most cherishes has been the direct result of that spirit of inquiry and
of those inductive processes of reasoning which Mrs. Eddy despises. If
the morality of the civilized world is higher to-day than it was in the
fifth century, it is not because men know any more about moral laws than
they did two thousand years ago, but because this same spirit of inquiry
has made cleaner living possible and imperative. Mrs. Eddy says that
Christian Science would abolish war; but the diminution of war has come
about, not through any growth of "Divine Mind" but, as Buckle pointed
out, through three triumphs of the experimental tendency of the
intellect;--the discovery of gunpowder, the discovery that war was
detrimental to trade and to the best economic conditions, and the
improvement in methods of transportation. Contemplating the history of
civilization from Mrs. Eddy's point of view, we have simply gone on
developing this injurious thing, "mortal mind"--applying our
intelligence to the study of the physical universe--and have gone on
piling up false belief on false belief. It is "matter" that is our great
delusion and that stands between us and a full understanding of God; and
matter exists, or seems to exist, only because we have invented it and
invented laws to govern it and have given properties to its various
manifestations. The more we know about the physical universe, the
heavier do we make our chains; our progress in the physical sciences
does but increase the dose of the drug which enslaves us. And there have
been but two breaks in this jumbled dream of "error": the first when
Jesus Christ "demonstrated the nothingness of matter," the second when
Mrs. Eddy proclaimed its nothingness from Lynn.
With a "sensationless body" for the goal of existence, the savage was
certainly much higher in "the scale of being" than the nations of modern
Europe, and Mrs. Eddy is perfectly right when she refers us to the
amoeba and crustacea. Happy, indeed, the lobster who thinks so little
about his anatomy that his lost claw is replaced by another!
From all her flights Mrs. Eddy comes back to her starting-point:
physical well-being. Not for a single page are we permitted to forget
that her religion is primarily a kind of "doctoring"; therapeutics made
religion, or religion made therapeutics. She makes the fact that Christ
healed the sick the principal feature of his mission, and makes it
authority for her assumption that religion and therapeutics are
essentially one. Certainly the burden of the New Testament is not that
man may avoid suffering, but that he may suffer with noble fortitude.
_Lack of Religious Feeling in Mrs. Eddy's Book_
But it is before such a word as fortitude that Mrs. Eddy's book takes on
its most discouraging aspect. Her foolish logic, her ignorance of the
human body, the liberties which she takes with the Bible, and her
burlesque exegesis, could easily be overlooked if there were any
nobility of feeling to be found in "Science and Health"; any
great-hearted pity for suffering, any humility or self-forgetfulness
before the mysteries of life. Mrs. Eddy professes to believe that she
has found the Truth, and that all the long centuries behind her have
gone out in darkness and wasted effort, yet not one page of her book is
tinged with compassion. "Oh that mine head were waters, and mine eyes a
fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the
daughter of my people!" If there were one sentence like that in "Science
and Health" no one would stop to quarrel with Mrs. Eddy's metaphysics.
But if there is little intelligence displayed in Mrs. Eddy's book, there
is even less emotion. It is not exaggeration to say that "Science and
Health" is absolutely devoid of religious feeling. God remains for Mrs.
Eddy a "principle" indeed, toward which she has no attitude but that of
a somewhat patronizing and platitudinous expositor. She discusses sin
and death and human suffering as if they were curves or equations.
_Malicious Animal Magnetism_
In all the editions of Mrs. Eddy's book there is the same shiftiness,
the same hardness, and the same astonishing complacency, and the text of
the first three editions is disfigured by innumerable ebullitions of
spite and hatred. In the first edition the first fifteen pages of the
chapter on "Healing the Sick" are given up to an attack upon Richard
Kennedy, the young man who was her first practitioner, and of whose
personal popularity she was so bitterly jealous. The second edition, a
small volume, is largely made up of denunciations of Daniel Spofford.
The third edition opens with a preface (signed Asa G. Eddy) attacking
Edward Arens, and contains the famous chapter on "Demonology" in which
Mrs. Eddy devotes forty-six pages to settling scores with half a dozen
of her early students, charging one and another with theft, adultery,
murder, blackmail, etc. The Reverend Mr. Wiggin, when he revised Mrs.
Eddy's book in 1885, persuaded her to omit these vituperative passages
on the ground that they were libelous.
Mrs. Eddy's one original elemental contribution to Quimbyism, was her
doctrine of Malicious Animal Magnetism; a grewsome superstition born of
her own vindictiveness and distrust. Mrs. Eddy's more enlightened
followers have for years tried to divert attention from this one of her
doctrines, and there are hundreds of Christian Scientists in the field
who know and think very little about it. But it has been a very
important consideration in the lives of those who have come into
personal contact with Mrs. Eddy. Between 1875 and 1888 many of Mrs.
Eddy's students left her because in her lectures and conversation she
dwelt more upon the malign power of mesmerism than upon the salutary
power of truth. In her contributions to the _Journal_ during those years
she frequently took up Animal Magnetism; she tells her followers over
and over again that she will denounce it, and that she will not be
silenced. For several years there was a regular department in the
_Journal_ with the caption "Animal Magnetism," but the crimes which were
charged to mesmerists were by no means confined to this department.
"_Also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their
pleasure, and we are in great distress_," the _Journal_ again and again
affirms.
_Poverty a False Belief_
Mrs. Eddy surmounts economics as easily as she does physics and
chemistry and physiology. Poverty is only a form of "error," a false
belief. It can be abolished as readily as sin or disease or old age. She
advertised the first edition of "Science and Health" as a book that
"affords an opportunity to acquire a profession by which you can
accumulate a fortune." "In the early history of Christian Science," Mrs.
Eddy says, "among my thousands of students few were wealthy. Now,
Christian Scientists are not indigent; and their comfortable fortunes
are acquired by healing mankind morally, physically, and spiritually."
Her healers should be well paid, she says. "Christian Science
demonstrates that the patient who pays what he is able to pay, is more
apt to recover than he who withholds a slight equivalent for health." In
Mrs. Eddy's book[12] she publishes a long testimonial from a man who
relates how Christian Science has helped him in his business.
This view of poverty has been generally accepted among Mrs. Eddy's
followers. One contributor to the _Journal_ writes: "We were
demonstrating over a lack of means, which we had learned was just as
much a claim of error to be overcome with truth as ever sickness or sin
was."[13]
Another contributor writes: "The lack of means is a lupine ghost sired
by the same spectre as the lack of health, and both must be met and put
to flight by the same mighty weapons of our spiritual warfare."[14]
In the files of the _Journal_ there are many reports of the material
prosperity of individual Christian Scientists. It is an evidence of
"at-oneness" with God to prosper in business just as it is to overcome
disease.
In the _Journal_ of September, 1904, a contributor says:
"Is it reasonable to believe, as we have believed, that popular
fancy, whims, climate, the state of politics, any or all of a
hundred lawless elements, are able to ruin a man's business while
he stands by and doesn't know enough even to make an intelligent
protest?"
Government, civilization, and even "climate" are demonstrated to be
unreal, but the reality and importance of "business" is never
questioned, and that each and every Christian Scientist should get on in
the world remains a matter of indubitable moment, even to Mrs. Eddy
herself.
_Mrs. Eddy's Views on Marriage_
Among the many incidental ideas which Mrs. Eddy has added to Quimbyism
are her theory that the Godhead is more feminine than masculine, and her
qualified disapproval of matrimony. Quimby himself had a large family
and saw nothing unspiritual in marriage. In defining the real purpose of
marriage Mrs. Eddy says nothing about children; "to happify existence by
constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, is the true
purpose of marriage." In her chapter on marriage she says: "The
scientific _morale_ of marriage is spiritual unity.... Proportionately
as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal harmonious
being will be spiritually discerned."
In her chapter called "Wedlock" in Miscellaneous Writings (1897) Mrs.
Eddy, after a vague and evasive discussion of the subject, squarely puts
the question: "Is marriage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge
inculcates that it is, while Science indicates that it is _not_." In the
same chapter she further says: "Human nature has bestowed on a wife the
right to become a mother; but if the wife esteems not this privilege, by
mutual consent, exalted and increased affections, she may win a higher."
Mrs. Eddy apparently believes that Jesus Christ taught us to ignore
family relations: "Jesus acknowledged no ties of the flesh. He said:
'Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your father which is
in heaven.' Again he asked: 'Who is my mother, and who are my brethren
but they who will do the will of my father?' We have no record of his
calling any man by the name of father."
_Future of Christian Science_
Whoever has watched the amazing growth of the Christian Science sect
must feel some curiosity as to its future. Mrs. Eddy's followers are by
no means the only people who are trying to meet, by suggestive
treatment, nervous diseases and the many functional disorders which
result from overwork, worry, and discouragement. The foremost
neurologists of all countries are employing more and more this
suggestive method which is the essential reality in Christian Science
healing. The followers of the "New Thought" school apply this principle
in their own way, and the hundreds of unaffiliated "mind curists" and
"mental healers" are each applying it in ways more or less honest and
legitimate.
In October, 1906, Dr. Elwood Worcester and Dr. Samuel McComb, the rector
and the associate rector of the Emmanuel (Episcopal) Church of Boston,
organized the Emmanuel Church Health Class, for the treatment of nervous
disorders. Believing that, as Professor William James has said, "the
sovereign cure for worry is religious faith," the workers at Emmanuel
Church have been endeavoring to cure nervous disorders by putting the
patient at peace with himself. Every patient is examined by a physician,
and if the root of his disorder proves to be nervous (hysteria, alcoholism,
a drug habit, insomnia, or any one of the many forms of neurasthenia)
he is admitted into the Health Class for psycho-therapeutical treatment.
Here he is encouraged to unburden himself of the distress or perplexity
which haunts him, and is given the kind of suggestive treatment which
seems best adapted to his disorder. Dr. Worcester studied psychology
under Wundt, in Germany, and taught it for six years at Lehigh
University. Dr. McComb studied psychology at Oxford. The records of the
Emmanuel Health Class show that of the 178 cases treated between March,
1907, and November, 1907, the condition of seventy-five patients has
been improved, forty-eight have not been helped at all, while in
fifty-five cases the result is unknown.[15]
_Mrs. Eddy's Opposition to the Mind Cure Movement_
Mrs. Eddy and her followers have given a demonstration too great to be
overlooked, of the fact that many ills which the sufferer believes
entirely physical can be reached and eradicated by "ministering to a
mind diseased," by persuading the sick man continually to suggest to
himself ideas of health and hope and happiness and usefulness, instead
of brooding upon the emptiness and unanswered needs of his life or upon
his failing physical powers. Mrs. Eddy's sect, more than any other one
of the cults which believe in and practise this method of bettering the
patient's physical condition through his mind, has forced the most
hide-bound medical practitioners to take account of this old but newly
applied force in therapeutics.
But what is Mrs. Eddy's own attitude toward the general awakening to the
value of psycho-therapeutics in the treatment of human diseases? She
declares that every kind of mind cure and suggestive treatment except
her own is dangerous and harmful. As one of Mrs. Eddy's students wrote
in the _Christian Science Journal_, September, 1901, "The loyal
Christian Scientist knows that neither he nor his patient should read or
study the books of any other author than those of our beloved Leader in
order to learn the Science of the Christ truth, which she is teaching
and demonstrating to this age."
Mrs. Eddy's own editorials in the _Journal_ are never so bitter as when
she is attacking the mental healers who do not practise her own
copyrighted variety of mind cure. Recently the _Christian Science
Sentinel_ of January 18, 1908, stated that Mrs. Eddy cannot countenance
the work done at the Emmanuel Church. Mr. Archibald McClellan, the
editor of that publication, published an article entitled "No Christian
Psychology." He says: "Christian Psychology is equivalent to Christian
phrenology, physiology and mythology, whereas Jesus predicted and
demonstrated Christian healing on the basis of Spirit, God. He never
complicated Spirit with matter, etc.... Her teachings (Mrs. Eddy's) show
further that she cannot consistently endorse as Christianity the two
distinctly contradictory statements and points of view contained in the
term 'Christian psychology'--otherwise Christian materialism."
Mrs. Eddy holds that any system of healing which at all takes account
of, or admits physical structure, is not Christian.
Mrs. Eddy's endeavor has been to convert a universal principle into a
personal property. And she has gone a wonderfully long way toward doing
it. Thousands of people believe that they owe their health and happiness
to a healing principle which was revealed by God to Mrs. Eddy and by
Mrs. Eddy to mankind; that since the ministry of Jesus Christ upon earth
no one of the human race has understood this principle except Mrs. Eddy,
and that she is the only human being now alive who fully understands it;
that when she dies her works alone will stand between the world and
darkness.
But all the while that Mrs. Eddy was energetically copyrighting, and
pruning, and expelling, and disciplining, that other stream which came
from Quimby, through Dr. Evans and through Julius Dresser and his wife,
was slowly and quietly doing its work.[16] Mind Cure and New Thought
grew up side by side with Christian Science. As organizations they were
not nearly so effective, and their ranks, like Mrs. Eddy's, were often
darkened by the adventuress and the battered soldier of fortune. But the
Mental healers and the New Thought healers treated the sick on exactly
the same principle which Mrs. Eddy's successful healers employed.
As to the future of Mrs. Eddy's church, her own attitude toward every
attempt to investigate and to apply liberally the principle of mental
healing, seems to determine that. It has been possible for her, during
her own lifetime, absolutely to prohibit preaching, thinking,
independent writing,--investigation or inquiry of any sort--in her
churches. But after her death, when that compelling hand is withdrawn,
either the church must renew itself from among the ignorant and
superstitious, as Mormonism has done, or it must permit its members to
use their minds. Those who use their minds will discover that Christian
Science is only one method of applying a general truth, and that it is a
method which is hampered by a great deal that is illogical and absurd;
that if Christian Science, as Mrs. Eddy has promulgated it, were
universally believed and practised, it would be the revolt of a species
against its own physical structure; against its relation to its natural
physical environment, against the needs of its own physical organism,
against the perpetuation of its kind. The moment a Christian Scientist
realizes that the helpful and hopeful principle of his religion can
operate quite independently of all the inconsequential theories which
Mrs. Eddy has attached to it, that moment he is, of course, lost to Mrs.
Eddy. Mrs. Eddy's church organization stands as a sort of dyke between
the general principle of mind cure and Mrs. Eddy's very empirical,
violent, and temperamental interpretation of that principle. It is the
future of psycho-therapeutics that will determine the future of
Christian Science. If "Mind Cure," "Christian Psychology," and regular
physicians offer the benefits of suggestive treatment in a more rational
and direct way than does Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy's church will find
in them very formidable competition. On the other hand, if Christian
Scientists throw down their barriers and join the general mind-cure
movement, and the two branches of Quimbyism meet, then half of Mrs.
Eddy's life-work is lost. The labor of her days has been to keep these
two streams apart; to prove one the true and the other the false. Her
efforts to stem the progress of all other schools of mental healing have
been secondary only to her efforts to advance her own. Yet,
unconsciously and against her own wish, she has been the most effective
instrument in promoting the interest of the whole movement.
On the theoretical side, Mrs. Eddy's contribution to mental healing has
been, in the main, fallacious, pseudodoxal, and absurd, but upon the
practical side she has been wonderfully efficient. New movements are
usually launched and old ideas are revivified, not through the efforts
of a group of people, but through one person. These dynamic
personalities have not always conformed to our highest ideals; their
effectiveness has not always been associated with a large intelligence
or with nobility of character. Not infrequently it has been true of
them--as it seems to be true of Mrs. Eddy--that their power was
generated in the ferment of an inharmonious and violent nature. But, for
practical purposes, it is only fair to measure them by their actual
accomplishment and by the machinery they have set in motion.
THE END
HER FRUITS
BY
MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS
These are her fruits, kindness and gentleness,
And gratefully we take them at her hands;
Patience she has, and pity for distress,
And love that understands.
Ah, ask not how such rich reward was won,
How sharp the harrow in the former years,
Or mellowed in what agony of sun,
Or watered with what tears.
THE KEY TO THE DOOR
BY FIELDING BALL
ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN
"_There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see.
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was--and then no more of Thee and Me._"
The postmaster was lounging in an open window, cleaning his fingernails
with his pocket-knife, as Allison went into the post-office. He rose
with some show of animation at sight of the tall, boyish figure in the
doorway.
"I got a hired girl for you all right, Mr. Allison," he said, advancing
to meet him. "Used to work down to Webb City, in a restaurant, but got
tired of it--hours too hard. She's a good cook, and she knows how to get
things on the table so they look real nice--I knew that would mean
considerable to you folks."
He went on to dwell at length upon the girl's good points, becoming more
nervously demonstrative in his praise as he found that Allison's face
reflected none of his enthusiasm, but remained unexpectedly impassive
and non-committal.
Allison interrupted at the first opportunity.
"You have been very kind, Mr. Barbour," he said, with impersonal
civility. "Would you be so good as to get me my mail?"
He took the letters which the man handed him and walked out without
giving him another glance.
Just outside of the door he met Jim Brown, man-of-all-work at the
station. Allison himself was station agent. Allison looked at Jim as he
passed with such a cold, unswerving gaze that in spite of himself the
other dropped his eyes. Jim had been present at the interview between
Billings and Allison that morning; Allison knew that he was coming now
to tell the postmaster about it. The young man set his lips hard at the
thought of some of the things he had done during the last two weeks,
when he had been full of glad confidence in himself and in this
invention of his--this brake which Billings had told him an hour ago was
not worth the stuff of which it was made. The recountal of his
performance would doubtless afford much entertainment to the pair in the
post-office. Just yesterday he had asked the postmaster to find for him,
if possible, a capable maid-servant, and had said, without thinking
anything in particular about it, that he would pay a satisfactory girl
five dollars a week. Five dollars a week--it had not seemed much to him;
he had been amused by Barbour's evident astonishment. To-day he saw more
reason in it.... Then there was that perfume for Gertrude--he should
have to countermand his order for that. He had no choice in the matter,
he told himself, with bitter resentment that a paltry nine dollars
should mean so much to him. In spite of the fact that he had come to
this decision before he reached the drug store, he did not go in, but
walked past with his head in the air, looking neither to right nor to
left. He felt as though every one must already know of the morning's
experience; and he was fearful of meeting eyes alight with cynical
understanding.
The postmaster and Jim watched the young man from the post-office door
as he made his way up the one hilly street of the little town. The
soldierly precision of his carriage and gait, together with a certain
air of distinction about his clothes, made him seem singularly out of
keeping with all about him--the narrow, stony road, the straggling white
houses on each side of it, the unkempt yards, the neglected trees, the
dilapidated sidewalks half hidden by an amazing growth of dog-fennel.
"You'd know somep'n had gone wrong by the way he had his head reared
back, wouldn't you?" Jim asked with a smile on his dark face.
He had just finished telling Barbour of what had happened that morning.
Several days before, Allison had got word from the railroad company
that some time this week they would send a man to tell him what offer
they were prepared to make for the brake on which he had been working
for so many weeks, and had finally finished; and this morning Billings
had put in his appearance. The brake was practically good for nothing,
he assured Allison--certainly not worth a cent to the company; and he
told him the reasons why this was so.
He went on to say, however, that he felt sorry for Allison,--sorry for
that nice little wife of his,--Jim smiled grimly as he repeated the
condescending phrase,--that he knew they were having a mighty hard time
of it. Sixty dollars a month was not enough for a single man to live on
decently, much less a married one; and the way in which Allison had been
brought up made it harder. He didn't mean to criticize Allison's
father--he didn't believe in criticizing the dead--but he certainly
should not bring up _his_ son in such a way that he couldn't make a
living for himself if necessary. You never could tell what was going to
happen in this world; Allison wasn't the first gay young fellow who had
grown up not expecting ever to have to do a day's work, and then all of
a sudden had found himself glad to get almost any sort of a job. Well,
as he said, he was sorry for Allison, and ready to help him out a
little. He meant to see to it that Allison got something out of this
brake of his--a couple of hundred dollars, perhaps; of course, two
hundred dollars wasn't a great deal; it wouldn't mean much to
him--Billings--but it would probably mean considerable to Allison.
"What did Mr. Allison say?" the postmaster asked.