Chapter XI: Minor Cults: the Meaning of the Cults for the Church 326 (4)

Practically faith and mental healing had depended, till Quimby took it up, upon persons or objects. The saint or the healer worked through personal contact; the shrine must be visited, the relic be touched. Such a system was naturally dependent upon accidents of person or place; it would not be widely extended nor continued nor made the basis of self-treatment. But if what lay behind the whole complex group of phenomena could be systematized and given real power of popular appeal through its association with religion it would possess a kind of continuing independence, conditioned only by the willingness of people to be persuaded of the truth of its philosophy or to answer to its religious appeal. It would then become a mental and spiritual discipline to be written into books and taught by the initiated. As far as it could be associated with religion it would become the basis of a cult and it would have an immense field.

All difficult or chronic or obscure illnesses would offer an opportunity to its propagandists, and the necessary obscurities and irrationalities of such a system would simply be, for the minds to which it would naturally appeal, added elements of power. Any system which has sickness for its field and credulity for its reinforcement and a specious show of half truth for its philosophic form and religion to give its sanction and authority is assured, to begin with, of a really great following. Its very weaknesses will be its strength. It will work best as it is neither clear nor simple--though it must make a show of being both. And if, in addition, there is somewhere at the heart of it force and truth enough to produce a certain number of cures it will go on. What it fails to do will be forgotten or ignored in the face of what it really does do.

Now Quimby, through his own native force and such a combination of circumstances as occurs only once in long periods of time, stood upon the threshold of just such a revolution in the history of faith and mental healing as this. He anticipated the method and supplied the material, but he either did not or could not popularize it. He was not selfish enough to monopolize it, not shrewd enough to commercialize it, and, maybe, not fanatic enough to make it a cult. He was more interested in his own speculations than in making converts and without one of those accidents which become turning points in a movement nothing would have probably come of his work save its somewhat vague and loose continuance in the thought and teaching of a small group. (It is doubtful if New Thought, which as we shall see grew out of his work through his association with the Dressers, would have come to much without the stimulus of Christian Science against which it reacted.) Some one was needed to give the whole nebulous system organization and driving force and above all to make a cult of it.

_Outstanding Events of Her Life: Her Early Girlhood_

Mary Baker Eddy did just this and Christian Science is the result. It is idle to calculate the vanished alternatives of life but in all probability she never would have done it without Quimby. She and her followers would do far better to honestly recognize this indebtedness. It would now make little difference with either the position of their leader or the force of their system but it would take a pretty keen weapon out of the hands of their critics and give them the added strength which thoroughgoing honesty always gives to any cause. There is, on the other hand, little likelihood that Quimby's persuasions would ever have carried beyond the man himself if he had not found in Mrs. Eddy so creative a disciple.

The outstanding facts of Mary Baker Eddy's life are too well known to need much retelling here. The story of her life and the history of Christian Science as told by Georgine Milmine in _McClure's Magazine_ during the years of 1907-8 is final. It is based upon thorough investigation, original documents and an exhaustive analysis of facts. The facts brought out in the various litigations in which Mrs. Eddy and the church have been involved confirm both the statements and conclusions of this really distinctive work. The official life by Sibyl Wilbur (whose real name seems to be O'Brien) is so coloured as to be substantially undependable. It touches lightly or omits altogether those passages in Mrs. Eddy's life which do not fit in with the picture which Mrs. Eddy herself and the church desire to be perpetuated.

Mrs. Eddy was descended from a shrewd, industrious and strongly characterized New England stock. Her father was strongly set in his ways, narrow and intense in his religious faith. Mary Baker was a nervous, high-strung girl, unusually attractive in personal appearance, proud, precocious, self-conscious, masterful. She was subject to hysterical attacks which issued in states of almost suspended animation. Her family feared these attacks and to prevent them humoured her in every way. In due time she joined the Tilton Congregational Church. She says herself that she was twelve years old at the time, but the records of the church make her seventeen. The range of her education is debated. Mrs. Eddy herself claims a rather ambitious curriculum. "My father," she says, "was taught to believe that my brain was too large for my body and so kept me out of school, but I gained book knowledge with far less labour than is usually requisite. At ten years of age I was familiar with Lindley Murray's Grammar, as with the Westminster Catechism and the latter I had to repeat every Sunday. My favourite studies were Natural Philosophy, logic and moral science. From my brother Albert I received lessons in the ancient tongues, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. After my discovery of Christian Science most of the knowledge I gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined that grammar was eclipsed. Etymology was divine history, voicing the idea of God in man's origin and signification. Syntax was spiritual order and unity. Prosody the song of angels and no earthly or inglorious theme."[26]

[Footnote 26: "Retrospection and Introspection," 1909.]

_Her Education: Shaping Influences_

It is not fair to apply critical methods to one who confesses that most of the knowledge she had gleaned from school books vanished like a dream, but there is much in Mrs. Eddy's writing to bear out her statement. Those who knew her as a girl report her as irregular in attendance upon school, inattentive during its sessions and far from knowing either Greek or Latin or Hebrew. "According to these schoolmates Mary Baker completed her education when she had finished Smith's Grammar and reached Long Division in Arithmetic." The official biography makes much of an intellectual friendship between the Rev. Enoch Corser, then pastor of the Tilton Congregational Church, and Mary Baker. "They discussed subjects too deep to be attractive to other members of the family. Walking up and down in the garden, this fine old-school clergyman and the young poetess as she was coming to be called, threshed out the old philosophic speculations without rancour or irritation."[27]

[Footnote 27: "The Life of Mary Baker Eddy," Sibyl Wilbur, 4th edition. Christian Science Publishing Company.]

There is little reason to doubt her real interest in the pretty rigid Calvinistic theology of her time. Indeed, we could not understand her final line of religious development without taking that into consideration. Milmine suggests other forces which would naturally have influenced a sensitive and curious girl; for example, the current interest in animal magnetism, a subject which dominated certain aspects of her thinking to the end. Milmine suggests also that she may have been considerably influenced by the peculiar beliefs of the Shakers who had a colony near Tilton. The Shakers regarded Ann Lee, their founder, as the female principle of God and greater than Christ. They prayed always to "Our Father and Mother which art in heaven." They called Ann Lee the woman of the Apocalypse, the God-anointed woman. For her followers she was Mother Ann, as Mary Baker was later Mother Eddy. Ann Lee declared that she had the gift of healing. The Shakers also made much of a spiritual illumination which had the right of way over the testimony of the senses. The Shakers called their establishment the Church of Christ and the original foundation the Mother Church. The Shakers forbade audible prayer and enjoined celibacy. There are parallels enough here to sustain Milmine's contention that Mary Baker was at least largely influenced by suggestions from her peculiar group of neighbours.

_Her Unhappy Fortunes. She is Cured by Quimby. An Unacknowledged Debt_

Mary Baker married George Washington Glover at the age of twenty-two. She was soon left a widow and her only son was born after his father's death. The story of the years which follow is unhappy. She was poor, dependent upon relatives whose patience she tried and whose hospitality was from time to time exhausted. Her attacks of hysteria continued and grew more violent. Her father sometimes rocked her to sleep like a child. The Tiltons built a cradle for her which is one of the traditions of this unhappy period of her life. She tried mesmerism and clairvoyance and heard rappings at night.

She married again, this time a Dr. Daniel Patterson, a travelling dentist. He never made a success of anything. They were miserably poor and his marriage was no more successful than most of his other enterprises. He was captured, though as a civilian, during the Civil War and spent one or two years in a southern prison. Futile efforts were made at a reconciliation and in 1873 Mrs. Patterson obtained a divorce on the grounds of desertion. Meanwhile she had been separated from her son, of whom she afterward saw so little that he grew up, married and made his own way entirely apart from his mother.

In 1861 Mrs. Patterson's physical condition was so desperate that she appealed to Quimby. Her husband had had some interest in homeopathy and she was doubtless influenced by the then peculiar theories of the homeopathic school. (Indeed she claimed to be a homeopathic practitioner without a diploma.) She had had experience enough with drugs to make her impatient and suspicious of current methods of orthodox medication. Under Quimby's treatment she was physically reborn and apparently spiritually as well. It is necessary to dwell upon all these well-known details to understand what follows and the directions which her mind now took. Milmine's analysis is here penetrating and conclusive. She had always been in revolt against her environment. Her marriages had been unhappy; motherhood had brought her nothing; she had been poor and dependent; her strong will and self-assertive personality had been turned back upon herself.

She had found no satisfaction in the rigid theologies of the time. She had sought help from accepted religion and religion had had nothing to give her. We have to read between the lines and especially to evaluate all this period in the light of "Science and Health" itself to reconstruct the movement of her inner life, but beyond a doubt her thought had played about the almost tragic discrepancy between her own experiences and the love and goodness of God. She had known pain and unhappiness in acute forms and had found nothing in what she had been taught ample enough to resolve her doubts or establish her faith.

She found in Quimby's philosophy a leading which she eagerly followed. Now for the first time she is really set free from herself. A truer sense of dramatic values would have led Mrs. Eddy herself to have made more of the unhappy period which began to come to an end with her visit to Quimby and would lead her disciples now to acknowledge it more honestly. It is a strong background against which to set what follows and give colour by contrast to her later life. The twice-born from Saul of Tarsus to John Bunyan have dwelt much upon their sins and sorrows, seeking thereby more greatly to exalt the grace of God by which they had been saved. Mary Baker Eddy came strongly to be persuaded that she had saved herself and consequently not only greatly underestimated her debt to Quimby, but emptied her own experiences of dramatic contrasts to make them, as she supposed, more consistent, and her disciples have followed her.

As a matter of fact, though her life as a whole is not an outstanding asset for Christian Science and is likely to grow less so, one must recognize the force of a conviction which changed the neurotic Mrs. Patterson of the fifties and sixties into the masterful and successful woman of the eighties and nineties. She belongs also to the fellowship of the twice-born and instead of minimizing the change those who seek to understand her, as well as those who seek to exalt her, would do well to make more of it. She did that herself to begin with. No master ever had for a time a more grateful disciple. She haunted Quimby's house, read his manuscripts, wrote letters for the paper, "dropped into verse" and through her extravagance "brought ridicule upon Quimby and herself."

Quimby died in 1866, accompanied to his last resting place by a tribute in verse from his grateful pupil. Mrs. Eddy had at the time apparently no thought of continuing his work except in a most modest way. She wrote Julius Dresser who had come under Quimby's influence, suggesting that he would step forward into the place vacated. "I believe you would do a vast amount of good and are more capable of occupying his place than any other I know of."[28] She asked Dresser's help in recovering from a fall which she had just had on the ice and which had so injured her, as she supposed, to make her the helpless cripple that she was before she met Quimby. This fall is worth dwelling upon for a bit, for it really marks a turning place in Mrs. Eddy's life. In her letter to Dresser she says that the physician attending "said I have taken the last step I ever should, but in two days I got out of my bed alone and will walk."[29] Sometime later in a letter to the _Boston Post_ Mrs. Eddy said, "We recovered in a moment of time from a severe accident considered fatal by the regular physicians." There is a considerable difference between two days and a moment of time and the expression of a determination to walk in the Dresser letter and the testimony to an instantaneous cure in the _Boston Post_ letter. Dr. Cushing, the physician who attended Mrs. Eddy at the time, gives still a third account. He treated her, he says, over a period of almost two weeks and left her practically recovered. He also attended her in a professional capacity still later and offers all this in a sworn statement on the basis of his record books. There is a very considerable advantage in a philosophy which makes thought the only reality, for, given changing thought and a complacent recollection, facts may easily become either plastic or wholly negligible.

[Footnote 28: "A History of the New Thought Movement," Dresser, p. 110.]

[Footnote 29: _Ibid._]

_She Develops Quimby's Teachings Along Lines of Her Own_

The real significance of this much debated but otherwise unimportant episode is that it seems to have thrown Mrs. Eddy upon her own resources, for now that Quimby was dead she begins to develop what she had received from him through both experience and teaching along lines of her own. She had found a formula for the resolution of problems, both physical and mental, which had hag-ridden her for years. She had a natural mental keenness, a speculative mind, a practical shrewdness (the gift of her New England ancestors) and an ample field. The theology, the medical science and indeed the philosophy or psychology of the New England of the sixties contributed strongly, through their limitations, to the growth of bizarre systems which had in them elements of truth. We shall need to come back to this again in any evaluation of Christian Science as a whole, but we cannot understand the rapid development of the movement of which Christian Science was just one aspect without taking all this into consideration.

Medicine itself has been greatly revolutionized within the last fifty years. While Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy was finding her unhappy way through border-land regions into a cloudy light, Louis Pasteur, sitting, in the phrase of Huxley, "as humbly as a little child before the facts of life," was making those investigations in bacteriology which were to be, in some ways, the greatest contribution of the nineteenth century to the well-being of humanity. He was following patiently the action of microscopic organisms, especially in their relation to health, discovering the secret of contagion and infection, outlining methods of defense against the attacks of these invisible armies, finding the true basis for inoculation, extending its operation, robbing hospitals of their terrors and surrounding surgery with safeguards heretofore undreamt of, literally performing miracles (in his control of swine plague and the like), and for the want of another subject preparing to experiment upon himself for the prevention of hydrophobia, and in doing it all in the most simple and humble way, naively unconscious of his own fame and living from first to last in a noble and comparative poverty which contrasts dramatically with the material well-being for which Mrs. Eddy was so eager. Nothing of this had ever come into Mrs. Eddy's field or those whom she addressed. With all the aid which the modern physician has at his control, diagnosis is still a difficult matter, physicians confess it themselves. There is still, with all the resource of modern medical science, a residuum of hopeless and obscure cases which baffle the physician. That residuum was very much larger fifty years ago than it is now.

_She Begins to Teach and to Heal_

The typical Protestant religious experience, as we have seen, was not great enough to contain all the facts of life. The molten passion of an earlier Calvinism had hardened down into rigidities which exalted the power of God at the cost of human helplessness. There was no adequate recognition among the devout of the sweep of law. Everything that happened was a special Providence and it was hard enough to fit the trying facts of life into an understanding of Divine Love when there was apparently so much in life in opposition to Divine Love.

A very great deal of the ferment of the time was just the endeavour to find some way out of all this and the group of which Mrs. Eddy was a part were really the first to try to find their way out except as roads of escape which were, on the whole, not ample enough had been sought by the theological liberalism of the time of which Unitarianism was the most respectable and accepted form. There are, as has been said, curious underground connections through all this region. We find homeopathy, spiritualism, transcendentalism, theological liberalism and faith healing all tied up in one bundle.

The line which Mrs. Eddy now came to follow is, on the whole, clear enough. She becomes in her turn teacher and healer, giving her own impress and colour to what she called the science she taught, claiming it more and more as her own and not only forgetting, but denying as she went on, her indebtedness to any one else. The whole thing gradually became in her mind a distinct revelation for which the ages had been waiting and this revelation theory is really the key to the contradictions and positive dishonesties which underlie the authorized account of the genesis of Christian Science. She associated herself with one of the more promising of her pupils who announced himself as Dr. Kennedy, with Mrs. Eddy somewhat in the background. Kennedy was the agent, Mrs. Eddy supplied him with the material of what was a mixed method of teaching and healing. She had always been desperately poor; now for the first time she had a respectable bank account.

There were corresponding changes in her personality and even her physique. She began to give lessons, safeguarding her instructions from the very first in such ways as to make them uncommonly profitable. Her pupils paid $100 for the course and agreed also to give her a percentage of the income from their practice. In the course of litigation which afterward follows, the courts pronounced that they did not find in her course of instruction anything which could be "in any way of value in fitting the defendant as a competent and successful practitioner of any intelligible art or method of healing the sick." The court, therefore, was of the opinion that "consideration for the agreement had wholly failed." In a sense the court was mistaken. Mrs. Eddy was giving her disciples something which, whether it fitted them to be competent and successful practitioners of any intelligible art or method of healing the sick, or no, was of great financial advantage both to them and to their teacher. She afterward raised her tuition fee to $300 and stated that God had shown her in multitudinous ways the wisdom of this decision.

_Early Phases of Christian Science_

Everything was, to begin with, a matter of personal relationship between Mrs. Eddy and her students. They constitute a closely related group, the pupils themselves extravagant in their gratitude to their teacher. There were, of course, schisms, jealousies, recriminations, litigation, but none the less, the movement went on. The first attempt at organization was made at Lynn in 1875. A hall was rented, meetings were held in the evening, the society was known as the "Christian Scientists" and as an organization Christian Science came into the world. The first edition of "Science and Health" was also published in 1875. There was difficulty in finding a publisher; those who assisted Mrs. Eddy financially were losers in the enterprise. They were never reimbursed, though "Science and Health" afterward became the most remunerative single publication in the world. Two years later Mrs. Glover (for after her divorce from Patterson she had taken her earlier married name) married Gilbert Eddy and so took the name by which she is best known to the world.

There is much in this period of Mrs. Eddy's life to indicate that she had not yet reached an inner serenity of faith. She was never able to free herself from a perverted belief in animal magnetism or mesmerism which showed itself in fear rather than faith. She believed herself persecuted and if she did not believe in witchcraft she believed in something curiously like it. Indeed, to Mrs. Eddy belonged the rather curious distinction of having instigated the last trial for witchcraft in the United States and with a fitting sense of historic propriety she staged it at Salem. The judge dismissed the case, saying that it was not within the power of the Court to control the defendant's mind. The case was appealed, the appeal waived and the whole matter rests as a curious instance in the records of the Salem court.

Mrs. Eddy does not appear as the plaintiff in the case. The complainant is one of her students, but Mrs. Eddy was behind the complaint, the real reason for which is apparently that the defendant had refused to pay tuition and royalty on his practice and was interfering with the work of the group of which Mrs. Eddy was leader. The incident has value only as showing the lengths to which the mind may be led once it has detached itself from the steadying influences of experience-tested reality. It is interesting also to note that in one way and another Mrs. Eddy and her church have been involved in more litigation than any other religious teacher or religious movement of the time.

_She Writes "Science and Health" and Completes the Organization of Her Church_

Nothing apparently came of the first tentative organization in 1875. The first incorporated Church of Christ Scientist was chartered in 1879 with twenty-six charter members and Boston as its seat. Meetings of this church were held, to begin with, in Lynn and Boston, but Lynn was not friendly to the new enterprise and the Boston group became the center of further growth. Mrs. Eddy left Lynn finally in 1882 and during all the next period the history of Christian Science is the history of the Mother Church in Boston and of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Mrs. Eddy suffered no dissent, her pupils either followed or left her. She was the controlling force in the whole movement. She began to surround herself with a certain mystery and delighted in theatrical effects. She had written and rewritten "Science and Health" until it began to take final form. The _Journal of Christian Science_ became the official organ of Mrs. Eddy's movement as "Science and Health" was its gospel.

The movement reached beyond Boston and New England and invaded the West. It was now so outstanding as to create general public interest. The churches began to take notice of it and indeed, whatever has been for the last twenty years characteristic of Christian Science was then actively in action. What follows is the familiar story of Mrs. Eddy's own personal movements, her withdrawal to Concord, her growing detachment from the movement which she nevertheless ruled with an iron hand, the final organization of the church itself along lines wholly dictated by its leader, the deepening of public interest in the movement itself, Mrs. Eddy's removal from Concord to Newton and her death. She left behind her the strongest and most driving organization built up by any religious leader of her time. Of all those, who since the Wesleys have inaugurated and carried through a distinct religious movement, only Alexander Campbell is in the same class with Mrs. Eddy and Campbell had behind him the traditional force of the Protestantism to which he gave only a slightly new direction and colouring. Mrs. Eddy's contributions are far more distinct and radical.

We need, then, to turn from her life, upon whose lights and shadows, inconsistencies and intricacies, we have touched all too lightly, to seek in "Science and Health" and the later development of Christian Science at once the secret of the power of the movement and its significance for our time.

V

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A PHILOSOPHY

Christian science has a considerable group of authorized publications and a well-conducted department of publicity. Its public propaganda is carried on by means of occasional lectures, always extremely well advertised and through its reading rooms and periodicals. Its unadvertised propaganda is carried on, naturally, by its adherents. Every instance of obscure or protracted illness offers it an opportunity and such opportunities are by no means neglected. But the supreme authority in Christian Science is Mary Baker Eddy's work "Science and Health." This is read at every Sunday service and is the basis of all lectures and explanatory advertisements. In general its exponents do not substantially depart from the teachings of its book, nor, such is the discipline of the cult, do they dare to. There are doubtless such modifications of its more extreme and impossible contentions as every religion of authority experiences. Christian Science cannot remain unaffected by discussion and the larger movements of thought. But it has not as yet markedly departed from the doctrines of its founder and must thereby be judged.

The book in its final form represents a considerable evolution. The comparison of successive editions reveals an astonishing amount of matter which has been discarded, although there has been no real modification of its fundamental principles. References to malicious animal magnetism which fill a large place in the earlier editions, are almost wholly wanting in the last, and there has been a decided progress toward a relative simplicity of statements. The book is doubtless much in debt to Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser, Mr. Wiggins, who brought to the revision of Mrs. Eddy's writings a conscientious fidelity. One needs to stand a good ways back from the book itself in order at all to get any balanced view of its philosophy but, so seen, its fundamentals are almost unexpectedly simple.

_Christian Science a Philosophy, a Theology, a Religion and a System of Healing; General Conditions Which Have Lent it Power_

Christian Science is offered as a philosophy, a theology, a religion and a method for the practical conduct of life and it needs to be considered under each of these four heads. It demands also for any proper understanding of it the backgrounds of Mrs. Eddy's peculiar temperament and checkered history. It is a growth. For her fundamentals Mrs. Eddy is, beyond reasonable debate, in debt to Quimby and in some ways Quimby's original insights have suffered at her hands. None the less, in its final form "Science and Health" is what Mrs. Eddy has made it and it is what it is because she was what she was. She shared with her own generation an absorbing interest in fundamental theological problems. She inherited a religion which has reduced the whole of life to rigid and on the whole too narrow theological formulae. She was not able to fit her experience into the formula which her faith supplied and yet, on the other hand, her faith exercised a controlling influence over her life. She was in a small and pathetic way a kind of nineteenth century Job grappling with the old, old question given sin and, above all, pain and suffering to find God. She could not adjust either Divine love or a just Divine sovereignty to what she herself had been called upon to bear. A natural tendency toward the occult and the desperate willingness of the hopelessly sick to try anything which promises a cure, led her in many directions. So much her biography explains.

Quimby was the first teacher she found whose system seemed to offer any key at all to the intellectual and spiritual puzzle in which she found herself and when his system seemed to be proved for her by her recovery from a chronic abnormal state, she thereafter followed and elaborated what he suggested. Here a certain natural shrewdness and ingenuity of mind stood her in good stead. She was helped by her own ignorances and limitations. If she had been a trained thinker, familiar with a wide range of philosophic speculation, she would never have dared write so dogmatically; if she had been a great philosopher with the philosopher's inclusive vision, she would never have dared build so much on foundations so narrow.

Mrs. Eddy was, unconsciously to herself, a type. She thought and felt for multitudes of perplexed people unable to reconcile the more trying experiences of life with what faith they had in the love and goodness of God, unable on the other side to find the love and goodness of God in the wide sweep of law and the orderly sequence of cause and effect, and incapable under any circumstances of the patient analysis needed to trace to all their sources the threads of their strangely mingled webs of life; impressionable folk under the spell of words; speculative; at once credulous and skeptical; intellectually alert enough to want to do their own thinking and not intellectually disciplined enough to do it well; persuaded that the Bible has both a message and authority and unable to find in their traditional interpretation of it either a satisfying message or an adequately directing authority; impatient of discipline and pathetically eager for some short cut to happiness and well-being. In a very signal way Mrs. Eddy has spoken and written for this type particularly in American life. Her very style a liability as it is, when tested by either logic or the accepted standards of good writing, has, nevertheless, been an asset with those who have made her their prophetess.

The secret of Mrs. Eddy's power and the power of her system after her is most largely in her essential intellectual and spiritual kinship with such a temper and intellectual status as this, but she possessed also a real measure of creative capacity, a marked reach of speculative power, rare shrewdness and a masterful temper. Mrs. Eddy believed herself to have found her system in the Old and New Testaments--but she did not. She gradually built it up out of the suggestions which had been given her to begin with; she gave it colour and direction from her own experiences; she proved it to her own satisfaction in the healings which seemed to result from it, then fitted it all as best she could into the framework of her inherited Christian faith and read its meanings back into the Scriptures. It is a pseudo-philosophy pseudo-Christianized (if one may use the word) by a curious combination of ingenuity, devotion, main strength and even awkwardness. And though Christian Science is carrying on to-day as a religion rather than as either a philosophy or a system of healing, it will stand or fall on the intellectual side as a philosophy and not as a religion.

_The Philosophic Bases of Christian Science_

It is professedly an idealistic monism based on carefully selected facts and depending for its proof upon certain results in the experience of those who accept it. An idealism because there is for Mrs. Eddy no reality save in mind, a monism because there is for Mrs. Eddy only one reality and that is God. For a definition of God she offers only synonyms and affirmations though here perhaps she follows only the usual procedure of theology. God is divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind--and all these capitalized, for it makes a vast difference in the philosophy of Christian Science whether such familiar words as these are spelled with a capital letter or not. It would be possible from Mrs. Eddy's own words to pretty effectually prove what has been more than once claimed: that Christian Science does not offer a personal God, but all our terminology in this region is necessarily somewhat loose, though hers is excessively so. Some of her definitions of God are as personal as the Westminster Catechism or the Thirty-nine Articles. The writer believes, however, after such dispassionate consideration of the philosophy of Christian Science as he is able to give, that it would make absolutely no difference in its philosophic basis whether God were conceived as a person or not. If the God of Christian Science be taken merely as the exaltation of an abstract idealism or a philosophic Absolute everything would be secured which is otherwise secured.

Up to a certain point Christian Science marches with other idealistic systems. From Plato down we have had philosophers a plenty, who have sought to build for us a universe whose only realities are mind and its attributes, or perhaps more technically, consciousness and its content. It is truly a difficult enough matter to relate the world without and the world within, once we begin thinking about it (though happily and in the practical conduct of life this is not so hard as the philosophers make out, otherwise we should be in a hopeless state), and it is natural enough for one type of mind to simplify the problem by making the world within the only world. Nor have there been wanting those who have sought to reduce everything to a single reality whether matter or mind, and ever since we have had theology at all a perplexed humanity has been seeking to reconcile the goodness and the power of God with the sin and sorrow of our troubled world.

But Christian Science parts company soon enough with this great fellowship of dreamers and philosophers and takes its own line. It affirms consciousness and its content to be the only reality; it affirms the divine Mind to be the ultimate and all-conditioning reality; it affirms love and goodness to be the ultimate qualities of the divine Mind, but it meets the problem of sin and evil by denying them any reality at all. (Here it is in more or less accord with certain forms of mysticism.) But even as Christian Science cuts this Gordian knot it creates for itself another set of difficulties and involves itself in those contradictions which will eventually be the undoing of it as a philosophy.

_It Undertakes to Solve the Problem of Evil. Contrasted Solutions_

What Christian Science is seeking is an ideal order with a content of unqualified good and it secures this by denying the reality of every aspect of experience which either challenges or contradicts its own idealism. What is distinctive, then, in Christian Science is not its affirmations but its denials. All systems of philosophic idealism face practically the same problem and offer various solutions. They most commonly resolve evil of every sort--and evil is here used in so wide a way as to include sin and pain and sorrow--into an ultimate good.

Evil is thus an "unripe good," one stage in a process of evolution which, when it has had its perfect and all-transforming way, will reveal both moral and physical evil to have been no evil at all but simply aspects of life, trying enough at the time and puzzling enough when taken by themselves, but having their own distinct and contributory value when considered in their relation to the final whole. Such an approach as this does not in any wise diminish for the individual either the reality of pain or the unhappy consequences of sin, but it does ask him to judge the wisdom and love of God not by their passing phases but by their outcome in the wealth and worth of character.

Robert Browning sang this sturdily through a long generation riding down its difficulties by the sheer force of an unconquerable optimism and subduing argument to lyric passion.

"The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?"

Others affirm the self-limitation of God.[30] In His respect for that human freedom which is the basis of self-regulated personal action and therefore an essential condition of character, He arrests Himself, as it were, upon the threshold of human personality and commits His children to a moral struggle justifying the inevitable incidents of moral defeat by the greatness of the ends to be attained. A vast deal of what we call evil--broadening evil to include not only moral defeat but also pain--is either a consequence or a by-product of what Henry Churchill King calls the fight for character. Such a solution as this is consistent with the love of God and the moral order; whether it is consistent with a thoroughgoing monism or not is another question. William James doubted it and so frankly adopted Pluralism--which is perhaps just a way of saying that we cannot reconcile the contending forces in our world order with one over-all-controlling power--as his solution of the problem.

[Footnote 30: Walker, for example, in his extremely suggestive Spiritual Monism and Christian Theism.]

Josiah Royce has valiantly maintained, through long and subtle argument, the goodness of the whole despite the evil of the incidental. "All finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is good. The Temporal Order contains at no one moment anything that can satisfy. Yet the Eternal Order is perfect. We have all sinned, and come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in its entirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard sayings are the deepest expressions of the essence of true religion."[31] He finds the root of evil in the dissatisfaction of the finite will--a dissatisfaction which on the other hand is the secret of the eventual triumph of good.

[Footnote 31: "The World and the Individual," Royce, Vol. II, Chap. 9--passim.]

We suffer also through our involution with "the interests and ideals of vast realms of other conscious and finite lives whose dissatisfactions become part of each individual man's life when the man concerned cannot at present see how or why his own ideals are such as to make these dissatisfactions his fate." We suffer also through our associations with nature, none the less "this very presence of evil in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order." He dismisses definitely, in an argument still to be quoted, the conclusion of the mystic that an "experience of evil is an experience of unreality ... an illusion, a dream, a deceit" and concludes: "In brief, then, nowhere in Time is perfection to be found. Our comfort lies in the knowledge of the Eternal. Strengthened by that knowledge, we can win the most enduring of temporal joys, the consciousness that makes us delight to share the world's grave glories and to take part in its divine sorrows,--sure that these sorrows are the means of the eternal triumph, and that these glories are the treasures of the house of God. When once this comfort comes home to us, we can run and not be weary, and walk and not faint. For our temporal life is the very expression of the eternal triumph."

One may gravely question whether philosophy has ever so completely made out its case as Professor Royce thinks. He is affirming as the reasoned conclusion of philosophy what is rather a faith than a demonstration, but none the less, all honest thinking has hitherto been brave enough to recognize the reality of evil and to test the power of God and His love and goodness not by the actuality of present pain, or the confusion of present sin, but rather by the power which He offers us of growing through pain to health or else so bearing pain as to make it a real contribution to character and of so rising above sin as to make penitence and confession and the struggle for good and the achievement of it also a contribution to character. So St. Paul assures us that all things work together for good for those that love God. "The willingness," says Hocking, "to confront every evil, in ourselves and outside ourselves, with the blunt, factual conscience of Science; willingness to pay the full causal price for the removal of the blemish; this kind of integrity can never be dispensed with in any optimistic program."[32]

[Footnote 32: "The Meaning of God in Human Experience," p. 175.]

Sir Henry Jones takes the same line. "The first requisite for the solution of the contradiction between the demand of religion for the perfection of God, and therefore the final and complete victory of the good in the other, is the honest admission that the contradiction is there, and inevitable; though possibly, like other contradictions, it is there only to be solved."[33]

[Footnote 33: "A Faith that Enquires," p. 45.]

_The Divine Mind and Mortal Mind_

Christian Science solves this problem, as has been said, by denying the reality of evil, but since we have an abundance of testimony to pain and sickness, Mrs. Eddy goes a step farther. She denies the reality of the testimony of the senses wherever pain and sickness are concerned.[34] (Mrs. Eddy's denial of the reality of sin is hardly parallel to her denial of the reality of physical ills.) And here the word comes in which is made to carry a heavier load than any one poor word was ever burdened with before. All that is involved in the recognition of physical ills and indeed all that is involved in the recognition of the material side of existence is error. (Once fairly on her road Mrs. Eddy makes a clean sweep of whatever stands in her way.) What one may call the whole shadowed side of experience is not only ignored, it is denied and yet before it can be explained away it has to be explained. It is, in brief, for Mrs. Eddy and her followers the creation of mortal mind. Mortal mind, she says, "is nothing claiming to be something; mythology; error creating other errors; a suppositional material sense; ... that which neither exists in science nor can be recognized by the spiritual sense; sin; sickness; death."[35]

[Footnote 34: "Science and Health," last edition, pp. 108, 120, 293, 488.]

[Footnote 35: _Ibid._, p. 591.]

Mortal mind is that side of us which accepts our entanglement in the facts and forces of the world order and upon mortal mind so vaguely conceived Mrs. Eddy throws the whole burden of responsibility for all the unhappy aspects of experience and conditioning circumstances. She gives it a surprising range of creative power. It has created everything Mrs. Eddy does not like or believe in. In other words, there is not one reality but two, one the reality of well-being, the other the reality of unhappiness and suffering, but according to Mrs. Eddy the first reality is the only real reality, the second is an unreal reality which we ourselves create through false beliefs and which we may escape at any moment by simply shifting the center of our creative idealism. Mrs. Eddy makes what she means by mortal mind reasonably clear through endless repetition and some analysis, but she never for a moment accounts for its existence. It is no creation of what she calls the divine Mind; indeed she says in substance that God is not conscious of it at all; it lies entirely outside the range of His knowledge. (Page 243.)

God is Good. Since He is good He cannot have created nor be responsible for, nor even recognize pain, sorrow or suffering. "The Divine Mind cannot suffer" (page 108, also page 335), "is not responsible for physical and moral disasters" (page 119). God did not create matter (the Father mind is not the father of matter) (page 257), for matter means pain and death, nor do such things as these belong in any way to the order of the Divine Mind. They have no admitted reality in Mrs. Eddy's scheme of a true idealism. Man is "God's spiritual idea" and since he belongs by right to an order in which there is neither sin nor sorrow nor death, such things as these have no reality for him save as he admits them. What really admits them is mortal mind, the agent of another system of Belief in which humanity has in some way, which is never really explained, become entangled, and we may apparently escape from the one order to the other simply by a change in our beliefs. For all the shadowed side of life has reality only as we accept or believe in it; directly we cease to believe in it or deny it it ceases to be.

It is, as near as one can make out, a myth, an illusion, whose beginnings are lost in obscurity and which, for the want of the revelation vouchsafed through her, has been continued from age to age by the untaught or the misled. For example, Arsenic is not a poison, so we are told again and again. It is only a poison because people think it is;[36] it began to be a poison only because people thought it was, it continues to be a poison only because the majority of people think it is now and, such is the subtle and far-reaching influence of mind upon mind, it will continue to be a poison as long as any one continues to believe it to be. Directly we all believe that Arsenic is not a poison it will be no poison. Poisons, that is, are the creation of mortal mind. Pain is pain only through the same mistaken belief in the reality of it. "By universal consent mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bind mortals to sickness, sin and death." And so on at great length and almost endless repetition.

[Footnote 36: Page 178.]

_The Essential Limitations of Mrs. Eddy's System_

Since matter conditions us who were born to be unconditioned and since matter is apparently the root of so many ills, the seat of so many pains, matter goes with the rest. Mrs. Eddy is not always consistent in her consideration of matter; sometimes she confines herself to saying that there is neither sensation nor life in matter--which may be true enough save as matter both affords the material for sensation and conditions its forms, which is an immense qualification,--but again and again she calls matter an illusion. Consistently the laws of physics and chemistry should disappear with the laws of hygiene and medicine, but Mrs. Eddy does not go so far as that though it would be difficult to find a logical stopping place once you have taken this line. Mortal mind is apparently the source of all these illusions.

Mrs. Eddy's disposal of matter, along with her constant return to its misleading mastery in experience is an outstanding aspect of her book. The writer is inclined to believe that Mrs. Eddy's formula: "There is ... no matter in life and no life in matter," is an echo of Tyndall's famous utterance--made about the time she was working with her system--that he found "in matter the promise and potency of all life." There is surprisingly little reference in "Science and Health" to philosophic or scientific sources. Cutter's physiology is quoted in some editions--an old textbook which the writer remembers to have found among his mother's school books. There are a few references to popular astronomy, but in general for Mrs. Eddy modern science does not exist except in the most general way as the erroneous expression of error and always with a small "s" as against the capital "S" of her own system. Nor does she show any knowledge of other philosophic idealisms nor any acquaintance with any solution of the problems she was facing save the commonplaces of evangelical orthodoxy. "Science and Health" knows nothing also of any medical science save the empirical methods of the medical science of 1860 and 1870.

But she cannot have been wholly uninfluenced--being a woman of an alert mind--by the controversy which, in the seventies and eighties, was raging about a pretty crass and literal materialism, and her writings probably reflect--with a good deal of indirection--that controversy. Here is a possible key to a good many things which are otherwise puzzling enough. She is, in her own fashion, the defender of an idealistic interpretation of reality and experience. Now all idealistic systems have had to dispose of matter in some way. In general idealists find in matter only the reflection in consciousness of the material which sense experience supplies, and since the raw material is in every way so different from the mental reflection, the idealist may defend his position plausibly in assuming matter to be, in its phenomenal aspects, really the creation of thought. But he must account for the persistency of it and the consistency of experience so conditioned. He does this by assuming the whole interrelated order to be held, as it were, in solution, in some larger system of thought which really supplies for us our environment and if he be both devout and consistent he calls this the thought God.[37] In this way he solves his problem--at least to his own satisfaction--and even supplies a basis for Theistic faith. But he does not deny the working reality of his so-called material experiences nor does he, like Mrs. Eddy, accept one aspect of this experience and deny the other. This is philosophically impossible.

[Footnote 37: So Royce in "The World and the Individual."]

A thoroughgoing theistic monism must find in matter some aspect or other of the self-revelation of God. It may be hard pressed to discover just how the psychical is "stepped down" to the physical. (That is the essential difficulty in all Creationism.) But something must be assumed to get a going concern in any department of thought and there is much in that resolution of matter into force and force into always more tenuous and imponderable forms--which is the tendency of modern science--to render this assumption less difficult to the rational imagination than perhaps any other we are asked to make. When the final elements in matter have become electrons and the electron is conceived as a strain in a magnetic field and thus the

"Cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which is inherent,"

become the projection into sensibly apprehended form of the flux of an infinite and eternal energy, it is not hard to define that energy in terms of a divine will. Indeed it is hard not to do just that. But there is no place in such a resolution as this for the conclusions of "Science and Health."