had suppressed the truth about her age, and justified
the misrepresentation on metaphysical grounds. In her _Science and
Health_, pp. 245-6, she asserts that a woman could not age while
believing herself to be young. Eternity, according to her, has nothing
to do with chronology, and "time-tables of birth and death are so many
conspiracies against manhood and womanhood."
"Never record ages," she advises. But if it makes no difference to a
Christian Scientist how old or how young she is, so far as the number of
years is concerned, why did Mrs. Eddy under-state her age? In pretending
to be younger than she really was did she not show her fear of advancing
years? Perhaps Mrs. Eddy also believed that _truth_ as well as _time_
had lost all claims upon Christian Scientists. To change a lie into a
truth, all that is necessary is to deny that "time-tables and calendars"
have any meaning to the believer in eternity.
One could even commit murder and deny that a bullet or a knife could
possibly deprive a man, who is _all mind_, of his life. Mrs. Eddy and
her book, I suppose, will be about all the protection we shall have
against the lightning, the storm, or the cold, or against hunger,
ignorance, and crime. It is not difficult to imagine the kind of world
this would be when stripped of everything but Mrs. Eddy's "inspired"
metaphysics.
In the State of Washington the Christian Scientists, as soon as they
had acquired sufficient political power to do it, abolished the law
requiring the medical inspection of children in the public schools.
But who will be the greatest sufferers from this foolish ordinance?
The children, of course: the pupils afflicted with defective vision
or throat and nose maladies will be deprived of the benefits of human
knowledge and experience. Their prayer for better sight, for freer
breathing and unhampered speech, will remain unheeded, upon the plea
that sight, hearing, and speech are of the Mind, and that bodily
obstructions cannot interfere with them. The Washington state law
abolishing the physical examination of public-school children gives us
an idea of what to expect under a metaphysical government.
And under Christian Science who, for example, will care for the deaf and
dumb unfortunates in the community? Material science, seconded by human
sympathy, has greatly helped to rob deafness and dumbness of more of
their power to discourage and depress. I have met deaf people who
were so well trained to read the movement of the lips as to be able to
converse freely. What will Christian Science do for these unfortunates?
Has it ever taken thought of them? And has Christian Science ever
planned or built homes for crippled children--the poor little ones who
cannot walk or move without pain? And what has metaphysics ever done in
the fight against the white plague? Has it made a single discovery, or
given a new weapon to man against any of the evils human flesh is heir
to? With this Asiatic superstition or fatalistic belief, masquerading as
Christian and scientific, in control of our institutions, all sanitary
laws, such as the pure food law, the law requiring the fumigation of
houses or the isolation of their inmates suffering from contagious
diseases, the laws requiring the inspection of ships from plague-ridden
ports, those requiring fireproof public buildings or providing for fire
escapes and a hundred other safety-first measures, will receive scant
attention.
To see and fight evil is wiser than to shut our eyes to it. The rose is
no more real than the thorns which guard it. The tear is as natural as
the smile, and equally divine. To be able to suffer for those we love,
and for a cause we prize, is a privilege.
Christian Science robs people of the feeling of sympathy, without which
man and marble become alike. But sympathy is born of the consciousness
that there are pain and suffering, evil and error, in the world.
Cognizance of evil is not permitted to a Christian Scientist. Being in
Nirvana himself, the disciple of Mrs. Eddy neither sees nor feels, or
at least he pretends not to see or feel, the sorrow that draws the tear.
Are there not times when, as the poet Hood in his _Ode to Melancholy_
says, the genuine tear is nobler than the artificial smile?
Oh, give her, then, her tribute just,
Her sighs and tears and musings holy!