It is evident that she made disciples fast, and that their belief in her
and in the authenticity of her heavenly ambassadorship was not of the
lukewarm and half-way sort, but was profoundly earnest and sincere.
Her book was issued from the press in 1875, it began its work of
convert-making, and within six years she had successfully launched a new
Religion and a new system of healing, and was teaching them to crowds of
eager students in a College of her own, at prices so extraordinary
that we are almost compelled to accept her statement (no, her guarded
intimation) that the rates were arranged on high, since a mere human
being unacquainted with commerce and accustomed to think in pennies
could hardly put up such a hand as that without supernatural help.
From this stage onward--Mrs. Eddy being what she was--the rest of the
development--stages would follow naturally and inevitably.
But if she had been anybody else, there would have been a different
arrangement of them, with different results. Being the extraordinary
person she was, she realized her position and its possibilities;
realized the possibilities, and had the daring to use them for all they
were worth.
We have seen what her methods were after she passed the stage where her
divine ambassadorship was granted its executer in the hearts and minds
of her followers; we have seen how steady and fearless and calculated
and orderly was her march thenceforth from conquest to conquest; we have
seen her strike dead, without hesitancy, any hostile or questionable
force that rose in her path: first, the horde of pretenders that sprang
up and tried to take her Science and its market away from her--she
crushed them, she obliterated them; when her own National Christian
Science Association became great in numbers and influence, and loosely
and dangerously garrulous, and began to expound the doctrines according
to its own uninspired notions, she took up her sponge without a tremor
of fear and wiped that Association out; when she perceived that
the preachers in her pulpits were becoming afflicted with
doctrine-tinkering, she recognized the danger of it, and did not
hesitate nor temporize, but promptly dismissed the whole of them in a
day, and abolished their office permanently; we have seen that, as fast
as her power grew, she was competent to take the measure of it, and that
as fast as its expansion suggested to her gradually awakening native
ambition a higher step she took it; and so, by this evolutionary
process, we have seen the gross money-lust relegated to second place,
and the lust of empire and glory rise above it. A splendid dream; and by
force of the qualities born in her she is making it come true.
These qualities--and the capacities growing out of them by the nurturing
influences of training, observation, and experience seem to be clearly
indicated by the character of her career and its achievements. They seem
to be:
A clear head for business, and a phenomenally long one; Clear
understanding of business situations; Accuracy in estimating the
opportunities they offer; Intelligence in planning a business move;
Firmness in sticking to it after it has been decided upon; Extraordinary
daring; Indestructible persistency; Devouring ambition; Limitless
selfishness; A knowledge of the weaknesses and poverties and docilities
of human nature and how to turn them to account which has never been
surpassed, if ever equalled.
And--necessarily--the foundation-stone of Mrs. Eddy's character is a
never-wavering confidence in herself.
It is a granite character. And--quite naturally--a measure of the talc
of smallnesses common to human nature is mixed up in it and distributed
through it. When Mrs. Eddy is not dictating servilities from her throne
in the clouds to her official domestics in Boston or to her far-spread
subjects round about the planet, but is down on the ground, she is kin
to us and one of us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical,
incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable,
inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly
self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the
commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass
god with clay legs.