MIND AND BODY.
"I have been lent your book 'The Soul of a People,'" said a lady to me,
"but I have only had time so far to read the dedication. Do you know
what I exclaimed?"
"I cannot even guess," I replied.
"I said, 'How very scientific.' Do you know what I meant?"
As my dedication is to the Burmese people, and only says I have tried
always to see their virtues and forget their faults, as a friend should,
I was quite unable to see where the science came in, and I said so.
"It is Christian Science," she told me.
Then she proceeded to tell me much about this Christian science, that it
was the science of looking at the best side of things, that it cured the
body by mind, despair by hope, darkness by light, solitude by a sense of
the companionship of God (good). She had proof in her own family of
what a change it can bring to the unhappy. It was, she said, all new,
and discovered by Mrs. Eddy.
This was not, of course, the first I had heard of this strange cult. It
has been in the air for some time past. Mostly it has been jeered at as
an absurdity by those who have looked only at the extraordinary claims
it makes, at the intellectual fog it offers as thought, at the
childishness and inconsequence of whatever conceptions could be picked
out of the maze of words; and up till then it had seemed to me but
another of those misty foolishnesses that amuse people who have nothing
else to do.
But when a case of real benefit, of benefit I could see and understand,
was offered me in proof of its value, it seemed to me worth while to
consider what there was in this teaching, to see what sense lay in this
apparent senselessness, and to what want this new science appealed.
I have mentioned elsewhere in this book--it is a fact that comes to one
who has been in the East many years very strongly--the aimless pessimism
that is so prevalent in England and Europe. I am not here concerned with
its cause. Mainly, perhaps, it is due to the rise of a great class of
middle and upper-middle people who have no object in life. They have by
inheritance or acquirement enough money to live upon, and the struggle
for life passes them by. They have no necessity to work, and they are
not endowed with the brain or energy necessary to take to themselves
some object or pursuit. Their minds and sympathies have never been
trained by necessity. They have fallen out of the great world of life
and passion into eddies and backwaters. They have become flabby, both
bodily, mentally, and emotionally, and, conscious of their own
uselessness, they have fallen into the saddest pessimism. They are not
blase, because they have never tasted the realities of life; they have
few friends, because they have no common interest to bind them to
others. Their lives are monotonies, and their thoughts and speech are a
prolonged whine. They are perpetually searching and never finding,
because they know not what they seek. Most of them are women, but there
are men also. I do not mean that all Christian Scientists are from the
ranks of the unemployed. It is recruited also from those who with larger
needs for emotion find the circumstances of ordinary life too narrow for
them, from the over nervous and weak of all classes. But the majority
are, I think, of those who do nothing.
They turn to the established religions, vaguely hoping for the emotional
stimulus they need, but they fail to find it.
I am not quite sure why. One Christian Scientist assured me that Mrs.
Eddy had discovered, all out of her own mind, that God was Love, and
that was why Christian Science was so successful. This was a lady who
had gone to church regularly all her life. Yet she supposed this a new
discovery! A strange but not at all solitary instance of what I have so
often found, that the immense majority who call themselves Christians
have never tried to realize what their religion is. Many others have
told me that they are "Christian Scientists" for other allied reasons.
But no doubt the great attraction of Christian Science is in its
doctrine, that bodily ills can be cured by mental effort, the assertion
that evil exists only in the mind. This is, of course, nothing new.
Faith healing has been common in all stages of the world, has allied
itself to all religions. There is the standing example of Lourdes
to-day, there was the relic worship of the middle ages, the pilgrimages
and washings in sacred pools. It is common all over the world. The good
effects attributed, and often truly, to charms and magic are but another
instance of it. A great deal of the sickness and unhappiness of the
world has always been purely the result of a diseased thought acting
upon the body. The great antidote the world has always offered to this
evil has been work. In daily work, in the necessity for daily effort, in
the forced detachment of mind it brings on, in the interest that a
worker is obliged to take in his work lest he fail, or even starve, lies
the great tonic. And to this has been always added the belief in some
religious rite, or in charms.
But these resources are closed to the unhappy class that I am writing
of. They need not work. They never have worked at anything, and know not
how to do it. Even from childhood their brains have been relaxed and
their interests narrowed. Yet a great interest is a necessity for all
men and women. But consider the lives of these people, especially of the
women, how terrible it is. There is nothing they care for, nothing. One
day of monotony is added to another for ever. Marriage and children may
dissipate it for a time, may give them the interest they require, but it
does not last long. Love fades into indifference, the children grow up.
They no longer need care and thought, and there is nothing else. Dull,
blank misery descends upon them as a garment never to be lifted.
And if the love be a disappointment, a tragedy, then what help is there
anywhere? "Let me die," she cries, "and be done with it. Life is not
worth living." The world is horrible, because they see the world through
glasses dimmed with their own misery.
To them comes Mrs. Eddy and says, "All the evil you feel, the mental
sickness, the bodily sickness, is imaginary. Face your evils in the
certainty that they are but bogies and they will flee before you. You
shall again become well and strong, and life shall be worth living."
It is, of course, a wild exaggeration. Pain and sickness are real
things, and the empire of the mind over the body is very limited.
Still, there is an empire and it must never be forgotten. The
healthy-minded--those who work, who live their lives, who love and hate,
and fight, and win and lose, to whom the world is a great arena--will
laugh at Mrs. Eddy. They need not this teaching which is half a truth
and half a lie. They see the false half only because they need not the
true half. And the others, the mental invalids, they see the true half
and not the false. It is _all_ true to them, and it _must_ be all true
to be of use, for power lies in the exaggeration, never in the mean.
This is the secret of "Christian Science." We have in our midst a
terrible disease, growing daily worse, the disease of inutility, which
breeds pessimism, and Mrs. Eddy's doctrine of the imaginary nature of
evil is good for this pessimism. The sick seize it with avidity because
they find it helps their symptoms, and in the relief it affords to their
unhappiness they are willing to swallow all the rest of the formless
mist that is offered to them as part of their religion.
I do not know that "Christian Scientists" differ greatly from believers
in other religions in this point. It is an excellent instance of how one
useful tenet will cause the acceptance of a whole mass of absurdities
and even make them seem real and true. Christian Science has come as the
quack medicine to cure a disease that is a terrible reality, and it is
of use because it contains in all its melange one ingredient, morphia,
that dulls the pain. But the cure of this disease lies elsewhere than in
Christian Science, than, indeed, in any religion.
I have given a chapter to this "Science," not because it appears to me
that it is ever likely to become a real force or of real importance, but
because it illustrates, I think, the reason of the success or otherwise
of all religions. It exhibits in exaggerated form what is the nature of
all religions.
They come to fulfil an emotional want, or wants that are imperative and
that call for relief. And they succeed and persist exactly as they
minister to these emotional wants. The emotion that requires religion
is always a pessimism of some form or other, a weariness, a
hopelessness. And the religion is accepted because it combats that
helplessness and gives a hope. All religions are optimisms to their
believers.
A great deal of foolishness may be included in a faith without injury to
its success. Doctrine, theory, scientific theology, may be as empty and
meaningless as it is in Christian Science, and still the faith will
live. And the central idea must be exaggerated. It must be so
exaggerated that to outsiders it appears only an immense falsehood. It
is so in all the religions. Truth lies in the mean, power in the
extreme. They are opposed as are freewill and destination, as are God
and Law.