The facts and fables of Christian science

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Preface

In presenting this book to an inquiring public I do not do as some, cry aloud, "let us alone," fearing the light of criticism; but I urge and ask for the most searching criticism, that its abrasiveness may aid me in not only emphasizing the Fables, but in bringing to a keener edge whatever there is of working quality or "cash value" — as James would say — in Christian Science.

If my perspective of this subject is wrong, and I am blinded by beams in my own eyes, and see beams in Mrs. Eddy's teachings where I should not even find the mote, I believe I am sincere when I say that I will be truly grateful to the combined intelligences that will remove the beam and give to me a clear vision.

If Mrs. Eddy's Book, Science and Health, is a revelation direct from God, and is His fullest and final expression to the peoples of this earth, — as she informs us it is, and as tens of thousands of people believe today, — it is highly important that you and I become cognizant of this great, new truth. On the other hand, if, — as my perspective gives, — Mrs. Eddy got from another "mortal" a system of healing that brings physiological results, and expanded it into a religion and commercialized not only the healing system but the religion as well, — prostituting thereby the most sacred department of human experience, it is highly important we should become cognizant of

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this truth. It is of you that I ask co-operation in sifting the wheat from the chaff; separating the sheep from the mischievous goats ; the Facts from the Fables of this "religion" and "Science."

Healthy tissue wishes to be seen and struggles to get to the light. Disease germs seek dark and hidden corners, for light is inimical to them. Health Boards seek to throw the rays of light into all darkened corners, that mischief breeding germs may be eradicated. The Panama Canal is a monument to the value of physical sanitation and to the bravery of achievement.

We recognize a mental as well as a physical hygiene, and give it a place of importance side by side with the physical. Those systems of belief that teach under cover of secrecy, — and cry "let us alone" when the intelligence of the world wishes to make examination of the nature of the doctrines, — need to be put under the glass.

My confidence in Public Opinion is large, when the public has correct data to work from. Commercialism and personal ambition — in this age of individualism run riot — furnishes to the public much false data from which to form its conclusions; thus the crass superstitions of this enlightened age. I ask you to help me that we may lay before the whole public correct data upon the subject of this book. I will revise any page of it that together we determine needs it. We can't — as a race — afford to be wrong. All that is wrong with us is that we see through a glass darkly.

I believe that the most important business of

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the human race is to get its religion right. I can say with Sir Oliver Lodge: "The region of a true religion and a completer science are one." If we find that there is "cash-value," to a small or greater extent, in some ambitious person's religious philosophy, it behooves us to seek out the pragmatic fact, or secret, and make it common property.

If we find — as in Christian Science — a certain "cash-value/' a certain truth that works ; and we find it copyrighted, and branded, and sold for cash in advance, — at prices such as no monopoly of material commodities ever was guilty of, — we may be sure to find diseased tissue in the system. So great is the demand for the "cash-value" in this practical age, that the religion that gives a measure of it may befog the mind of the seeker, after he holds in his hands the "cash" paid to him. May we not call it a "tip," since it is not a Living! Seeing the "tip," he will barter away the Lord for it, and through the agency of Christian Science this is being done every day.

I do not believe that we are yet ready to construe the word Christ to mean that which any adventurer may claim a corner on, and commercialize into a monopoly. I have spoken with conviction when, in the body of this book, I have used the words descriptive of the claims of Christian Science, — "the commercialization of the Holy Ghost, the syndication of the Messiah."

I will be severely criticised by Scientists and their friends for reviewing the personality and

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characteristics of their "Revelator." I have no apology to make for having done so. I only have an explanation, which is this :

Christian Science is Mrs. Eddy. Every one of her fundamental teachings has in it her characteristics. Her doctrines are her best biographers. To understand Christian Science, one must know the characteristics of the person who made it, and who is governing it Even the time honored premise, "God is All in All," when treated by Mrs. Eddy, has degenerated into a soulless abstraction. There is no love left in it. Mrs. Eddy was herself wanting in that greatest human asset. She* did away with the memorials of Jesus. The reason for this will be found in her dominant characteristic, greed. What may at first sight appear to be monumental egotism, comes to find its true place in the word greed. Every year of her history bears out this conclusion.

Mrs. Eddy took petition out of prayer, because she was not a woman of prayer herself. She never acknowledged a fault, but always shifted it upon someone else; thus she would not leave the words of the Lord's Prayer alone which say: "forgive us our sins/' but changed them into noncommittal words. She took the Lord out of the Twenty-third Psalm and gave the romantic of her followers opportunity to see her in it. Her diatribes upon Marriage and propagation are biographies of her.

She always would rule or ruin. That is seen in her claim of Divine guidance and inspiration.

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She must be the fulfilment, must give the "absolute letter of truth/' so that all the works of men of science and philosophy, which do not bolster up her doctrines, must be wrong. She can comfortably use these words to describe her own work: "undivorced from truth, uncontaminated and unfettered by human hypotheses, and authorized by Christ'' ; and just as comfortably use these words to describe thinkers like William James and Oliver Lodge: "but evil ties its wagon-load of offal to the divine chariots, — or seeks so to do, — that its vileness may be christened purity, and its darkness get consolation from borrowed scintillations."

I have had friends admonish me with these words : "If you want to carry weight with your work, don't let any levity enter it." I have had to reply : "You can't be serious for long at a time at a vaudeville ; they won't let you. Every proposition laid down by the Leader of Christian Science, followed to its logical conclusion, leads into the ridiculous." In handling a subject like this, where you find that the author seemed never to have been honest, recourse in the humorous becomes a helpful escapement. It saves one from other sins.

There is a school of non-resistants who say, "Don't disturb it. We know that there is false - hood and fraud about it, but let it alone and it will die of its own destruction, or undergo purification because all things will become right. It is doing some good by healing people."

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Is not this a lazy way of doing the world's work? If Christian Science teachers have the gift of the laying on of hands, and if Christian Science is the Holy Ghost, why does it cost so much — one hundred dollars, — and why will they not sell it to all who ask and are even willing to pay the price ? You must be elected to that privilege, and pay for the election with much evidence of credulity and submissiveness.

The trance medium has given us a deeper insight into the constitution of the human mind and its pow r ers. Must we bow in worship before her because of this, and accept with a gulp all the theories she gushes forth? There is a nucleus of truth ; some cash-value in every system of human belief.

The function of the researchers is to do the diver's part; go below the surface and bring up to his reader the gems worth while. The diamond is found embedded deep in worthless clay. The clay must not be made into images and worshiped because it held the precious stone.

The greatest exhibitions of healing for some centuries have resulted from most faulty premises. Have we not wisdom enough among us, and faultless religion enough among us to rescue the diamonds from the clay of human experience, give the gem without price to those in need, and turn the gaze away from the clay, upward to Him who knows every human need? I believe we have.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Sketches From the Early History

of Mary Baker Eddy n

Chapter I

SKETCHES FROM THE EARLY HISTORY OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY.

That anyone should write a history of Mary Baker Eddy, or comment at length upon her life and works, is rather an adverse commentary upon the age, than a compliment to her. That she has become widely known as a leader and propagandist, with a following numbering into the tens of thousands, is due to fortuitous and accidental circumstances, and to a fault in the race, and not to any superiority of character or learning.

Some of the greatest fortunes of the day were built through the opportunities open for exploitation because of the lack of vigilance of the public, or of those whose place it was to know the conditions and to protect the people. Some of these fortunes were so ill-gotten as to have made the public cautious, even in the acceptance of the millions proffered as gifts of benefaction. These men have histories written about them, and their names are household names. Their lives are a study in moral pathology, and prove useful in forcibly calling attention to social and economic departments long neglected. Much of the progress of the human race has been bought at a great price, paid for the selfishness of opportunists.

Only here and there do we find a leader who is so unselfish as to do the good and service to the race that lies at his hand. Too often through his egotism or his greed does he leave a vast work to be undone by others before the race has become free from the virus of his selfseeking.

We recognize today a mental, or intellectual, as well as a physical, hygiene. We deplore the spread of doctrines that mean intellectual suicide to those who become inoculated. The race has suffered and toiled long and patiently to arrive at the present outlook upon its highway at which it has become freed from its low understanding and superstitions which held it in check and bondage. If, then, we meet such doctrines brought fresh to this age, and observe them take root and spread like a disease, it behooves us to take thought concerning them as we would the spread of a contagion that only affects the body.

When I say that Mrs. Eddy through her teachings, called Christian Science, has given a disease to the race, wherever the culture takes, I am speaking soberly and only after most thorough investigation and consideration. A disease seldom takes effect in a perfectly normal and healthy body. The normality of the body affords its own immunity. A mental disease seldom takes root where the mind is normal and properly supported with knowledge. When the body is racked with pain and suffering the mind is in ill shape to exercise philosophical discrimination, and the sheerest nonsense may be insinuated into it through a potion that gives relief from suffering, and healing to the body. Herein lies the keynote to the steady progress made by this cult.

Seldom does it ever occur that a person healthy in body and mind takes up the philosophy propounded in the book "Science and Health," and of his own accord acquiesces to the doctrines taught, and becomes an ardent adherent. Intellectual discrimination gives immunity against the inoculation of Mrs. Eddy's teachings. Many are caught unprepared, or at times when they are willing to sacrifice the intellect for physical relief. This w r ill be made clearer in another chapter.

The words below from John Fiske are eloquently descriptive of the intellectual influence of Christian Science:

"Indeed one of the most primitive and fundamental shapes which the relation of cause and effect takes in the savage mind is the assumed connection between disease or death and some malevolent personal agency — the minds of civilized people have become familiar with the conception of natural law, and that conception has simply stifled the old superstition as clover chokes out weeds — the disposition to believe was one of the oldest inheritances of the human mind, while the capacity for estimating evidence in cases of physical causation is one of its latest and most laborious acquisitions/'

I cannot point you to a religious leader since Mahomet whose system of philosophy demands of its followers such abject slavery of conscience, and such intellectual suicide as does the teachings of Mrs. Eddy carried to their logical conclusions. While I make these sweeping statements in this opening chapter without proofs, I promise the most conclusive proofs of every position I take in succeeding chapters.

Since, or before, the founders of Mormonism, no religious leader has taken such liberty to shape the Bible to serve his ends for ecclesiastical power and commercial gain, and trailed divine inspiration in the mire of personal ambition and profit, as has the leader of Christian Science.

A friend said to me, referring to my writings on this subject, "I see you are raising the devil. " "No," I replied, "Mrs. Eddy has resurrected him out of the dark ages of her untutored mind; and I am trying to destroy him through facts and logic."

She is fond of referring to herself as the greatest discoverer of this or any other age since the advent and mission of Christ. Touch her works at any point and you are never allowed to escape the flaunting sign-boards of this announcement. It, no doubt, will sound hazardous and presumptious when I say that I will prove that the only thing she discovered is the Christian Science devil, and that he is the most contradictory and misshapen creature of that family that can be found outside the thickest jungles of Africa. Furthermore, I shall show who her devil is, and unless you hasten to get inside her city of refuge, the identity may become uncomfortable.

Goethe said: "Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it." For boldness and audacity I can point you to no like figure in history that will compare with this discoverer. It is no mean undertaking to tinker the Trinity to meet one's own ends. When I discovered that she had appropriated the fourth wall of the New Jerusalem, my astonishment was expressed by puzzled and mingled feelings; but on shortly finding that she had absorbed the whole Celestial City I discovered that I must needs protect myself against surprises too great to survive. This I did by acknowledging that she was welcome to the whole universe, and it was well I did, for I found that when she was done with her merger that there was slim picking left for any other ambitious mortal.

The Holy Ghost did not escape her grasp, but she penned it up within the covers of her book "Science and Health," and walled it about with a succession of copyrights, and it is now dispensed at three dollars per volume. The book is the only divinely ordained pastor on this planet, and outside of this book and her other writings all is unstable and self -destructive error — the work of the devil.

When she had finished illuminating the Book of Revelation, all prophecies had been fulfilled for this planet, and she was the favored one to complete God's work for this globe. The Messiah has come again through her, so that you may now have that off your mind. During her life she made Him work overtime filling her coffers with gold. Since her decease a self -perpetuating board of five directors are conducting the monopoly, and unlike the scene at the foot of the cross where the soldiers cast lots for Christ's raiment, at present there are suits in the courts of the land to determine who shall own Him.

Since she has trafficked in the tenderest sentiments and most sacred institutions of the Christian world, and turned them into millions of dollars, benighting the minds of a multitude of people, it behooves us to look into the history and cause of so audacious and powerful a movement. Her principal writing is the book "Science and Health," of which she said : "No human tongue or pen taught me the science contained in this book, Science and Health, and neither tongue or pen can overthrow it." In the words of St. John: "He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever. This Comforter I understand to be Divine Science."

"Our Master healed the sick, practiced Christian Science healing, and taught the generalities of its divine Principle to his students ; but He left no definite rule for demonstrating His Principle of healing or preventing disease. This remained to be discovered through Christian Science. A pure affection takes form in goodness, but Science alone reveals its Principle and demonstrates its rules."'

"Even the Scripture gave no direct interpretation of the Scientific basis for demonstrating the spiritual Principle of healing, until our Heavenly Father saw fit, through the Key to the Scriptures, in Science and Health, to unlock this mystery of Godliness."

"The second appearing of Jesus is unquestionably the spiritual advent of the advancing idea of God as in Christian Science."

"The opinions of men cannot be substituted for God's revelation."

"Outside of this Science all is unstable error."

"Deific power cannot be apprehended until Divine Science becomes the interpreter."

Since the only source from which to receive the above blessings and salvation, is the book and teachings of "Science and Health," we will not begrudge the hour's study in following the history of its advent.

"Christian Science as it stands today, is a kind of autobiography in cryptogram; its form was determined by a temperament, and it retains all the convolutions of the curiously duplex personality about which it grew." 1

As this statement is essentially true, the religion now in vogue shaping the lives of so many of Mrs. Eddy's followers cannot be understood in its true light without a knowledge of the

i Georgine Milmine. McClure 's History of Mary Baker Eddy.

leader who inspired it and whose personality wields such a mystical influence over the more romantic of her cult, even after her decease. That many worship her as Christ is worshiped is not to be wondered at, since it was the studied effort of her last decades to secure this exaltation.

"Science and Health is built upon the sand of metaphysics, and on nothing else. It is the most successful effort which the modern world has seen to make popular a philosophical abstraction. It is, to be sure, biography, but the biography of a single soul, and that a soul which has not entered deeply into life. If the author of Science and Health has ever yielded herself in a self -forgetful outpour of affection to any human soul, there is no trace of any such experience in her book. Once at least she has reproved a follower for expecting to receive from her a love individualized. The love she has for man she gives to man as an abstract composite. No one would think of calling her what Henry Drummond once called D wight L. Moody, a 'big-human.' There are no heart-throbs in her book. There is nothing human in it." 1

From the above estimate of the book one would hardly select its author as a Christian leader to build upon and add to the works of Jesus, which are pulsating with love and compassion. In the very opening of her book she gives without comment the quotation:

i Lyman P. Powells Christian Science, p. 25.

"I, I, I, I, itself I,

The inside and outside, the what and the why, The when and the where, the low and the high, All I, I, I, I, itself I."

When you have taken the I, and her devil — mortal mind— out of her book you have not much left, for the god she postulates is a selfish being interested only in himself. This will be made clear when we come to deal with her theology.

She was one of the few mothers who cared little for her own child. Her relatives and neighbors reared her son, George W. Glover. Her own father said of her: "Mary acts just like an old ewe sheep that won't own its lamb. She won't have it near her." Her first husband had died in the south and she being left penniless was assisted to her parents' home in New Hampshire — the money being furnished by the Masons. There her son and only child was born.

The young widow had no means of support and lived for some years under the parental roof, and with her sister, Mrs. Tilton. Few acts of her life show the real character more than her attitude toward her own child. Mrs. Eddy's accounts about herself never coincide with the facts in the case. It will require some exposition of her history to make this fully apparent to all readers. There are two Mrs. Eddy's to be accounted for. The real Mrs. Eddy must be found in the facts of her life; the ideal Mrs. Eddy is an artificiality created by her own misrepresentations with the aid of paid artists and critics.

The following paragraph is from Georgine Milmine's "Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy." This history I wish to recommend to all readers. It was first published in McClure's Magazine in 1 907- 1 908. It is now published in book form by Doubleday, Page & Co. :

"On the whole, it is no wonder that Mrs. Glover was not taken seriously in her own town. Artificiality spread over all her acts, and in no relation in life did she impress even her nearest friends or her own family with genuine feeling or sincerity. Indeed, she was bitterly censured in those years for the more active faults of selfish and unfilial conduct and a strange lack of the sense of maternal duty. In 185 1 Mrs. Glover had given her son, George, to Mahala Sanborn. The boy having reached the age of seven, was growing too large to be sent around from one house to another to be looker after. Mrs. Glover's mother had died of typhoid fever in November, 1849, an d Mrs. Tilton was growing each year more impatient and weary of Mrs. Glover's conduct. So when Mahala Sanborn married Russel Cheney and was preparing to move away from Tilton, Mrs. Glover begged her to take George to live with her permanently. Mrs. Cheney, who was attached to the boy, at last consented to do so, and George accompanied her and her husband to their new home in North Groton, and was called by their name."

This is the history of the son as the facts show. Mrs. Eddy's history as given by Georgine Milmine was collected with painstaking and at great expense. The editorial announcement in Mc- Clure's Magazine speaks as follows concerning the difficulties of investigation:

"Certain difficulties face all investigators who seek the truth concerning Christian Science. Practically no assistance can be obtained from Christian Scientists themselves. Official documents on this subject are frequently incorrect. Mrs. Eddy herself has published an autobiography which, in many points, does not agree with the statements of unprejudiced outsiders. She refuses to be consulted personally on the main facts of her own life. The Christian Science mind is unfriendly to independent investigation. It presupposes that anything even slightly unfavorable to Mrs. Eddy or to Christian Science is deliberate falsehood. The Church organization has also branded as 'forgeries' and 'counterfeits' documents which it has not seen. This mental attitude results from the Christian Science philosophy. It assumes that it has the truth — the mental illumination that sees things as they are; and that the rest of the world lives in error. Fundamentally it denies the evidence of the senses. It believes that such evidence is illusion ; and never to be accepted as truthworthy testimony against Mrs. Eddy or the Christian Science Church: Mrs. Eddy herself is the source of truth ; and her word, in the minds of the faithful, counts against that of all others."

"Suppose Mrs. Eddy should commit a crime — rob a bank, for example" — the present writer asked a Christian Scientist closely in touch with his leader. "Suppose certain reputable persons — for example, the Mayor of Concord, the Governor of New Hampshire, President Roosevelt, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Pope of Rome — saw her rob the bank. Suppose they all went upon the witness stand and swore that they saw her do this — would you believe their testimony?" "No," came the prompt response. "Why not?" The Christian Scientist murmured the word "hypnotism." That is, the forces of evil, working through hypnotism, might easily lead astray the senses of all these high-minded witnesses and force them to bear false testimony. "I should believe Mrs. Eddy against the statements of all the world," Christian Scientists frequently declare. "But if Mrs. Eddy herself told you that she committed this crime, would you then believe it?" "No." Indeed, Mrs. Eddy has explained away certain letters written by herself which tend to disprove her claim to the discovery of Christian Science, by saying that she wrote them while in a mesmeric state.

"Necessarily, McClure's Magazine does not accept these rules of evidence. It brings to bear upon the facts merely "mortal mind." It has the utmost confidence in the evidence of the senses. It will use these senses and not a certain esoteric philosophy, in determining the value of certain facts. It holds no argument for or against Christian Science; and will simply tell the truth, as that truth is ascertained by the use of ordinary human faculties."

From Mrs. Eddy's autobiography, "Retrospection and Introspection,'' page 21, I wish to quote her own account of her motherhood. Her writings can best be understood viewed in the light of her true character. I regret to say, that I fail to find her modest and sincere. I am forced to the conclusion that she never told the truth if the false would serve her ends better. She says:

"After returning to the paternal roof, I lost all my husband's property, except what money I had brought with me ; and remained with my parents until after my mother's decease.

"A few months before my father's second marriage to Mrs. Elizabeth Patterson Duncan — sister of Lieutenant-Governor George W. Patterson, of New York — my little son, about four years of age, was sent away from me, and put under the care of our family nurse, who had married, and resided in the northern part of New Hampshire. I had no training for self-support, and my home I regarded as very precious. The night before my child was taken from me, I knelt by his side throughout the dark hours, hoping for a vision of relief from this trial. The following lines were taken from my poem, 'Mother's Darling/ written after this separation:

Thy smile through tears, as sunshine o'er the sea, Awoke new beauty in the surge's roll,

Oh, life is dead, bereft of all, with thee, Star of my earthly hope, babe of my soul/

"My dominant thought in marrying again was to get back my child, but after our marriage his stepfather was not willing that he should have a home with me. A plot was consummated to keep us apart. The family to whose care he was committed very soon removed to what was then regarded as the far West.

"After his removal a letter /was read to my little son informing him that his mother was dead and buried. Without my knowledge he was appointed a guardian, and I was then informed that my son was lost. Every means within my power was employed to find him, but without success. We never met again until he had reached the age of thirty-four, had a wife and two children, and by a strange providence learned that his mother still lived, and came to see me in Massachusetts."

The marriage referred to in the above quotation was her marriage to her second husband, Dr. Patterson. He, like all her early associations, had to come in for his share of misrepresentation when the artificial Mrs. Glover-Patterson-Eddy was being created for the public view.

Mrs. Eddy — then Mrs. Patterson — moved to North Groton, where the Cheneys and her son, George Glover, lived. Though living in the same small place she saw little of her son, not because she could not, but because she did not wish to. In 1857 the Cheneys moved to Enterprise, Minn., taking George Glover with them. The Cheneys wrote frequently to friends and relatives in North Groton and Tilton giving details of George's progress. Mrs. Patterson-Eddy knew all about him; knew when he joined the army in 1 86 1 ; and wrote a letter to P. P. Quimby in 1865 f elling of George's illness in Enterprise, Minn., w r here he had returned after the war. Mrs. Eddy's own accounts are her severest accusers and indictments. Mrs. Eddy never in her whole long life arose superior to the dominant and unfortunate characteristics of her girlhood and early married life. These characteristics are to be found in their extremest expression in her writings, her method of organization, and her executive sway. Our study of her works would not be complete without this background of early history. We will let the "McClure's History" give us a glimpse of her early life.