therapeutics, and an improved form of Christianity. As the founder of a
system of idealistic philosophy, Mrs. Eddy does indeed, as Mr. Alfred
Farlow says, "begin where the sages of the world left off." Other
philosophers have reached the conclusion that we can have no absolute
knowledge of matter, since our evidence regarding it consists of sense
impressions, and that we can absolutely assert of matter only that it
exists in human consciousness; but Mrs. Eddy begins boldly with, "There
is no such thing as matter." She reaches her conclusion by steps which
she deems complete and logical:
1. God is All in all.
2. God is good. Good is Mind.
3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter.
Mrs. Eddy calls attention to the fact that even if read backward, these
propositions mean identically the same as when read in the usual order,
and she seems to regard this as conclusive proof of their logical truth.
She says, "The metaphysics of Christian Science, like the rules of
mathematics, prove the rule by inversion. For example: there is no pain
in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no mind in nerve;
no matter in Mind, and no mind in matter," etc.
In his article upon Christian Science, published in _The Atlantic
Monthly_, April, 1904, Dr. John Churchman says:
The uncompromising idealism, however, which Mrs. Eddy offers us not
only has these defects, but is guilty of a far more serious charge.
It poses as an explanation, and is in reality a total evasion. To
deny that matter exists, and assert that it is an illusion, is only
another way of asserting its existence; you are freed by your
suggestion from explaining the fact, but forced by it to explain
the illusion. It is the old mistake of imagining that an escape
from a problem is a solution. You are out of the frying-pan, it is
true, but you are in the fire instead.[4]
Having thus disposed of matter, Mrs. Eddy seems to think that her
definition has actually changed the nature of the case, and that though
we live in houses, eat food, and endure the changes of the seasons, our
relation to the material universe is changed because she has defined
matter as an illusion.
It is not, however, Mrs. Eddy's definition which is so remarkable, but
her application of it. Having stated that matter is an illusion, she
asserts that "matter cannot take cold";[5] that matter cannot "ache,
swell and be inflamed";[6] that a boil cannot ache;[7] that "every law
of matter or the body, supposed to govern man, is rendered null and void
by the law of God".[8]
_There is No Material Universe_
Quimby acknowledged the actual existence of the universe, of the
physical body, and of disease; Mrs. Eddy teaches that they are all
illusory. The earth, the sun, the millions of stars, says Mrs. Eddy,
exist only in erring "mortal mind"; and mortal mind itself does not
exist. All phenomena of nature are merely illusory expressions of this
fundamental error. "The compound minerals or aggregate substances
composing the earth, the relations which constituent masses hold to each
other, the magnitudes, distances, and revolution of the celestial
bodies, are of no real importance.... Material substances, astronomical
calculations, and all the paraphernalia of speculative theories ... will
ultimately vanish, swallowed up in the infinite calculus of spirit."
"Earthquake, wind, wave, lightning, fire, bestial ferocity" are merely
the "vapid fury of mortal mind." "Heat and cold are products of
mind"--even a "mill at work, or the action of a water wheel," is only a
manifestation of "mortal mind force." Apart from mortal belief, there is
no such thing as climate.
"Repulsion, attraction, cohesion, and powers supposed to belong to
matter are constituents of mind," Mrs. Eddy says. By this she does not
mean that these forces exist, for us, in our minds, but that at some
time in the dim past "mortal mind" imagined matter and imagined these
properties in it. Christ, she says, was able to walk upon the water and
to roll away the stone of the sepulcher because he had overcome the
human _belief_ in the laws of gravity. (Yet, Mrs. Eddy is continually
reminding us that the fall of an apple led Newton to discover a great
law, etc.) "Geology," Mrs. Eddy says, "has never explained the earth's
formations. It cannot explain them." "Natural Science is not really
natural or scientific, because it is deduced from the evidences of the
senses." "Vertebra, articulata, mollusca, and radiata are evolved by
mortal and material thought." "Theorizing about man's development from
mushrooms to monkeys, and from monkeys into men, amounts to nothing in
the right direction, and very much in the wrong." But it is not only
with the natural sciences that Mrs. Eddy is displeased. "Human history,"
she says, "needs to be revised, and the _material record expunged_."
Having dismissed the history of the race as trivial, the natural
sciences as unscientific, the evidence of the senses as a cheat, and
matter as non-existent, Mrs. Eddy proceeds to propound her own curious
theory of the Universe and man. She has a theory; incomplete, but
ingenious.
_Mrs. Eddy's Exegesis_
Mrs. Eddy says that her theory of the universe is founded, not upon
human wisdom, but upon the Bible; and so it is, but she uses both
addition and subtraction very liberally to get her Biblical
corroboration. The Bible may be interpreted in two ways, Mrs. Eddy says,
literally and spiritually, and what she sets out to do is to give us the
spiritual interpretation. Her method is simple. She starts with the
propositions that all is God and that there is no matter, and then
reconstructs the Bible to accommodate these statements. Such portions of
the Bible as can be made, by judicious treatment, to corroborate her
theory, she takes and "spiritually interprets,"[9] that is, tells us
once and for all what the passages really mean; and such portions as
cannot possibly be converted into affirmative evidence she rejects as
errors of the early copyists. Mrs. Eddy insists that the Bible is the
record of truth, but a study of her exegesis shows that only such
portions of it as meet with Mrs. Eddy's approval and lend
themselves--under very rough handling--to the support of her theory, are
accepted as the record of truth; the rest is thrown out as a mass of
erroneous transcription. Mrs. Eddy's keen eye at once detects those
meaningless passages which have for so long beguiled the world, just as
it readily sees in familiar texts an entirely new meaning. She explains
the creation of the world from the account in the first chapter of
Genesis, but the unknown author of this disputed book would never
recognize his narrative when Mrs. Eddy gets through with it.
_Mrs. Eddy's Account of the Creation_[10]
To begin with, Mrs. Eddy says, there was God, "All and in all, the
eternal Principle." This Principle is both masculine and feminine;
"Gender is embraced in Spirit, else God could never have shadowed forth
from out Himself, the idea of male and female." But, Mrs. Eddy adds, "We
have not as much authority for calling God masculine as feminine, the
latter being the last, therefore highest idea given of Him."
Mrs. Eddy next sets about the creation. The "waters" out of which God
brought the dry land, she says, were "Love"; the dry land itself was
"the condensed idea of creation." When God divided the light from the
darkness, it means, says Mrs. Eddy, that "Truth and error were distinct
from the beginning, and never mingled." But Mrs. Eddy has always
insisted on the idea that "error" is a delusion which arose first in the
mind of mortal man; what is error doing away back here before man was
created, and why was God himself compelled to take measures against it?
Certainly the account of the Creation which came from Lynn is even more
perplexing than that which is related in the Pentateuch.
With regard to the creation of grass and herbs, Mrs. Eddy eagerly points
out that "God made every plant of the field before it was in the earth,
and every herb of the field before it grew." And that, she says, proves
that "creations of Wisdom are not dependent on laws of matter, but on
Intelligence alone." She admits here that the Universe is the "idea of
Creative Wisdom," which is getting dangerously near the very old idea
that matter is but a manifestation of spirit. Call the universe
"matter," and Mrs. Eddy flies into a rage; call it "an idea of God," and
she is serenely complaisant. There was certainly never any one so put
about and tricked by mere words; on the whole, it may be said that the
English language has avenged itself on Mrs. Eddy.
Arriving at the creation of the beasts of the field, Mrs. Eddy says that
"The beast and reptile made by Love and Wisdom were neither carnivorous
nor poisonous." Ferocious tendencies in animals are entirely the product
of man's imagination. Daniel understood this, we are told, and that is
why the lions did not hurt him.
When she comes to the creation of man, Mrs. Eddy accepts the first
account given in Genesis, but the second, which states that God formed
man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath
of life, she rejects as untrustworthy. The first account, she says, "was
science; the second was metaphorical and mythical, even the supposed
utterances of matter; the scripture not being understood by its
translators, was misinterpreted."
_The Story of Adam_
"The history of Adam is allegorical throughout, a description of error
and its results," etc. Man was created in God's likeness, free from sin,
sickness, and death; but this Adam, who crept in, Mrs. Eddy does not
explain how, was the origin of our belief that there is life in matter
and was to obstruct our growth in spirituality. Mrs. Eddy says, "Divide
the name Adam into two syllables, and it reads, _a dam_, or
obstruction." This original method of word-analysis she seems to regard
as final evidence concerning Adam. About the creation of Eve, Mrs. Eddy
changes her mind. In the later editions of her book she says it is
absurd to believe that God ever put Adam into a hypnotic sleep and
performed "a surgical operation" upon him. In the first edition she says
it is a mere chance that the human race is not still propagated by the
removal of man's ribs. "The belief regarding the origin of mortal man
has changed since Adam produced Eve, and the only reason a rib is not
the present mode of evolution is because of this change," etc.
Not to be warned by the footprints of time, Mrs. Eddy pauses in her
revision of Genesis to wonder "whence came the wife of Cain?" But on the
whole she profits by the story of Cain, for here she finds one of those
little etymological clews which never escape her penetration. The fact
that Adam and all his race were but a dream of mortal mind is proved,
she says, by the fact that Cain went "to dwell _in the land of Nod, the
land of dreams and illusions_." Mrs. Eddy offers this seriously, as
"scientific" exegesis.
Mrs. Eddy's conclusion about the Creation seems to be that we are all in
reality the offspring of the first creation recounted in Genesis, in
which man is not named but is simply said to be in the image of God; but
we _think_ we are the children of the creation described in the second
chapter; of the race that imagined sickness, sin, and death for itself.
The tree of knowledge which caused Adam's fall, Mrs. Eddy says, was the
belief of life in matter, and she suggests that the forbidden fruit
which Eve gave to Adam may have been "a medical work, perhaps."
_Mrs. Eddy Denies the Atonement_
When she comes to the Atonement, Mrs. Eddy says that Christ did not come
to save mankind from sin, but to show us that sin is a thing imagined
by mortal mind, that it is an illusion which can be overcome, like
sickness and death. It was by his understanding of the truths of
Christian Science that Christ remained sinless, healed the sick, and
that he "demonstrated" over death in the sepulcher and rose on the third
day. His sacrifice had no more efficacy than that of any other man who
dies as a result of his labors to bring a new truth into the world, and
we profit by his death only as we realize the nothingness of sickness,
sin, and death. "God's wrath, vented on his only son, is without logic
or humanity, and but a man-made belief."
The Trinity, as commonly accepted, Mrs. Eddy denies, though she seems to
admit a kind of triune nature in God by saying over and over again that
he is "Love, Truth, and Life."
The Holy Ghost she defines as Christian Science; "This Comforter I
understand to be Divine Science."
_Mrs. Eddy's Revision of the Lord's Prayer_
In the course of Mrs. Eddy's revision of the Bible, she paused to
"spiritually interpret" the Lord's prayer. She has revised the prayer a
great many times, and different renderings of it are given in different
editions of "Science and Health." The following is taken from the
edition of 1902:
"Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious, adorable One. Thy kingdom
is within us, Thou art ever-present. Enable us to know--as in
heaven, so on earth--God is supreme. Give us grace for to-day; feed
the famished affections. And infinite Love is reflected in love.
And Love leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth from sin,
disease, and death. For God is now and forever all Life, Truth, and
Love."
In this interpretation the petitions have been converted into
affirmations, and Mrs. Eddy's prayer seems a somewhat dry enumeration of
the properties of the Deity rather than a supplication.
This method of "spiritual interpretation" has given Mrs. Eddy the habit
of a highly empirical use of English. At the back of her book, "Science
and Health," there is a glossary in which a long list of serviceable old
English words are said to mean very especial things. The word
"bridegroom" means "spiritual understanding"; "death" means "an
illusion"; "evening" means "mistiness of mortal thought"; "mother" means
God, etc., etc. The seventh commandment, Mrs. Eddy insists, is an
injunction against adulterating Christian Science, although she also
admits the meaning ordinarily attached to it. In the _Journal_ of
November, 1889, there is a long discussion of the ten commandments by
the editor, in which he takes up both personal chastity and the Pure
Food laws under the command, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."
Mrs. Eddy insists, and doubtless believes, that her "Science" is simply
an elaboration, a more advanced explanation, of the teachings of the New
Testament. Yet on the subject of repentance, which occupies so important
a place in the teachings of Christ, we hear never a word, and upon that
consciousness of sin, which is the burden of the Epistles, she is
consistently silent. Paul's reiterated explanation of original sin, of
the Atonement and Redemption, are ignored. "As in Adam all die, so in
Christ shall all be made alive" is made to read: "As in error all die,
so in Truth shall all," etc. Even Paul's "Who shall deliver me from the
body of this death?" is made substantially to mean, Who shall deliver me
from the belief that there is sensation in matter? Whatever cannot be
"spiritually interpreted" into a confirmation of Mrs. Eddy's theory that
sin, sickness, and death are non-existent, she refuses to consider.
_Mrs. Eddy's Therapeutics_
Mrs. Eddy's theology is, of course, a mere derivative of her system of
therapeutics, an attempt to base her peculiar variety of mind-cure upon
Biblical authority. In her therapeutics there is nothing new except its
extremeness. That the mind is able, in a large degree, to prevent or to
cause sickness and even death, all thinking people admit. Mrs. Eddy's
fundamental propositions are that death is wholly unnecessary and that
the body and the organs of the body have nothing to do with life. A man
could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if
he but thought he could. "Cold, heat, exercise, study, food, infection,
etc., never caused a sick or healthy condition in man." "Scrofula,
fever, consumption, rheumatism or small-pox never produced pain or
inharmony." "A dislocation of the tarsal joint (ankle-joint) would
produce insanity as perceptible as that produced by congestion of the
brain, were it not that mortal mind thinks this joint less intimately
connected with mind than is the brain."
Sight and hearing do not depend upon the eyes and ears. The nervous
system can really cause no suffering. "Nerves are not the source of pain
or pleasure." "Nerves have no more sensation, apart from what belief
bestows upon them, than the fibre of a plant." What really suffers is
mind, or belief; and, if we change that belief, the pain will disappear.
"You say a boil is painful," says Mrs. Eddy, "but that is impossible,
for matter without mind is not painful. The boil simply manifests your
belief in pain, through inflammation and swelling; and you call this
belief a boil."
Mrs. Eddy even argues against spanking children because "the use of the
rod is virtually a declaration to the child's mind that sensation
belongs to matter."[11]
Mrs. Eddy's idea is that our lungs are necessary to us because we think
they are, just as we think heavy underwear is necessary in winter.
Horses and cows, certainly, do not think much about their lungs, but
Mrs. Eddy says that domestic animals are controlled by the beliefs of
their human masters, and that we have corrupted the horse and have
taught him to have epizooetic and colic. "What," says Mrs. Eddy, "if the
lungs are ulcerated? God is more to a man than his lungs." "Have no
fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed.... Your body would
suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the trunk of a tree
which you gash, were it not for mortal mind."
All functional and organic diseases are produced by a popular belief in
their reality. "No gastric juice accumulates ... apart from the action
of mortal thought."
"Inflammation, hemorrhages, tubercles, decompositions are all dream
shadows," "Man is the same after, as before, a bone is broken or a head
chopped off."
But as to who invented the idea of pain and whence came the superstition
that we must have lungs to breathe and that the heart is necessary to
life, Mrs. Eddy maintains a discreet silence. Sin, sickness, and death,
she says, are beliefs which originated in mortal mind. And how and when
did mortal mind originate? Mortal mind does not exist, she answers,
therefore it had no origin. This reasoning satisfies her; she believes
it perfectly adequate.
It is not only the diseased body which is to be disregarded and put out
of mind, but all hygienic precautions. Mrs. Eddy particularly objects to
diets, and she says that one food is as good as another. God gave man
"dominion not only over the fish in the sea, but over the fish in the
stomach also," she once said.
There is no such thing as fatigue: "You would not say that a wheel is
fatigued; and yet the body is just as material as the wheel. If it were
not for what the human mind says of the body, the body would never be
weary, any more than the inanimate wheel."
Mrs. Eddy denies that physical exercise strengthens the muscles.
"Because the muscles of the blacksmith's arm are strongly developed, it
does not follow that exercise has produced this result, or that a
less-used arm must be weak.... _The trip-hammer is not increased in size
by exercise._ Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron?"
Constant bathing, Mrs. Eddy says, received a "useful rebuke from Jesus'
precept, 'Take no thought ... for the body,' We must beware of making
clean merely the outside of the platter."
_A Sensationless Body the Goal of Existence_
"A sensationless body," Mrs. Eddy says, is the ultimate hope of
Christian Science. Since insensibility to pain is the ultimate good
which her system of philosophy offers, it is natural that she should
often point us to the lower forms of animal life for our exemplars. "The
conditions of life become less imperative in lower organisms, or where
there is less mind and belief on this subject." She points out hopefully
that certain marine animals multiply their species by self-division.
"The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the
unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again." If we but believed
that matter has no sensation, "then the human limb would be replaced as
readily as the lobster's claw." She points out the fact that flowers
produce their seed without pain. "The snowbird sings and soars amid the
blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet."
"Obesity," Mrs. Eddy says, "is _an adipose belief of yourself as a
substance_."
_Mrs. Eddy's Physiology_
The most discouraging thing about Mrs. Eddy's dissertations upon anatomy
and physiology is that she seems to know so little about the physical
facts and laws which she despises. She says, for instance, that a father
"plunged his infant babe, only a few hours old, into water for several
minutes and repeated this operation daily until the child could remain
under water for twenty minutes, moving and playing without harm, like a
fish." Does Mrs. Eddy actually believe that a child could live under
water for twenty minutes? Again: "The supposition that we can correct
insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a species
of insanity." Where did Mrs. Eddy get the idea that such treatment was
ever supposed to cure "insanity"? Mrs. Eddy says the fact that a finger
which has been amputated continues to hurt is proof that nerves have
nothing to do with pain, because, she states, "_the nerve is gone_"!
Mrs. Eddy says that when we burn a finger, not fire but mortal mind
causes the injury. To this statement she adds: "Holy inspiration has
created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the
flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast
into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might
produce spontaneous combustion." That is, if mortal mind worked hard
enough, we could burn our fingers without any fire, or we could produce
the fire by willing it.
The action of drugs depends entirely upon the belief of mortal mind.
Stimulants, narcotics, poisons, affect the system solely because they
are reputed to do so. And yet, with all her ingenuity, Mrs. Eddy has to
admit that if a man took arsenic unknowingly it would probably kill him.
This, she says, is because of the consensus of opinion that arsenic is
deadly. Such would probably be her explanation of the destructive
processes which go on in the world without the knowledge of man; fire
consumes the forest, the tiger kills the antelope, and the bite of the
cobra kills the tiger because the human mind has attributed such
tendencies to fire, to the tiger, and to the cobra.
_Mrs. Eddy's View of History_
All the emanations of mortal mind are evil. Our redemption, Mrs. Eddy
says, lies in Divine Mind, of which we are a part. "Spirit imparts the
understanding which leads into all Truth.... This understanding is not
intellectual, is not aided by scholarly attainments." There is no
mistaking Mrs. Eddy's meaning; the thing in us which is capable of
cultivation and expansion, that which inquires and investigates and
reasons, is mortal mind, and is therefore evil. All the physical
sciences are the harmful inventions of mortal mind, and the slow and
painful accumulation of exact knowledge has been but the harmful
activity of the baser element in human nature. There was never such a
discouraging view of human history.