Christian science and the ordinary man

Foreword

To those good people who are so constituted that they can see nothing in aught save '* facts/' by which I assume that they mean that which can be verified by sight, hearing, smell, touch, or taste, my advice is frankly, that they lay this book down without attempting to read it, for to those so constituted, it will be sure to prove only a source of irritation. If, on the other hand, you are ready to admit with me that the world has only progressed through the exercise of faith in the direction of the things it has hoped for; if you can see that the great inventions and great discoveries of the world have always, prior to their existence ''objectively'' in consciousness, existed in the minds of men as things, which they inferred as possible because of pushing known facts to the limit of reason, and then exercising beyond the limiits of reason a faculty which, for want of a better term, I have called in this book the ''Faith which is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen''; if you are willing in your turn to exercise your reason to its limits, and then speculate from known facts to unknown, using Faith, the Bible, and Demonstration as your iv Foreword

guides; then I have hope that you will gain from this little volume, if not a conviction of its truth and an agreement with its views, at least something which will help you onward in the pathway toward truth which we all are traveling.

Many things written herein are acknowledged to be speculations and inferences from the known to the unknown. They are things which seem sufficiently probable to form a basis for the exercise of faith. None of us can see the whole of the pathway, but by comparing our views of that which we do see, and by relying on divine guidance, we shall some day come where we can see ''face to face, '' and not as now '' through a glass darkly. ''

Lest I be forced to do it many times, I wish to explain, once for all, what may appear to many to be a needless repetition of the same idea or ideas in the chapters to follow. This repetition is intentional and therefore I do not apologize, but explain that as in the vicinity of a large city all roads eventually lead to the same place, so the roads near the City which is called Beautiful all lead to God. I have but traveled the roads as I found them. Sometimes my footsteps may have strayed from the pathway, but always the roads themselves have led me to a central idea. One must look at a beautiful building from different angles to appreciate the plan of the architect, but from whatever angle he looks, it is the building he sees, and of it he must speak as best he may, even though he uses the same words many times.

Foreword v

And besides, this book is intended to be and is only a series of random thoughts spoken from one friend to another.

I should add to this foreword the statement that while this book has in its title the words ''Christian Science/' the author is one who believes that all mankind are on the way to final and conscious unity with God. Many theories of truth held by men have elements of real truth in them, which elements of real truth, as the ''leaven which leavens the whole lump,'' will, the author believes, eventually lead their followers through experience out of those portions of their behef which are untrue and into the one way of truth which is that trod by Christ Jesus. This book, in addition to being a discussion of Christian Science, is in part an attempt to set forth the essential true elements existing in some other beliefs, to the end that a starting point may be found for greater brotherhood among all churches and beliefs, a basis in Christ for the Brotherhood of Man.

Grateful acknowledgment is hereby made for the courteous permission to include in the present volume citations from works copyrighted and controlled by the following individuals and firms: — Houghton, Mifflin Co. and Henry Holt, for permission to make citations from Cosmic Relations; D. Appleton & Co., for permission to make quotation of certain paragraphs derived from Essays on Controverted Questions by Thomas H. Huxley; the vi Foreword

International News Service for their authorization

to reprint an article entitled Hatred Allowed to

Grow, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which appeared in

the Minneapolis Tribune; the Minneapolis J ournidy

for permission to reprint a portion of an editorial

from the columns of that paper, and to Dr. William

Osier, for permission to reprint a portion of an article

from his pen which appeared in the Ladies Home

Journal in 191 5.

W, S. H.

Minneapolis, Minn.

June 10, 1916.

Contents

PAGE

Foreword iii

CHAPTER

Chapter I. A Few Preliminary Thoughts

Ideas bom of long rambles in the pines come to me seeking the clothing of written word that they may present themselves with decency to friend and antagonist alike; but I fear they find in me a sorry tailor. That which in the mossgrown silences was alive with the vital spark of truth; that which in the camp-fire glow waked a sympathetic response and sprang swiftly into word so soon as born in the mind, shrinks sensitively from the test of limited and unsympathetic ink and paper. The experience is not new. Ideas are more real than words can make them. They spring forth in the mind with such swiftness and power of conviction that they write for themselves a volume in an hour, yet when for the love of giving a message to the joy of others, one would fain clothe them in the feeble alphabet, it seems that anchoring tornadoes with a cotton string would be as easy. The most one can hope to do when separated from the play of personality in the spoken word is to here and there strike a tone of truth that it may, like the tuning fork, evoke an answering harmony in the sensitive mind strings of the friends who read intuitively that which it is in the heart to write.

Yesterday, I built in mental sentences a dignified structure called *' Preface" in which ''I'' became ''the writer," and all the binding conventions of literary style were strictly remembered; but the temple of yesterday becomes the ruin of to-day when I recall the camp-fire circle and remember that we were there quite ready to use all the ^Ts" in the type case if only we could send a Uving message from heart to heart and through hearts sympathy to mind. Conventions and literary styles have their good places and uses, yet as between friends who wish to speak intimately of subjects mutually interesting, they seem an added barrier for the thoughts to cross and a fortress wall warring against closer acquaintance.

''Personal Acquaintance" one often hears is the key to the minds of many men, and those who have communed with others in the still of moonlit evenings around the fire with nothing humanly visible between them and the stars know that there that key can easily be found. It is the key I would most gladly use with all who here read the record of some thoughts (both of mine and of others)

which, bom in the camp-fire light, have drawn at least one and it is hoped other men a little nearer the source of all good. While we cannot all sit around the same fire, we can at least, in imagination and sympathetic thought, even through the poor medium of the written word draw closer in that personal acquaintance which goes far to smooth the way for sympathetic converse and understanding. That is why this chapter might have been headed, ' ' By way of getting acquainted. "

As you may have truly surmised from the foregoing, I love the out-of-doors. I have in that far-distant locality, which to my family is known vaguely as ''the woods," two log cabins, both of which would rattle if shaken in the room in which I am now writing. They are magnificently equipped with everything which ought to make me long for home. These are my occasional winter residences, and I do not hesitate to visit them even though the snow be piled high before the door. In summer, I have a consumptive gasoline launch which coughs, sputters, and dies but can always be resurrected by minute attention to details. In this, with tents and much impedimenta too varied for description, I voyage unknown waters, stopping for the night wherever the sun decrees.

Sometime, I am going to take you with me on one of these joumeyings, but my mission now is a message and not a story, and I mention the story part only to give you a thought of how the message came and why I hope it may please and interest you.

I used to think of ''the woods'' as a place where I went to run away from the turmoil of external things which overpressed me — a place where God's air was fresher than at home, where there was a subtle mystery of different sunshine, an ill-understood, invisible medicinal something to send me back strong, to meet again the same pressure of externals. On growth of thought, however, that theory failed to meet the facts for plainly the sunshine at home was just as beautiful, the air at home just the same air, and strange to relate (as I then thought) the turmoil was there and here alike.

So I have had to revise my thoughts, as thanks be we often are forced to do, and now I think of going to ''the woods" as a process of changing thoughts, and stilling that turmoil which I now know to be but a part of myself, by fixing those thoughts on that which comes nearer the realization of God's idea for man than the things I once thought of as resistlessly pressing upon me from without in the busy city. Some day, I hope that I can sit here in my study and realize in mind, though far distant, the quieting influence of the pines, but God leads us gently and when we cannot of ourselves realize all of Him we ought, He supplies the pines and his wild creatures to help us. Now that I have written this last paragraph, I cannot 3ay clearly why it seems to fit my message unless it be because of the hope that it will help you to see the surroundings in which that message had its start, and further help you to know the men who were instruments in starting it.

Probably they are the last persons in the world whom you would look to either as source or as contributing influences to the thoughts I wish to talk with you. As I have said above, the only reason I mention either them or the woods is to bring to you closely the surroundings in which the thoughts had birth, and to impress an idea upon you which has grown upon me: the idea that of all the subjects discussed around the camp fire, in the street, the office, or the home, there is none in which men are so truly interested and about which they are more ready and anxious to talk than that new type of thought about God, which brings Him nearer to the daily life of every man, and makes Him a more vital factor in that life.

I must dwell a little on this thought. Perhaps it will be a revelation to you as it was to me — • or perhaps you will have discovered it for yourself and this part of my story will be an old one to you. Nevertheless, I must tell of it. I had thought in former days that a monopoly existed among "educated" folk both as to philosophical thought and as to its understanding. First oflf , it seemed to me that the Presbyterians had the sum of the truth rolled up in a package and specially delivered to them. A little later in life, I extended the limits to Presbyterians and college men who agreed with Presbyterians in spirit though not in word. Then I discovered that sometimes a business man evinced an unexpected and dehghtful intelligence and interest in philosophy and in religion, and of late I have with a large degree of success ventured to mention the subjects to, and found receptive intelligence coming from, the man who chops trees, the man who cooks, and even from Old George who lives in a tar-paper shack because the demon rum chased him there.

The proposition that matter does not exist is one that, unless you have had just the experience I have had, you would probably expect George and the man who chops to vehemently deny, and it was one that I did not venture to mention until I found that somewhere and by some mysterious means they had already heard of it. Now, while I cannot make it plain, either to my own material senses or to those of another, that matter does not exist, I can give reasons which are satisfactory to me, at least, for thinking it is by no means as certain as we have been accustomed to believe, that it does. And I can give very excellent reasons, again satisfactory to me, why it would be a very great blessing to mankind if it did not.

When asked to do so, I did explain to George and to others like George in some respects, and I was surprised to find that what I had to say was received with the greatest of interest, and with apparent acceptance of its possibility. This experience is one I have had everywhere I have gone in the last two years, and I have come to wonder whether, after all, there may not be, as Mrs. Eddy of Christian Science fame says there is, an unspoiled man underneath or rather behind the appearance we see, who apprehends instinctively, — understands and assimilates a statement made to him which seems to lead toward or approximate truth. It is difficult to account for the ready apprehension of these things by the so-called uneducated, on any other basis. I have also wondered whether the possession of that which we call education, if it happens to have directed one's mind in certain fixed channels, does not positively hinder understanding of spiritual truth. ''A little child shall lead them."

I think it was vastly more difficult for me to grasp things not apprehensible by my senses than it was for George, in spite of his unfortunate history, and inasmuch as I have found all over the country those in widely differing walks of life who have listened to what was in my heart to say with interest and sympathy, it has seemed that the experience of one who has come to his present viewpoint by rather a difficult pathway might be helpful to others who perchance are starting, ending, or midway through the same journey.

So I come to you with my story. It is not, probably, a new one, but it may be the first time it has been told in this way, and it may be new to you. I do not pretend that this I have to say is the sum of wisdom. Something may come to me to-morrow which will lead me to change the view I now have, and I reserve the right to do so, as should you. I do not ask you to agree with me, but my hope is that as one goes to pick raspberries in a field, you will not reject the berries and turn back without crossing the fence because you see some weeds. I am reminded that when I first read Science and Health, there were many things on every page I could not agree with — there are still many — but on every page I found also much that helped me to help others, and myself. If this book can in anjrwise help another, its purpose is accompHshed.

I am a Presbyterian, perhaps not a very consistent one, but at least I am not nor have I ever been a member of any Christian Science organization. I make this explanation because there are many good people to whom the name of Christian Science acts very much as a red rag does when shaken at a bull. Mr. Darwin tells us that we are descended from the animals and it has been my pleasure often to imagine that some of us may be descended from other animals than the monkey. So, I have no doubt that there are people both of the bovine and the bull variety. I surmise that if you should ask Mr. Bull why he always runs violently in the direction of a red rag, he, if endowed with speech, would find great difficulty in explaining — it just makes him feel that way anyhow — the blame thing is no good anyway, and Grandfather Bull always said ''down with if — so he sticks his tail up in the air, bellows madly, and rams away — and if the rag happens to be moved, he rams the nearest thing handy.

So it is with Christian Science — substitute those words for the rag, any allied doctrine for the nearest thing handy; Smith, Jones, or Brown for the bull, and your parallel is exact. All of which is said with the utmost good nature, and no malice whatever. Many of these good people are my very good friends and I only reserve the right to poke a little good natured fun at them just as they doubtless will find many occasions, if they read this book through, for poking fun at me.

Huxley says in one of his books that he is an agnostic, and then proceeds to define that term as signifying a person who, if you asserted the proposition that two and two make five, would lend an attentive ear to your arguments, and agree with you, if you could show him a satisfying reason for so holding. While I might differ with this definition, I can with all sincerity say that if that be the true attitude of an agnostic, it is to my mind far preferable to the attitude of that man who adopts a constitution and by-laws for himself (or perchance adopts one made to order for him by another) and then, having himself named it the sum of all truth, refuses to consider opposing thoughts which may be presented to him. I have always, from the earUest days of independent thought, felt instinctively that to get into the attitude of an attorney or advocate, either for or against any belief or statement of belief, is a misfortune for any man. If you have any legal attitude which you feel must be adopted, let it be that of the judge who, listening to both sides of the argument, makes up his mind on the basis of the best evidence presented, and is always ready to change his opinion if other and more convincing evidence be offered and whenever it is offered. The truth is always the same, and always has been. But man's knowledge of and opinions concerning that truth change. The sum total of unknown truth is surely great enough, if one may judge from the discoveries concerning it in the last hundred years, to constitute a mental warning to any man not to shut his ears and his heart arbitrarily to any who wishes sincerely to present that which appears to be a new truth, or rather I should say a new statement of the truth. Listening does not mean accepting. The Master has equipped every man with the capacity to test that which he hears, and has given satisfactory instructions from time to time as to how to go about it. *'By their fruits ye shall know them,'' and ''Knock and it shall be opened unto you, " *'Seek and ye shall find" — seem to me to indicate pretty clearly the way in which each man of you can for himself reach a conviction of the truth of any belief presented to him for consideration — but one is not ''seeking" who shuts

A Few Preliminary Thoughts ii

the door to the statement of truth just because it seems to destroy former beHefs, and a great deal of the knocking done nowadays is of the destructive variety and can only be efficiently done with a hammer.

All of which is merely by way of saying that in reading this book, I plead for the open mind from all of my readers. All of which seems also to have slid off my pen in consequence of the remark that I am not a Christian Scientist.

In naming this book, I hesitated to bring into its title the name of Christian Science for many reasons, one of which — the antipathy of many good persons to that doctrine — I have already mentioned. Then, too, I have not consulted with any Christian Scientist concerning either its writing or publication, and as I have in reading Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, reserved at all times my liberty to disagree with such of its conclusions as I could not either understand or demonstrate, I cannot, with any assurance, say that I represent the Christian Science point of view — all I can claim to do is to truthfully set forth my own. But in spite of these very good reasons for not using the term Christian Science in connection with my book, I find that much of that which I have in my heart to write is so far in agreement with the views of the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, that I would fail in my obligation of acknowledgment were I to speak of the views herein to be set forth as my own, and I have therefore entitled the book Christian Science and the Ordinary Man. It has seemed to me that the story of the process by which one common ordinary man has come to the views here to be expressed, and some of his speculations regarding things which cannot be apprehended by finger, ear, or eye, might be of interest and value to some other common ordinary man, not because of the fact that the views are new, but because of the fact that God in wonderful ways leads those who sincerely wish the truth, to convictions which become too real to the individual to be harnessed in words; and possibly the story of mental processes in one case may help others who are on the same pathway, to reach the same inner conviction and peace. For be it known at the outset that I am not a college professor, but just an ordinary business man.

I do not pretend to an excess of knowledge, and the road along which I have come is simply that to be trodden, I beUeve, by any man who starts sincerely in the direction of finding the truth for himself, and pursues the way with zeal and interest. I say interest, advisedly, for as I have elsewhere said, it seems to me that of all the interesting subjects now discussed by men, there is none so interesting and none in which more men are interested than in what I may call the true relation of man to God, and in what that relation may mean to man in his common daily life.

My first acquaintance with the type of thought which I have, in the title of this work, named Christian Science for want of a better term to comprise it, came about, as is very often the case, because of ill health — not of the so-called organic variety — merely a nervous condition induced, — no, not by overwork, — but by overworry. Doubtless many have experienced the same sort of thing — sleepless nights, and just as tired when sleep came as when it did not, pins and needles, aches and pains like hatpins all over, every time the baby speaks above a whisper, which is always, one jumps far enough to land a distance record, thoughts skipping from Hudson Bay to Patagonia and back again, without resting on one spot more than a second, etc., — the etc. containing more than the specifications. I went to all the doctors there were and was dissatisfied with each new opinion received therefrom, there being an opinion for each doctor and one over, because one doctor had two opinions. No offense to the doctors. One always respects sincere effort. Some of my old doctors are among the most self-sacrificing of men, and if you leave out the *'self " you can cover most of the rest.

Seriously, I have many good friends among the doctors for whom I feel the truest respect. I have no doubt they have produced and will produce much of good, though possibly, as I will have occasion to say later, not just in the way that has been supposed by them and others.

Be that as it may, one of my good friends — though not a Christian Scientist — desired me to try Christian Science — it being, as was said, **good for a man who really has nothing the matter with him — and as it could not do any harm anjrway, we might as well try it, and if it has no serious effects, perhaps we can use it to make the baby go to sleep/' So protesting my own wisdom, and the foolishness of others, I went to a Christian Science practitioner; for what could he do for me where my eminent friends of long and erudite study had failed ? This said practitioner is a large and benevolent gentleman who to-day is my very good friend, and after a few well chosen words by me in my own behalf (for who will take the trouble to explain to others that you are noty in spite of appearances, if you neglect doing it yourself?) he closed his eyes and went to sleep, right in the middle of an argument of mine, to the effect that there was nothing to it. There being nothing further to say, or at least no one to whom that which needed to be said could be spoken, silence reigned, and after it had reigned sufficiently, it abdicated and some more silence climbed up in the throne. Now, I am trying to tell this to you just as it seemed to me at the time, and if you will try to project yourself into my mind then and now, you will see that I mean no disrespect. I am simply trying to tell you how you will feel if you try it — later I will have more to say. The only sensation I was conscious of was like that which happened once when I was a little boy and a mouse crawled up the minister's sleeve while he was saying a prayer. Try it and see — a sort of ''I just won't explode feeling,'' you know, and I am ashamed to confess that the thought came to me, **How do you suppose he would explain it if he has bad sleeping habits, and forgot himself?"

But you recall that once Diogenes had it demonstrated to his own satisfaction by another wise man, that he just could not get up and walk around his tub — and refuted the argument by getting up and walking around it. So, in a very few days, I began to feel better, and in a few days more, at the invitation of my large gentleman friend, I ventured to call him up at two o'clock in the morning when I could not sleep, and I went to sleep immediately thereafter.

Now, I am well aware that there are running through your mind, thoughts something like the following : nervous imagination, auto-suggestion, confidence induced by mental reliance on another, precipitation of gastric juices through serene mental atmosphere, subjective mind regaining control over objective mind by suggestion, etc., for I am familiar with all of these, and I believe that there is scarcely a book on the subject I have not read — but Hsten — I remember that in our philosophy class we had a favorite illustration to the effect that if you were throwing dice with a man and he got double sixes twice in succession, you thought he was lucky, but if he got them twenty times in succession, you pulled a gun on him on the theory that the dice were loaded — you didn't actually know it till you cut open the dice — he might have hypnotized them — but you had a pretty safe chance of vindication if you used the gun. And anyway even if it be auto-suggestion that helped me, it got the results. Like the blind man whom Jesus cured and who said, ''This one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see,'' to me the method is of interest only, that I may try to understand and apply it again.

So, the baby, one afternoon, had a vomiting spell, with fever and other distressing signals. I called up the practitioner — the fever and vomiting promptly left. I had a cold so that my vocal apparatus was converted into a furnace which customarily would have been like the heathen in the Messiah. I visited the little office downtown, and came away from there in half an hour with no vestige of trouble, and no return. There is no need of multiplying instances — they were sufficient for me to see in them a V'stop, look, and listen" signal, and while I am not going to be drawn into any argument — having previously seen the disaster thereof — I will venture the prediction that if any sincere person will do the same thing I did with the desire to find out, and not with the thought of disproving something in which he, a priori, does not believe, that same sincere person will, as I did, get enough conviction to start him in the direction of studying the subject seriously. It is a curious fact that we get out of life very much that which we put into it, and if one puts in skepticism and disbelief, instead of a desire to learn, it is not impossible that conviction of the truth will not become clear to that individual. To any one, the process is slow — one cannot expect to jump from inherited belief to that which at first sight seemiS to controvert in essentials all which one used to hold. But of that, more hereafter.