There she stands-painted by herself. No witness but herself has been
allowed to testify. She stands there painted by her acts, and decorated
by her words. When she talks, she has only a decorative value as
a witness, either for or against herself, for she deals mainly in
unsupported assertion; and in the rare cases where she puts forward a
verifiable fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses to furnish
to anybody else. Also, when she talks, she is unstable, she wanders,
she is incurably inconsistent; what she says to-day she contradicts
tomorrow.
But her acts are consistent. They are always faithful to her, they never
misinterpret her, they are a mirror which always reflects her exactly,
precisely, minutely, unerringly, and always the same, to date, with only
those progressive little natural changes in stature, dress, complexion,
mood, and carriage that mark--exteriorly--the march of the years and
record the accumulations of experience, while--interiorly--through all
this steady drift of evolution the one essential detail, the commanding
detail, the master detail of the make-up remains as it was in the
beginning, suffers no change and can suffer none; the basis of the
character; the temperament, the disposition, that indestructible iron
framework upon which the character is built, and whose shape it must
take, and keep, throughout life. We call it a person's nature.
The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally--with his
hands; but not with his heart. The man born kind and compassionate
can have that disposition crushed down out of sight by embittering
experience; but if it were an organ the post-mortem would find it still
in his corpse. The man born ambitious of power and glory may live long
without finding it out, but when the opportunity comes he will know,
will strike for the largest thing within the limit of his chances at the
time-constable, perhaps--and will be glad and proud when he gets it,
and will write home about it. But he will not stop with that start; his
appetite will come again; and by-and-by again, and yet again; and when
he has climbed to police commissioner it will at last begin to dawn upon
him that what his Napoleon soul wants and was born for is something away
higher up--he does not quite know what, but Circumstance and Opportunity
will indicate the direction and he will cut a road through and find out.
I think Mrs. Eddy was born with a far-seeing business-eye, but did not
know it; and with a great organizing and executive talent, and did not
know it; and with a large appetite for power and distinction, and did
not know it. I think the reason that her make did not show up until
middle life was that she had General Grant's luck--Circumstance and
Opportunity did not come her way when she was younger. The qualities
that were born in her had to wait for circumstance and opportunity--but
they were there: they were there to stay, whether they ever got a chance
to fructify or not. If they had come early, they would have found her
ready and competent. And they--not she--would have determined what they
would set her at and what they would make of her. If they had elected to
commission her as second-assistant cook in a bankrupt boarding-house,
I know the rest of it--I know what would have happened. She would have
owned the boarding-house within six months; she would have had the late
proprietor on salary and humping himself, as the worldly say; she would
have had that boarding-house spewing money like a mint; she would have
worked the servants and the late landlord up to the limit; she would
have squeezed the boarders till they wailed, and by some mysterious
quality born in her she would have kept the affections of certain of the
lot whose love and esteem she valued, and flung the others down the back
area; in two years she would own all the boarding-houses in the town, in
five all the boarding-houses in the State, in twenty all the hotels in
America, in forty all the hotels on the planet, and would sit at home
with her finger on a button and govern the whole combination as easily
as a bench-manager governs a dog-show.
It would be a grand thing to see, and I feel a kind of
disappointment--but never mind, a religion is better and larger; and
there is more to it. And I have not been steeping myself in Christian
Science all these weeks without finding out that the one sensible thing
to do with a disappointment is to put it out of your mind and think of
something cheerfuler.
We outsiders cannot conceive of Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science Religion
as being a sudden and miraculous birth, but only as a growth from a seed
planted by circumstances, and developed stage by stage by command and
compulsion of the same force. What the stages were we cannot know, but
are privileged to guess. She may have gotten the mental-healing idea
from Quimby--it had been experimented with for ages, and was no one's
special property. [For the present, for convenience' sake, let us
proceed upon the hypothesis that that was all she got of him, and that
she put up the rest of the assets herself. This will strain us, but
let us try it.] In each and all its forms and under all its many names,
mental healing had had limits, always, and they were rather narrow
ones--Mrs. Eddy, let us imagine, removed the fence, abolished the
frontiers. Not by expanding mental-healing, but by absorbing its small
bulk into the vaster bulk of Christian Science--Divine Science, The Holy
Ghost, the Comforter--which was a quite different and sublimer force,
and one which had long lain dormant and unemployed.
The Christian Scientist believes that the Spirit of God (life and love)
pervades the universe like an atmosphere; that whoso will study Science
and Health can get from it the secret of how to inhale that transforming
air; that to breathe it is to be made new; that from the new man all
sorrow, all care, all miseries of the mind vanish away, for that only
peace, contentment and measureless joy can live in that divine fluid;
that it purifies the body from disease, which is a vicious creation of
the gross human mind, and cannot continue to exist in the presence of
the Immortal Mind, the renewing Spirit of God.
The Scientist finds this reasonable, natural, and not harder to believe
than that the disease germ, a creature of darkness, perishes when
exposed to the light of the great sun--a new revelation of profane
science which no one doubts. He reminds us that the actinic ray, shining
upon lupus, cures it--a horrible disease which was incurable fifteen
years ago, and had been incurable for ten million years before; that
this wonder, unbelievable by the physicians at first, is believed by
them now; and so he is tranquilly confident that the time is coming when
the world will be educated up to a point where it will comprehend and
grant that the light of the Spirit of God, shining unobstructed upon the
soul, is an actinic ray which can purge both mind and body from disease
and set them free and make them whole.
It is apparent, then, that in Christian Science it is not one man's mind
acting upon another man's mind that heals; that it is solely the Spirit
of God that heals; that the healer's mind performs no office but to
convey that force to the patient; that it is merely the wire which
carries the electric fluid, so to speak, and delivers the message.
Therefore, if these things be true, mental-healing and Science-healing
are separate and distinct processes, and no kinship exists between them.
To heal the body of its ills and pains is a mighty benefaction, but in
our day our physicians and surgeons work a thousand miracles--prodigies
which would have ranked as miracles fifty years ago--and they have so
greatly extended their domination over disease that we feel so well
protected that we are able to look with a good deal of composure and
absence of hysterics upon the claims of new competitors in that field.
But there is a mightier benefaction than the healing of the body, and
that is the healing of the spirit--which is Christian Science's other
claim. So far as I know, so far as I can find out, it makes it good.
Personally I have not known a Scientist who did not seem serene,
contented, unharassed. I have not found an outsider whose observation
of Scientists furnished him a view that differed from my own. Buoyant
spirits, comfort of mind, freedom from care these happinesses we all
have, at intervals; but in the spaces between, dear me, the black hours!
They have put a curse upon the life of every human being I have ever
known, young or old. I concede not a single exception. Unless it might
be those Scientists just referred to. They may have been playing a part
with me; I hope they were not, and I believe they were not.
Time will test the Science's claim. If time shall make it good; if time
shall prove that the Science can heal the persecuted spirit of man and
banish its troubles and keep it serene and sunny and content--why, then
Mrs. Eddy will have a monument that will reach above the clouds. For if
she did not hit upon that imperial idea and evolve it and deliver it,
its discoverer can never be identified with certainty, now, I think.
It is the giant feature, it is the sun that rides in the zenith of
Christian Science, the auxiliary features are of minor consequence [Let
us still leave the large “if” aside, for the present, and proceed as if
it had no existence.]
It is not supposable that Mrs. Eddy realized, at first, the size of her
plunder. (No, find--that is the word; she did not realize the size of
her find, at first.) It had to grow upon her, by degrees, in accordance
with the inalterable custom of Circumstance, which works by stages, and
by stages only, and never furnishes any mind with all the materials for
a large idea at one time.
In the beginning, Mrs. Eddy was probably interested merely in the
mental-healing detail, and perhaps mainly interested in it pecuniary,
for she was poor.
She would succeed in anything she undertook. She would attract pupils,
and her commerce would grow. She would inspire in patient and pupil
confidence in her earnestness, her history is evidence that she would
not fail of that.
There probably came a time, in due course, when her students began to
think there was something deeper in her teachings than they had
been suspecting--a mystery beyond mental-healing, and higher. It is
conceivable that by consequence their manner towards her changed little
by little, and from respectful became reverent. It is conceivable that
this would have an influence upon her; that it would incline her to
wonder if their secret thought--that she was inspired--might not be a
well-grounded guess. It is conceivable that as time went on the
thought in their minds and its reflection in hers might solidify into
conviction.
She would remember, then, that as a child she had been called, more
than once, by a mysterious voice--just as had happened to little Samuel.
(Mentioned in her Autobiography.) She would be impressed by that ancient
reminiscence, now, and it could have a prophetic meaning for her.
It is conceivable that the persuasive influences around her and within
her would give a new and powerful impulse to her philosophizings, and
that from this, in time, would result that great birth, the healing of
body and mind by the inpouring of the Spirit of God--the central and
dominant idea of Christian Science--and that when this idea came she
would not doubt that it was an inspiration direct from Heaven.