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Title: The Religio-Medical Masquerade: A Complete Exposure of Christian Science

Author: Frederick William Peabody

Release date: April 16, 2014 [eBook #45419]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Paul Flo Williams, from images provided by the
Internet Archive

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RELIGIO-MEDICAL MASQUERADE: A COMPLETE EXPOSURE OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE ***

The Religio-Medical Masquerade

A Complete Exposure of Christian Science

By
FREDERICK W. PEABODY, LL.B.
OF THE BOSTON BAR

THE HANCOCK PRESS
BOSTON, MASS.

Copyright, 1910
BY
Frederick W. Peabody

The price of this book is $1.00.

Mailed to any address upon receipt of price and eight cents in stamps for postage.

The Hancock-Press, Post-Office Box 2789, Boston, Mass.

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Sacrifice of Children

The Detached Heart

Pretended Equality with Jesus

The Faked “Revelation”

The Fiction of God’s Authorship

A Sham “Religion”

A Bogus Healing System

Immeasurable Greed

The Eddy Autocracy

The “String” on the Gifts

The Eddy Ban on Marriage

Christian Science Witchcraft

Introduction

Christian Science is the most shallow and sordid and wicked imposture of the ages. Upon a substratum of lies a foundation of false pretense has been laid, upon which has been built a superstructure of outward beauty in which multitudes of credulous people gather to glorify the founder as God’s chief anointed.

Never before has the world witnessed a masquerade like that of Christian Science. Being everything that Christianity is not, it puts on the garb of Christianity and seizes the name of Christ the better to attract and the more strongly to hold people of shallow mind, but sincere heart. Having nothing in it remotely worthy of the name of science, it meaninglessly appropriates scientific terms and phrases in order to parade before the world with an air of learning.

The founder of this pretended religion, this bogus healing system, audaciously and irreligiously professing equality of character and of power with Jesus, has, throughout her whole long life, been in every particular precisely antithetical to Christ. Sordid, mercenary, unprincipled, the consuming passion of her life has been the accumulation of money, and she has stopped at no falsehood, no fraud and no greater wickedness that seemed to put her in the way of adding to her accumulations, or overcoming her supposed enemies.

Jesus condemned nothing so forcefully as the mercenary spirit. With a whip he scourged the money changers from the Temple, and in language that burned as flaming fire he denounced the hypocrites and liars of his time as “like unto whited sepulchers that are indeed beautiful outward, but within are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

If the language of this book seem severe, if its denunciations are emphatic, if things are called by their right names and facts handled without the least equivocation, if contrasts are drawn between the founder of Christianity and the founder of Christian Science that seem to border upon the irreverent, let it not be assumed that there is in the heart of the author the slightest particle of personal animosity, or in his attitude toward real Christianity and Christ anything but the most complete reverence.

It is time the plain facts should be stated in plain terms, that the hand of truth should ruthlessly tear away the mask of falsehood from the face of hypocrisy and expose to the horrified gaze of mankind the hideous lineaments upon which are indelibly and unmistakably written the craft and insincerity of utter selfishness and monstrous greed, and the hardness of a cruelty almost unbelievable.

Without egotism, I may say that no other man knows, as I know, the true inwardness of Christian Science, because no other man has come face to face with it again and again on so many occasions as I have, and no other has been in the position I have to force from the lips of reluctant witnesses, under the sanction of an oath, unwilling and discrediting testimony.

Ten years ago I knew nothing and cared less about Christian Science, assuming it to be a sincere, but deluded, manifestation of the childish credulity to which the human race is prone. But ten years of investigations and repeated professional employments, in which it became my duty as a lawyer to get at the actual facts with the aid of legal process, have qualified me, as no other not having had my experience can be qualified, to set forth the amazing story in utter nakedness. In order that it may appear that I am talking from a basis of knowledge, and not of rumor or gossip or speculation, let me briefly narrate the professional experiences above referred to.

My first encounter with Christian Science came about through an employment by the Arena Company, publishers of the Arena magazine, in 1899. In the May number of the magazine for that year an article by Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury, that was in the nature of an exposé of Christian Science, was published, and instead of bringing suit against Mrs. Woodbury or the magazine for the statements contained in the article, an endeavor was made, in Mrs. Eddy’s interest, to suppress the magazine by a suit in equity to restrain its publication based upon the incorporation in the article of a photograph of Mrs. Eddy said to have been copyrighted. The Arena Company retained me to represent its interests in the litigation, and during that employment I was brought in contact with the author of the article, and from her got my first inkling of the real character of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, and her religio-medical-commercial system.

Mrs. Woodbury had been a Christian Scientist for many years, during a long portion of which time she enjoyed Mrs. Eddy’s confidence as one of her leading lieutenants. She had accumulated many letters from Mrs. Eddy, and all her published utterances, whether in book or pamphlet form, from the beginning of the movement down to that time. Mrs. Woodbury was a woman of forceful, dominating personality, of much greater culture than Mrs. Eddy and the rank and file of her following, and in course of time she attracted to herself a personal popularity and influence that so threatened Mrs. Eddy’s, that it became important, if her ascendency was to be maintained unimpaired, that Mrs. Woodbury be cast into outer darkness and her influence wholly destroyed. Occasion was readily found for this and, in due time, without warning, without a notice of the charges made against her, and without an opportunity to be heard, Mrs. Woodbury was excommunicated from the Boston Christian Science Church and cut off from fellowship with the faithful. This placed her in a position where rational reflection was forced upon her, and she speedily came to the necessary conclusion that she had been duped.

Arriving at this conclusion, with a courage much to be admired Mrs. Woodbury wrote and published in the Arena magazine the article to which I have referred, and in unmeasured terms laid open the sinister and sordid quality of the whole movement, and exposed the consummate selfishness and greed in the heart of its “founder.” The article went forth in the Arena, and Christian-Sciencedom was up in arms. Mr. Septimus J. Hanna, then editor of the Christian Science Journal, Mrs. Eddy’s organ, hastened to Concord, New Hampshire, to confer with Mrs. Eddy regarding ways and means of meeting it, and the method of squaring the account with Mrs. Woodbury was considered and determined.

Let it be remembered that the article in the Arena was published in the May, 1899, number. Almost immediately after the appearance of the article, Mrs. Woodbury’s husband, to whom she had been much devoted, died and pæans of rejoicing went up from the Christian Scientists that the Judge of all the world had thus righteously punished one who had dared to assail the sanctified personality of “God’s voice to this age.”

Mrs. Eddy’s personal opportunity came in the month of June, 1899, when, in her annual message to the “Mother Church” in Boston, she undertook to dispose once and for all of Mrs. Woodbury. In language, seldom or never before equaled for cruelty and brutality, Mrs. Eddy assailed Mrs. Woodbury. Pretending, herself, to be the woman “clothed with the sun,” spoken of in the Book of Revelation, Mrs. Eddy denounced Mrs. Woodbury as the Babylonish woman there referred to. She said:

“The doom of the Babylonish woman referred to in Revelation is being fulfilled. This woman, drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, drunk of the wine of her fornication, would enter even the church and retaining the heart of the harlot and the purpose of the destroying angel … poison such as drink of the living water.” And further: “And a voice was heard saying, come out of her my people and hearken not to her lies that ye receive not her plagues, for her sins have reached unto Heaven and God hath remembered her iniquities. Double unto her double, according to her work: in the cup which she hath filled, fill to her double. For she saith in her heart I am no widow.… Therefore shall her plague come in one day, death, mourning and famine: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. That which the revelator saw in spiritual vision will be accomplished. The Babylonish woman is fallen: and who shall mourn over the widowhood of lust, of her that hath become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and the cage of every unclean bird.”

I make no defense of Mrs. Woodbury’s absurdities when she was a Christian Scientist. She went the limit. Nothing could have exceeded her confidence in Mrs. Eddy’s teachings and her zeal for the cause; but I am absolutely certain that there was nothing in Mrs. Woodbury’s life in the slightest degree justifying the reflections upon her chastity, and Mrs. Eddy’s attack was utterly baseless and wanton and purely vengeful.

Immediately upon publication of this message and its public reading in the “Mother Church” in Boston, all Christian Scientists recognized the person thus assailed. Either from native shrewdness, or by advice of friends or perhaps of lawyers, Mrs. Eddy had abstained from using Mrs. Woodbury’s name in the message; but no Christian Scientists anywhere had any doubt that Mrs. Woodbury was the subject of Mrs. Eddy’s attack and, on every hand, Christian Scientists openly expressed their gratification that Mrs. Woodbury had thus been finally suppressed. The next day after the publication, I asked a Christian Scientist with whom I was intimately acquainted, whom Mrs. Eddy referred to in the passage quoted from her message. The unhesitating response was, “Why, that vile Mrs. Woodbury, of course.”

The acquaintance, begun with Mrs. Woodbury through my employment by the Arena Company, developed into the relationship of attorney and client after the publication of Mrs. Eddy’s message; and it was determined to bring suit against Mrs. Eddy for this attack and against other Christian Science officials responsible for its publication. Before beginning, I advised Mrs. Woodbury that, as she was not named in the article, her identity at the trial could only be established by persons who understood her to be referred to, and I asked her if she believed that prominent Christian Scientists, who had openly avowed such an understanding, could be relied upon to tell the truth upon the witness stand. She assured me of her confident belief that they could and that none of them would go upon the witness stand and deliberately commit perjury; but at the time of the trial, having called as witnesses only those close to Mrs. Eddy who had made avowal of their understanding that Mrs. Woodbury was the subject of Mrs. Eddy’s attack, none of them admitted that, at the time of the publication, they had any such understanding. As the language was wholly unintelligible to any one but Christian Scientists, the suit necessarily failed; but it would not have failed if, at that time, I had had the familiarity I now have with Mrs. Eddy’s private correspondence; for I should have been able to introduce in evidence letters of hers clearly showing that Mrs. Woodbury was the Babylonish woman of her message.

In the course of the preparation for the trial of this case, all of Mrs. Woodbury’s letters from Mrs. Eddy and all of Mrs. Eddy’s published utterances from the beginning down to that time, including every edition of her book, “Science and Health,” and every number of the Christian Science Journal, were turned over to me by my client and studied with most thorough and painstaking care. Then it was I learned that Christian Science was a deliberate fraud foisted upon mankind by Mrs. Eddy in the name of religion for the mere purpose of extorting money from credulous people. Since that time I have been intensely interested in following the matter up and adding to my store of facts, until now I am confident that no man can read this book, no man and no woman who has not parted with every scrap of sanity and who retains elemental decency in his or her heart, and not be in entire accord with my conclusions.

Some time after the Woodbury-Eddy litigation, I was retained by Rev. Minot J. Savage, then of New York City, to collect for him, and at his expense, in legally evidential form, the facts showing unmistakably Mrs. Eddy’s false pretense and fraud, and in pursuance of this employment I examined numerous individuals and took their statements under oath for Mr. Savage. Later, when McClure’s magazine undertook the publication of the facts of Mrs. Eddy’s career, I was employed to procure the sworn statements of many individuals in support of the magazine’s story, and shortly thereafter I was retained by Mrs. Eddy’s two sons, George W. Glover, born to her by her first husband, and Edward J. Foster, her son by adoption, to cooperate with their other lawyers, Hon. William E. Chandler, Ex-United States Senator from New Hampshire being senior counsel, in the prosecution in the courts of New Hampshire of a suit in equity for the appointment of a receiver to have charge of their mother’s large estate for her benefit, upon the ground that, through old age mental weakness and delusions, if not actual insanity, she was incompetent to have the care of it. This litigation never reached a determination in the courts, but the family controversy was ultimately settled by a family settlement in which the two sons were paid approximately $300,000 for a relinquishment of their prospective interest in their mother’s estate and an agreement not to contest any will or other instrument disposing of her property.

As the Massachusetts attorney in this litigation, it became my duty in the City of Boston to examine, under oath, many of Mrs. Eddy’s most intimate friends, and the highest officials of organized Christian Science, who, by legal process, were compelled to produce many hundreds of personal letters received by them from her. This last professional experience completed my understanding of Christian Science, and the facts herein set forth are, almost without exception, based, either upon Mrs. Eddy’s own published utterances, her private correspondence, the sworn testimony of witnesses, or the admissions under oath of her most confidential friends and followers; and I give my book to the world with a full understanding of the responsibility I assume and a complete willingness to justify in any legal tribunal every statement I make.

Let it not be supposed, however, that I am presenting the spectacle of a cowardly man attacking a weak and unprotected woman. Mrs. Eddy is the head and front of a powerful and rich organization, the leader of a movement that numbers many thousands of adherents, amongst them some thousands of more or less masculine men. She is Christian Science, and Christian Science is Mrs. Eddy. Anything that money can buy or fanaticism give is constantly at her disposal, and back of her, as behind the greatest and the humblest, stands the sovereign law. Whoever offends another, is accountable to the law; and if anything I say offend against her right to enjoy the reputation warranted by her life, I can and should be called to speedy and strict account. If the contents of this book are not true, I, myself, proclaim that the severest legal penalty would inadequately punish me for its publication. If, on the other hand, what I say be true, as I am confident there can be no doubt in any honest mind that follows me to the end, then decent people, men or women, can no longer afford to give the slightest countenance to Mary Baker G. Eddy and her impostures, be they called by the name of religion, or be they pretended cure-alls for the ills to which our human flesh is heir.

I challenge Mrs. Eddy and the whole Christian Science combination to dare to prosecute me for libel, and I affirm and shall continue to affirm that their omission so to do is an acknowledgment of the truth of every statement I make. She knows I am telling nothing but the truth, and that the whole truth, to be brought out upon a judicial investigation, would be more damning than the truth as I have presented it. The whole truth cannot be told outside of a judicial tribunal.

In presenting the substance of this book in the form of a lecture to the people of the country, from one ocean to the other, the only response has been slander and defamation of me, the last resort of the accused who can make no defense; but nobody has met my facts with anything like evidence, or undertaken in any serious manner to disprove the truth of my most damaging charges.

I beg every one who reads this book not to be diverted from the facts by any personal abuse of me that may follow its publication. It is the only response that has been or can be made to my presentation, and I am accustomed to it from the paid spokesmen of a cult that, so far as its ruling spirits are concerned, more resembles an organization of outlaws banded together for plunder, than a religious establishment based upon the sublime teachings of the Man of Sorrows.

The knowledge I possess I could not suppress without making myself a party to one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against the human race; and I will not, by my silence, permit myself to become an ally with Mrs. Eddy and her associates in that crime.

History is but repeated in Christian Science. “We have seen,” said Macaulay, “an old woman with no talents beyond the cunning of a fortune teller, and with the education of a scullion, exalted into a prophetess and surrounded by tens of thousands of devoted followers, many of whom were, in station and in knowledge, immeasurably her superiors, and all this in the nineteenth century, and all this in London.”

Marveling as he thus did at the success of Joanna Southcott’s parody upon religion in the early part of the last century, what would Macaulay have thought of Mary Baker G. Eddy’s utterly unintelligible hodge-podge, which she falsely calls both a discovery and a revelation, a science and a religion, and what would he have thought of her following?

Mrs. Eddy is in no respect superior to Miss Southcott in the matter of origin and education. One was as obscure and as unlearned as the other. In one respect at least the Southcott woman was superior to the Eddy woman. The former was at least honest; she believed in her mission. There is no evidence that she built up a pretended religion upon a foundation of lies. She was, at the worst, an unbalanced creature with a form of religious mania. She did not grow rich out of her followers. She did not use her supposed revelation as a business asset and sell it for what it would bring. She did not take out a copyright on her “religion,” and monopolize its sale for extraordinary profit. There was no taint of commercialism about her frenzies. She died poor.

The founder of Christian Science, on the contrary, is everything that Joanna Southcott was not. She is mercenary, insincere, shameless, and bold to a degree surpassing that of all other persons who have duped mankind. Upon theft and falsehood she has laid the foundations of the “religion” by the sale of which she has accumulated a fortune.

F. W. P.

The Religio-Medical Masquerade

Chapter I

The Sacrifice of Children

At the very outset of a candid consideration of Christian Science, I feel the necessity, if not of an apology, at least of an explanation. I shall with entire freedom discuss a woman and a combined religio-medical-commercial system of which she is the founder. I shall handle the one and the other without the least regard for anything but the truth. Mary Baker G. Eddy is the woman, and Christian Science, so called, is the system; but they are inseparable, identical. They have arisen and they will go down together, and I predict that they will go down much more rapidly than they have ascended.

I am going to hold up for the inspection of mankind the soul of a woman, of a woman eighty-eight years of age, and I am going to do it without regard to the fact that she is feminine and aged. There is no other way to present Christian Science in its true aspect. It rests exclusively upon Mrs. Eddy’s representations and Mrs. Eddy’s character. If everything she has claimed regarding herself and Christian Science as a religion and healing system be absolutely false, then there is no justification for the existence of Christian Science as a religion, or a healing system, every church erected in its honor is but a monument to the “Queen of frauds and hypocrites,” and every worshiper at its shrines the dupe of a designing old woman who has laughed in her sleeves at the ease with which she has gulled them.

While this is unmistakably true, it is, notwithstanding, most distasteful to a man, if he be half a man, publicly to assail the character of a woman, and nothing under heaven can justify it, if she be in private life and not putting forth nor seeking to put forth an influence upon the lives of others; but if she have constituted herself sponsor for a religion of lies and a medical system that is a fraud and a shame, if she profess God imparted knowledge of everything needful for human bodies and souls, if she reach out her influence to all parts of the land and seek to govern hundreds of thousands of people in every detail of their daily lives, and if her influence be harmful and only harmful, it is the duty of a man, who knows the facts, to make them public, regardless of sex or age or anything whatever but the public good. And so I ask my readers to believe that while for Mrs. Eddy, the feeble and palsied old woman tottering on the very verge of the grave, I have feelings only of compassion; for Mrs. Eddy, the charlatan and adventuress, for Mrs. Eddy, the impious pretender to equality with Jesus, the fraudulent claimant of exclusive and immediate revelation from God, for Mrs. Eddy, upon whose altar of greed have been sacrificed the harmony and happiness of marriage, the natural love and tenderness of parents and the sweet lives of God only knows how many children, for Mrs. Eddy, the heartless and avaricious despot of multitudes of despoiled and demented dupes, for that woman, as there is no sympathy in my heart, so there shall be no charity in my speech.

Now, who is Mrs. Eddy, and what is this strange thing called Christian Science?

As I understand her, Mrs. Eddy is the inventor and sole proprietor of the greatest get-rich-quick concern ever conceived. Her business​—​there is no religion about it, and her writings may be searched from end to end without finding a line about the worship of God​—​her business converts into cash the very highest emotions of the human soul by an appeal to religious feeling and extorts huge sums of money from multitudes of credulous people for healing them of nothing but the delusion that there is something the matter with them. Christian Science never cured any one of anything but imaginary illness; it never relieved any one of any real evil​—​but his money.

Mrs. Eddy, boldly professing to have received a revelation from God, and to be the equal of Jesus Christ, has made upwards of a million and a half dollars out of her enterprise that she calls Christian Science since she reached sixty years of age; and, if some be inclined to infer therefrom the possession by her of extraordinary genius, I cannot agree with them. Mrs. Eddy has succeeded, not because of her greatness, but because of the avidity with which unreasoning people swallow the most monstrous absurdities, the shamelessness with which men and women will intellectually prostrate themselves before the coarsest vulgarity and the most patent fraud.

Let me illustrate this, if I can. It is no part of my undertaking to account for Mrs. Eddy’s following. The fact that she has some thousands of followers does not, of itself, prove the truth of any of her teachings or pretensions. There was never any religious pretender yet, who could not, with slight effort, obtain a hearing and a following. I recently observed, in one of our daily papers, an account of an amusing incident of this character in Oklahoma. A man, believing himself to be the incarnation of Almighty God, started out to convert the world to his belief, and considered it to be his mission, in the first instance, to persuade mankind to divest themselves of clothes. The first man he encountered was his next-door neighbor and the first woman his next-door neighbor’s wife, and they were easily persuaded of the man’s divine mission, and that it was God’s wish that they should revert to primitive nakedness. So the three doffed the attire of civilization and perambulated into the adjoining town, naked as they came into the world. A police officer, who encountered them upon the street, with averted eyes hustled them into a van and carted them off to the nearest police station, where they were compelled to assume at least the outward garb of decency and sanity. This only shows how true it is that the religious impostor has no difficulty in making converts, and that the first person he converts is usually the first he encounters.

I am continually met with the inquiry, “If Christian Science is an absolute fraud, how do you account for the fact that so many intelligent people are Christian Scientists?”

In the first place, many people may be intelligent enough about the ordinary affairs of life, and utterly imbecile upon religious matters. History has again and again shown that in no respect are people so easily credulous and so readily victimized as in respect to religious things. Doubtless there are intelligent people in Christian Science; but the whole cult is not numerous, and the intelligent minority is a negligible quantity.

In the latest bulletin of religious statistics, published by the Federal Government in 1909, the total number of Christian Scientists is given as 85,717; but it is stated that a large portion, at least half, of the membership of the “Mother Church” in Boston is counted twice in this estimate; for the 41,634 membership of this Boston church is largely composed of non-residents, who are also members of other churches. So at least 20,000 must be deducted from the total of 85,717 in order to get at anything like an accurate estimate, which cannot be far from 65,000. These are the government’s figures for 1906, although Mrs. Eddy definitely stated that there were a million Christian Scientists as long ago as 1883.

Now, admitting that amongst this 65,000 people there are intelligent persons, I make the affirmation boldly that not one of them ever went into Christian Science because of his intelligence but notwithstanding and in spite of it. Let me make plain this non-intelligent attitude of its devotees toward Christian Science.

The religious service in a Christian Science church contains no original utterance from the pulpit. There is no preacher connected with any Christian Science church, and the individuals officiating from the platform are called readers, the first reader being a man, who reads from Mrs. Eddy’s book, and the second reader being a woman, who reads from the Bible. The sermon consists exclusively of the alternate reading, by the second reader of passages from the Bible, and by the first reader of alleged interpretative passages from Mrs. Eddy’s book, “Science and Health,” which is called by her, “The Key to the Scriptures.”

Mr. Arthur G. Frisbie of Cleveland, Ohio, an absolutely sincere and honest man, was for many years the first reader of the leading Christian Science church in that city. He became, however, convinced, as every sincere and honest person, who retains any remnant of analytical power sooner or later must, that the thing was a monstrous fraud, and he now denounces it in no less unmeasured terms than my own. Mr. Frisbie tells me that during all the time he was officiating as first reader in the church and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book, try as hard as he might he could discover no slightest relation between the Bible passages read by the second reader and the “Science and Health” interpretative passages read by himself. Any one who cares to make the experiment may demonstrate this for himself if he will get a copy of the Christian Science Quarterly in which the so-called Sermon Lessons are outlined. Such a test will show that there is no more connection between the Biblical passages and those selected and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book than there would be if “Mother Goose” or “Robinson Crusoe” were used as interpreters of the Scriptures. And yet I have sat in a Christian Science church and seen thousands of the faithful, with nothing less than ecstatic expressions upon their countenances, listening to readings that were absolutely unintelligible to both readers and hearers. So I say that the only possible way to be a Christian Scientist is to completely subordinate intelligence to feeling and approximate as nearly as possible the ideal condition pictured by Mrs. Eddy when she says, “The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better.”

Before passing from this point, I can’t refrain from incorporating here, for the benefit of mankind, the sage summary of a man whom I regard as the very wisest of living estimators of human qualities. I refer, of course, to Mark Twain. His opinion of why Mrs. Eddy has so many followers is most informing. In a letter to me some few years ago, Mr. Clemens said:

“Have I given you the impression that I was combating Xn Science? or that I am caring how the Xn Scientists ‘hail’ my articles? Relieve yourself of those errors. I wrote the articles to please MYSELF; and it had not occurred to me to care what the ‘Scientists’ might think of them. I am not combating Xn Science​—​I haven’t a thing in the world against it. Making fun of that shameless old swindler, Mother Eddy, is the only thing about it I take any interest in. At bottom I suppose I take a private delight in seeing the human race making an ass of itself again​—​which it has always done whenever it had a chance. That’s its affair​—​it has the right​—​and it will sweat blood for it a century hence, and for many centuries thereafter.

“It distresses me a little to hear you talk about ‘sanity in the affairs of men.’ So far as I know, men have never shown any noticeable degree of sanity in their affairs, and to me it seems rather large flattery to intimate that they are capable of it.

“See them get down and worship that old creature. A century hence, they’ll all be at it. Sanity​—​in the human race! This is really fulsome.”

There is no other possible explanation than this of Mrs. Eddy’s success. It is based, as Mark Twain says, upon the irresistible propensity of the human race to make an ass of itself every time it gets a chance. It is astounding, but it is a fact, that by many thousands of people in the United States in the year of grace 1910 this aged, illiterate, unprincipled, vulgar woman is regarded as the agent and representative of the Almighty God. I do not know how many times I have been told that because I have endeavored to make the people of the country understand that Christian Science is based wholly upon Mrs. Eddy’s falsehoods, I am therefore irreverently assailing the Almighty upon His throne. I confess I am not much disturbed by this particular criticism, because I feel that, if it be a fact, the Almighty will deal with me indulgently, knowing the integrity of my motives, and that, however aggressive I may become, the Almighty is in no danger.

The more I have studied and learned of the life of this strange creature and the more closely I have observed her effect upon the lives of those who come under her sway, the more strongly I am convinced of the harmfulness of her influence. It is literally derationalizing thousands of people, it is turning multitudes from the pursuit of knowledge and steeping them in a superstition worse than that of the Middle Ages. It is remorselessly separating husband and wife, parent and child. It is the mother and promoter of a new-old witchcraft which has so taken possession of the minds and lives of people that they live in constant terror of its supposed baneful work. This Christian Science witchcraft has reached the proportion amongst the faithful almost of panic, and of it more hereafter. But of all of the harmful influences of this alleged medical science, which is an unmitigated nonsense or deviltry, and of this alleged religion which, so far as its founder is concerned, is the very quintessence of irreverence and hypocrisy, of all of the evil consequences of the life and work of this monumental imposture, the unrelieved suffering of helpless children is the worst.

Mrs. Eddy teaches and her followers believe that God has revealed to her, as absolute truth, that sickness, pain and suffering do not in reality exist, and many are the deluded mothers upon whom this belief has taken so fast a hold that they permit their helpless children to suffer and to die without the slightest effort to alleviate the suffering, and with the continued iteration and reiteration of the insane notion that the child cannot be sick and cannot suffer, because sickness and suffering are unreal. Meantime the sickness of the child is real, the suffering terribly real, and after protracted suffering it dies without the turning of a hand to relieve its pain or to save its life. Those sane parents who have endured the anguish of seeing their child suffer, say from abscess in the ear, or from any one of the other forms of torture with which nature stretches our little ones upon beds of pain, will appreciate the enormity of this crime.

I recently talked with a lady who had been visiting her Christian Science sister whose little boy, eight or ten years of age, became sick during my friend’s visit. He went to his mother and said, “Mother, I have a terrible pain and feel very sick, and think I ought to have a doctor.”

What did the Christian Science mother do? Did she coddle the little fellow, take off his clothes and put him to bed and tell him the good doctor would soon be there and that he would be all well again very shortly? Nothing of the kind. “Richard,” she said, “it is very wrong of you to talk that way, when you have that error of belief. You know you are not sick, Richard, and cannot be sick; you know how to treat yourself when you have that false belief. Treat yourself, run away and play, and don’t bother me any more.”

Little Richard turned from his Christian Science mother and resumed his play, so long as he could stagger about on his little feet and keep up the sad pretense. And when he could not keep on his feet any longer, he sat down upon the floor with his toys about him, moaning with pain and holding his hand upon his side. Meantime his Christian Science mother busied herself about her family duties, totally ignoring him.

The time came when little Richard could not any longer sit up and completely lost interest in his toys; and then he fell over upon the floor, and died​—​died with his clothes on, died with his toys about him, died absolutely neglected by his mother in his extremity, died without the slightest sane endeavor to save his life.

And so it is everywhere in Christian Science families throughout the length and breadth of this land. Nothing but the employment of a fool-man or a fool-woman, called a Christian Science healer, to administer a Christian Science treatment, which consists only of the inaudible repetition of Mrs. Eddy’s meaningless jargon, can be done by a Christian Science parent to save the life of his child without repudiating Mrs. Eddy’s fundamental teaching that sickness is unreal and giving the lie to her “inspired” insanity that there are no such things as pain and death.

Who has not, for years past, read such items as these in the daily papers? “Christian Science parent arrested. Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin’s twelve years’ old child died without medical attendance.”

Again: “Jail term for Christian Scientist Brine, who let his six-year-old child die without medical attendance.”

Again: “No medicine for dying boy. Public prosecutor to take up case of year-old son of Frank A. Black, who died on Saturday without medical attendance.”

Again: “Mr. and Mrs. Edwin M. Watson, Christian Scientists, convicted of voluntary manslaughter for failure to provide medical attendance for their seven-year-old child, Granville.”

Again: “Little Esther Quimby, the seven-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Quimby, Christian Scientists, allowed to die of malignant diphtheria without attendance of a doctor.”

There was in this country in the neighborhood of 5,000 advertising Christian Science healers, so called, and their patients are largely women and children. If each of them has but one patient a day, there are over a million and a half lives annually placed under their senseless and impotent ministrations. As they doubtless average many more than one a day, their patients are in the aggregate many millions a year, largely women, still more largely children. There are no statistics showing the mortality of such patients, for it is the practice of these healers to conceal their operations by calling in a physician at the last moment to qualify him to give the necessary death certificate, in order that there may be no investigation of their criminal practices. It cannot be doubted, however, that the sacrifice of child life to this stupid and cruel monster runs up into the hundreds, if not the thousands, annually. Could anything be more hideous?

But what, may I ask, does Mary Baker G. Eddy care about the sacrifice of children, so only that her bank account continue to grow and grow and grow?

Her concern for children generally may be somewhat judged by her regard for the only child she ever brought into the world. Mrs. Eddy, when she was Mrs. Glover, in September, 1844, gave birth to her only child, a son, whom she named after his father, George Washington Glover. As a young infant, George lived at his aunt’s house with his mother, who, however, frequently sent him on long visits to the family of John Varney, the hired man (in whose lap it was her custom, when a young widow, to be rocked to sleep at night), and also to Mahala Sanborn, who had attended her at the boy’s birth.

When he was seven years old, Miss Sanborn, who had become Mrs. Cheeney, took him, at his mother’s request, permanently to live with her in North Groton, New Hampshire, where he was from 1851 to 1857, when the Cheeneys moved to Enterprise, Minnesota, taking George with them. During the larger part of his life in North Groton, Mrs. Eddy lived in the same town, but she seldom saw him, and did nothing for him. She abandoned him, in other words, to an entirely illiterate person who had lived as a servant in her father’s family. As her father said, she acted “just like an old ewe sheep that would not own its lamb.”

Mrs. Eddy now pretends that she was obliged to give up her child because her second husband, Patterson, would not have him in the house. This seems to me a poor reason for a woman to abandon her infant child, but it is not true in Mrs. Eddy’s case, because she did not acquire Mr. Patterson until years after she had permanently abandoned her child. So complete was her neglect, so utter her abandonment of him that at the age of sixty-five this man, born of New England parents, can neither read nor write! A mother who is so unmotherly as Mrs. Eddy was toward her only child when it was little more than a baby, cannot be expected to give herself great concern over the sacrifice of the children of strangers that is incidental to the accumulation of her fortune.

If the adult prefer foolishness to wisdom, if he prefer suicide to life, by the Christian Science or any other method, he may enjoy his preference. It is no business of mine to come between him and the grave; but no man and no woman has any right, whatever be the motive or the relation, to stand silently by and permit a child needlessly to suffer and needlessly to die. The laws of the land should provide, as they do in some States, for the punishment of such cruel offences; and to the extent that my opposition and my protest may avail, no man and no woman shall be permitted to murder little children by a wilful neglect that is based upon an insane belief in the wicked teachings of a wicked woman, in her cruel, greedy fraud, in her brazen, murderous lies.

If any one be disposed to feel that my language sounds extravagant thus early in the narrative, I beg that judgment may be suspended until I have concluded, when the moderation of my speech will, I think, be cause for wonder.

Chapter II

The Detached Heart

Mary Baker Glover Eddy was born in the town of Bow, New Hampshire, on July 16, 1821, of good New England parentage; but never received anything but the most rudimentary education. The stories of her higher education are all fables. She pretends to have studied the classic languages, and to have been familiar with Hebrew. She has never known anything of any of these languages, and any one who has been compelled, as I have, to peruse her unedited personal correspondence knows that she has never been on any, but the most distant of speaking terms, with her mother tongue. She was graduated, she says, from Dyer H. Sanborn’s Academy at Tilton, New Hampshire; but her old schoolmates, still living, say there was no such academy, although Sanborn did teach a few children each year in a room over the district school. There was no regular course of study and were no graduations. According to these same schoolmates, Mary Baker completed her education upon reaching long division in arithmetic, and her culture, in advanced years, may be somewhat gauged by her written attribution in her seventieth year, when, if ever, one’s education may be assumed to have made some little progress, of the authorship of Irving to the Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens. “The language is decaying as fast,” she says, “as that of Irving’s Pickwick Papers.”

One may be moved, by this reflection upon our poor speech, to something like commiseration for the language that has been so useful to us for centuries past. But it is consoling to reflect that the race may have access, throughout coming ages, to Mrs. Eddy’s exhaustless well of English undefiled as it appears in her various immortal publications. Her private correspondence, it must be admitted, however, does not exhibit any considerable degree of excellence in the matter of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization; but an inspired person may be excused for a little carelessness in the use of words.

Mrs. Eddy accounts for her amazing deficiency of education and entire lack of culture by an ingenious fairy tale. “After my discovery of Christian Science,” she says, “most of the knowledge I had gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined, that grammar was eclipsed.” If any scraps of knowledge were ever possessed by this peculiar creature, vanished, dreamlike or otherwise, they surely did; and without quite assenting to the illumination of learning hypothesis, I find no ground for dissenting from the view that, at some time or other, grammar underwent total eclipse.

The first fifty years of her life were lived in great poverty and complete obscurity. Before her alleged discovery of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy at one time eked out a precarious existence in and about Boston as a Spiritualist medium, giving public seances for money. Sweet converse with the illustrious dead could be had of Mrs. Eddy at any time by any one who had the price. Her interest in the dead seems to have been strictly confined to the illustrious departed.

In December, 1843, when twenty-two years of age, she married George W. Glover, a young bricklayer by trade, and with him, shortly after the marriage, went to Wilmington, North Carolina, where wages were somewhat higher than in New Hampshire. There Glover, three months after the marriage and six months before the birth of her only child, died of yellow fever. He was buried in Wilmington, but the spot is, to this day, unknown even to his widow.

Mrs. Eddy has for many years been exceeding rich in this world’s goods. In her personal conversation, and in her published works, she has spoken in terms of the highest praise of this her first husband, “whose tender devotion to his young wife was remarked,” she says, “by all observers.” He was the father of her only child, yet all that is mortal of him has for nearly seventy years lain with the unclaimed, forgotten and abandoned dead at Wilmington, North Carolina.

Some years ago, friends of Mrs. Eddy at Wilmington erected a stone to the memory of Mr. Glover over a grave supposed to be his; but a descendant of the person really buried there ruthlessly tore the stone from the place he believed it to desecrate, and poor Glover’s final resting place remains unknown and unnoticed.

After reaching the dignity of leader of a great religious movement, Mrs. Eddy elevated the poor bricklayer husband to the proud position of Colonel of Volunteers, and she thus glorified him for approximately forty years. Sad to relate, however, he is “Colonel” no longer. In the recent litigation, instituted by Mrs. Eddy’s sons, one of the witnesses I was examining produced in evidence a letter from Mrs. Eddy in which she said, “I called my late husband” (she should have said late first husband, as a second, a third and perhaps a fourth had then intervened), “I called my late husband Colonel, because he was connected with the militia, and I had got mixed on his rank.” She might just as well have called him General for the same reason.

As a matter of fact, if Glover ever belonged to the militia, he never arose beyond the dignity of high private and having been a man of simple life and honest purpose would, no doubt, if he could know of it, be a little uncomfortable in his narrow bed at the undreamed military distinction thrust upon him by his famous widow; but it would sadden him a little to know that, after having elevated him to the exalted rank of Colonel, she should in later years have reduced him to the less imposing position of Major, by which military title he now is distinguished in Mrs. Eddy’s conversation.

As a second matrimonial venture, Mrs. Eddy in 1853 allied herself with one Daniel Patterson, who in her autobiographical sketches has been completely ignored, although he shared twenty years of connubial life with her. He does not seem to have left behind him the sweet aroma of the more chivalrous Glover, who survived the marriage only three months. Patterson was an itinerant dentist of little or no practice, and life with him does not appear to have been a pathway strewn with flowers.

It profits not to dwell upon the Patterson episode. When he was not pursuing the elusive dollar that perpetually fled away, he appears to have been chasing the festive bullfrog whose dismal croak jarred upon his wife’s sensitive nerves. Suffice it to say that Daniel and Mary endured one another, with what serenity and fortitude they might, for twenty long, weary years, when, in 1873, a divorce was granted her for his desertion. Mrs. Eddy says the divorce was granted for a different cause, but the record contradicts her. The record always contradicts her. She has declared herself to be opposed to divorce for any but the single Biblical cause; but the record of the Superior Court at Salem shows her to have obtained a divorce from Patterson for desertion seven years after the time God, as she says, had revealed to her the final religion.

Mrs. Eddy does not believe in marriage​—​for others. She was inspired of God to teach that it is not good​—​for others​—​to marry and she has inspired into the minds of her faithful followers the belief that marriage is of the earth very earthy indeed, and that life in the realm of spirit is impossible to those in the holy estate of matrimony. But so far as she herself was concerned, it cannot be denied that she seems to have had a distinct fancy for marriage, and I may go so far as to say something approaching fondness for variety in the marriage state.

In any event, after the termination by operation of law of the second marriage, that is to say on January 1, 1877, Mrs. Eddy made another and third venture into marriage and conferred upon one Gilbert Asa Eddy the proud and happy distinction of successor to the deceased Glover and the departed Patterson. The record of this marriage (another record, be it noted) discloses the amusing fact that Mrs. Eddy’s age was given as forty years, the marriage having been celebrated fifty-six years from the date of her birth; so that instead of blossoming and blooming in garlands gay for a fair, young, winsome thing of forty summers, the roads were decked with garlands somewhat somber for the third glad nuptials of the blushing bride of fifty-six. But what is a little matter of sixteen years in the life of a person who is superior to time and of whose life here in the flesh there shall be no end?

After years of toil and trouble, of conflict and disharmony, of stress and strain, in which some of Mrs. Eddy’s early friends strongly sympathized with Mr. Eddy, who complained that neither he nor God Almighty could please his exacting spouse, this husband, too, was gathered to his fathers and Mrs. Eddy was for a third time a widow.

In her efforts to impose upon the credulity of simple-minded people, Mrs. Eddy has not hesitated to claim the power to triumph over death, and to have actually restored the dead to life. To her intimates she has claimed to have thus twice restored to life this lamented third husband, Asa G. Eddy.

If Mrs. Eddy has, or had, this power, the mind of the incredulous will wonder why the poor man is now dead, why his potent helpmate did not restore him to life the third time he died. Presumably, Mrs. Eddy reasoned with herself that it was really expecting too much of a woman, even a woman Messiah, that she should recall from death the third husband three times, and as husbands had become, to some extent, a matter of habit with her, it is not, perhaps, remarkable that she consented finally to part with this one after such unmistakable evidence of his persistent desire to be separated from her even by death.

Mrs. Eddy has in her book, “Miscellaneous Writings,” modestly given us this husband’s estimate of her in these words: “Perhaps the following words of her husband, the late Dr. Asa G. Eddy, afford the most concise, yet complete, summary of the matter, ‘Mrs. Eddy’s works are the outgrowth of her life. I never knew so unselfish an individual.’” So, perhaps, she let Eddy go, finally, out of pure unselfishness. Sweet as was his companionship, she could not keep him by her side when repeatedly assured of his unalterable wish to go hence.

The first husband, Glover, survived the marriage but a few months; the second husband, Patterson, unappreciative wretch that he was, ran away, and, as Mrs. Eddy tells us, found consolation in the affection of the “wealthy lady” who ran away with him (although it must be said that no corroboration whatever of the “wealthy lady” feature of Mrs. Eddy’s story exists); and the third husband, Eddy, after having been twice recaptured, finally escaped by death’s door.

There is another singular, grewsome incident connected with the death of Mr. Eddy, husband number three. He died of heart disease. There was no manner of doubt about that; but Mrs. Eddy had professed to have the power to cure heart disease in the most advanced stage, and she must find an explanation of her husband’s death consistent with the possession, by her, of such power. So she said that Eddy did not die of heart disease after all. He died of poison, of arsenical poison, that’s what he died of; and he didn’t die of arsenical poison mixed with his food or drink or otherwise in chemical form smuggled into his organism. He died of arsenical poison mentally administered, thought into him by her enemies.

Now even a woman Messiah could not be on the lookout all the time against these malicious thoughts directed at her third husband and, in a moment of inadvertence, one of them got by and killed Eddy, and killed him dead.

To confirm her singular notion and prove the presence of the symptoms of arsenical poison in the body, Mrs. Eddy procured the performance of an autopsy upon her late husband’s remains.

Dr. Rufus K. Noyes of Boston, who performed the autopsy, tells me that, having removed the diseased organ from Mr. Eddy’s breast, he exhibited it upon a platter to the sorrowing widow, who craved the ocular demonstration, and pointed out to her curious and eager inspection the precise cause of death in its diseased condition. And it was after, and notwithstanding, her close scrutiny of the physical heart that had so robustly throbbed with love of her, that, much to Dr. Noyes’ amusement, Mrs. Eddy gave out the statement, to the extent of a column or more in the newspapers, that arsenical poison mentally administered by absent treatment had in fact torn her loved one a third time, and finally, from her clinging grasp.

How sweet, how charming, is the wifely devotion, that, kissing the lips of death, speedily and forever loses track of the sacred ashes of the beloved first husband, rushes into the divorce court for freedom from the truant second, and, having twice restored the adored third to life, when a third time he thus eludes her refuses, positively and coldly refuses, to bring him back and looks with calm and critical eyes upon the formerly attached, but now, alas, detached heart!

To the soft impeachment of these three several marriages, this pronounced opponent of marriage pleads a bashful guilty, but many are they who believe there was yet a fourth marriage, and that the widow Eddy in course of time became, and is today, the wife of one, Calvin A. Frye.

Frye is, ostensibly, at least, Mrs. Eddy’s servant, her man of all work. He is her footman, and in the livery of a footman rides upon the driver’s seat of her carriage when she goeth forth for her daily drives. He is also her private secretary, who handles her mail, and, at his pleasure, permits her to peruse, or throws into the waste-paper basket, communications addressed to Mrs. Eddy. He is her major-domo, master of ceremonies in her pretentious establishment and director of her large retinue of assistant secretaries, literary experts, personal healers, mental protectors and domestic servants. These positions Mr. Frye has adorned, as a resident member of Mrs. Eddy’s family, occupying an adjoining room, for upwards of thirty years. But not only is Mr. Frye Mrs. Eddy’s servant, her footman, her secretary, her man-of-all work, he, strangely it would seem, has for years at a time held the legal title to the capacious residence in which she has lived at Concord, New Hampshire, and to all the highly cultivated grounds about it, and to all the personal property upon the place. And not only has Mr. Frye been Mrs. Eddy’s servant and secretary, her footman and the owner of her lands and houses, her horses and carriages, the furniture within the houses, and the crops upon the extensive acres, he was for years the legal owner of her costly jewels, of the diamond cross which she wore at her throat. Her footman, owner of the house in which she lived, of the carriage in which he took her to drive and of the jewels she wore! This condition of affairs was not changed until I called attention to it a few years ago, when Mr. Frye reconveyed to, shall I say Mrs. Frye? all the property standing in his name.

All of these circumstances, taken with the confident opinion of one long a member of her household that, if Mrs. Eddy isn’t the wife of Frye, she ought to be, are to my mind strong indication that Mrs. Eddy ought to be called Mrs. Frye and her credulous followers not Eddyites, but Fryeites or Frytes; and I predict that, if Frye survive Mrs. Eddy and be not amply provided for by her will or settled with by her executors, he will go into the Probate Court and proclaim himself to be her surviving husband, entitled to one-third of her estate.

I do not state this fourth marriage as a fact, but offer it as the only possible and creditable explanation of the facts.

As has been said, Mrs. Eddy has one son born to her who was totally and unfeelingly abandoned by her in his early infancy, who lives in a western State, and seldom or never visits his famous mother. No member of her family ever believed in her, ever placed the slightest credence in her preposterous pretentions. Mrs. Eddy also has an adopted son. Some years ago she legally adopted a male child, a medical man named Foster, then forty years old, who, to acquire a mother by adoption, took the name of E. J. Foster-Eddy, and became a member of Mrs. Eddy’s family; but, after a too brief period of harmonious cohabitation, the sweet domestic relation was, for reasons not made public, interrupted, and now he also finds it agreeable to live elsewhere than with his adopted mother and is heard of no more in Christian-Science-dom.

From a humble position of dependence, Mrs. Eddy has arisen to a proud position of great opulence, and from complete obscurity, devoid of influence and power, has placed herself at the head of the most phenomenal “religious” movement of this or any other time, and made herself believed to be the God-anointed successor to Jesus Christ, and His equal in attributes and power; and this she has accomplished through a lie, a deliberate, wilful, wicked lie.

Chapter III

Pretence of Equality with Jesus

Coming now to what makes it worth our while to consider the career of this remarkable woman, let me present the facts regarding her relation to the life and to the activities of the world of today, and how and by what very devious means she has reached and maintains the position she now holds.

What does Mrs. Eddy claim to be, and what is she believed to be by many thousands of people who have made her their religious leader and guide, and reverence her as the devout Christian reverences Christ?

Mrs. Eddy claims that she is the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, that she and her book are specifically referred to and prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

She says, “My attention is especially called to the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse or Revelation of Saint John, on account of its suggestiveness in connection with this nineteenth century. In this opening of the sixth seal, there is one distinctive feature which has special reference to the present age, and the establishment of Christian Science in this period. ‘And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’”

With eyes downcast, with “bated breath and whispering humbleness,” bashfully pointing to herself, in low tones that inspire awe, she says, “The woman clothed with the sun, Mary Baker G. Eddy.”

Again, she says: “Saint John writes in the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation: ‘And I saw another mighty angel come down from Heaven, clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was, as it were, the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. And he had in his hand a little book, open, and he set his right foot upon the earth.’ Is this angel, or message from God, Divine Science that comes in a cloud? This angel had in his hand a little book open for all to read and understand. Then will a voice from harmony cry, Go and take the little book. Take up Divine Science. Study it, ponder it. It will be indeed sweet at its first taste when it heals you, but murmur not over Truth if you find its digestion bitter.”

The “little book,” “Science and Health,” of God’s authorship, but copyrighted by Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy, and to be had of her publisher in Boston by any one who has three dollars or more, according to binding, to pay for it!

Intentionally vague as are these oracular utterances, we cannot but catch her evident meaning: In me behold the woman clothed with the sun; in my book, the “little book” sent down from Heaven, and in Christian Science the message from God contained in the little book held in the hand of the angel!

Christian Scientists get this down without so much as a murmur! This is one of the easy things she has given them to swallow.

Besides this, Mrs. Eddy has distinctly authorized the claim in her behalf that she herself is the chosen successor to and equal of Jesus, that her mission is to complete the religion of Christ.

In the earlier days she placed her mission above that of Jesus, inasmuch as the idea of God given by her was, she said, “higher, clearer and more permanent than before.” But, later, she seems to have been satisfied with equality only, and says, “The second appearing of Jesus is unquestionably the second advent of the advancing idea of God as in Christian Science.”

She, however, patronizingly points out the short-comings of Jesus. “Our Master healed the sick, practiced Christian healing, and taught the generalities of this divine principle to his students, but he left no definite word for demonstrating his principle of healing and preventing disease. This remained to be discovered through Christian Science,” and “Had wisdom characterized all his sayings, he would not have prophesied his own death and thereby hastened or caused it.” While in speaking of herself she said, “The works I have written on Christian Science contain absolute truth and my necessity was to tell it. I was a scribe under orders, and who can refrain from transcribing what God indites?” So wisdom did not characterize all of the sayings of Jesus; but Mrs. Eddy speaks absolute truth!

In the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, when it was her property and published by her, and upwards of twenty years after the time she says God had selected her to complete the religion of Jesus, it was claimed for her, and with her sanction, that she was equal with Jesus, and elaborate effort was made to establish the claim. “Now a word about the horror many good people have of our making the author of ‘Science and Health’ equal with Jesus!” says the writer, and in the first paragraph of the article, the question is asked, “Do we, then, say that the author of ‘Science and Health’ is equal with Jesus?” A little further on appears the statement, “Jesus demonstrated over all the beliefs of this false sense of life, even over the belief of death, the last enemy to be overcome.” And further, “Mrs. M. B. G. Eddy has worked out for us, as on a blackboard, every point in the demonstrations, or so-called miracles of Jesus, showing us how to meet and overcome the one, and perform the other” and, throughout the article, its whole clearly apparent purpose is to carry the conviction that in attributes and power Mrs. Eddy is the entire equal of Jesus.

In an illustrated “poem” entitled “Christ and Christmas,” written by Mrs. Eddy, and published and copyrighted by her in 1894, there is a picture labeled “Christian Unity,” in which Jesus is represented as seated upon a stone holding the right hand of Mary​—​Mary Baker G. Eddy. In the left hand of the woman is a scroll bearing the legend “Christian Science,” and about the head of each figure, that of Jesus and that of the Christian Science woman, there is a halo. The picture is illustrative of these lines on the opposite page:

“As in blessed Palestine’s hour, so in our age

’Tis the same hand unfolds His Power and writes the page.”

At the time this book was announced by Mrs. Eddy, in December, 1893, she publicly said of it, “‘Christ and Christmas’ voices God through song and object lesson.” The price of the book was three dollars. How convenient to be able to command a market by voicing God! How kind God has been to Mrs. Eddy’s business ventures!

At the time of this publication, Mrs. Eddy, who claimed to have shared in making the illustrations (which her man Hanna called “exquisite bits of art,” but which are, doubtless, the vulgarest products of the art of book-making of many years), at this time, I say, Mrs. Eddy unquestionably wished this “Christian Unity” illustration to signify the unity of Christianity and Christian Science, as represented by the founder of Christianity and the founder of Christian Science, and about her own head, as about the head of Christ, she hangs a halo! The two Messiahs, masculine and feminine, and representing “Our Father and our Mother God,” hand in hand, absolute equality. Christian Unity!

Her private correspondence has been full of pretensions to direct meditation with God, and her followers have been induced unquestioningly to comply with her wishes regarding the most trivial things because she but voiced a wish communicated to them through her by God.

“God, our God has just told me,” she says, “who to recommend to you for editor of the Christian Science Journal,” And, “No man or woman has told me of this obnoxious feature, but my Father has, and it shall be stopped by His servant who has given His word to the world.” And, “God’s law ‘to feed my sheep,’ to give Science and Health at once to those hungering for it, must be obeyed.” (To those hungering three dollars worth!) And, “I ought not to have consulted with man on the copyright of God’s Book.” And, “Come to see me next Saturday, a.m., on nine o’clock train, and God will settle this matter.” And, “Now what can I do, only to spread His word of warning and wait for all students to grow up to understand His ways, and mine when God directed.” And, “God will not let me be silent relative to your business here yesterday, but demands me to answer, reminding you of your feelings toward me.” And, “Push the Book to as fast as possible completion. It is God’s Book, and he says give it at once to the people.” (At three dollars per copy!) And, “You know they cannot be made sick for printing and binding God’s Book.”

But Jove nods; Mrs. Eddy stumbles. Sometimes it is the Christian Science devil that, impersonating God, whispers to her. “I regret,” she says, “having named the one I did to you for editor. It was a mistake, he is not fit. It was not God evidently that suggested that thought, but the person who suggests many things mentally; but I have before been able to discriminate.” This incident suggests the importance of one, who is the channel of wireless telegraphy from God, being able to discriminate between messages from Heaven and messages from Hell, and having the power to prevent satanic interference with the medium of communication.

In a late edition of “Science and Health” Mrs. Eddy speaks of Jesus as “the masculine representative of the spiritual idea,” and says, “the impersonation of the spiritual idea had a brief history in the earthly life of our Master, but of His Kingdom there shall be no end, for Christ’s, God’s idea, will eventually rule all nations and people, imperatively, absolutely, finally,​—​with Divine Science. This immaculate idea, represented first by man and last by woman, will baptize with fire,” etc.

By “Divine Science,” Mrs. Eddy, of course, means Christian Science, as the terms are used interchangably with her, and with characteristic modesty she places herself by the side of the Master​—​He being the first and masculine, and she the last and feminine, representative of the “immaculate idea.”

What marvelous presumption! What ineffable audacity!

The Mary Baker G. Eddy, who in speaking of a woman she disliked savagely exclaimed, “I’d like to tear her heart out and trample it under my feet!” who, at Lynn, because of her abuse of her husband and violent outbursts of temper, was known as the “she devil”; who, four years after the time of her pretended selection by God for a divine mission, being denied hospitality she had abused in the Wentworth household at Stoughton, left in a fury of passion after having, with obvious intent, put live coals from her stove upon a heap of newspapers in the closet; who figured first as a spiritualist medium, giving public séances for money, and later as the president of a bogus medical college issuing illegal degrees; who unfeelingly abandoned the only child born to her, and looked with unflinching eyes upon the detached heart of her deceased husband; who has become the champion fraud and impostor of the age; who in the livery of heaven has for forty years wrought in the direct interest of hell,​—​this Mrs. Eddy, the self-constituted representative with Jesus of the immaculate idea! this woman and the immaculate Jesus mentioned in the same breath!

Chapter IV

The Faked Revelation

Back in 1877 Mrs. Eddy placed her mission, as I have said, above that of Jesus. In a personal letter to a friend, she said, “I know the crucifixion of one who presents Truth in its higher aspect will be this time through a bigger error, through mortal mind instead of its lower strata or matter, showing that the idea given of God this time is higher, clearer, and more permanent than before.” But of late years she has contented herself with claiming only equality, in all respects, with Jesus, and has not hesitated boldly and in so many words to declare her teachings to have been expressly “authorized by Christ.”

We must go into this matter with some particularity, and I crave indulgence while I present certain essential details. I want to leave no doubt in any orderly mind as to just what Mrs. Eddy claims to be, and shall then show, with an abundance of evidence that will not permit of the slightest doubt, just exactly the manner of woman she has been and is. When the most corrupt tree in the orchard brings forth the sweetest and most beautiful fruit of all, it will be believed that Mary Baker G. Eddy can be the channel through which God has revealed Himself to mankind, and it will not be believed until then.

I am of those who believe that there can be no religion but a religion based upon revelation. Either God reveals himself to us, or He remains unknown and unknowable. “No man by searching can find out God.” Reason alone cannot attain unto Him. God hides Himself from the wise, and the mightiest intellect approaches no nearer to Him than the simple mind of a child.

This great truth has been and is the common belief of mankind, and every unprincipled person, who has appealed to human credulity along religious lines, knowing mankind to so believe, has faked a revelation from God. Mrs. Eddy has put herself in a class by herself by the boldness, the irreverence, the recklessness, the blasphemy of her pretended intimacy with God.

In express terms, the founder of Christian Science claims to have received from the Almighty a revelation which she has incorporated in her book entitled “Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures.” Speaking of this book, in January, 1901, she said: “I should blush to write of ‘Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures’ as I have, were it of human origin and I, apart from God, its author, but as I was only a scribe echoing the harmonies of Heaven in divine metaphysics, I cannot be super-modest of the Christian Science Text-book.”

Nothing could be plainer or more unequivocal than that. There is a distinct avowal that the book entitled “Science and Health” was the work of Almighty God, and, preposterous as the claim may seem to any rational being who has ever undertaken to read the book, slanderous as it is upon Omniscience, some thousands of people in the United States today believe it precisely as made. They believe that God literally dictated the contents of this book to Mrs. Eddy, and that it is in every part as much the word of God as the most devout Christian believes the Bible to be in any part the word of God.

This is the sacrilegious lie upon which Mary Baker G. Eddy has reared her whole fraudulent superstructure, which she had denominated Christian Science, and which has become the religious belief of thousands. It is because of this lie that Christian Science flourishes like a green bay tree; that the old faith does not hold its believers; that real scientific knowledge in medicine is losing the confidence it ought to enjoy. It is because of this lie that Christian Science wives separate themselves from their husbands; that Christian Science mothers abandon their children; that young women believers put marriage behind them as lustful and unclean and inconsistent with true spirituality of life and character. It is because of this lie, this cruel and wicked lie, that children are permitted needlessly to suffer and needlessly to die without any intelligent perception that they are suffering, and after a resolute withholding by their deluded parents of trained medical skill that would alleviate suffering and save life. And this odious lie, I purpose, while strength abides with me, to hold up to the enduring detestation of mankind.

I am going to show, with absolute conclusiveness, that Mrs. Eddy’s claim to revelation is wholly false. And when I have shown that, I shall have shown that the “religious” phase of Christian Science is a fraud and a sham; I shall have shown that it is a veritable parody upon religion, a caricature upon Christianity; I shall have shown that every beautiful temple erected for the worship of the Christian Science God is a monument to Mrs. Eddy’s success in imposing upon mankind, and that all of the thousands upon thousands of pure and simple-minded people, who acclaim her God’s messenger, are the victims of a mercenary old schemer who has amazed herself at the gullibility of her worshipers.

I am not dealing in exaggeration. I am not speaking without knowledge when I say that no sane person can follow me through this narrative and not agree with me that Christian Science as a religion is a sham, as a healing system is a fraud; that it kills the sweetest and tenderest emotions in the human heart by rooting out sympathy and charity and compassion; that there is no other hatred and vindictiveness equal to the hatred and vindictiveness of its founder and her leading votaries; that there is no other cruelty, no other greed that can be compared with theirs, and that the “inspired” teaching of Mary Baker G. Eddy regarding the most sacred institution established amongst men, I refer to the institution of marriage, is so low and so vile that decent people, when they come to understand it, must repudiate the woman and the thing from overwhelming shame.

Insanity is not responsible for indecency, but those Christian Scientists who have not parted with their sanity, and are not Christian Scientists for revenue only, will turn with horror from the woman and her work when they know what they are.

I say that Mrs. Eddy’s claim to having received an inspiration from God is fraudulent. Now, what are the facts?

That God had nothing to do with Mrs. Eddy’s book is abundantly proven by the book itself, to any person of sufficient understanding to be at large outside of Bedlam. Who but a person of weak or disordered mind could believe that God is the author of this, “The condition of the stomach, bowels, food, clothing, etc., is of no serious import to your child”?

Can any not absolutely insane parent believe that God communicated that “absolute truth” to Mrs. Eddy?

Again: “The less we know of or think about Hygiene, the less we are predisposed to sickness.”

That is to say, the more we know about how to keep well and how to avoid conditions breeding disease, the more likely we are to be sick.

Again: “Treatises on anatomy, physiology and health sustained by what is termed material law, are the promoters of sickness and disease. It is proverbial that as long as you read medical works you will be sick.”

We have all observed the truth of this inspired utterance in the fact that the physicians, as a body, are almost constantly in bed of one disease or another. The wonder is that any of them ever survive the courses of preparatory study.

Again: “Not because of muscular exercise, but because of the blacksmith’s faith in muscle, his arm becomes stronger.”

All one has to do to develop his biceps is to have faith that his biceps will develop, if Mrs. Eddy really speak by inspiration of God.

Again: “You say or think because you have partaken of salt fish that you are thirsty, and you are thirsty accordingly; while the opposite belief would produce the opposite result.”

That is to say, you may partake of all the salt fish you please; but if you persistently say and believe it cannot cause thirst, thirst is the last sensation that will afflict you.

Again: “Question. Do not brains think and nerves feel, and is there no intelligence in matter? Answer. Not if God be true and mortal man a liar.”

In other words, if God be true, brains do not think and nerves do not feel. That brains do not think, Mrs. Eddy, when she contemplates her foolish following, may have some reason to believe; but she will have some difficulty in satisfying the rest of us that brains do not possess the function of thought. I think, therefore I am not a Christian Scientist.

Again: “The blood, heart, lungs, brain, etc., have nothing to do with life.”

When this impressive passage was first presented to my darkened mind, I was inclined to believe it to contain no element of truth; but I am persuaded that there is a grain of truth in it. I have sat in a Christian Science church repeatedly and have seen some thousands of people with open mouths and ecstatic expressions listening to material from the platform wholly unintelligible to those who read it and wholly unintelligible to every person in the building who heard it; and I have come slowly, very slowly and regretfully, to the conviction that it is true, that amongst large masses of people there are times when the brain has absolutely nothing to do with life. As to the blood, heart and lungs, I am still of my early prejudice that they have something to do with life, notwithstanding Mrs. Eddy’s affirmation that God has informed her to the contrary.

Again: “Gender also is a quality, a characteristic of mind and not of matter.”

It is all in your mind. You are a man or a woman according as you think you are a man or a woman, and not otherwise. If a man thinks he is a woman, and if a woman thinks she is a man, that settles it; they are.

Again: “The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again. If the science of life were understood, it would be found that the senses of mind are never lost and that matter has no sensation. Then the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster’s claw.”

This makes it plain that, from Mrs. Eddy’s standpoint, the less mind, the better; the less mind, the more Christian Scientists; the more Christian Scientists, the more revenue; the more revenue, the greater glory for impostors and charlatans. And, oh, wonder of wonders! God here informs us, if Mrs. Eddy speak the truth, that the loss of a human leg will be but a temporary inconvenience when man has advanced to the high stage attained by the wholly mindless lobster!

Again: “Man is the same after, as before, a bone is broken or a head chopped off.”

And so, the head follows the lungs, and the blood, and the heart, and the brains, and the stomach, and the bowels, as useless members of the human body, if Mrs. Eddy speak the words of truth and inspiration.

Again: “That life is sustained by food, drink, air, etc., that it is organic or in the least dependent upon matter or sustained by it, is a myth.”

Mrs. Eddy teaches that there is no reality in matter. When she sits down at her table three times a day and puts into her immaterial and nonexistent stomach unrealities in the shape of bread and butter and beef steak and tea and coffee, and so on, life is sustained by the belief that the food sustains life, and not by the food itself. It would be interesting to have Mrs. Eddy demonstrate in her own daily life that the partaking of what we grosser persons regard as food indispensable to the survival of the physical organism could be wholly dispensed with and life, notwithstanding, continue.

And, finally, and I commend this precious gem of truth to those of my readers who are parents, be they fathers or mothers, and who agree with me that the loveliest of all lovely things in the world is the wholesome baby enjoying his morning bath: “The daily ablutions of an infant are no more natural or necessary than would be the process of taking a fish out of the water every day and covering it with dirt, in order to make it thrive more vigorously thereafter in its native element.”

To bathe a baby is the same thing as to grab a fish out of the water and rub it all over with mud! If it were of mere “human origin,” Mrs. Eddy would “blush” to deliver herself of that beautiful and “absolute” truth.

This twaddle inspired of God! And these selections, taken at random from Mrs. Eddy’s book of which, she says, not she but God was author, are of a piece with the thing as a whole.

I am told, as I have said, that there are intelligent persons in Mrs. Eddy’s following, and yet such things as those I have quoted slap intelligence in the face from every page of her book; and her friends, nevertheless, persist in affirming, “Lo, the Lord’s anointed, God’s voice to this age!”

“I cannot see,” says Mark Twain, “how any one contemplating Mrs. Eddy’s career can deny to the Divine Being the possession of a sense of humor.” God is so amused by Mrs. Eddy’s accomplishments that He is provoked to laughter, and Christian Science thus escapes the consuming fire of Divine wrath.

Chapter V

The Fiction of God’s Authorship

God, we are told, is without variableness or shadow of turning, and yet, if He were the author of Mrs. Eddy’s book, He would be as changeable as a weathercock, for the book, throughout its numerous editions, has in the past thirty-five years undergone continuous change and revision at the hands of the literary expert, and the final product is so unlike the original as to be almost unrecognizable. Chapters have been dropped, chapters have been added and chapters have been shifted about from one place to another, and the book has been as coherent at the end as at the beginning of the process. Early editions, with compromising contents, have been suppressed at great expense, and the book, as now published, is Mrs. Eddy’s work only in part. She says herself that read backward it has, in part, as much meaning as read forward; and those of you, who have attempted to read it forward, have discovered that, so read, it has precisely as little meaning as if read backward.

James Henry Wiggin, an ex-Unitarian minister, recently deceased, was for years Mrs. Eddy’s literary expert, putting all her productions, including her book, into good English, and into as coherent a form as she would permit. He wrote a sermon for Mrs. Eddy to preach, which she preached as her own, and subsequently incorporated, with some easily perceptible additions that conspicuously marred Mr. Wiggin’s work, in her God-inspired book, as a chapter entitled “Wayside Hints.” This chapter is left out of the latest editions, but it was given to the world with the rest in the “thirty-sixth” edition, as of God’s authorship.

Mr. Wiggin’s story of the manner in which a sermon of his became a part of her inspired volume is not a little amusing.

While acting as Mrs. Eddy’s literary friend and guide and helper, an edition of “Science and Health” was prepared for publication, completely written and completely set up in type and electrotyped; but as it contained a chapter that Mr. Wiggin regarded as in the nature of a libel upon several living persons, who were referred to and attacked by name, he endeavored to prevent the publication until that chapter had been eliminated. As the whole book had been electrotyped, the fifteen pages composing this chapter could not be taken out, unless fifteen others were inserted in their place, without involving new plates of all the succeeding pages, and a large consequent expense. So the publication was withheld, until in some manner fifteen pages could be furnished in substitution for the objectionable chapter.

Just at this time it happened that Mr. Wiggin prepared a sermon for Mrs. Eddy to preach. He attended the service at which the sermon was delivered by Mrs. Eddy as her own composition, although she read it from a manuscript furnished by him. As Mrs. Eddy attempted to read without spectacles, which she never used in public and always used in her private intercourse with Mr. Wiggin, her rendering of the sermon was, in Mr. Wiggin’s opinion, halting and ineffective, and it irritated him not a little that a production of his should be subjected to such handling in public. But after the service was over, Mr. Wiggin, walking down the aisle to speak with Mrs. Eddy, on every hand heard exclamations of approval in more or less superlative terms. “Wasn’t it grand! Wasn’t she inspired today! How beautiful her sermons are!” and so on, until Mr. Wiggin’s irritation was quite allayed, and he concluded Mrs. Eddy had not done badly after all. Reaching the platform, Mrs. Eddy leaned over and whispered, “How did it go off?” “Splendidly,” said Mr. Wiggin, “I have an idea.” “What is it?” inquired Mrs. Eddy. “This sermon is just what we need for those fifteen pages. All of these people have heard you preach it today, it will be assumed that you wrote it, and it will just about fill the space we want to fill in the book, and the publication need be no longer delayed.” “Fine idea!” said the preacher of Mr. Wiggin’s sermon. “Will you make it fit in those fifteen pages, so it can just take their place?” He said he would. He did, and it appeared as a chapter entitled “Wayside Hints,” in the thirty-sixth and some later editions.

Many a time have I heard Mr. Wiggin say, with a chuckle of amusement, that it was a source of much mirth to him to hear from time to time Mrs. Eddy’s devotees exclaim, with pious earnestness, that the chapter he had written, at so much per word, was the very most divinely-inspired portion of the divine volume.

Mrs. Eddy does not hesitate to declare herself the authorized interpreter of the Bible, authorized expressly by Christ himself. The rules of the Christian Science organization and the “Mother Church” were all formulated by Mrs. Eddy as under divine guidance, and she reaches so far into the proceedings of the so-called branch churches all over the land as to dictate every detail of the religious services, and has required that every so-called sermon in a Christian Science church shall be preceded by the following declaration: “The canonical writings, together with the word of our text-book [her book “Science and Health”], corroborating and explaining the Bible texts in their spiritual import and application to all ages, past, present and future, constitute a sermon undivorced from truth, uncontaminated and unfettered by human hypotheses, and authorized by Christ.”

That is either true or false. If it is true, all mankind should know it. If it is false, it is as wicked a falsehood as was ever told.

Having lectured to immense crowds upon Christian Science from one end of this country to the other, I have repeatedly had occasion to demand of official Christian Scientists in the audience, especially first readers, so called, in Mrs. Eddy’s churches, who as such had read the declaration I have just quoted, standing face to face with them, that they arise and give some scintilla of warrant or authority for the making of the declaration that Mrs. Eddy’s book was “authorized by Christ” as an interpretation of the Bible; but I have never had the slightest response, for the reason, of course, that no evidence can in any form be produced of the truth of this declaration falsely formulated and by her sacrilegiously required to be publicly read at every Sunday service in every Christian Science Church. All of these official Christian Scientists know that this declaration is without warrant, all of them know it is utterly false; and Mrs. Eddy herself makes it, deliberately knowing it to be untrue, knowing that she has and can produce no scrap of any kind of warrant for it, and she makes it and compels its repetition in her churches only to carry out her fraud and imposition that there is a sacred character to, and a Christian warrant for, her utterly bogus “religion.”

This, I think, is one of the most audacious things this utterly unprincipled woman in her whole career has dared to do; and I cannot conceive of any real Christian entertaining toward her, because of it, feelings other than those of pronounced resentment and indignation.

Nothing but an insane mind, a degenerate mind or a mind possessed of an overmastering passion to perpetrate a monstrous fraud upon the human race could, with the aid of the literary expert, have written “Science and Health,” and then have declared God to be its author; and no one but an utterly irreligious, irreverent, wicked person could invent the fiction of Christ’s authorization and compel its promulgation at “religious” services. But Mrs. Eddy has done precisely these things and her followers believe her irreverent and audacious claims.

Truly, “The absurdity the human race can’t swallow, hasn’t been invented yet!”

After Eddyism it may be assumed, I think, that man’s greatest ingenuity is unequal to the invention of an absurdity so immense as to exceed human gulpability. The more monstrous it is, the more eagerly it is clutched; and the more unintelligible it is, the greater is the certainty that it must have emanated from the All-wise.

But let me do Mrs. Eddy full justice. I think I have read everything she has written, and one sentence does indeed stand out vividly by itself, a solitary and perfect star of purest ray serene. Apropos of her basic contention (upon which the whole Christian Science superstructure rests, and without which it would fall to the ground) that there is no sensation in matter, she deprecates the spanking of children, because, she wisely says, “the use of the rod is virtually a declaration to the child’s mind, that sensation belongs to matter.”

Impossible as I have found it to reach the understanding of Christian Scientists by arguments addressed to their intelligence, I strongly incline to the idea that the spanking process would be likely to induce more or less vague impressions that sensation does actually reside in the material of which these living bodies are composed; and I respectfully submit that it would seem to follow that the most effective way of reaching Mrs. Eddy’s childish followers and curing them of their strange distemper would be the considerate, not too vigorous, application, all around, after the manner of the old woman who lived in a shoe, of the corrective maternal slipper.

Chapter VI

A Sham “Religion”

Mrs. Eddy describes herself, and has made her followers believe her to be, the “discoverer and founder of Christian Science.”

It is very easy to disprove her claim to discovery, and to show her foundation stones to have been theft and falsehood and fraud. As a pretended “religion” it is all hers, and no one else lays claim to it; as a mental healing system, it is none of it hers and her pretensions to originality are wholly fictitious.

Let it be remembered, always, that on the first page of her book, “Science and Health,” as published in 1898, and in many other editions, Mrs. Eddy makes her claim to originality and revelation in the following unequivocal terms:

“In the year 1866 I discovered the science of metaphysical healing and named it Christian Science. God had been graciously fitting me during many years for a final revelation of the absolute principle of scientific mind healing.”

If, prior to 1866, God had been “graciously fitting” her during many years for the “final revelation,” it appears that, years afterwards, God’s work was not quite completed and her character entirely sublimated. Some of her friends in Lynn, in 1881, fifteen years after the date of her alleged revelation, became of the opinion that she was not, even then, absolutely perfect and withdrew from her church there, giving, in writing, as their reason, “her departure from the straight and narrow road which alone leads to growth of Christ-like virtue, made manifest by frequent ebullitions of temper, love of money and the appearance of hypocrisy.” How accurate was this early estimate of the woman as shown by every known act of her life!

The writer of the series of articles in McClure’s Magazine on Christian Science told me she had heard the criticism that it contained only the bad things about Mrs. Eddy, and she had been asked why she had not incorporated such good things as might be said of her. She assured me she had searched the whole of Mrs. Eddy’s life for a kindly, a generous, an unselfish, a fine womanly deed, and would have been only too glad to have recorded it, but had not found one​—​not one such act in the long life of more than fourscore years.

Mrs. Eddy claims discovery, and commits herself not only as to the time of her “discovery,” but as to the manner of it, and each claim, that of discovery, that of the time and that of the manner, is wholly and demonstrably false.

In October, 1862, Mrs. Mary M. Patterson (now Mary Baker G. Eddy) placed herself in the hands of Dr. Phineas P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, for treatment, with the result described by herself over her own signature in the Portland Evening Courier, of November 7, 1862, as follows:

“Three weeks ago I quitted my nurse and sickroom en route for Portland. The belief of my recovery had died out of the hearts of those who were most anxious for it. With this mental and physical depression, I visited P. P. Quimby, and in less than one week from that time I ascended by a stairway of one hundred and eighty-two steps to the dome of the City Hall, and am improving ad infinitum. This truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if received understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their normal action and the mechanism of the body goes on undisturbed. That this is a science capable of demonstration, becomes clear to the minds of those patients who reason upon the process of their cure. The truth which he establishes in the patient, cures him (although he may be wholly unconscious thereof), and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease.”

This was Mrs. Patterson-Eddy’s professed understanding of Dr. Quimby’s “science,” in 1862, after having been three weeks under his treatment, and any one familiar with Christian Science will not need to be told that it is the same thing. This “truth,” which Mrs. Patterson-Eddy in 1862 said Quimby opposed to the “error” of placing intelligence in matter and which, when established in the patient, cured him, is the very same “truth” which in her book, with tireless iteration, Mrs. Eddy opposes to the very same alleged “error,” which thereupon effects the same alleged “cure.” Every “Scientist” will at once recognize the A B C of “divine science.”

Dr. Quimby, who is spoken of by a lady, who knew him well at the time Mrs. Patterson-Eddy was taking his treatment and stealing his system, as a man of “absolute sincerity and purity of thought and life,” died in January, 1866, and Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Patterson, not having conceived the plan of appropriating to herself the ideas and theories she had learned from him, almost immediately after his death wrote and published some verses about him, in which she compared Quimby with Jesus. She now speaks of him as a vulgar mesmerist or magnetic healer whose scribblings she put into grammatical form; she then, in 1866, glorified him as the Christian glorifies only the Saviour.

These verses, as here presented, are copied from a copy in Mrs. Eddy’s own handwriting, now in the possession of Mrs. Sarah Crosby of Waterville, Maine, to whom, in 1866, upon the death of Dr. Quimby, she sent them:

“Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, who Healed the Sick as did Jesus, in contradistinction to all Isms.

“Did Sack-cloth clothe the sun, and day grow night,

All matter mourn the hour with dewy eyes,

When Truth receding from our mortal sight,

Had paid to error her last sacrifice?

“Can we forget the power that gave us life?

Shall we forget the wisdom of our way?

Then ask me not amid this mortal strife—

This keenest pang of animated clay,

“To mourn him less! To mourn him more were just,

If to his memory ’twere a tribute given

For every earnest, solemn, sacred trust,

Delivered to us ere he rose to Heaven.

“Heaven but the happiness of his calm soul,

Growing in stature to the throne of God;

Rest should reward him who hath made us whole,

Seeking, ’tho tremblers, where his footsteps trod.”

M. M. Patterson.

Comment cannot add to the force of these verses. Inferior as poetry, they constitute proof and argument not all the falsehoods and sophistries in the imagination of Mrs. Eddy and her corps of official defenders can meet and overcome.

In 1866, Mrs. Eddy reverently declared that Dr. Quimby had “healed the sick as Jesus did;” today speaking slightingly of the good old man, she says, “his healing was never considered anything but mesmerism.” Then she gratefully acknowledged that he had made her “whole”; now she says that his mesmeric treatment gave her but slight, temporary relief. Then, not having contemplated the great theft, she spoke of the “earnest, solemn, sacred trust” delivered to her and others by the trustful man; now she repudiates him altogether, and denies that she received any helpful suggestion from him. Then she spoke of herself as “seeking, though a trembler, where his footsteps trod;” now she scornfully says, “I used to take his scribblings and fix them over for him and give him my thoughts and language which, as I understand it, were far in advance of his.”

Can anything Mrs. Eddy says be believed, after this? Could ingenuity contrive a more violent contradiction in human speech? Standing absolutely alone, would anything more be needed to convict her, out of her own mouth, of the basest ingratitude and the most reckless fraud? But this is only one of a thousand items in the accumulated proof!

If Christian Science healing is, as Mrs. Eddy and all other Christian Scientists claim, a revival of the method employed by Jesus, then Mrs. Eddy here, in her own handwriting, admits that she learned it from Quimby. There is no possible escape from one horn or the other of the dilemma​—​either it is not Christian, or it is not Mrs. Eddy’s. It requires even less intelligence than Mrs. Eddy’s friends bring to bear upon her teachings to comprehend the conclusiveness of this demonstration.

Mrs. Eddy did not discover the Christian Science method of attempting to heal. Let me make this a little clearer by demonstrating the falsity of her story as to the manner in which she made the discovery.

Dr. Quimby died on January 16, 1866, and the first day of February, 1866, Mrs. Patterson-Eddy, then living in Swampscott, a suburb of Lynn, fell upon the icy sidewalk and injured herself; and she now fixes upon her alleged miraculous recovery from this injury as the precise way in which she made her great discovery and received her revelation.

In a sketch, published by her concern, The Christian Science Publishing Society of Boston, and endorsed and approved by her as an authorized statement, is the following account of how Mrs. Eddy discovered Christian Science:

“The manner of the discovery has been vividly described. In company with her husband, she was returning from an errand of mercy, when she fell upon the icy curbstone, and was carried helpless to her home. The skilled physicians declared that there was absolutely no hope for her, and pronounced the verdict that she had but three days to live. Finding no hope and no help on earth, she lifted her heart to God. On the third day, calling for her Bible, she asked the family to leave the room. Her Bible opened to the healing of the palsied man, Matt. ix. 2. The truth which set him free she saw. The power which gave him strength she felt. The life divine which healed the sick of the palsy restored her, and she rose from the bed of pain healed and free.”

In her autobiography, “Retrospection and Introspection,” she says:

“It was in Massachusetts, February, 1866, and after the death of the magnetic doctor, Mr. P. P. Quimby, whom spiritualists would associate therewith, but who was in no wise connected with this event, that I discovered the science of Divine Metaphysical healing, which I afterward named Christian Science. The discovery came to pass in this way. During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.

“My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself and how to make others so.

“Even to the homeopathic physician who attended me, and rejoiced in my recovery, I could not then explain the modus of my relief. I could only assure him that the Divine Spirit had wrought the miracle, a miracle which later I found to be in perfect Scientific accord with divine law.”

Unfortunately for her reputation for veracity and fortunately for the truth of history. Dr. Alvin M. Cushing, the physician who attended Mrs. Eddy, or Patterson, upon this particular occasion, is still living and as an honored member of the profession is now practising in Springfield, Mass. Dr. Cushing expressly, and under oath, denies that he at any time believed or said that Mrs. Patterson was in a critical condition, or that there was no hope for her, or that she had but three or any other limited number of days to live, and he, with great positiveness, says that she did not, on the third day or any other day of her illness, say, or suggest, or pretend, or in any way whatever intimate that she had miraculously recovered or been healed, or that, discovering or perceiving the truth of the power employed by Christ to heal the sick, she had, by it, been restored to health, and he further says that, on the contrary, on the third day and later days of this illness, he himself gave her medicine, and again in August of the same year called upon her four or five times and gave her medicine.

Dr. Cushing still has his record book in which he, at the time, recorded each visit, every symptom and every particular of his treatment.

It must be a peculiar type of mind that can believe Mrs. Eddy’s story of this illness and recovery, after having the disinterested version of the attending physician. There is no reason why Dr. Cushing’s version should be doubted. There is no reason whatever why Mrs. Eddy’s should be believed.

But Mrs. Eddy herself furnishes, as usual, the most conclusive evidence of the falsity of this story of her miraculous cure. Her inventive faculty has ever been more remarkable than her memory, and what she has forgotten contradicts her.

On “the third day,” according to her latest version, she “arose from the bed of pain, healed and free,” but in a letter dated February 15, 1866, two weeks after the accident and while she was still suffering from its effects, she complained that she was then “slowly failing,” and implored Mr. Julius Dresser, to whom the letter was written, to help her.

Here is her story of the incident as written at the time:

Lynn, Feb. 15, 1866.

“Mr. Dresser,​—

“Sir: I enclose some lines of mine in memory of our much-loved Friend, which perhaps you will not think over-wrought in meaning, others must of course.

“I am constantly wishing that you would step forward into the place he has 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.

“Two weeks ago I fell on the sidewalk and struck my back on the ice and was taken up for dead, came to consciousness amid a storm of vapors from cologne, chloroform, ether, camphor, etc., but to find myself the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby.

“The physician attending said I had taken the last step I ever should, but in two days I got out of my bed alone, and will walk, but yet I confess I am frightened, and out of that nervous heat my friends are forming, spite of me, the terrible spinal affection from which I have suffered so long and hopelessly.… Now can’t you help me. I believe you can. I write this with this feeling: I think I could help another in my condition, if they had not placed their intelligence in matter. This I have not done and yet I am slowly failing. Won’t you write me if you will undertake for me if I can get to you?…

“Respectfully,

“Mary M. Patterson.”

Not to comment upon the singularity of the administration of chloroform and ether to an unconscious person, it sufficeth to call attention to the manner in which again Mrs. Patterson contradicts Mrs. Eddy. She furnishes the most effective kind of corroboration of Dr. Cushing, and the whole thing is clearly seen to be an invention, so far as any unusual or peculiar or miraculous features are concerned. It is clear that Mrs. Eddy did not discover Christian Science in the manner claimed.

So much for that particular, and particularly silly perversion of the truth, and invention of the fictitious.

Mrs. Eddy has herself made it especially easy to prove her revelation to be a fraud and has supplied us with a form of proof especially convincing. It is conceivable that a claim to revelation, however intrinsically idiotic, might be made, the legal disproof of which might be difficult; but if I today say God revealed something to me a year ago, and if you find many persons of excellent character who tell you that three, four, five, six and seven months ago I openly, by word of mouth, and in writing, times without number, admitted having learned the whole thing from John Smith, it will be impossible to believe that God revealed it to me and to me alone. This is precisely the case with Mrs. Eddy and her Christian Science “religion.” Her oft-repeated admissions of appropriation disprove her “revelation” completely.

Absolutely conclusive evidence of the fraudulent character of Mrs. Eddy’s claim to originality, either by discovery or revelation, has come to light, and any one, who will take the trouble to examine it, will have no difficulty in arriving at positive certainty in the matter.

Now, remembering Mrs. Eddy’s claim to discovery by revelation from God in 1866, let us see what she was doing in 1867, 1868, 1869 and 1870, the years immediately following her alleged discovery.

Some years ago I delivered an address in Boston upon Christian Science that was extensively reported in the newspapers, and a day or two following the delivery of the lecture a gentleman called at my office and introduced himself as Horace T. Wentworth of Stoughton, Mass. He asked me if I knew that in 1868, 1869 and 1870 Mrs. Eddy had lived with his mother, Mrs. Sally Wentworth, at Stoughton.

I assured Mr. Wentworth that I had not heard of it, and asked him what she was doing while there.

“Why, she was teaching my mother Dr. P. P. Quimby’s system of mental healing,” said Mr. Wentworth, “and I have in my pocket my mother’s copy of the manuscript from which Mrs. Eddy taught.”

Mr. Wentworth pulled the manuscript out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was entitled, on the front page, “Extracts from Dr. P. P. Quimby’s Writings.” I glanced through the manuscript and discovered that it was copiously corrected and interlined in Mrs. Eddy’s handwriting and contained an introduction signed by her name. Perusal of it showed it to be in every particular precisely the same thing as Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science teachings regarding the cure of disease.

This was a most interesting discovery, and I carefully investigated the whole situation, made several trips to Stoughton for the purpose, and talked with many residents of the place who had known Mrs. Eddy well, and were perfectly familiar with her history while there. I subsequently procured the whole story in writing, under oath, by those who knew it personally. Since then, others following my published accounts, have detailed the Stoughton episode and McClure’s Magazine published it in full.

It appears that in 1867, Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Patterson, went to Stoughton to live. She had separated from her second husband, Daniel Patterson, and not having then married her third husband, Eddy, called herself, and was known by the name of her first husband, Mary M. Glover.

Mrs. Glover first lived at Stoughton with one Hiram Crafts, and taught Crafts from manuscript a system of mental healing she told Crafts she had learned from Dr. P. P. Quimby. After learning it, Crafts undertook to practise it and had announcements printed and circulated declaring his system to have been the discovery of Dr. Quimby.

But Mrs. Glover and Mrs. Crafts did not seem to find one another’s society especially enjoyable, and for a time, Mrs. Crafts left Mrs. Glover in possession. In 1868, upon the invitation of Mrs. Sally Wentworth, Mrs. Glover moved to the Wentworths’ house at Stoughton, where she continued to live until 1870.

Mrs. Eddy’s writings will be searched in vain for any reference to Mrs. Wentworth, or to the fact that she spent about three years in the Wentworths’ house at Stoughton; but, in characteristic fashion, she hides the facts under this obscure and oracular utterance:

“I then (1866), withdrew from society, about three years, to ponder my mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind that should take the things of God and show them to the creature, and reveal the great Curative Principle, God.”

Mrs. Wentworth invited Mrs. Glover to live with her and teach her the Quimby science of mind healing, and that is what Mrs. Glover did during the three years she was a member of Mrs. Wentworth’s family. She “pondered her mission,” etc., by avowedly teaching Dr. Quimby’s alleged science of mind healing, and she gave Mrs. Wentworth a copy of her, Mrs. Glover’s, manuscript copy of Quimby’s writings. This copy of Mrs. Eddy’s copy of what she then said were Quimby’s writings, in Mrs. Wentworth’s handwriting and containing corrections and interlineations in the handwriting of Mrs. Glover-Eddy, is the manuscript now in the possession of Mrs. Wentworth’s son, Horace T. Wentworth of Stoughton, Mass.

During Mrs. Glover’s sojourn at Mrs. Wentworth’s, the household consisted, besides Mrs. Wentworth and her guest, of her husband, Mr. Alanson C. Wentworth, and their two children, Lucy and Charles O. Wentworth. Mr. and Mrs. Wentworth died in 1882, but Lucy and Charles O. and Horace T. Wentworth are still living, and they, with their cousin, Mrs. Catherine I. Clapp, who was much at their house during Mrs. Glover’s visit, have stated the facts under oath and in such a manner that they must be believed.

Lucy Wentworth, now Mrs. Arthur L. Holmes, was about seventeen years of age when Mrs. Glover left her mother’s house. Mrs. Holmes, who still lives at Stoughton, says that she well remembers Mrs. Glover’s visit, and that she was teaching her mother a system of mental healing she said she had learned from Dr. Quimby.

“‘It wasn’t safe for anybody to say anything to me against Mrs. Glover,’ says Mrs. Holmes. ‘She spent all her time teaching my mother her new science. I was around her constantly, would rather be with her than with any one else, and I often used to hear her say, “I learned this from Dr. Quimby.” It is one of the distinct recollections of my childhood.’”

Charles O. Wentworth, now of Avon, Mass., says he, too, well remembers Mrs. Eddy’s visit during the years 1868, 1869 and 1870, and that he many times heard her say she had learned her mental science from Dr. Quimby. He says she avowed it openly, and always spoke of it as Dr. Quimby’s system.

Horace T. Wentworth, who was married and so not living at home with his parents, but who was often at their house, adds his positive testimony. He says:

“Never at any time during the years she was at our house, from 1868 to 1870, did Mrs. Glover give the slightest hint that any one other than Dr. Quimby had had any share in the origin of the system of mental healing she was teaching my mother. It could not then have entered her mind to claim it for herself. That was an afterthought. I heard Mrs. Glover over and over again say she got it all from Quimby.”

Mrs. Clapp’s statement is even more specific than the others. She is own cousin to the Wentworths and frequented their house at the time Mrs. Glover was visiting them, and knew that Mrs. Glover was teaching Mrs. Wentworth the Quimby system.

When Mrs. Clapp was recently asked if she had ever heard Mrs. Glover-Eddy say that she learned her system from Dr. Quimby, she replied:

“Yes, and I am not likely to forget it. It is fixed in my memory by a very reprehensible proceeding of my own. You see, Mrs. Glover used to say this to everybody who came in. She wasn’t content with mentioning once or twice that she had learned this from Dr. Quimby, she repeated it so often that we girls got deadly tired of hearing it.

“Now Mrs. Glover not only said it to the point of wearying us, but she had a peculiar way of saying it, and I am ashamed to say that I used to mock her​—​I, a young lady grown, who ought to have known better than to make fun of a person so much older.

“She always tried to be very gracious to everybody and she tried so hard that it gave her graciousness a ridiculous touch. She would fold her hands softly in her lap, smile gently, nod her head slowly at almost every word, and say in a sweet voice, ‘I learned this from Dr. Quimby and he made me promise to teach it to at least two persons before I die.’

“Well, this tiresome iteration, always with the same emphasis and the same exaggerated graciousness, used to excite the derision of the girls, and when Mrs. Glover wasn’t in hearing, I would take her off. I would say, ‘I learned this from Dr. Quimby,’ etc., at the same time nodding my head with a great exaggeration of Mrs. Glover’s gentle inclination, and putting tremendous emphasis on the words she emphasized, and wearing a fixed smile.

“I know it was an awful thing to do,” added Mrs. Clapp, penitently, “especially for a grown-up girl, but it used to make my cousins laugh and that made me feel that I had done something clever. Anyway, you see how it has fixed it on my memory.”

Mrs. Clapp well remembered seeing Mrs. Wentworth copy Mrs. Glover’s copy of Dr. Quimby’s writing.

“I once went to the Wentworths’ to get something,” she said, “and Mrs. Wentworth was busy copying this manuscript. I went to the buttery to get what I wanted, but couldn’t find it, and called Mrs. Wentworth. She got up to get it for me, but before doing so she put Mrs. Eddy’s copy of the Quimby manuscript in the desk and locked it. I suppose I looked surprised that she should take such pains when she was only stepping across the room, for a moment, and she noticed my look, and said, ‘Mrs. Glover made me promise never to leave this manuscript even for a moment without locking the desk.’”

While Mrs. Wentworth was copying the Quimby manuscript, Mrs. Clapp was employed by Mrs. Glover to copy a manuscript of her own for publication. This manuscript contained the first expression of the ideas subsequently given to the world by Mrs. Eddy. When the book was completed, Mrs. Glover paid Mrs. Clapp for the work and took it to Boston, but could not get a publisher to accept it.

Mrs. Clapp was quite familiar with the appearance of the Quimby manuscript from seeing Mrs. Wentworth copying it​—​she was Mrs. Wentworth’s niece​—​and also from seeing Mrs. Glover take it out to correct some of the work which Mrs. Clapp was doing. That would happen in this way. Mrs. Clapp would complete the copying of a page of Mrs. Glover’s book. Mrs. Glover would appear to be dissatisfied with it; she would take from her desk the original Quimby manuscript, the one from which Mrs. Wentworth had been copying, and compare this original with the work Mrs. Clapp had done. Then she would tear up Mrs. Clapp’s page and write it all over again, consulting the Quimby manuscript as she did so, and Mrs. Clapp would have the copying to do over again.

The unmistakable inference was that Mrs. Eddy was making her book out of the ideas contained in the original Quimby manuscript. Mrs. Clapp, with the irreverence of girlhood, had scant respect for the weighty ideas contained in the Quimby-Glover book, and there was one particular idea which she used to scoff at and make fun of to her intimates. It was to this effect:

“The daily ablutions of an infant are no more natural or necessary than would be the process of taking a fish out of water every day and covering it with dirt to make it thrive more vigorously thereafter in its native element.”

Years afterward, Mrs. Clapp picked up a copy of “Science and Health,” and opened it to this identical sentence which had so often excited her girlish derision. It is on page 41, edition of 1898.

When Mrs. Wentworth died, in 1882, and the property was divided, the son Horace laid claim to the copy of the Quimby manuscript. He wanted it because it was in his mother’s handwriting (with the exception of Eddy’s corrections), and it would be a souvenir of her. He kept it with no other thought until now.

“But of late years,” said Mr. Wentworth, “as I have seen the amazing spread of this delusion, and the way in which men and women are offering up money and the lives of their children to it, I have felt that it is a duty I owe to the public to make it known.

“I have no hard feelings against Mrs. Eddy, no axe to grind, no interest to serve, I simply feel that it is due the thousands of good people, who have made Christian Science the anchorage of their souls and its founder the infallible guide of their daily life, to keep this no longer to myself. I desire only that people who take themselves and their helpless children into Christian Science shall do so with a full knowledge that this is not a divine revelation, but simply the idea of an old-time Maine healer.”

It may be assumed then, as proven, that as in 1868, 1869 and 1870 Mrs. Glover (Eddy) was teaching a system of mental healing she, at the time, said she had learned from Dr. P. P. Quimby, she couldn’t have discovered it herself in 1866. It now becomes interesting to know if there is any similarity between what we may call Quimbyism and Christian Science, between the teaching of Mrs. Glover-Eddy in 1870 and her teaching now.

On the outside, this Quimby-Glover manuscript is entitled, “Extracts From Doctor P. P. Quimby’s Writings,” and at the head of the first page, on the inside, it is further entitled, “The Science of Man, or The Principle Which Controls all Phenomena.”

There is a preface of two pages with Mary M. Glover’s name signed at the end. The “Extracts” are in the form of fifteen questions and answers, covering about thirty large pages, and are labeled, “Questions by Patients and Answers by Dr. Quimby.” The document contains an elaboration of Dr. Quimby’s mental healing system as taught by Mrs. Eddy, by her own acknowledgment, as late as 1870.

The contents of this Quimby-Glover manuscript having been communicated to Mr. George A. Quimby of Belfast, Maine, son of Dr. P. P. Quimby, he says, having compared it with his father’s writings in his possession, that it is a precise copy of them. He further says that an opportunity was afforded Mrs. Eddy to copy his father’s writings, as his father was accustomed to lend his manuscript to his patients, one of whom Mrs. Eddy was.

A perusal of this manuscript in comparison with Mrs. Eddy’s “Science and Health” shows, that every basic idea of Christian Science as a healing system was bodily appropriated by her from Dr. Quimby’s manuscripts and not obtained, as she says, by revelation from God. As contained in the manuscript and as taught by Dr. Quimby, there was no suggestion of a religious character to his teachings; the religious phase was an afterthought of Mrs. Eddy’s, as a means of facilitating the sale and distribution of her profit-yielding, copyrighted and “inspired” writings.

It may be here remarked that, at the outset, Mrs. Eddy especially deprecated the giving to Quimbyism, or Christian Science, a religious character, as I shall hereafter show in more detail, and she goes so far as to criticise the disciples of Jesus for founding, as she says, religious organizations and church rites.

Thus, at first, healing was the only phase of Christian Science. The religious feature was a subsequent invention.

Quimbyism, as contained in Mrs. Wentworth’s copy of Mrs. Glover’s copy of Dr. Quimby’s “Science of Man,” as revised and corrected in Mrs. Glover’s own handwriting, is compared with Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science as contained in her “Science and Health” in the following parallel passages from the two. A glance will show Dr. Quimby’s system of mental healing, as taught by Mrs. Glover, later Mrs. Eddy, in 1870, to be no other than the “Science of Metaphysical Healing” that Mrs. Eddy, formerly Mrs. Glover, now says was revealed to her in 1866:

Quimby: From Quimby’s “Science of Man,” as Expounded by Mrs. Eddy at Stoughton, 1868-69-70.

“If I understand how disease originates in the mind and fully believe it, why cannot I cure myself?”

Disease being made by our belief or by our parents’ belief or by public opinion, there is no one formula of argument to be adopted; but every one must fit in their particular case. Therefore it requires great shrewdness or wisdom to get the better of the error.” ....

Eddy: From Mrs. Eddy’s “Science and Health,” the Text-Book of the “Christian Science” She now Claims to have Discovered in 1866.

“Disease being a belief, a latent delusion of mortal mind, the sensation would not appear if this error was met and destroyed by Truth.”​—​Page 61, edition of 1898.

“Science not only reveals the origin of all disease as wholly mental, but it also declares that all disease is cured by mind.”​—​Page 62, edition of 1898.

Quimby:

“I know of no better counsel than Jesus gave to His disciples when He sent them forth to cast out devils and heal the sick, and thus in practice to preach the Truth, ‘Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.’ Never get into a passion, but in patience possess ye your soul, and at length you weary out the discord and produce harmony by your Truth destroying error. Then it is you get the case. Now if you are not afraid to face the error and argue it down, then you can heal the sick.”

Eddy:

“When we come to have more faith in the Truth of Being than we have in error, more faith in spirit than in matter, then no material conditions can prevent us from healing the sick and destroying error through Truth.”​—​Page 367, edition of 1898.

“We classify disease as error, which nothing but Truth or Mind can heal.”​—​Page 427, edition of 1898.

“Discord is the nothingness of error. Harmony is the somethingness of Truth.”​—​Page 172, edition of 1898.

Quimby:

“The patient’s disease is in his belief.”

“Error is sickness. Truth is health.”

Eddy:

“Sickness is part of the error which Truth casts out.”​—​Page 478, edition of 1898.

Quimby:

“In this science the names are given; thus God is Wisdom. This Wisdom, not an Individuality but a principle, embraces every idea form, of which the idea, man, is the highest,​—​hence the image of God, or the Principle.”

Eddy:

“God is the principle of man; and the principle of man remaining perfect, its idea or reflection​—​man​—​remains perfect.”​—​Page 466, edition of 1898.

“Man was and is God’s idea.”​—​Page 231, edition of 1898.

“Man is the idea of divine principle.”​—​Page 471, edition of 1898.

“What is God? Jehovah is not a person. God is principle.”​—​Page 169, edition of 1881.

Quimby:

“Understanding is God.”

Eddy:

“Understanding is a quality of God.”​—​Page 449, edition of 1898.

Quimby:

“All sciences are part of God.”

Eddy:

“All science is of God.”​—​Page 513, edition of 1898.

Quimby:

“Truth is God.”

“There is no other Truth but God.”

“God is Wisdom.”

“God is Principle.”

Eddy:

“Truth is God.”​—​Page 183, edition of 1898.

“Truth, God, is not the Father of error.”​—​Page 469, edition of 1898.

Quimby:

“Wisdom, Love and Truth are the Principle.”

Eddy:

“How can I most rapidly advance in the understanding of Christian Science? Study thoroughly the letter and imbibe the spirit. Adhere to its divine Principle, and follow its behests, abiding steadily in Wisdom, Love, and Truth.”​—​Page 491, edition of 1898.

Quimby:

“Error is matter.”

“Matter has no intelligence.”

“To give intelligence to matter is an error which is sickness.”

“Matter has no intelligence of its own, and to believe intelligence is in matter is the error which produces pain and inharmony of all sorts; to hold ourselves we are a principle outside of matter, we would not be influenced by the opinions of man, but held to the workings only of a principle, Truth, in which there are no inharmonies of sickness, pain, or sin.”

“For matter is an error, there being no substance, which is Truth in a thing which changes and is only that which belief makes it.”

“Christ was the Wisdom that knew Truth dwelt not in opinion and that matter was but opinion that could be formed into any shape which the belief gave to it, and that the life which moved it came not from it, but was outside of it.”

Eddy:

“Matter is mortal error,”​—​Page 169, edition of 1881.

“The fundamental error of mortal man is the belief that matter is intelligent.”​—​Page 122, edition of 1881.

“Laws of matter are nothing more or less than a belief of intelligence and life in matter, which is the procuring cause of all disease; whereas God, Truth, is its positive cure.”​—​Page 127, edition of 1881.

“There is no life, truth, intelligence, or substance in matter.”​—​Page 464, edition of 1898.

[It will be seen that every idea contained in this last passage, Mrs. Eddy’s famous “scientific statement of being,” the mental repetition of which constitutes Christian Science “treatment,” is taken from Dr. Quimby’s writings.]

This paralleling of Eddyism, or Christian Science, with Quimbyism shows that, as late as 1870, Mrs. Eddy professed to have learned from Quimby, that error is sickness; that belief is sickness; that discord is sickness; that there is no life, truth, intelligence, or substance in matter; that matter is error; that the belief of intelligence in matter is the cause of all disease; that Truth is God; that there is no other truth but God; that God is Principle; that Wisdom, Love and Truth are Principle; that Truth is health and cures sickness; that harmony, by destroying disharmony, cures disease; and, finally, that all disease originates in mind and is cured by mind alone.

And this is the sum total, the beginning and the end, of that strange thing Mrs. Eddy calls Christian Science, as it is contained and set forth in her book, “Science and Health.”

If the founder of Christian Science could be expected to give a candid answer to a plain question, might not some such respectful inquiry as the following at this point be pertinently propounded: If Mrs. Patterson, or Mrs. Glover, afterwards Mrs. Eddy, in 1868, 1869 and 1870 openly avowed that the “scientific mind healing” she then taught was the discovery of Dr. P. P. Quimby, when and how did Mrs. Eddy, formerly Mrs. Patterson and Mrs. Glover, discover that she had discovered it herself in 1866?

But the question will not be answered for the reason that the sworn evidence of the Wentworths and Mrs. Clapp, together with the paralleling of Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science of today with her version of Quimbyism of 1870 shows, as clearly as words can show anything, that Mrs. Eddy’s claim to having received, in 1866, a final revelation from God, who for many years had been fitting her to receive it, is an invention, a fiction, a fraud, a lie that for wickedness and cruelty surpasses any lie ever invented by hypocrisy and greed.

The only person living who can meet this testimony and answer it is Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy. Her newspaper puppets of the “Publication Committee” knew nothing about her at the time to which it relates. They have no knowledge whatever of the facts stated. They will affirm or deny anything they are told to affirm or deny; but their principal has maintained and will maintain discreet silence. She will not venture to deny that she wrote the letter to the Portland Courier, that she wrote the verses upon Dr. Quimby glorifying him as a second Jesus, that she lived at the Wentworths’ house during the years 1868, 1869 and 1870, and that she then taught from a copy of Quimby’s writings a mental healing system she then said she had learned from him.

Mrs. Eddy is bold, but not so bold as to give the lie direct to the sworn statements of Horace T. Wentworth, Catherine Isabel Clapp, Lucy Holmes and Charles O. Wentworth, all highly respected residents of the town of Stoughton. Mrs. Eddy will dare much; but she will hardly dare to dispute the evidence furnished by her own hand.

And silence is confession, and confession is acknowledgment of theft and falsehood and fraud, and hypocrisy beyond comparison.

Not upon such stones did the Jesus Christ, Whom Mrs. Eddy professes to emulate, construct the religion that bears His name; and there can be no greater irreverence than Mrs. Eddy’s calling her pretended religion “Christian,” and no greater absurdity than her calling it “Science.”

My purpose in showing Dr. Quimby’s authorship of Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science is to establish the falsity of her claim that God revealed it to her. The thing itself, as Dr. Quimby’s, is of no greater weight and of no more consequence than as Mrs. Eddy’s. Dr. Quimby and Mrs. Eddy were evidently upon the same intellectual plane, both uneducated and crude. He was a good and sincere and unselfish and trustful man, and she appropriated his ideas. They knew nothing of philosophy nor of science, and whether Christian Science be his or hers is of slight importance, except as the establishment of his authorship proves her to be the author of a fraud whose large proportions and successful workings challenge the kind of admiration one feels for the criminal whose great crime proves him to be a man of immense mental fertility and of profound understanding of human weakness.

When it is said that Mrs. Eddy stole her system from Dr. Quimby and then falsely pretended that she received it by revelation from God, her only response has been that the matter has been adjudicated by the courts, and it has been definitely settled that the charge is false. The adjudication in the courts had no bearing whatever upon this charge. One Edward J. Ahrens, a German adventurer, at one time an intimate of Mrs. Eddy’s, published copious extracts from her book, and, having been sued by her for infringement of copyright of her revelation and having failed to make any defense, the court adjudged his publications infringements of her copyright.

I am not aware that anyone has pretended that Mrs. Eddy did not write “Science and Health” in its crudest, original form, and is not entitled to the protection of copyright upon the book, but the fact that the court has decided that she is entitled to the protection of copyright, is no answer to the charge that certain claims and pretensions made in the book are false. The copyright, in her case, simply means that no one else has a right to publish her lies without her consent. To the simple minded, it may seem a little peculiar that Mrs. Eddy should insist upon exclusive rights to publish and sell, by procuring copyright, a book of which she says, not she, but God, was author and which she calls “God’s Book,” at a profit, not to God, but to her, of 500 per cent; but, as in the case of her three hundred dollar fee for twelve or seven lessons, to which I shall presently call attention, the worldly wisdom of her course has appeared in multitudinous ways, likewise multitudinous dollars!

It would seem like a waste of time to contend that God is not the author of “Science and Health;” that God, the All-wise, the All-loving, the All-powerful, did not wait nineteen hundred years after the death of Christ to complete the revelation of Himself made through Jesus; that of all the personalities who have lived upon this earth since the time of Jesus, the one selected by God to lead the world unto Him should be this uncultivated and vulgar woman, whose variegated career has been somewhat presented, and whose whole energies have been devoted to utilizing her pretended revelation for pecuniary profit. I say, it would seem to be an utter waste of time, were it not for the pathetic fact that thousands​—​sixty or seventy thousands​—​perhaps more​—​of the people of this country believe that Almighty God so acted.

It now being perfectly clear that Mrs. Eddy did not, as she says, receive Christian Science by revelation from God, she clearly has no warrant for pretending it to be a religion. As a religion, Christian Science is the shallowest fraud and imposture. It has no conceivable right to the name “Christian,” and every one of the beautiful churches erected in its honor is a monument simply to Mrs. Eddy’s deception and hypocrisy and lies and to the limitless gullibility of the human race, and every one of the many thousands of sincere and simple-minded people who at its services lift up their hearts in worship to God are the victims of an old woman’s insincere, mercenary appeal to their religious feelings.

No sane person can have followed this narrative thus far and not agree with me that, as a religion, there is no warrant for Christian Science, and those who will continue to the end will further agree with me that, as a healing system, it is just as fraudulent; that it kills the sweetest and tenderest emotions in the human heart by rooting out sympathy, charity and compassion; that there is no other hatred and vindictiveness equal to the hatred and vindictiveness of its founder and her leading votaries; that there is no other cruelty, no other greed, that can compare with theirs; that the so-called malicious animal magnetism, the witchcraft feature, is as wicked an invention as the human mind ever conceived, and that its attempted use for veritable assassination is as devilish as anything that could possibly emanate from the depths of hell; and, finally, that the inspired teaching of the three-or-four-times-married Mary Baker G. Eddy, regarding the most sacred and fundamental institution established among men, I refer to the institution of marriage, is so low and so vile that self-respecting people, when they come to understand it, must repudiate it from overwhelming shame. Insanity is not responsible for indecency; but those Christian Scientists who have not parted with their sanity, and are not in Christian Science for revenue only, will turn with horror from the woman and her work, when they know precisely what they are.

Surely one may be pardoned some warmth of indignation at the assumptions of this vulgar adventuress, this mercenary charlatan! It is difficult to think of them without impatience; it is impossible to speak of them without anger.

Chapter VII

A Bogus Healing System

Of course the successor to and equal of Jesus must perform miracles, and Mrs. Eddy has a stock of miracles on hand suited to the large, the very large, the extraordinarily large, swallowing capacity of those who ache for something real hard to take in and digest. Nothing could be too hard for her worshipers, and she gives free rein to her inventive faculty in suiting the miracle to the need.

Mrs. Eddy has ever been noted for her modesty, her retiring disposition and proneness to underestimate herself and her powers. “Has Mrs. Eddy lost her power to heal?” she asks, and with characteristic bashfulness and self-depreciation she replies, “Has the sun forgotten to shine and the planets to revolve around it?” Sooner shall the light of the sun pale, sooner the planets fly from their orbits, than Mrs. Eddy part with her power to heal!

So great was the healing influence that radiated from her personality that she sometimes healed unconsciously.

“It was not an uncommon occurrence in my own church,” she says, “for the sick to be healed by my sermons. Many pale cripples went into the church leaning on crutches, who went out carrying them on their shoulders.”

What an inestimable blessing it would be, if a person possessing such power should make a visit to the hospital in Boston for crippled children, and preach a little sermon there to the young unfortunates! Mrs. Eddy has but to step into her automobile and in twenty minutes she may be at this hospital, and by putting forth the power she says she has and healing the pale little cripples, as she says she has healed others, bring the whole world to her feet.

In a letter to a friend written in March, 1896, she says over her autograph, but speaking of herself, as she often does, in the third person:

“While Mrs. Eddy was in a suburban town of Boston she brought out one apple blossom on an apple tree in January, when the ground was covered with snow; and in Lynn demonstrated in the floral line some such small things.”

That isn’t so remarkable as if an orange blossom had been brought out on the apple tree (as it would doubtless have been if Mrs. Eddy had thought of it), but it was quite an accomplishment, nevertheless. Mrs. Eddy’s “treatment,” probably of the “absent” variety, sent a summer’s warmth through the earth’s frozen surface and tingling with animation the sap in the roots sent it by leaps and bounds through the trunk into the ice-laden branches, and, presto! a tender, pink-white blossom, pushing its way through the ice, appeared.

Mrs. Eddy is too reticent and too diffident. Why does she not tell us of the other equally well authenticated occasion upon which she brought out a few stars in the sky when the sun was at high noon, and “demonstrated” in the astronomical line some such large things.

I have called certain of Mrs. Eddy’s representations lies, and the word “lie” is a very disagreeable word. It is bad enough to have to use it in characterization of the utterances of a man; but it is still worse to apply it in all its brutality to a woman. I have endeavored to find another word, meaning precisely the same thing, that isn’t so intrinsically offensive; but there is no other word that suits my purpose and the occasion as does this word “lie,” and so I am compelled to adhere to it, even at the risk of being charged with lack of gallantry in my attitude toward a woman. Gallantry really has nothing to do with my undertaking. Truth and lies are sexless, and the only question is, has Mrs. Eddy told the truth?

But further word about lies. There are some lies that are not so bad as other lies, and there have been lies that have called forth commendation. I recall in that wonderful story, Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” the incident of the lie told by the Sister Superior of the convent in order to save from the brutal grasp of the law incarnate, as represented by Javert, the sublime personality of the transformed ex-convict, and Hugo’s beautiful eulogy of that lie and that woman:

“Oh, holy woman, it is many years since you were upon this earth; you have rejoined in the light you sister, the virgins, and your brothers, the angels; may that falsehood be placed to your credit in Paradise!”

There are lies arising merely out of a tactful wish to spare people’s feelings, and there are the little white lies of social life that nobody especially reprobates; but there are lies that are intrinsically of an infamous character, and I can conceive of no falsehood more infamous than that which, proceeding from a wholly mercenary motive, is deliberately planned and put forth in order to alienate people from a religion in which is the hope of salvation and immortality, and from a scientific medical system in which is the hope of bodily health and life. These are the precise kind of lies of which this woman is most prolific, and which she distributes most lavishly.

The passage I am now to quote is taken from a communication signed by Mrs. Eddy and published by her in the New York Sun for December 16, 1898, and it contains the boldest and wickedest of these most bold and most wicked lies.

In this letter Mrs. Eddy said:

“I challenge the world to disprove what I hereby declare. After my discovery of Christian Science, I healed consumption in its last stages, that the M.D.’s, by verdict of the stethoscope and the schools, declared incurable, the lungs being mostly consumed. I healed malignant tubercular diphtheria and carious bones that could be dented by the finger, saving them when the surgeon’s instruments were lying on the table ready for their amputation. I have healed at one visit a cancer that had so eaten the flesh of the neck as to expose the jugular vein so that it stood out like a cord.”

She manufactured new lungs, offhand. She healed carious bones, instantaneously. She put forth the divine power God had conferred upon her, and at one visit healed that most frightful of all diseases, a malignant cancer.

This statement is either true or false. If it is true, the whole world should know it, for its truth would prove Mrs. Eddy to have the power to triumph over death, and when the king, or the queen, of death shall come to earth, all knees will touch the ground. No one can love another very much and not be willing to go upon his knees before the man or the woman who can protect that loved one forever from the hand of death; and I should want to be the very first to prostrate myself in all humility and gratitude before the conqueror of death. And if, on the other hand, Mrs. Eddy’s statement is false, absolutely false, a fiction made out of whole cloth, then it is important that such falsity should be clearly shown, and shown throughout the world that all mankind may know the wickedness of her falsification. I affirm, and shall show, it to be false in every particular.

Mrs. Eddy’s statement gives no names, dates, localities, nor any substantial thing to enable any one to investigate any of these professed miracles, and every effort to induce her to particularize ended, as always, in failure. There would have been as much, and as little, sense in a challenge to the world to disprove the green-cheese hypothesis of the structural composition of the moon.

In the issue of the Sun of January 1, 1899, Dr. Charles A. L. Reed, a prominent physician of Cincinnati, published a challenge to Mrs. Eddy to prove the truth of her miraculous cures. He offered to furnish her cases identical with those she said she had healed, and he said that, if she would heal any one of them, he would proclaim her omnipotence from the housetops; and if she would cure all or half of them, he would cheerfully crawl upon his knees that he might but touch the hem of her garment.

But dumbness possessed Mrs. Eddy from that time forth. Probably she didn’t want to be glorified from the housetops; she didn’t wish to have any mere medical man crawling at her feet.

As Mrs. Eddy furnishes no specifications, it is impossible, of course, to meet her allegations in the ordinary way; but I purpose, nevertheless, to satisfy every intelligent mind that there is not an atom of truth in her professed miracles.

If you have the power over life and death here claimed by Mrs. Eddy, when do you employ it? You employ it, do you not, when some one you greatly love is suffering, when some one dear to you is approaching the grave? If you have the power to save human life, you save the life, first of all, of those whom you most love; and if you know those you dearly love to be suffering torture from frightful disease and that, if the progress of the disease is not stopped, the hand of death will inevitably snatch them, if you know these things and put forth no particle of power, make no effort to allay the suffering or stay the progress of the disease, then it becomes clear that you have no such power, or that you are a monster of inhumanity, does it not?

This is the case with Mrs. Eddy. If she has had the power she claims, she has the most unfeeling heart that ever beat in a human breast; for she has never put forth the power to save those she most loved as they stood on the very edge of the grave.

In the summer of 1902, there died in the city of Boston, after seven years of illness, Mrs. Mary Ann Baker, the widow of Mrs. Eddy’s deceased brother, Samuel Baker. The relations between the sisters-in-law had, for years, been most cordial, and I have seen and read Mrs. Eddy’s autograph letters in which she professed, only a few days before her sister’s death, the greatest affection for her.

Mrs. Baker’s disease, of which Mrs. Eddy from the beginning to the end was fully informed, was cancer of the breast, and her suffering during the seven years of illness from that awful disease may be better imagined than described.

At Mrs. Eddy’s request, Mrs. Baker had submitted to Christian Science “treatment,” the healer selected by Mrs. Eddy being Mrs. Janette E. Weller, a close friend of Mrs. Eddy and her confidential representative in Boston; but Mrs. Baker derived no benefit from it whatever, and died in the care of Dr. H. S. Dearing of Boston.

From one end of the country to the other I have asked Christian Scientists this question:

If Mrs. Eddy, for hire, had healed, at one sitting, a cancer that had so eaten into the neck of a stranger that the jugular vein stood out like a cord, why, I ask, why in the name of God, did she not, for her love’s sake, stay the progress of the loathsome disease that for seven years ate into the breast of the sister she loved? Until Mrs. Eddy or one of her professed disciples has answered that question, let her not look for followers amongst people who know of this incident and have hearts; for she hadn’t the power or she hadn’t the wish to save her sister, and the want of power would prove the baseness of her falsehoods, as the want of a wish would prove the adamantine quality of her heart.

If Mrs. Eddy possessed this miraculous power, why did she permit her third husband to die of heart disease by her side, when one treatment of hers would have saved him? Why did she not reach out her all-powerful hand and save her own granddaughter, the child of her only son, when piteous appeal to her was made by the child’s father? Why, instead of putting forth the slightest personal effort, did she recommend the employment of a Boston healer, so called, a retired sea captain, one Joseph Eastaman by name, to give absent treatment in Boston to the poor girl dying in South Dakota? Imagine a retired sea captain sitting in his office in Boston, closing his eyes, placing his aged hand upon his vacant forehead and trying to think health and life into Mrs. Eddy’s granddaughter nearly two thousand miles away! If Mrs. Eddy could have saved her own flesh and blood and did not, what must have been the condition of that thing Mrs. Eddy calls her heart? Who that has human feeling in his heart would not give his life for his child or his grandchild? and this woman, posing as the successor to and as like unto Him who said, “Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven,” and claiming to have performed miracles equal to any ascribed to Him in the Gospels, did absolutely nothing to save the life of her granddaughter!

If Mrs. Eddy had been the miracle worker she claims to have been, why did she turn poor, devoted Mrs. Leonard, herself a renowned healer of the cult, who had slaved in her household for years, and had for months and years been dying of diabetes under her very eyes​—​why did Mrs. Eddy turn Mrs. Leonard out of the house at Concord, New Hampshire, shortly before her death of that distressing disease? Was it because Mrs. Eddy didn’t wish the striking discredit of her professed powers that would follow Mrs. Leonard’s death upon the Eddy premises? Having the power to save her life, as she claims, all Mrs. Eddy did for Mrs. Leonard was to ask her, when death became imminent, to be so good as to go away and die elsewhere.

Mrs. Eddy estimates values in terms of dollars and cents, and yet, possessing the mastery over death, she put forth no effort to save the life of Joseph Armstrong, her close friend of many years, a director in her church from its foundation, her personal business manager who had made a fortune for her, and yet departed this life of pleurisy with effusion in the summer or fall of 1907. If Mrs. Eddy could save any human life, she would have saved this one, so pecuniarily precious above all other lives to her.

If she had such marvelous power, why did she allow her personal coachman, the man who had sat on the seat of her carriage as she took her daily drive, to die in her house of a disease of which he had been “completely cured” by Christian Science? Why did she let her close, personal friend, her leading lecturer and proselyter, Edward E. Kimball, die in the prime of life and at the height of his usefulness to her cause? Why has she turned a deaf ear to the prayers that have been addressed to her by broken-hearted parents who have so often journeyed to her home to beg her to exert her God-like power to save from the grave their dying child? Why has she for thirty years and more refused to even try to heal any one, to attempt to allay any pain however fearful, or save any human life however beautiful and however precious?

If Mary Baker G. Eddy has the power she boldly claims to have, and if she has wrought the miracles she says she has wrought, she has that power, then, I say, she has the heart of a very fiend; for not once in thirty years has she consented to try, out of ordinary humanity, to prevent suffering or to save life.

The truth is, Mrs. Eddy’s miraculous cures are all frauds, every one of them, and the failure of attempted healings would prove them to be frauds, and she does not wish to so discredit herself. She never healed any one of any serious disease. She never in her life had any curative power whatever, and she has been wise indeed not to advertise the fact by attempting to cure. Her man, Alfred Farlow, the official, highly paid and carefully coached spokesman of her cult, and its leading press agent, admitted, in response to my questioning and when testifying recently under oath and subject to cross examination, that he did not know of any cure ever having been made by Mrs. Eddy of any organic disease in her life, but stiff leg; and he said that, in his understanding as a high practitioner of the Christian Science art of healing, a stiff leg is an organic disease.

When I entered upon my investigation of the matter, I believed in the reality of some of the professed cures of Christian Science, even of organic disease, but closer acquaintance with the subject has satisfied me that they are, without exception, false pretensions or honest delusions. I have known of the most honest, but erroneous, belief in cure by Christian Science, I have known people so resolutely to deny to themselves the reality of disease, that they have come to believe in its unreality; and one case has come to my notice of a poor woman’s insistence with her dying breath that she had been healed of an incurable disease and was then perfectly well, while her death within a few hours was the sad witness to the delusive character of her “cure.”

Perhaps the most impressive case of this delusive cure of incurable disease is that of the Earl of Dunmore. He was Christian Science’s show convert. His personality was always in the foreground, he always sat in the front row upon the platform and his name was always in the papers.

In March, 1907, he published in the Cosmopolitan Magazine an account of his conversion to Christian Science, which was due, he said, to his having been healed by it of a disease an eminent London surgeon had pronounced incurable. The Earl of Dunmore, when he published that article, doubtless believed it was true. He was perfectly sincere, but his death, within a few weeks after the publication of his conversion through cure, his death of the very disease pronounced incurable by the London doctor, was pathetic and convincing testimony to his mistaken opinion that he had been cured and to the accuracy of the medical diagnosis that his disease was incurable.

Again and again the most persistent effort has been made to induce Christian Science healers to give some reasonable proof of their powers; but they as persistently refuse to submit any alleged cures to anything like scientific scrutiny. There has never been a scientifically established Christian Science cure. The “healers” confess that they are, nay even boast that they are, incompetent to diagnose disease. If they can’t determine the presence of disease, how then can they determine its cure? Mrs. Eddy herself goes so far as to say that ignorance of all departments of the science of medicine is an aid in the cure of disease, according to her system. What value then is to be attached to anything any of them say about disease, if they are completely ignorant concerning it? And it being a fundamental article of their faith to deny the reality of disease, how can they admit its reality, however manifest in their patients, without stultifying themselves? Is it not superlatively absurd to be in the slightest degree influenced by anything any of these monomaniacs, or fakers, can possibly say upon a subject of which they openly profess to know, and boast that they know, absolutely nothing?

Besides, and let me emphasize this statement, there is not a Christian Science healer, in good and regular standing anywhere in the world, who tells the truth, or tries to tell the truth, or could tell the truth if he tried. They know that suffering is real, they know disease is real, they know that death is the most positive of all realities, and yet they perpetually affirm the unreality of all these things. Every former healer, who has reformed, or recovered his sanity and given up pretending to heal by denying the reality of a condition he is attempting to change, will tell you he lied perpetually when practising so-called Christian Science; for to admit the reality of disease or suffering or death, however confident of its existence, is to deny the faith and pronounce Mrs. Eddy to be a fraud.

Let me here, parenthetically, call attention to another phase of this thing. Not only are these unrealities proclaimed, but the reality of sin is in like manner denied. If sin is unreal, to commit sin is nothing, and no iniquity is so great as to be morally reprehensible. There is no such thing as morality or immorality, if sin is unreal; and any one who proclaims the unreality of sin, if he have any influence in the community, is about as harmful a member of society as can exist.

The denial of suffering and death, the denial of poverty and sin, have had a markedly observable effect in Christian Science circles in drying up the springs of the sweetest and tenderest of human feelings. If none of these things really exist, there can be no occasion for charity, for compassion, for sympathy, and to give expression to any of these sentiments is to admit the reality of the things Mrs. Eddy affirms to be unreal. One cannot be a Christian Scientist and have in his heart the Christ-like emotions of sympathy and charity and compassion. It is said that the faces of Christian Scientists wear a perpetual smile. It is the stereotyped smile of affected cheerfulness and it covers a heart from which the most humane and attractive qualities have been, as nearly as may be, rooted out. But to return to the healers.

I know a woman who was a successful healer for fifteen years and as conscientious as any of them, and she is now frank enough to say that she never healed any one of any real disease or serious indisposition in all that time, and doesn’t know of any other healer who did. They simply fool themselves and their patients by denying the reality of disease so long as there is breath in the body, and when death occurs and actually confronts them, they deny the reality of death. Could absurdity further go?

Perhaps it is due to their belief in the unreality of death, that they permit no funerals in their churches; perhaps, also, it may be due to their unwillingness, from a business standpoint, to admit that Christian Scientists, young and old, die just as do the benighted people who have not bowed down to Mrs. Eddy.

Surely, if the healings of Christian Scientists were realities, once a convert would mean always a convert; but it is a fact that people are coming out of Christian Science as rapidly as they are going in, and the more intelligence they have the more quickly they abandon the thing when they come to understand what it is. If you are all right in the region of the brain and all right in the region of the heart, you won’t tarry very long in the Christian Science camp. I know many ex-Christian Scientists who denounce it as roundly as I do and declare it to be a fraud in all its aspects. I could name hundreds of people, formerly zealous followers of Mrs. Eddy, who now repudiate her with scorn and contumely. Would they do this if she were in fact the miracle worker she claims to be, and if Christian Science were in fact the sovereign antidote to sickness, sin and death?

The following is taken from a letter recently received from a gentleman of exceptional intelligence:

“I have been connected with that church for five years and have lately had my eyes opened to the most cold-blooded skin game conceivable under the guise of a religion. Having conducted a Christian Science sanitarium for three years, I am in possession of facts unknown to any but Christian Scientists, and to only a few of the inner circle of grafters. I was a student of medicine at Harvard in the 70s, am a B.A. of the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and ought to have known better​—​but there are others.”

Christian Science is a “skin game” and the powers that be in Christian Science are the “inner circle of grafters”! Strange language this to be applied to a “religion” and its leading officials by a former believer; but it is precisely as former Christian Scientists, men and women, speak of the thing and the people they have repudiated.

Cures of real or imaginary illness are sometimes effected in very extraordinary ways. Being recently in San Francisco, I talked with a friend, a lawyer, there who had gone through the experience of the earthquake. The house in which he was born and in which he lived was burned to the ground after its contents had been dragged out and heaped up upon a vacant lot, and he turned from his law office, his library shelves crowded with books, no one of which he had an opportunity to save from the devastating flames. The experience was an intensely distressing and exhausting one. For two days and two nights he did not get a wink of sleep. Prior to the earthquake and fire, he had been a constant sufferer from the most excruciating headaches. Not a headache has he had since! Cured by earthquake!

I talked with another gentleman, and he told me that his mother-in-law had been bedridden for five years, and not once in that time had put her foot upon the floor. She had not attempted to walk because she was positive she was unable to walk and her death was daily expected. As the flames approached the region of her residence, my friend and his wife started off in different directions to find some form of conveyance to carry their mother to a place of safety, and when they returned, in about an hour, she had vanished. Unaided, she had gotten up, dressed herself, and walked between two and three miles! Cured by conflagration!

Marvelous cures these, almost in the nature of miracles; and yet even a Christian Scientist would smile disdainfully if earthquake and conflagration were seriously prescribed for headache and paralysis.

No doubt people have recovered of illness while under Christian Science treatment; just as they have when under no treatment; but the Christian Science inane treatment was no more the cause of the recovery than was the absence of treatment of any kind.

There is a great deal of delusive sickness, which is easily cured by a putting away of the delusion, and there was never yet any, but a delusive, cure by Christian Science of an organic disease​—​not one. Will Mrs. Eddy and all her healers and followers throughout the world be able to add one moment, one breath, to the life of Mrs. Eddy herself, when the hour of her death has arrived? No, deny the reality of disease and death as they may, it comes to them one and all, just as to others, when the angel of death approaches and beckons from the darkness that closes upon their drooping eyes.

I am sure that there can be no doubt in any honest, clear-thinking mind that has followed me thus far, that all of these monstrous and irreverent pretensions of the leader and founder of Christian Science are wholly false, and I am equally confident that I shall establish in the mind of those who go with me to the end of my showing, that Mrs. Eddy’s frauds have had their incentive in a purely mercenary motive; that she has claimed to have received a revelation from God and equality with Jesus and the performance of miracles for the purpose alone of fooling people into placing an extraordinary value upon her valueless teachings for which she has made extortionate charges; that she has claimed to be the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, “the woman clothed with the sun,” and that her book, “Science and Health,” was the little book held in the hand of the angel, that she is herself the feminine impersonation, as Jesus was the masculine impersonation, of the immaculate idea, and that, not she, but God was the author of her book, solely and only that she might build up a powerful organization and a large fortune. Money and power are the explanations of Mrs. Eddy’s frauds, her lies, her blasphemies, I will even say of her crimes, for when crime could, as she believed, be accomplished through mental effort, maliciously employed for the destruction of her enemies, she has not hesitated so to seek its accomplishment, and her whole career, for thirty or forty years past, has been the crime of obtaining money by false pretenses.

Chapter VIII

Immeasurable Greed

Let us now go with some particularity into these charges that I make against Mrs. Eddy. I charge that she has been and is wholly mercenary; that her pretended revelation, her pretended exceptional character as successor to Jesus, her pretended marvelous curative powers, are dishonestly invented and put forth, first, as a means of making money, and then as a means of acquiring despotic power.

First, as to the mercenary motive.

Mrs. Eddy’s activity as a teacher of Christian Science began in the year 1870, after leaving Stoughton and going to Lynn, Massachusetts. She was then in her fiftieth year, and from the time of her marriage to Glover in 1843 had been extremely poor. Christian Science, at the very outset, took on a money-making character. Her familiarity with Quimby’s teachings, transformed into a discovery of her own, and then into a revelation from God, became with her a business asset to be utilized for revenue only.

In the introduction to her “Science and Health,” published in 1898, Mrs. Eddy says that her “first pamphlet on Christian Science was copyrighted in 1870, but it did not appear in print until 1876, as she had learned that this science must be demonstrated by healing before a work on the subject could be profitably published.” I emphasize the word “profitably.” At the very start there was the resolution in the woman’s heart that this “science,” ultimately to become a “religion,” was not to be given to the world until it could be published with profit to her, and from the beginning, until now, profit has been her first and main consideration.

In the Banner of Light, the organ of the spiritualists, of July 4, 1869, and three years after the date she now claims as the time of the “revelation,” Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Glover, published the following advertisement:

“Any person desiring to learn how to heal the sick can receive of the undersigned instruction that will enable them to commence healing on a principle of science with success far beyond any of the present modes. No medicine, electricity, physiology or Hygiene required for unparalleled success in the most difficult cases. No pay is required unless the skill is obtained. Address Mrs. Mary B. Glover, Amesbury, Mass., Box 61.”

One is reminded of the flaunting advertisements of the cut-rate drug stores, guaranteeing a cure by a liberal use of patent medicines or a return of the money.

Mrs. Eddy started out with the guarantee system, no skill imparted, no money required; but it may be believed that the guarantee system was speedily abandoned. There was no money in a guarantee of skill to heal disease through Mrs. Eddy’s teachings, and a change was speedily made to the permanently-adopted system of “cash in advance.”

It appears that, as to teaching, there was a progressive scale of charges. First it was whatever she could get; then $100 in advance, with ten per cent royalty on the students’ subsequent income from practice, and $1,000 if, having learned the system, he did not care to practise it; then $300 for twelve lessons, cash “strictly in advance,” and ultimately $300 for seven lessons, “cash strictly in advance.”

I have examined the court record in two litigations instituted by Mrs. Eddy (years after God had, as she says, selected her for her divine mission), for the recovery of money alleged by her to be due upon a contract reading as follows:

“We, the undersigned, do hereby agree, in consideration of instructions and manuscripts received from Mrs. Mary B. Glover, to pay her $100 in advance, and ten per cent annually on the income that we receive from practicing or teaching the same. We also do hereby agree to pay the said Mary B. Glover $1,000 in case we do not practice or teach the science she has taught us.”

The Banner of Light advertisement was dated July 4, 1869, and one of the contracts is dated August 17, 1870, so it will be seen how brief was the duration of Mrs. Eddy’s guarantee system of operating.

I think, in all her lawsuits for the recovery of tuition Mrs. Eddy never prevailed after a hearing upon the merits, and in one of them, the Judge, who tried her case, after having heard her testimony in full, said:

“I do not find any instruction given by her nor any explanations of her ‘science’ or ‘method of healing,’ which are intelligible to ordinary comprehension, or which could in any way be of value in fitting the defendant as a competent and successful practitioner of any intelligible art or method of healing the sick. And I am of opinion that the consideration for the agreement has wholly failed, and I so find.”

This finding of the court is interesting as a judicial estimate, based upon her own sworn testimony, of the value of Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science, which has never been any more intelligible to any one else than it was to the learned Judge.

In 1881, Mrs. Eddy established what she called the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, which was an institution for the turning out of Christian Science healers. Her adopted son and husband, with herself, constituted the faculty of this remarkable institution, and the entire college course consisted of twelve lessons. The following is taken from an advertisement in the Christian Science Journal, Mrs. Eddy’s personal organ, for September, 1886, under the heading, “Massachusetts Metaphysical College, Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy, President, 571 Columbus Ave., Boston, Mass.”:

“The collegiate course in Christian Science metaphysical healing includes twelve lessons. Class convenes at 10 a.m. The first week, six consecutive lessons. The term continues about three weeks. Tuition, three hundred dollars. Tuition for all strictly in advance.”

Remember that this was Mrs. Eddy’s charge fifteen years after God had, by revelation, as she says, freely imparted to her what she was here advertising to sell at the rate of twenty-five dollars per lesson, cash “strictly in advance.” Mrs. Eddy’s was a strictly cash business, no trust, no “revelation” C.O.D., or on the installment plan, and no money returned however dissatisfied with the purchase.

Referring to this charge of three hundred dollars for twelve lessons, Mrs. Eddy, in her book, “Retrospection and Introspection,” has perpetrated one the funniest passages to be found in all literature:

“When God impelled me to set a price on Christian Science mind healing,” she says, “I could think of no financial equivalent for the impartation of a knowledge of that divine power which heals; but I was led to name three hundred dollars as the price for each pupil in one course of lessons at my college; a startling sum for tuition lasting barely three weeks. This amount greatly troubled me. I shrank from asking it, but was finally led by a strange Providence to accept this fee. God has since shown me in multitudinous ways the wisdom of this decision.”

The idea of setting a price on Christian Science mind healing never occurred to Mrs. Eddy until God called it to her attention and impelled her to it. Unaided, it was impossible for her to have thought of or wished to establish a financial equivalent for the impartation of a knowledge of that “divine power which heals,” but, led by Divine Providence, she finally consented to name three hundred dollars as the price. God, from his seat at the center of the universe, turning His attention from the laws that hold the spheres in their orbits, leaning earthward, whispered in the attentive woman’s ear, “Mary, a price should be charged for my word. It is a private snap, all your own, and three hundred dollars is about the proper figure.” So troubled was this diffident person by the divine command, that she positively shrank, retreated before it with her hands clasped tight behind her. How persistent must the Almighty have been to have overcome such hesitancy! How He must have labored to convince the woman that His revelation was expressly designed for her pecuniary profit. But God triumphed and Mrs. Eddy yielded, and subsequently in multitudinous ways Providence demonstrated to her the wisdom of her decision​—​multitudinous ways​—​and multitudinous dollars.

So shrinkingly did Mrs. Eddy prevail upon herself, finally, to accept this God-ordained financial equivalent for “impartation of the divine power that heals” to those who could afford to pay in advance for it at the rate of twenty-five dollars per hour, that a large imagination may possibly conceive of the struggle with herself necessary to enable her to bring suit in the courts to recover from those she had been foolish enough to trust, notwithstanding her noble resolution to carry on a strictly cash business; and surely it will be quite impossible for any one, however gifted with imaginative faculty, to realize what the poor creature must have suffered to overcome the “shrinking” that possessed her modest soul so far as to enable her to increase her charge by almost a hundred per cent, as she did in a couple of years.

If we may judge by results, it must be admitted that the wisdom, the commercial wisdom, of her decision, whether shown by God or not, was quite clearly demonstrated, as Mrs. Eddy says that “during seven years some four thousand students were taught by me (her) in this college.” Four thousand students, at three hundred dollars per student, for a “college” course of twelve lessons! Four thousand times three hundred equals one million two hundred thousand, and one million two hundred thousand dollars may be said to be fairly reasonable compensation for instruction, even in Christian Science, covering a period of seven years, especially as it was all in the family. A family of three, even three adults, as frugal and thrifty as these, could comfortably provide themselves with the necessaries of life upon an income of one hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year.

Mrs. Eddy has put herself to some trouble to show that she got the full three hundred dollars from every one of the four thousand students. I don’t think she did, but I have no doubt she tried to. However, she says she did, in these words:

“I wrote ‘Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures,’ taught students for a tuition of $300 each and seldom taught without having charity scholars, sometimes a dozen or upwards in one class. Afterwards, with touching tenderness, those very students sent me the full tuition money. However, I returned this money with love; but it was again mailed to me in letters begging me to accept it, saying, ‘Your teachings are worth much more to me than money can be.’”

God had decided that three hundred dollars was a financial equivalent for the teaching; but the grateful students deemed its value beyond financial computation. Presumably the payment of the large tuition was, in itself, a means of grace and power, just as those who have paid the healers’ bills most promptly have recovered most speedily.

According to its founder, “Christian Science demonstrates that the patient who pays whatever he is able to pay for being healed is more apt to recover than he who withholds the slight equivalent for health.” Pay well, extremely well, for teaching if you aim to become a great healer; and impress upon your patients the pronounced curative properties of prompt and liberal payment of their bills for treatment!

President Mary Baker G. Eddy and her faculty, which, when it did not consist of herself alone, included her third husband and adopted son, do not seem to have needed a bargain counter for marked down educations. Marked up educations in Christian Science were the ones that sold best, as Mrs. Eddy wisely foresaw. So, after only a couple of years of the God-established rate of three hundred dollars for twelve lessons, Mrs. Eddy and her learned faculty concluded to set aside God’s judgment and raise the rates. They thriftily, and “shrinkingly,” of course, resolved that three hundred dollars for so many as twelve lessons, although advised by God, was in truth not a fair “financial equivalent for an impartation of a knowledge of that divine power which heals,” and in the Christian Science Journal for December, 1888, twenty-two years after God had, as she says, freely revealed it to her, Mrs. Eddy published the following notice:

“Having reached a place in teaching where my students in Christian Science are taught more during seven lessons in the primary class than they were formerly in twelve, and taught all that is profitable at one time, hereafter the primary class will include seven lessons only. As this number of lessons is of more value than twice this number in times past, no change is made in the price of tuition, three hundred dollars. Mary Baker G. Eddy.”

Three hundred dollars for seven lessons, forty-two dollars per lesson, from each person in the primary class of unalloyed humbug, by a rank impostor! Over two thousand dollars for each single lesson to classes of fifty, and thousands of people living in the most enlightened portion of the world, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, willing to pay it! Verily there is ground for humbleness of spirit in such a display of credulity, not to say imbecility, or, as Mark Twain would say, asininity, in this so-called enlightened age!

Does not, in all sincerity, I ask, does not Mrs. Eddy’s “shrinking” suggest in an impressive and beautiful way the chaste hesitancy of the hungry pig as he scrambles on all fours into the replenished trough!

Recall the picture of the haloed Mrs. Eddy standing by His side and holding the Saviour’s hand, as illustrative of equality and “Christian Unity”; and imagine, if imagination be equal to the task, Jesus availing Himself of His communion and kinship with the Father to accumulate money. Fancy His Sermon on the Mount being imparted, after the payment to Him by each disciple of a financial equivalent of the proportions of the Eddy exaction. See Him crowding into the courts those poor unfortunates who were unable to pay, and by the employment of legal process seeking to wrest it from them. Imagine His requiring all His disciples to sign a contract to pay so much in advance, such a percentage of their annual income from healing, and one thousand dollars forfeit if they were indisposed to heal after having been taught. Hear Him instructing His disciples to go into all the world, teach the gospel to every creature for cash strictly in advance, to lay hands upon the sick and assure them that they would be more likely to be healed after having paid whatever they were able to pay for the service.

Again, may we hear the burst of divine indignation at the impious and infamous pretensions of this sordid creature! Again the words, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers! How can ye escape the damnation of hell”!

But teaching was not Mrs. Eddy’s only bonanza, and her income from teaching was only a fraction of her total income.

In 1875, or thereabouts, Mrs. Eddy had a book on her hands that she had most laboriously written, and for which she must create a market. The book was the veriest rubbish and, with only her name to back it, was utterly without value to any one. In course of time, it not selling readily, the idea seems to have dawned upon her that, if she could make people believe that this book, this crude, incoherent jumbling together of meaningless terms, was in very deed the Word of God, the Infallible, the All-wise, and that its mere perusal would cure disease, a market would be created for it and her fortune would be made. Acting upon this theory, little by little she advanced the idea that the contents of the book came to her by revelation, and she soon reached a point where she did not hesitate to declare that it is, in its details and in its completeness, the “Word of God” in precisely the same sense and to precisely the same extent that the Christian believes the Scriptures to be the word of God.

She would blush, she says, to speak of “Science and Health” as she does, “were it of human origin” and she “apart from God its author,” and “No human pen or tongue taught me the Science contained in this book and neither tongue nor pen can overthrow it;” and she boldly affirms it to have been expressly “authorized by Christ” as an interpreter of the Bible. Referring to its curative properties, she said, “The perusal of the author’s publications heals sickness.”

With these affirmations the humbug was consummated and the book placed upon a parity with, nay, upon a higher plane than, the Bible, for I think it has never been said that the mere reading of the Bible cures disease; but never for a moment did the shrewd woman relax her hold upon her copyright or permit the publication, outside the covers of her copyrighted books, of even so much as her so-called spiritual interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer or the tenets of the faith. Everybody must pay her a royalty for access even to her prayers and her creed. Mrs. Eddy has been wise in her day and generation. She knew how large a part of the public likes to be fooled all the time, and she has fooled and now fools a very considerable part to the very top of its bent.

Many hundreds of thousands of copies of this book have been sold at three dollars and upwards per copy. It is entitled, “Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures,” although the only parts of the Scriptures touched upon by the alleged “Key” are the first chapter of the Old Testament and the last chapter of the New, Genesis and Revelation. To the intervening goodly portions God does not, through Mrs. Eddy, appear to have furnished us any “Key.”

“A Christian Scientist,” says Mrs. Eddy “requires my work ‘Science and Health’ for his text book, as do all his students and patients;” the soul’s salvation and body’s health being dependent upon the purchase and perusal thereof.

The organization of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, so called, which, let me again affirm, was a sham affair from start to finish, without college building, classrooms, faculty, curriculum or entrance or graduating examinations, this institution was a valuable agency for the distribution of Mrs. Eddy’s inspired and curative and copyrighted and costly writings, and so have been the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, the Mother Church, so called, and all the other Christian Science churches, of which the book itself has been, by her decree, constituted the impersonal “pastor.” Every member of every church and every student at the “college” must have a copy of the inspired “Science and Health,” at three dollars per copy, for the cheapest editions. (There is good profit in three dollars for a book costing not over fifty cents to publish​—​five hundred per cent profit.) Every teacher of Christian Science and every teacher’s student must have a copy of “Science and Health” properly to teach and to understand Mrs. Eddy’s “Science.”

Every one of the five thousand advertising Christian Science healers must keep a stock of the books on hand and sell them to their patients, who are made to believe, or to try to believe, Mrs. Eddy’s absurd pretension that its mere perusal cures disease, at prices ranging from three to six dollars, according to binding. And, finally, chapters having been transposed, the most trivial additions made or a different picture of the author inserted, all hands are invited, no matter how many copies may already be upon their shelves, to again step up and buy another copy, the revised edition, containing matter said to be of the greatest importance to their bodily and spiritual welfare, and all obediently accept the invitation.

In the words of our friend, Colonel Sellers of joyful memory, “There’s millions in it”!!!

It would be difficult to convince any one of the boundless audacity employed by Mrs. Eddy to promote the sale of this worthless book, if the authoritative evidence over her own signature were not available; but she has convicted herself, has proven in her own hand over her own signature that the author of this book, the founder of this alleged religion and the pretended successor to Jesus is the arch impostor of all time.

Before I quote the grabber of money against the “founder” of a “religion,” let me remind you that it was and is a part of Mrs. Eddy’s claim that her teachings complete the teachings of Jesus; that her “religion” completes the religion of Christ; that, as Jesus said, “No man cometh unto the Father but by Me,” so Mrs. Eddy, in effect, says, “No man cometh unto the Father but by Jesus, and me.” To come unto the Father is to obtain knowledge of the Father, and, according to Mrs. Eddy, while incomplete knowledge may be obtained through the teachings of Jesus, complete knowledge of the Father is attainable only through Jesus and her. She has established and organized The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, ostensibly to lead into complete knowledge of the Father those who seek Him in spirit and in truth. Bearing this in mind, note what follows, taken from the March, 1897, Christian Science Journal, signed by Mary Baker G. Eddy, and published just as her book, “Miscellaneous Writings,” was placed upon the market and for the sole purpose of promoting its sale.

She says: “Christian Scientists in the United States and Canada are hereby enjoined not to teach a student of Christian Science for one year, commencing on March 14, 1897.

“Miscellaneous Writings is calculated to prepare the minds of all true thinkers to understand the Christian Science text book more correctly than a student can.

“The Bible, ‘Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,’ and my other published works, are the only proper instructors for this hour. It shall be the duty of all Christian Scientists to circulate and to sell as many of these books as they can.

“If a member of The First Church of Christ, Scientists, shall fail to obey this injunction, it will render him liable to lose his membership in this church.

Mary Baker G. Eddy.”

At this time there were upwards of twenty thousand members, resident and non-resident, of this church, and every one of them was by this decree required to become a canvasser for the sale of Mrs. Eddy’s books. Twenty thousand unpaid vendors of her worthless patent medicine, upon which there was a profit of five hundred per cent! Is it not enough to make other manufacturers of proprietary concoctions turn green with envy!

This compulsory sale of her books was in 1897, when Mrs. Eddy was seventy-six, but she is the same woman today, at eighty-eight years of age. With only a few steps between her and the grave, she reaches out her withered, palsied hand to grab, grab, grab.

One of her latter-day schemes for bleeding the faithful has been, as I have indicated, to publish frequent “revised” editions of her great work, “Science and Health,” with the announcement of additions to its text necessary to growth in “Science.” Everybody must buy a new book and add a new profit to Mrs. Eddy’s coffers.

In February, 1908, over her signature, she published this:

“Take Notice

“I request Christian Scientists universally to read the paragraph beginning at line thirty of page 442 in the edition of ‘Science and Health,’ which will be issued, February 29. I consider the information there given to be of great importance at this stage of the workings of animal magnetism, and it will greatly aid the students in their individual experiences.

“Mary Baker G. Eddy.”

Shortly after the time of the publication of this notice (the litigation brought by her sons being still pending) Senator Chandler, their senior counsel with whom I was associated, happened to be in Boston. As the Senator was particularly interested in keeping tabs on Mrs. Eddy’s mental attitude toward so-called “animal magnetism,” he asked me if I would procure for him a copy of this edition, as her notice seemed to indicate a possible change in her point of view on that subject. After protesting mildly that I hated to put any good money into that fake enterprise, I went to the publication office in Boston and asked for a copy of the edition of “Science and Health” published on February 29. The clerk in attendance informed me that the edition was completely exhausted, but that another edition containing those alterations and others could be had. Insisting that no other edition than the one of February 29 would answer my purpose, a somewhat worn copy was finally produced as the only one in the place and I was told I could have it, if I didn’t object to its condition. Turning to page 442 and running my eye down to line thirty, where there was a little paragraph of two lines, I returned the book to the clerk and said it was not what I wanted, as it didn’t appear to contain the new matter of “great importance” referred to by Mrs. Eddy’s published notice. Upon his assurance, however, that it was the volume published on February 29 and that the paragraph of two lines, at line thirty, page 442, was the paragraph referred to in Mrs. Eddy’s notice, I tucked the little gold brick under my arm, reluctantly parted with my three good dollars and, returning to the Parker House, handed it to Senator Chandler without a word.

Turning to page 442, the Senator paused at line thirty long enough to read the paragraph of two lines, and then, looking up, exclaimed:

“What a swindle! Do you suppose any one can be of so little intelligence, who buys that book in consequence of Mrs. Eddy’s notice and reads this paragraph, that he does not feel, as we feel, that he has been swindled?”

I assured the Senator that, in my judgment, Mrs. Eddy’s following was largely made up of people who dearly loved to hand their money over to her, that nothing else gave them quite such joy and that they would be only too delighted and satisfied to be told by Mrs. Eddy that they must be a law unto themselves in order to be protected, sleeping or awake, from the foul fiend of animal magnetism. As Mrs. Eddy says her students said of her teachings for which they had rapturously parted with three hundred dollars, “it was worth more to them than money could possibly be.”

What was this information, of “great importance,” which “would greatly aid the students” and which Christian Scientists “universally” must buy a new book to read? It was just two lines inserted in a blank space at the end of a chapter and necessitated the change of no other plate of a single page in the book.

“Christian Scientists, be a law to yourselves, that mental malpractice can harm you neither when asleep nor when awake.”

Only this and nothing more. It is senseless, and yet it cost many thousands of Christian Scientists from three to six dollars apiece to find out, if they could find anything out, that the “revelator” had sold them a “gold brick.” And even since the edition of February, 1908, another edition, with only one line added, has been foisted upon the faithful.

What is the meaning of these things? Here is a woman claiming the succession to Jesus, claiming to have received an exclusive revelation from Almighty God necessary to salvation, and, having organized a church ostensibly to lead unto the Father, she requires, as a condition of continued membership in the church, that its members shall “circulate and sell” as many of her copyrighted books, upon which there is a profit of five hundred per cent, “as they can”; and, year in and year out, she palms off upon the believers new editions of the old stuff upon the false pretense of new material important to their spiritual growth.

Nobody ever went at a thing in a more round-about, indirect fashion, and nobody ever resorted to trickery more shamelessly than has the Reverend Mary Baker G. Eddy. Nobody ever assumed with so much boldness the complete asininity of the human race, as has this woman who professes to be the successor to Jesus Christ.

In the fall of 1899 suits were brought (as explained in the Introduction) against Mrs. Eddy and some of her leading supporters for the libel upon Mrs. Woodbury, in which damages, approximating half a million dollars, were asked. Mrs. Eddy and her friends were much alarmed and prepared for the most strenuous defence that could possibly be made. It was denied that Mrs. Woodbury was in any way referred to in the passage complained of; but numerous lawyers were retained to contest her endeavor to show that the denial was false. Mrs. Eddy retained four different firms of lawyers to represent her, three prominent Boston firms and the leading firm in New Hampshire, where she then lived. She thus found herself involved in enormous and unexpected expense, and money became the burning question of the hour.

Mrs. Eddy well knew, from experience, that all she had to do to procure the money necessary, was to ask the faithful to give it to her; but she, naturally, didn’t care to make an open appeal for it. She resorted, as I believe, to the strangest and most audacious trick ever employed by any human being to get money out of honest and trusting people.

Four days before Christmas, 1899, when it was safe to assume that the customary Christmas offerings were in the mail on their way to her, she published in the Christian Science Sentinel the following:

“A Card.

“Beloved: I ask this favor of all Christian Scientists. Do not give me on, before, or after the forthcoming holidays, aught material except three tea jackets. All may contribute to these. One learns to value material things only as one needs them, and the costliest things are those that one needs least. Among my present needs material are these three jackets. Two of darkish heavy silk, the shade appropriate to white hair. The third of heavy satin, lighter shade, but sufficiently sombre. Nos. 1 and 2 to be common sense jackets for Mother to work in, and not over trimmed by any means. No. 3 for best, such as she can afford for her drawing room.

“Mary Baker Eddy.”

When this “Card” was published Mrs. Eddy must have believed that there were upwards of a million Christian Scientists, for years before she had said, “In 1883 a million of people acknowledge and attest the blessings of this mental system of treating disease.” So she must have expected approximately a million people to make some response to her request.

It will be noted that the “Card” doesn’t ask for tea jackets; it asks for contributions for tea jackets. Mrs. Eddy had no expectation that a million or more garments would be received in response to her statement that she needed two of heavy silk, the shade appropriate to white hair, and one of heavy satin lighter shade but sufficiently sombre. If she had wanted the tea jackets and not contributions, she would have given waist and bust measurements, with length of sleeve and skirt. No, there was no room for doubt that what she wanted from all her “Beloved” was contributions and not jackets, and as she hadn’t designated anyone to receive the contributions, all were asked to make for Mother’s benefit, there was nothing to do but send the contributions straight to Mother. All had contributed many times and all were given another precious chance to show how “easy” they were.

There was never any publicity given to contributions received for the two common sense jackets for Mother to work in, and the more elaborate one such as she could afford for her drawing-room; but who, that has any familiarity with the exceeding eagerness of Mrs. Eddy’s followers to contribute, can have any doubt that none would think of sending her less than five dollars.

How lovely! There were not more than fifty thousand Christian Scientists at this time, but, if each chipped in five dollars toward Mother’s jackets, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars dropped into her lap.

I am only giving my interpretation of Mrs. Eddy’s strange request, when I say that clearly what she wanted was not tea jackets, but money to finance her very elaborate and expensive preparations to contest Mrs. Woodbury’s suits. She wanted money, she wanted it at once, and so she asked for it immediately. The request was made for a Christmas present, and it was made four days before Christmas.

My understanding that what Mrs. Eddy was after was money and not tea jackets, is confirmed by her own subsequent statement that she didn’t really want the garments after all. She gave her “Beloved” a whole week to decide how much the contribution should be and to make it. A minute was time enough, and she graciously gave them a whole week; and then she withdrew the request altogether.

On December 28, 1899, a week after the publication of the first “Card,” Mrs. Eddy published another, which is a perfect gem of characteristic ambiguity. It follows:

A Card.

Beloved: I accept most gratefully your purpose to clothe me, and when God has clothed you sufficiently, He will make it easy for you to clothe one of his little ones. Give yourselves no more trouble to get the three garments called for by me through last week’s Sentinel.

Mary Baker Eddy.

Pleasant View, Concord, N.H., Dec. 25, 1899.

Mother had asked for contributions for three tea jackets, and now accepts most gratefully the purpose of her “Beloved” to clothe her; and modestly puts it by. When God has clothed them sufficiently, He will make it easy for them to clothe one of His little ones. There speaks the oracle for you with true Delphic vagueness. “Give yourself no more trouble to get the garments called for by me through last week’s Sentinel.”

One thing, at least, is plain. She hadn’t called for jackets, but for contributions for jackets; and a week had been accorded her dear followers to contribute.

After everybody from whom a contribution could be expected, had sent it along, they are informed that the tea jackets were not wanted and that when God had sufficiently clothed them, He would make it easy for them to clothe one of His little ones.

Mother concluded that the common-sense jackets were not necessary to her work and that she could sufficiently grace her drawing-room without the help of the Beloved; but it has not appeared that any of the solicited contributions were returned.

I cannot say what an impression the loyal Christian Scientists may have received from this performance on the part of their leader; but I am very certain that any man of common sense, who had sent money in response to Mrs. Eddy’s first card, when he perused the second would speedily come to the conclusion that he had been buncoed.

I cannot leave this subject without giving one more illustration of Mrs. Eddy’s commercial spirit. Those of us who were brought up in the old school of medical practice do not forget the utility of spoons in that connection; and I vividly recall being made, in the spring-time, to stand in line with my numerous brothers and sisters and to march unflinchingly upon a spoon overloaded with sulphur and molasses. But what earthly connection there can be between the purely mental treatment of Christian Science and the purely physical thing, spoon, is not at first glance perceptible. It is plain, however, that spoons were a feature of Mrs. Eddy’s business. She was engaged in the exploitation of revelations and spoons, and, pursuant to her successful method of extorting money, made an appeal to the credulity of her people, utilizing the old gag of the dissemination of Truth to promote even the sale of spoons. The following is her command to the faithful:

“Christian Science Spoons​—​On each of these most beautiful spoons is a motto in bas-relief that every person on earth needs to hold in thought. Mother requests that Christian Scientists shall not ask to be informed what this motto is, but each Scientist shall purchase at least one spoon, and those who can afford it, one dozen spoons, that their families may read this motto at every meal and their guests be made partakers of its simple truth.

“Mary Baker G. Eddy.”

This, it will be seen, is not an appeal, a request or a suggestion, but a command. “Each Scientist shall purchase at least one spoon, and those who can afford it, one dozen spoons.” There is a motto on the spoon, of whose simple truth, with their meals, it is urged that the families of the faithful may be given an opportunity to partake, and “Mother” especially requests that Christian Scientists shall not ask to be informed what this motto is. To be informed of the motto, would enable her following to partake of its simple truth without purchasing one dozen spoons or even a solitary spoon; and the sale of spoons, and not the consumption of truth, was the plain purpose of Mrs. Eddy’s command.

The price of spoons was three dollars apiece for the plain silver and five dollars apiece for those with gold plated bowls; and I know a gentleman in Washington, D.C., then a professed Christian Scientist, who parted with sixty good American dollars for one dozen Christian Science spoons.

Truly, are not Mrs. Eddy’s followers the very easiest “easy marks” that any bunco-steerer ever went up against!

How naturally we fall into the slang of the street or into the language in which the operations of common swindlers are characterized, when we discuss this “religion” and its high priestess!

Is there any possible doubt of the basic motive of this woman? Did any one ever hear of anything approaching the audacity of this brazen creature? Is it now clear, beyond possibility of cavil, that all of Mrs. Eddy’s absurd and irreverent pretensions have been merely unique business methods utilized to the utmost to give a fictitious value to her foolish and harmful teachings, and to extend the sale of her foolish and harmful writings?

Is the founder of Christian Science in very truth anything more than a peddler of “revelations;” a huxter, who makes a commodity of “religion”; as Mark Twain says, a shameless old swindler who reaches out her irreligious hand and grabs the sacred name of Jesus the more easily to cheat and rob poor confiding creatures while looking to her for health to their aching bodies and peace to their troubled souls? Is there a blasphemy, a mendacity, a cruelty, beyond that of Mary Baker G. Eddy? Is there a greed that approaches hers?

Chapter IX

The Eddy Autocracy.

Money and power are the explanations of Mrs. Eddy’s life. We have seen how greedily she has accumulated wealth. Let us, for a moment, consider the way in which she has extended her power.

Nearly twenty years ago, Mrs. Eddy established the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, which is called the “Mother Church” and stands in the relation to the other churches, as she says, of the vine to the branches. It has been Mrs. Eddy’s repeatedly expressed wish that all Christian Scientists everywhere should belong to the Mother Church, and Mr. Hanna, then her chief representative in the organization, argued at length that this expressed wish of Mrs. Eddy’s was the revealed will of God; and no real Christian Scientist hesitates to do God’s will, as revealed through Mrs. Eddy.

Of course, membership in anything or connection with anything in Christian Science costs money, and every member, resident or non-resident, of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, is required to pay an annual tax of at least one dollar. The present total membership of this church, resident and non-resident, in which Mrs. Eddy’s arbitrary will is absolute law, is upwards of fifty thousand, and embraces all of the really devout and loyal Eddyites everywhere in the world. Here is, in itself, an income of some fifty thousand dollars annually of the First Church in Boston. If to this be added pew rents, church collections, the voluntary offerings of the faithful and the profits on the official periodicals, the aggregate will doubtless reach a total of considerably over one hundred and fifty thousand dollars per annum. Can any other church in the country show such revenues? Truly, the Church of St. Bunco, as Mr. Gordon Clark has happily named it, is a paying institution!

Mrs. Eddy is the head of this church. She constituted and calls herself pastor emeritus; but her relation to the organization is the reverse of what her title implies. Instead of being honorary merely, it is most positive and active. She has been the final authority on all matters in the church, dictated all its actions and ceremonies and formulated its rules and by-laws. By these rules and by-laws, which Mrs. Eddy has made, she has conferred upon herself the power to remove from office any officer of her church in Boston, without cause, and to excommunicate forever, without assigned cause, any of the fifty thousand members. By these rules, which Mrs. Eddy has made, she has conferred upon herself the power to remove the readers​—​the first and second readers, who take the place of ministers​—​of all Christian Science churches in the United States and foreign nations. No member excommunicated from the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, may hold a membership in any other Christian Science church anywhere in the world and is cut off from fellowship with the faithful, and cast into outer darkness forever.

By these rules and by-laws, which Mrs. Eddy has made, she has provided that the president and directors of the church may only be appointed subject to her approval; that no board of trustees of the church may ever be constituted except by her, and that the first members, or governing body, of the church may be appointed only with her approval. Indeed, only recently, with one stroke of her pen and without a word of explanation, she swept this governing body, the first or executive members, completely out of existence. No sermons shall ever be read in the churches, no original work of any first reader or minister is permitted (it would detract somewhat from Mrs. Eddy’s own writings) and the service is limited, by Mrs. Eddy’s rules, to the Bible and Mrs. Eddy’s published and copyrighted and profit-yielding works, announcements of the name of the author of the latter always being required while publicly read. Hypnotists, so called, must be excluded upon her complaint; and the editors and publishers of the Christian Science Journal and the other organs of the sect and the president of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College may be only persons of whom she expressly approves. Any teacher who dares to take a student of Mrs. Eddy’s into her class without Mrs. Eddy’s written consent “shall be” (not may be) “shall be excommunicated from the church.”

Mrs. Eddy’s rule, conferring upon Mrs. Eddy the power to remove officers of all Christian Science churches, is as follows:

“The pastor emeritus of the Mother Church (Mrs. Eddy) shall have the right, through a letter addressed to the individual and the church of which he is a reader, to remove a reader from this office in any Church of Christ, Scientist, both in America and foreign nations, or to appoint the reader to fill any office belonging to the Christian Scientists denomination.”

This by-law is followed by the further provision that it can neither be amended nor annulled except by Mrs. Eddy’s consent.

Mrs. Eddy’s rules provide that membership of the church is only possible to those familiar with Mrs. Eddy’s copyrighted, five hundred per cent profit earning publications; that the Bible and her book shall be the pastor​—​the impersonal pastor​—​of the Mother Church; that every member of the church, when publicly reading or quoting from the books of Mrs. Eddy, must first announce the name of the author; that teachers shall instruct their students how to defend themselves against mental malpractice, the witchcraft of Christian Science; that a degree of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College is a necessary preliminary to the teaching of Christian Science (and these degrees cost money); that any member of the church, working against what Mrs. Eddy believes advantageous to the church and the cause of Christian Science, shall, upon her complaint, be dropped forever from membership; that a member of the church who shall use written formulas, or permit his patients or his students to use them, shall be excommunicated; that any member daring to give advice on church matters, outside of the meetings, shall be dropped from membership, and so on, as Mark Twain says, “more ways to get out than to stay in”​—​the autocrat, the egotist, and the tradesman in every line.

And this woman, who has accumulated a fortune by the methods stated, and imposed upon the credulity of many thousands of religious people to build up a powerful organization of which she has made herself the whimsical and imperious autocrat, is the woman, forsooth, whom the Creator of the universe selected to be the successor to Jesus!

I lately stood at the threshold of the Holy of Holies of the “Mother Church,” and with a crowd of worshipers patiently waited for admittance to the hallowed precincts of the “Mother’s Room.” Over the doorway was a sign informing us that but four persons at a time would be admitted; that they would be permitted to remain five minutes only, and would please retire from the “Mother’s Room” at the ringing of the bell. Entering with four of the faithful, I looked with profane eyes upon the consecrated furnishings. A show-woman in attendance monotonously announced the character of the different appointments. Set in a recess of the wall and illumined with electric light was an oil painting the show-woman seriously declared to be a life-like and realistic picture of the chair in which the “Mother” sat when she composed her “inspired” work. It was a picture of an old-fashioned, country, haircloth rocking chair, and an exceedingly commonplace-looking table with a pile of manuscript, an ink-bottle and pen conspicuously upon it. On the floor were sheets of manuscript. “The mantelpiece is of pure onyx,” continued the show-woman, “and the bee-hive upon the window sill is made from one solid stone. The rug is made of a hundred breasts of eider-down ducks, and the toilet room you see in the corner is of the latest design, with gold-plated drain pipes. The painted windows are from the Mother’s poem, ‘Christ and Christmas,’ and that case contains complete copies of all the Mother’s books.” The chairs, upon which the sacred person of the Mother had reposed, were protected from sacrilegious touch by a broad band of satin ribbon. My companions expressed their admiration in subdued and reverent tones, and at the tinkling of the bell we reverently tiptoed out of the room to admit another delegation of the patient waiters at the door.

There are no other proselyters like the Christian Scientist; for there is no other “religion” that is at the same time a source of large revenue to its promoters. The more money that comes into the coffers of the central organization in Boston, the more liberal salaries may be voted to the workers. The organization publishes the periodicals, and there is a corps of salaried lecturers constantly distributed over the country. The Christian Science Journal, a monthly periodical, and the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly periodical, were for many years the only organs of the cult; but lately a more pretentious effort has been made and a daily newspaper has been established in Boston, called the Christian Science Monitor. The Journal and the Sentinel reach practically all of the sixty or sixty-five thousand Christian Scientists, and large numbers of them are regular subscribers to the daily newspaper. Of course, outside of Boston the paper cannot reach its subscribers in time to be anything but stale as a news agency. But what of that! To buy it helps the cause; and to help the cause puts money into the capacious pockets of the managers. All over the country copies of these various publications are distributed free, and in nearly every railroad station and waiting room throughout the length and breadth of the land copies of the weekly and monthly periodicals may be found in conspicuous places. The newspaper has little or no paid circulation outside the ranks of the believers, but many, many thousands of copies are daily delivered to people who pay nothing whatever for it. Of course, all of this costs a great deal of money, and the money comes out of the pockets of the believers, and goes into the pockets of the exploiters.

Chapter X

The “String” on the Gifts

Mr. Farlow, Mr. Hanna and other paid agents of Mrs. Eddy from time to time meet these various accusations with the response that, while Mrs. Eddy has made a great deal of money, she has given away a great deal; and, while she possesses the powers aforesaid, she lives in retirement, at Concord, N.H., and lets the organization run itself. Let us see what there is in these defenses.

Has Mrs. Eddy given away many thousands of dollars? Mr. Hanna quotes Mrs. Eddy as having said, “I could have been worth many millions of money. My college alone was an annual income of forty thousand dollars; but I managed to give away enough to balance my account with conscience.” It may be inferred from this that, but for what Mrs. Eddy has given away, she would today be worth many millions; consequently that she has given away millions. She has given away money, with reservations, but whenever she has so given it, it has been to enhance her comfort, to extend her power, or to add to her glory; and again and again, by herself and her chosen representatives, by Mr. Hanna and Mr Farlow, have false representations been made of the amounts given by her. This is important. Let me give a view of Mrs. Eddy’s character as displayed in these business transactions.

Much has been made of Mrs. Eddy’s gift of the land upon which the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, stands. In her book entitled “Pulpit and Press,” copyrighted by Mrs. Eddy, and published in 1895, is the statement that the cost of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, “is two hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars, exclusive of the land, a gift from Mrs. Eddy, which is valued at some forty thousand dollars.” Valued at some forty thousand dollars! Mrs. Eddy, of course, here intends to convey an impression that this gift of the land was a gift by her of some forty thousand dollars’ worth of real estate. In none of her many published references to this peculiar transaction has Mrs. Eddy told the truth, or any material part of the truth.

The land upon which the church stands was originally owned by a society known as The Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, and it was originally mortgaged for nine thousand dollars to Mr. Nathan Matthews. This original society, by contributions, fairs, etc., raised enough money to reduce the amount of the mortgage to about five thousand dollars, when, according to Mrs. Eddy’s statement in her book “Pulpit and Press,” “Owing to a heavy loss, they were unable to pay the mortgage; therefore I paid it, and through trustees gave back the land to the church.”

Mrs. Eddy did not pay the mortgage. She did not give back the land to the church. What she did was quite other than what she says she did. Through her agents, she took an assignment of the mortgage for the balance of five thousand dollars due upon it, foreclosed it, crowded out all of the original contributors, members of the Church of Christ, Scientist, acquired the title herself, and gave it to trustees for a new organization, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, reserving to herself a right to re-enter and repossess herself of the land with any church that might be constructed upon it. And this cost Mrs. Eddy five thousand dollars, not forty thousand, as she would have us understand, and as Mr. Farlow has represented; nor even twenty thousand, as the more modest Hanna intimates.

Real-estate men in Boston would wonder how it was possible for Mrs. Eddy legally to acquire, for the sum of five thousand dollars, by the proper foreclosure of a mortgage, property upon which Mr. Nathan Matthews had been willing to lend nine thousand dollars. Indeed, it is remarkable that Mrs. Eddy should, at an open foreclosure sale, have been able to buy for five thousand dollars a property hundreds of men in the city of Boston would have been only too glad to have paid, at the time, upwards of ten thousand dollars for. Was this foreclosure regular, or was it fraudulent, as were so many of Mrs. Eddy’s transactions? To one who has delved into her methods, as I have, it would seem as if everything that she touched became tainted with fraud or false pretense; and it is simply incredible that here in the city of Boston, after due advertisement, and at a legal public auction, a piece of real estate could be purchased for but little more than half the money so sagacious an investor as Mr. Matthews was willing to lend upon it. And what of the owners of the equity in this land, who were Mrs. Eddy’s own friends and followers, and whom she thus despoiled? They had contributed about $7,000 and were left nothing, while Mrs. Eddy for $5,000 acquired all.

Mrs. Eddy, herself, says, “the property was transferred in a circuitous and novel way, the wisdom of which a few persons have since scrupled,” and that her intent, while “spiritually inalienable,” was “materially questionable.” It is interesting to note that the instruments employed by Mrs. Eddy for the executing of the “materially questionable” transaction were two Boston lawyers who have since been disbarred.

Again, in the Christian Science Journal for February, 1898, is an editorial statement, evidently prepared by Editor Hanna under Mrs. Eddy’s direction, in which an effort is made to meet the criticism upon Mrs. Eddy’s mercenary methods, he refers to three instances which he calls “evidences of a generosity and self-sacrifice that appeal to our deepest sense of gratitude, even while surpassing our comprehension.”

Now, what are these evidences of this extraordinary “generosity and self-sacrifice”?

The first is the gift of the land to the church. “Years ago,” says Mr. Hanna, “she donated a lot of ground in Boston, on which to erect the Mother Church, that was then valued at twenty thousand dollars, and now estimated to be worth more than double that sum.” Mr. Hanna, it should be observed, does not say, “which cost her five thousand dollars,” but which “was then valued at twenty thousand dollars”; and he does not say anything about the reserved right to re-enter and repossess herself of the land and all the buildings that might be constructed upon it, which right she secured for not more than $5,000. If it was “then valued at twenty thousand dollars,” as Hanna says, or at forty thousand dollars, as Mrs. Eddy’s book says, how did Mrs. Eddy get it for five? Perhaps Mr. Hanna can tell. Mr. Hanna can tell many things, if he will. He has sworn that​—​so help him God!​—​he is completely ignorant of the belief of the members of the church of which he was the first reader, or minister, regarding the founder of the alleged religion he pretends to profess and professes to expound, so we may not ask him anything about that; but he may be able to tell us how his “generous” and “self-denying” leader secured for five thousand dollars Boston real estate worth twenty or forty thousand. It is a trick some of our real-estate speculators would be glad to learn.

Another of these evidences of a “generosity and self-sacrifice” surpassing Mr. Hanna’s comprehension is a conveyance in perpetuity to the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, of the real estate of the Christian Science Publishing Society; to wit, the lots and buildings known as 95 and 97 Falmouth Street, “valued,” says Mr. Hanna, at “not less than twenty-two thousand dollars.”

Again the wily Hanna gives us what he calls the value and not the cost to Mrs. Eddy; and again, like a true disciple of his cautious teacher, he suppresses the fact that the property in question was conveyed to Mrs. Eddy three days before she conveyed it to the church, by the Christian Science Publishing Society, for the nominal sum of one dollar. Mrs. Eddy always reserves very substantial rights, and here she reserved to herself the right to use and occupy as much room, conveniently and pleasantly located, as she might require for her own publishing business. If, at any time, she shall require the whole of the premises for her publishing business, she has the right, under her deed, to occupy the whole, and this right she acquired for one dollar, and did not part with. Mr. Hanna is a great stickler for values when contending for Mrs. Eddy’s great generosity. It sounds rather better, and makes a better showing for his patron, to say that her gift (to which she reserves, if she wishes it, the exclusive use) is valued at $22,000, than to state the cold truth that it cost her the sum of one dollar.

Another of these evidences of unselfishness on Mrs. Eddy’s part, too great for Mr. Hanna’s understanding, is the transfer to the church in perpetuity of the Christian Science Journal, Quarterly, and all the literary publications of the society, and every right and privilege whatsoever connected therewith, saving only the right to copyright the Journal in her own name; and these properties the astute Hanna again “values” at fifty thousand dollars. Again he says nothing about what they cost Mrs. Eddy, and again he says nothing about the right she reserved to herself. These properties, as in the case of the real estate, were acquired three days before she gave them to the church, by Mrs. Eddy, from the Christian Science Publishing Society, for the large sum of one dollar, and she reserved not only the right to copyright the Christian Science Journal, which was the only value the Journal possessed, but she reserved the right to withdraw the Journal from the trust and from the church at any time she pleased. In other words, she procured title to the Journal, with a subscription list of 20,000 and over, for $1.00 and did not give the Journal to the church or the society at all. What she did give to the church, according to the official record, cost her nothing, and what she acquired was a prosperous periodical with a paying subscription list of 20,000 or more.

These wonderful beneficences, which fairly startle Mr. Hanna, and which cost Mrs. Eddy $5,002, and Hanna says were “worth” $90,000, left her with a right, under certain circumstances, to take absolute possession of the land and the church, which cost her nothing and cost others over two hundred thousand dollars, guaranteed to her pleasant and permanent business quarters without expense of any kind, gave her complete control, amounting to ownership, of the Christian Science Journal, and made her the dictator and authoritative head, if she wishes to be, of the business end of Christian Science as conducted at the headquarters of the Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston. This was Mrs. Eddy’s own benefit from her outlay of $5,002, and yet the Honorable Septimus J. Hanna, with upturned eyes, piously exclaims:

“Let us endeavor to lift up our hearts in thankfulness to God for His goodness to us and our cause and to His servant, our Mother in Israel, for these evidences of a generosity and self-sacrifice that appeal to our deepest sense of gratitude, even while surpassing our comprehension.”

In a published statement, Mr. Farlow has said:

“As to Mrs. Eddy’s wealth, I want to say she has given away, during the past five years, more than double the sum total of the entire profits from the sale of her books from their first publication to the present time.”

I denounce this statement of Mr. Alfred Farlow’s as utterly false, and I defy him to name the beneficiaries of these hundreds of thousands of dollars he says his employer has given away. I challenge this official prevaricator of Mrs. Eddy’s religio-commercial enterprise to give the public the particulars of these alleged gifts. He cannot give them. They do not exist, and his falsehood is only one of many fabrications boldly put forth to bolster the tottering structure that has so long afforded him and his colleagues in fraud a comfortable financial refuge.

The public will be wise if it decline to accept, without verification, any statement that Mrs. Eddy or Mr. Hanna or Mr. Farlow may make. Mrs. Eddy, it would seem, cannot tell the truth, and Messrs. Hanna and Farlow, it would seem, are paid to tell lies.

But the story is only half told, and what follows is more damning than what has gone before.

Chapter XI

The Eddy Ban on Marriage

I have said that Mrs. Eddy’s influence as the founder of Christian Science is not confined to the religious activities of her followers, but extends into their domestic and marital relations and even their business affairs. One of the harmful results of Mrs. Eddy’s “inspired” teachings consists in the estrangement so frequently caused between husband and wife where either one or the other of them is a Christian Scientist. If both happen to be fast in the faith, the occasion for disharmony between them is not so great; for then the marital relation is suspended by mutual consent.

I cannot say that I have found very much sympathy on the part of husbands, even nominal Christian Science husbands, with Mrs. Eddy’s views upon the marriage relation; but I do know of many cases in which they have so influenced wives as to lead to the complete destruction of anything like real marriage.

Mrs. Eddy disapproves of marriage altogether. “These words of St. Matthew,” she says, “have special application to Christian Science, namely, ‘It is not good to marry.’”

In the first place, St. Matthew never said anything of the kind; and, in the second place, if he had said it, it would have been only so much to his discredit. No sane and sincere person has ever denounced marriage; and not only did St. Matthew not disapprove of it, but, in his Gospel, Jesus is quoted as having said: “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.” And the beautiful affection of Jesus for children is sufficient evidence of his high approval of marriage.

Mrs. Eddy, having been married three or four times, now emphatically disapproves of marriage, and a marriage between Christian Scientists is decidedly objectionable. There has never been a marriage in a Christian Science church. There is no Christian Science marriage ceremony and no Christian Science official authorized to perform a marriage. The marriage relation, as such, is regarded as sensuous and impure, and the marriage of an official of the church in any part of the country would mean instant loss of power and influence together with his office and its emoluments.

“Is marriage nearer right than celibacy?” asks Mrs. Eddy. “Human knowledge inculcates that it is, while science indicates that it is not.” Science is thus distinguished from human knowledge. Mrs. Eddy’s science is a thing imparted to her by Omniscience, and Omniscience, she says, indicates that marriage is not nearer right than celibacy. It is a part of Mrs. Eddy’s teaching and the teaching of her students, that a woman cannot be an effective healer, if she really love a man and be a true wife, and that a man cannot accomplish the best results in healing through Christian Science if he really love a woman and be a true husband.

With this objection to marriage goes also the objection to children, so that the birth of children in Christian Science families is of rare occurrence and is regarded as evidence of unspiritual living and is decidedly discrediting. “Sensual and mortal beliefs, material suppositions of life,” Mrs. Eddy calls children.

The effect of this teaching is shown in the difference between Christian Science Sunday Schools and Christian Sunday Schools. The membership of the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian Sunday Schools is about the same as their church membership; while in Christian Science Sunday Schools there is but one child for every five church members.

Mrs. Eddy’s objection to children does not appear to be to children themselves, but simply to children begotten and born as they have been from the beginning of man’s existence until now and will be until the end. It is a part of Mrs. Eddy’s inspired doctrine that, when Christian Science has made a conquest of the world and the “spiritual creation is discerned,” there will be no more marriage and the human race be propagated without regard to sex. “Until it be learned,” she says, “that generation rests on no sexual basis, let marriage continue,” and “until time matures human growth, marriage and progeny will continue unprohibited in Christian Science,” and “To abolish marriage at this period and maintain morality and generation, would put ingenuity to ludicrous shifts, yet this is possible in Science.” Insane as this teaching is, Mrs. Eddy’s alleged “intelligent” following believe it to be the teaching of Infinite Wisdom, and as such make it the desire of their lives.

Charming doctrine this for civilized people to make the regulator of their lives! Oh, charming! But Mrs. Eddy goes further and denounces marriage in the roundest and almost unprintable terms.

The most impressive and conspicuous incident in Christian Science history was the dedication in June, 1906, of the “Mother Church” in Boston, a beautiful building that cost upwards of two million dollars. In order to get her views regarding marriage before the faithful, in the most impressive manner, Mrs. Eddy incorporated them in her message which was read at the church dedication ceremonies. She took the bit in her teeth, as it were, and notwithstanding efforts to dissuade her or induce her to modify her statement, insisted upon getting her views before her following in their most extreme and obnoxious form, characterizing marriage as “synonymous with legalized lust.”

It has been denied by Mrs. Eddy’s press agents that she gave utterance to this opinion of marriage; but it will be found in her dedication message as published in the Christian Science Sentinel for June 16, 1906, and the Christian Science Journal for July, 1906.

To one not insane or degenerate, to all noble souls, marriage is the sweetest and purest relationship imaginable and fatherhood and motherhood are nothing less than divine; but this three-or-four-times-married woman gives us to understand that, so far as she knows it, marriage is “legalized lust.” I should think a so much married woman would deliberate a long time before she would give public utterance to such a view of the marriage relation. Far be it from me to dispute her own experience. Her whole teaching regarding the institution shows that it is impossible for her to conceive of what marriage means to a noble man and a noble woman who have found unity in its sacred bond; and when she applies that vile epithet to society’s fundamental institution, I tell her, though she pretend to voice God Himself, that she lies and the truth is not in her. How is it possible for a husband who loves and respects his wife, or a wife who loves and respects her husband, or parents who adore their children, to have anything but contempt for this woman and her odious teachings?

If Mrs. Eddy’s God were, in fact, the true God, and if Christian Science were a revelation from Him, and if all the miracles they pretend to have performed had been performed, I should still not bow down to their God nor worship him; I should not prostrate myself at their shrines nor have fellowship with them, so long as the attempt is made to place the stigma of impurity upon the purest of all pure things in the world to me, my child.

Yes, this is the twentieth century. No, we are not living in the year 500 nor yet in the year 1000. The ideas and doctrines, the beliefs and practices of Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science belong to the darkest period of the dark ages, but they are very real and very potent things in the lives of many thousands of people upon whom the light of the world’s highest civilization shines.

Chapter XII

Christian Science Witchcraft

Let us now pass to consideration of another phase of Mrs. Eddy’s influence, more astounding, perhaps, than any we have considered, and more discreditable, if possible, to the age in which we live. I refer to the belief in what I have called the new-old witchcraft; that is to say, to the belief, taught by Mrs. Eddy as inspired truth, and accepted by her followers as revealed of God, that a maliciously disposed person has the power, by absent treatment, through his or her mind to cause any form of sickness, the most horrible of deaths, and complete domestic, social or business disaster to others. I shall quote somewhat liberally from Mrs. Eddy’s own statements in this regard, in order that there may be no question that I represent her correctly, and of these statements I invite thoughtful consideration.

In her first edition of “Science and Health,” published in 1875, Mrs. Eddy said, on page 123:

“In coming years the person or mind that hates his neighbor will have no need to traverse his fields, to destroy his flocks and herds, and spoil his vines; or to enter his house to demoralize his household; for the evil mind will do this through mesmerism; and not in propria personæ be seen committing the deed. Unless this terrible hour be met and restrained by science, mesmerism, that scourge of man, will leave nothing sacred when mind begins to act under direction of conscious power.”

On page 382, Mrs. Eddy says:

“The silent argument used in his own behalf, as he manipulates the head, the malpractitioner would blush to make audibly. Suppose he has a juror for a patient, and establishes the mesmeric connection between them, he can influence more than law or evidence, the verdict of that honest juror.”

(Possibly this accounts for the presence in the court-room, at the trial of a case in which Mrs. Eddy was defendant, of a large number of the most potent Christian Science hypnotists.)

On page 177 of the 13th edition of “Science and Health,” Vol. II, Mrs. Eddy says:

“Mesmerism is practiced both with and without manipulation; but the evil deed without a sign is also done by the manipulator and mental malpractitioner.

“The secret mental assassin stalks abroad, and needs to be branded to be known in what he is doing.”

On page 175, Mrs. Eddy says:

“If the right mental practice can restore health, as is proven beyond a question, it is self-evident that a mental malpractice can impair the health of those ignorant of the cause and how to treat it.”

On page 179, Mrs. Eddy says:

“The evidence of the power that Mind exercises over the body has accumulated in weight and clearness until it culminates, at this period, in scientific statement and proof. Our courts recognize the evidence that goes to prove the committal of a crime; then, if it be clear that the so-called mind of one mortal has killed another, is not this mind proved a murderer, and shall not the man be sentenced whose mind, with malice aforethought, kills? His hands, without mortal mind to aid them, could not murder; but it is proven that this mind, without the aid of his hands, has killed.”

In “Science and Health,” thirty-sixth edition, published in 1888, Mrs. Eddy says, on page 220:

“It is hoped that eventually our laws will take cognizance of mental crime.”

On page 515, she says:

“This malicious animal-power (of which the Dragon is the type) seeks to kill his fellow-mortals, morally and physically, and then to charge the innocent with his crimes.”

On page 516, she says:

“The highest degree of human depravity, which is to be found in this propulsive will power, or Animal Magnetism.”

In “Miscellaneous Writings,” published in 1897, on page 222, Mrs. Eddy says:

“The crimes committed under this new regime of mind-power, when brought to light, will make stout hearts quail. Its mystery protects it now, for it is not yet known.”

In a long article entitled “Malicious Animal Magnetism,” written by Mrs. Eddy and published as hers in the Christian Science Journal for February, 1889, when the Journal was her property, she lays down her inspired teaching on that subject with unwonted clearness. She says:

“One of the greatest crimes practiced in, or known to, the ages is mental assassination. A mind liberated from the beliefs of sense, to do good, by perverting its power becomes warped into the lines of evil without let or hindrance. A mind taught its power to touch other minds by the transference of thought, for the ends of restoration from sickness, or, grandest of all, the reformation and almost transformation into the living image and likeness of God​—​this mind, by misusing its freedom, reaches the degree of total moral depravity.

“Does the community know this criminal? He sits at the friendly board and fireside; he goes to their places of worship; he takes his victim by the hand, and all the time claims the power and carries the will to stab to the heart, to take character and life from this friend who gives him his hand in full trust, and has, perhaps, toiled and suffered to benefit and bless him.…

“It is no longer possible to keep still concerning these things​—​nay, it is criminal to hold silence and to cover crime that grows bolder and picks off its victims as sharpshooters pick off the officers of an attacking force.

“These secret, heaven-defying enormities must be proclaimed, or we become guilty before God as accessory after the fact. If a friend were fallen upon and maltreated or murdered before our eyes, should we hold ourselves guiltless, should we count ourselves men and women, if we buried the secret of the violence and our knowledge of the assassins?

“Are we such cowards, knowing the facts that we do know, as to turn and run? Shall we see the evil, the deadly danger that threatens our brother, and, to hide ourselves, flee away not warning him?

“The Science of mind uncovers to Scientists secret sin, even more distinctly than so-called physical crimes are visible to the personal senses; crime is always veiled in obscurity, but Science fastens guilt upon its author through mind, with the certainty and directness of the eye of God Himself.

“Human laws will eventually be framed for these criminals that now go unwhipped of human justice. Human law even now recognizes crime as mental, for it seeks always the motive. Rude counterfeit as it is of Divine Justice, it metes out punishment or pardons according as it finds, or finds not, the evil intent, the mental element. The time has come for instructing human justice so that these secret criminals shall tremble before the omnipotent finger that points them out to the human executioner.”

If that isn’t witchcraft, I don’t know what witchcraft is. The Omnipotent finger will point out these criminals, who operate through silent and invisible mental influences, and justice will be meted out to them by the human executioner!

In a personal letter to a student Mrs. Eddy said:

“The mental malpractitioners or mesmerists employ the argument of poison to kill people. They cause you or your patients to suffer from arsenical poison in the blood or stomach, mercurial poison, morphine or any other form of mineral, vegetable or animal poison which they may name in their arguments.”

In the latest editions of her book, and in formal communications to her followers, Mrs. Eddy reaffirms her belief in this malicious power of mind, and again warns her followers against it. Her personal teaching to her students was even more extravagant than the language of her published works, and it was a common occurrence for her to frighten young girls and children nearly into fits with the dreadful fear that a malicious mind was seeking to cause them unspeakable disaster. She has taught that the malicious action of mind alone might, of itself, cause, and had caused, the pregnancy of woman, with consequences I must leave to your imagination. And all this damnable doctrine is accepted and believed by Mrs. Eddy’s “intelligent” followers as the truth revealed by God through the founder of Christian Science​—​believed with a belief that trembles.

I have talked with a gentleman who, years ago, with his family, lived for some six months in the house with Mrs. Eddy; and he said to me with great earnestness: “I lived there six months, and I tell you, sir, I would rather spend ten years in hell than another six months in Mrs. Eddy’s company. She nearly drove my children into frenzy with her malicious animal magnetism business.” Malicious animal magnetism is the name by which Mrs. Eddy now calls her witchcraft.

It has been also a regular part of the teachings of that bogus institution, the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, of which Mrs. Eddy was president, that malicious minds may, and today are, causing sickness, death and disaster to Christian Scientists and their families. I know it to be a fact that the lecturer there literally taught that Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury, whom he named, possessed this power, and used it to the detriment of Christian Scientists and the cause; and to such an extent has this teaching regarding this particular lady spread that I think it would be hard to find a Christian Scientist in the United States who did not, or had not, believed Mrs. Woodbury had possessed and had exercised this power.

A Christian Scientist healer, guilty of an unpardonable impropriety with young lady patients, is called to account by their father, and, acknowledging his offence, says that he can only account for it on the ground that Mrs. Woodbury made him do it, by malicious animal magnetism. An aged lady, a Christian Scientist in a distant city, having fallen unaccountable several times upon the street, explains to her daughter that the cause of it is “that vile Mrs. Woodbury of Boston.” The child of a member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, dies, and the grief-stricken mother entertains the firm conviction that Mrs. Woodbury killed it. The husband of a member of Mrs. Eddy’s church has been sick for years here in Boston, and for years, without having known or seen Mrs. Woodbury, such has been the teaching at the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston and of the alleged “College,” that she has had no doubt that Mrs. Woodbury caused her husband’s illness, and she has continually sought to protect her husband by a mental effort to throw the illness back upon Mrs. Woodbury. Meantime Mrs. Woodbury is, of course, utterly unconscious of all of these happenings and entirely innocent of any such criminal purposes and deeds.

And all this deviltry as revealed by God! All this medieval witchcraft in the name of Christ! Out upon it! I say. Let it no longer be tolerated amongst us!

Three hundred years ago, some nineteen or twenty estimable people in the town of Salem in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, because of the finding of a Court that they were witches, were legally hanged by the neck until they were dead. And should the inspired and infallible founder of Christian Science prevail in her benevolent intention of “instructing human justice so that these secret criminals shall tremble before the omnipotent finger that points them out to the human executioner,” the supposed offences of malicious animal magnetism, the invention of her disordered imagination, would be atoned upon the gibbet or at the stake.

In her published work Mrs. Eddy has expressly justified the employment of this alleged power for retaliation or defense. She says:

“It was years after we were personally attacked by mental malpractice before we defended ourselves or taught our students self defence. Until this attack was aimed at our life, we never resisted or even investigated it thoroughly and so discovered the full purpose and extent of a mental malpractice. But we gave our attention to it and found how to save the scattering remnants of our Christian students that had been mown down like grass. We resolved in the strength of God to save them and others from the hands of these murderers and to find, as sure defence, the ever present help. Since God has shown us our way in Christian healing, our mind often heals involuntarily. The malpractitioners know this and often have asked us about their patients to direct our thoughts to them, knowing the benefit therefrom. They know, as well as we, that it is impossible for science to produce sickness, but science makes sin punish itself. They should have feared for their own lives in their attempts to kill us. God is Supreme and the penalties of their sins they cannot escape. Turning the attention of the sick to us for the benefit they may receive from us, is another milder form or species of malpractice that is not safe; for if we feel their sufferings, not knowing the individual, we shall defend ourselves and the result is dangerous to the intruder.”

The retaliatory method of mental treatment devised by Mrs. Eddy consisted in an endeavor mentally to hurl cancer back upon the person she believed to be attempting to afflict her with cancer, or tumor upon the person attempting mentally to transmit tumor to her, or consumption upon the evil one thinking consumption at her, and the various forms of chemical poison upon those endeavoring to think mercurial, arsenical or other forms of poison into her organism. She told her students that she had the power of discerning such malicious mental activity on the part of those she believed to be her enemies, and that the way to protect her was to hurl the malicious thoughts backward and cause them, as it were, to recoil upon and destroy their authors.

When Mrs. Augusta Stetson of New York was accused of attempts at mental murder, she justified or tried to justify such endeavors on the ground that they were defensive and, as such, taught and sanctioned by Mrs. Eddy. Whatever Mrs. Stetson and other Christian Scientists know about the power to commit murder by mental means, they have learned from Mrs. Eddy; and if it be an offence against the Christian Science Church, as was decided in the case of Mrs. Stetson, to attempt to cause disease and to kill through the employment of mental powers, then Mrs. Eddy herself should follow Mrs. Stetson into exile from the communion of the saints.

Mrs. Stetson’s excommunication is an interesting sequel to an incident that occurred in Concord, N.H., in April of 1907. Mrs. Eddy was then living at Concord, and the litigation by the sons had been commenced in the preceding month. It had been the talk of the newspapers, from time to time, that Mrs. Stetson was nourishing an ambition to succeed Mrs. Eddy in the leadership of Christian Science upon Mrs. Eddy’s demise, and it had even been said that, expecting Mrs. Eddy’s death to occur at a particular time, Mrs. Stetson had come to Boston prepared with a most magnificent costume for attendance upon Mrs. Eddy’s ascension.

It was pretty generally known in Christian Science circles that Mrs. Stetson was maneuvering to succeed Mrs. Eddy as the official head of the movement, and doubtless the report reached Mrs. Eddy’s ears. At this time one Herman S. Herring was the first reader of Mrs. Eddy’s church at Concord and H. Cornell Wilson was acting as one of her secretaries at her home at Pleasant View. By some means, through the New York World, possession was obtained of a letter written by Herring to Wilson, dated April 27, 1907, in which he asked Mr. Wilson if “it would not be well to protect Mrs. Eddy from the Stetson argument specifically, or are the workers doing so?”

The meaning of this, of course, is that Herring assumed Mrs. Stetson was, by malicious mental endeavor, operating adversely to Mrs. Eddy, either to cause Mrs. Eddy to designate Mrs. Stetson as her successor, or to hasten Mrs. Eddy’s departure, by ascension or otherwise, from the world; and the “workers” referred to are the corps of Christian Science mental practitioners always maintained by Mrs. Eddy at her home by concentrated mental effort to erect and maintain a mental bulwark around her that shall be impenetrable by Mrs. Stetson’s or any other malicious mental bullets.

“It has troubled me,” said Herring, “but helped me, to hear that Frye was a channel for that diabolism.”

Mrs. Eddy has always contended that she herself was so immaculate that malicious animal magnetism could not immediately approach her; but injury to her might be effected through some less pure personality close to her. As no one was closer than Frye, it appears that he was believed to be the medium through which Mrs. Stetson was supposed to be operating, or attempting to operate, against Mrs. Eddy.

The newspaper reports of the Stetson trial and excommunication did not, so far as they came to my attention, contain any intimation that judgment had fallen upon Mrs. Stetson because of her mental attacks upon Mrs. Eddy; but there can be no doubt that Mrs. Eddy believes she had been the target of such attacks, and that the excommunication was Mrs. Eddy’s own act of retaliation upon Mrs. Stetson.

“The highest degree of human depravity,” Mrs. Eddy calls this alleged power to cause sickness and to cause death, which, when successfully employed, should be expiated upon the scaffold; and, deliberately and solemnly, with full understanding of the meaning of my language, I affirm and I charge that Mary Baker G. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science and the pretended successor to, and equal of, Jesus, has again and again and again sought to exercise it; that she, herself, has repeatedly thus sought to cause sickness, sought to cause death, and this, as everything else I have alleged, I will prove by legal evidence whenever Mrs. Eddy may be pleased to require it.

To bring out clearly the effect upon Mrs. Eddy’s daily life of her genuine belief in this diabolical thing she calls malicious animal magnetism, and her efforts to avail herself of the supposed power of mind to cause disease and death, the following letter, received from a gentleman, now a practising physician, who in his earlier manhood was attracted to Mrs. Eddy and her teachings, is incorporated here:

“I lived in the ‘College’ with Mrs. Eddy and her family for nearly a year, and had ample opportunity to observe all the things I now tell you; I shall not make a statement without knowing that it is absolutely true.

“As you desire information in regard to her teachings of malicious animal magnetism, I will confine myself mostly to that subject.

“Nearly two-thirds of the time of her class lectures was taken up with teaching us how to ‘meet the enemy,’ as she called Richard Kennedy, Edward Ames, Clara Choate, and her mother, Mrs. Childs. We were taught that Richard Kennedy, especially, was the ‘Arch Enemy’ of Christian Science, and of Mrs. Eddy herself; that he had learned the art of using ‘malicious animal magnetism’ on Mrs. Eddy and her students; that he had ‘secret service’ men and women who watched every movement of Mrs. Eddy, and of each one living with her; that we could not go out without some one following, and watching us, reporting to ‘the ring of enemies,’ namely, Kennedy Ames, Choate and Childs. We were taught that by being aware of all our movements​—​just how we looked, and who our patients were​—​they had the mental power to so mesmerize our minds as to cause us to meet with defeat in all our attempts to heal; that they were informed of the diseases and weaknesses from which we had been healed, and by malicious thoughts and concentration upon us could cause us to relapse into our old forms of disease.

“Mrs. Eddy was constantly having attacks of illness (always in the night). We were often called up about eleven o’clock at night to treat her, and were obliged to remain up until about two o’clock a.m. These attacks, we were told, were brought on by the ‘enemy,’ working through us, as her students. She claimed that the only way the ‘enemy’ could reach her was through her students, she being so strong and so pure that their ‘malicious animal magnetism’ could not reach her in any other way. So we used to go into the parlor, after breakfast and supper, each day, and mentally ‘take up the enemy.’ We were taught to recognize the error, and treat ourselves and the ‘enemy,’ so that they (‘the enemy’) could have no power over us, or our patients; and every time we gave the treatments we were taught to first ‘treat the enemy.’

“The result of all this was, that Mrs. Eddy was always full of fear; as the ‘enemy’ were supposed to have power to prevent all kinds of desired results, not only in healing, but in business, as well.

“I was taught that the postal clerks were so mesmerized that letters to and from the College would never reach their destination unless certain conditions were complied with; also that the telegraph operators were so under this malicious influence that a message sent by telegraph would not reach the person to whom it was sent unless certain precautions were taken. I was once sent from her house to West Newton to forward a telegraph message to Chicago, so that it would be sent by way of Worcester, instead of Boston, as all Boston operators were supposed to be so mesmerized by the ‘enemy’ that no message from Mrs. Eddy could reach its destination, if sent through their hands. And so I might run on for hours, giving you facts about such things.

“I was told to treat the ‘enemy’ (Kennedy, Ames, Choate and Childs) to cause their ‘old beliefs’ to return, ‘and prostrate them at once!’ ‘Old beliefs’ meant former diseases, from which they had been healed, in some cases even tumors and cancers.

“I could write pages of things said and done, to show that insane idea of the power of malicious men and women to nearly, if not quite, kill people. We were taught that they had killed several students of Mrs. Eddy. I was taught that Kennedy and Ames knew how to treat people in a way to cause ‘sixty symptoms of arsenic poisoning.’

“I was often called in the night to treat Mrs. Eddy, as she was sick. I have been sent to the homes of other students to call them in the night to help her out of her fears and spasms.

“I was sent in the month of May, 1884, at two o’clock a.m., to call lawyer Roberts to make her will, as it seemed she could not live till morning​—​all caused by ‘malicious animal magnetism,’ or ‘M.A.M.’ as we were in the habit of abbreviating it.

“I found Mrs. Eddy a strong-willed, obstinate, and arbitrary woman. Her business was obliged to be conducted as she dictated, whether right or wrong.

“I was one of four students told by Mrs. Eddy to treat certain clergymen of Boston to come into her classes and endorse Christian Science.

“The following incident might be of interest at this time:

“In the summer of 1884, Mrs. Eddy taught her first class in Chicago. For several weeks before going there she was constantly in a state of worry, or fear, that Mrs. Choate would ‘prostrate her,’ and so prevent her from going there, as she thought that Mrs. Choate herself wished to go and teach a class. Calvin A. Frye had purchased Mrs. Eddy’s ticket, and engaged a private compartment for her, and a berth for himself (to accompany her to Chicago), when, the night before she was to start, she was taken very ill (the work of Mrs. Choate, she believed it to be) and was not able to go the next day, as she had intended to do. She called in her students, at the College with her, to treat against Mrs. Choate, to prevent her mesmerism from prostrating her (Mrs. Eddy), and by the second day she was able to go to Chicago. We afterwards learned that at the same identical time, Mrs. Choate was ill, and thought that Mrs. Eddy was sending ‘malicious animal magnetism’ to prostrate her, and called in a former student of the college to treat against Mrs. Eddy’s mesmerism.

“So you see how fear controlled Mrs. Eddy (even at that distant day) and every one connected with her, and has continued to control every one taught by her, who has not escaped from the bondage of that teaching.

“This is only a fragment of what I might tell you in regard to Mrs. Eddy and her teachings at the time I was with her; but it is enough to show you what she taught and practised then, as well as now.”

Could anything be more insane than the condition of Mrs. Eddy’s household as indicated in this letter? Or could anything be more diabolical than her attempt, to which this gentleman and others are willing to make oath whenever they are called upon, by concerted mental operations to afflict her enemies with tumor and cancer?

But to be somewhat more specific. Some years ago Mrs. Eddy regarded Mr. Daniel H. Spofford, who had been one of her students and friends, as an enemy, and it was her determined and expressed purpose that he should in some manner be disposed of. The cause of Mrs. Eddy’s violent antipathy to Spofford is not quite clear, except perhaps upon the theory that all of her antipathies have been violent. It may be in some measure due to his unwillingness to pay her money he did not believe was due her, and to the failure of various litigations brought against him by her. Mrs. Eddy brought suit against Spofford upon one of her early contracts for $100 for teachings, ten per cent royalty on income, and $1,000 for omission to utilize the teachings; and she failed to recover in the courts. She actually caused a suit in equity to be brought against Spofford in the Superior Court at Salem, Mass., in which the court was asked to issue an injunction to restrain Spofford from using his mind to cause the illness of her patient, who was said to suffer physically from his malicious mental activity.

It is interesting to note that this singular proceeding was brought in the same jurisdiction in which, some hundreds of years ago, certain individuals were arraigned and tried for the crime of witchcraft, found guilty and hanged by the neck until they were dead.

Mrs. Eddy acted as attorney in fact for the plaintiff in this suit and the power of attorney is still of record in the case. The strange bill of complaint is as follows:

“Humbly complaining, the plaintiff, Lucretia L. S. Brown of Ipswich, in said County of Essex, showeth unto your Honors, that Daniel H. Spofford, of Newburyport, in said County of Essex, the defendant in the above entitled action, is a mesmerist and practices the art of mesmerism and by his said art and power of his mind influences and controls the minds and bodies of other persons and uses his said power and art for the purpose of injuring the persons and property and social relations of others and does by said means so injure them.

“And the plaintiff further showeth that the said Daniel H. Spofford has, at divers times and places since the year eighteen hundred and seventy-five, wrongfully and maliciously and with intent to injure the plaintiff, caused the plaintiff by means of his said power and art great suffering of body and mind and severe spinal pains and neuralgia and a temporary suspension of mind, and still continues to cause the plaintiff the same. And the plaintiff has reason to fear and does fear that he will continue in the future to cause the same. And the plaintiff says that said injuries are great and of an irreparable nature and that she is wholly unable to escape from the control and influence he so exercises upon her and from the aforesaid effects of said control and influence.”

Naturally Mrs. Eddy could find no lawyer sufficiently besotted, or shameless, to argue this case for her when it came up for hearing. She was present and such argument as was made was by one of her then dear friends, who afterwards became, as she believed, one of her dearest foes; but upon the filing of the demurrer by Mr. Spofford’s lawyer, raising the legal point that the bill of complaint did not set forth any cause of action, the court sustained the demurrer and threw the case out, declaring with a smile that it was not within the province of the court by its writ of injunction to control the operations of Mr. Spofford’s mind.

Whatever may have been the cause of Mrs. Eddy’s hatred of Spofford, she wished him killed, and to that end instructed her students to sit together daily, at noon and in the evening, and by concerted mental concentration hurl disease into Mr. Spofford.

I do not contend that Mrs. Eddy, or Christian Scientists or others, ever killed or can kill or afflict with disease any other person by absent mental treatment, and one of my strong reasons for this confident belief is that I am still permitted to walk the earth. I only seek to show the murderous purpose in the heart of the woman who is pretending to be the voice of God to this age and the equal of Jesus Christ.

Failing in her effort mentally to dispose of Spofford, did this vindictive woman endeavor to accomplish her purpose by any other method? I cannot precisely say, but what I can say is this: In December, 1878, after a hearing in the Police Court in Boston (in which one of the witnesses testified she had heard Mrs. Eddy say Spofford was a bad man and ought to be put out of the way), by which they were held for the grand jury in $3,000 bail, and after an examination by the Suffolk grand jury of some six or eight witnesses, one Edward J. Arens, and one Asa G. Eddy, third husband of Mary Baker G. Eddy, and then living with her as her husband, were duly indicted for a conspiracy to commit murder. To commit murder upon whom? Upon Daniel H. Spofford, the same Spofford Mrs. Eddy had solicited her followers to kill by mental means.

There were two counts in the indictment.

The first read: “That Edward J. Arens and Asa G. Eddy of Boston aforesaid, on the 28th day of July in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and seventy-eight, Boston, aforesaid, with Force and Arms, being persons of evil minds and dispositions did then and there unlawfully conspire, combine and agree together feloniously, wilfully, and of their malice aforethought, to procure, hire, incite and solicit, one James L. Sargent, for a certain sum of money, to wit, the sum of five hundred dollars, to be paid to said Sargent by them, said Arens and Eddy, feloniously, wilfully, and of his, said Sargent’s malice aforethought, in some way and manner and by some means, instruments, and weapons, to said jurors unknown, one, Daniel H. Spofford, to kill and murder. Against the law, peace and dignity of said Commonwealth.”

What connection there was between the failure of Mrs. Eddy’s efforts to kill Spofford or to have him killed by mental means and her husband’s alleged efforts to have him killed by physical means, I do not positively know. I did not hear Mrs. Eddy say to Mr. Eddy: Asa, we have tried and tried and tried to kill that man Spofford, but he is a tough proposition, and we have made no progress. Now you pay Sargent $500 to lie in wait for him with a club and we will see if that won’t settle him. That was the charge against Eddy. Nothing mental about the club form of treatment! I did not hear Mrs. Eddy say that to Eddy, but I very much doubt if he would have found himself in the position in which he was placed, if his dominating helpmeet had offered any objection to the thing of which he was accused. I do not know that Mrs. Eddy knew anything about Asa G. Eddy’s undertaking to have Spofford killed; but I do know that what I have stated is true, and I do know that the human mind necessarily makes deductions from circumstances; and I do not doubt every human mind that believes the facts to be as I have stated them, will make the same deduction that my mind makes.

For some unexplained reason this indictment was never prosecuted; but, upon the payment of costs by Eddy, was nol prossed. There was no disproof of the sworn testimony given in the Police Court. Eddy never asked for a hearing, he never insisted upon the vindication only a trial could give. He put his hand into his pocket and paid a considerable sum to escape a trial; and Mrs. Eddy and her friends call that a vindication. Does an innocent man accused of serious crime pay money to escape a trial, or does he demand a full hearing and establish his innocence?

And Spofford is not the only assumed enemy the good “Mother” of Christian Science has sought to dispose of by mental murder. Richard Kennedy and Clara E. Choate, both now living in Boston, and Edward J. Arens, also fell under the ban and at Mrs. Eddy’s instigation received so-called mental treatment designed to relieve them of the burden of the flesh by divers diseases.

Another one of her early friends, whom Mrs. Eddy ceased to love and grew to hate, was Richard Kennedy. He had been one of her earliest pupils, studying with her when she lived at the Wentworth house in Stoughton in the sixties; and they had carried on a sort of co-partnership at Lynn, Mrs. Eddy doing the teaching and Kennedy the healing.

But she had had a falling out with Kennedy as with her other early friends, Spofford and Arens, and she had dragged him into court as she had dragged them, Kennedy was a young man and an easy victim. He gave Mrs. Eddy his promissory note for a thousand dollars for her teachings, and after he had paid two hundred and fifty dollars on account she brought suit against him for the balance, seven hundred and fifty dollars, but again she lost her case.

After a time, somehow or other, the strange notion got into Mrs. Eddy’s head that Kennedy was the most malicious and Satanic of all her enemies, who were, by mental means, seeking her destruction. He was the very incarnation of the mind’s hellish power in its most malignant and effective form; and she denounced him in the following lurid language:

“The Nero of today, regaling himself through a mental method with the tortures of individuals, is repeating history and will fall upon his own sword and it shall pierce him through. Let him remember this when, in the dark recesses of thought, he is robbing, committing adultery, and killing; when he is attempting to turn friend away from friend, ruthlessly stabbing the quivering heart; when he is clipping the thread of life, and giving to the grave youth and its rainbow hues; when he is turning back the reviving sufferer to her bed of pain, clouding her first morning after years of night; and the Nemesis of that hour shall point to the tyrant’s fate, who falls at length upon the sword of justice.”

And in one of the editions of her book Mrs. Eddy went so far as to expressly accuse Kennedy of the crime of murder in the following extraordinary language:

“The husband of a lady who was the patient of this malpractitioner poured out his grief to us and said: ‘Dr. K—— has destroyed the happiness of my home, ruined my wife,’ etc.; and, after that, he finished with a double crime by destroying the health of that wronged husband so that he died. We say that he did these things because we have as much evidence of it as ever we had of the existence of any sin. The symptoms and circumstances of the cases, and the diagnosis of their diseases proved the unmistakable fact. His career of crime surpasses anything that minds in general can accept at this period. We advised him to marry a young lady whose affection he had won, but he refused; subsequently she was wedded to a nice young man, and then he alienated her affections from her husband.”

All of this, of course, by absent mental treatment!

It is a matter of record in the Superior Court of the State of New Hampshire, by sworn testimony, that Mrs. Eddy sought to relieve herself of the imagined malicious mental treatment of Mr. Kennedy by instructing her friends to sit together at stated times daily and, holding his lungs in a diseased condition in their minds, hurl consumption at him with all the power of concentrated malevolent thought.

Kennedy, who is living today, and with whom I am well acquainted, is as gentle and kindly a person as can be imagined; and, while Mrs. Eddy was working herself into a frenzy over his supposed malignity, and having consumption mentally hurled at him, was pursuing the even tenor of his way without thought of her except as an occasional memory of a bitter experience. Mrs. Eddy hated Kennedy as she hated Spofford, and she wanted Kennedy killed as she wanted Spofford killed; and, as in the case of Spofford, she solicited her friends and students to undertake by mental coöperation to terminate his mundane career.

It may relieve the minds of some to know that Mrs. Eddy’s kindly purpose did not succeed with any of the persons whose illness was sought, as I have related. Spofford, Kennedy and Mrs. Choate did not succumb to the malicious absent treatment, but are still present with us in the flesh. Arens died, I am told, but some time after Mrs. Eddy had given him up as hopelessly tenacious of life.

But one more incident and I have done​—​I have kept the worst until the last.

A sad and tragic episode in connection with the litigation instituted by her sons in reference to Mrs. Eddy’s mental condition, was the suicide at the Parker House, in Boston, on April 20, 1907, of Miss Mary C. Tomlinson, sister of Irving C. Tomlinson, a former Universalist minister, but then and now a Christian Science healer, and of Rev. Vincent Tomlinson, a Universalist minister of Worcester, Mass. Miss Tomlinson had lived with her brother Irving at Concord, N.H., and had been a Reader in the Christian Science Church there and an ardent disciple of Christian Science and of Mrs. Eddy, being much in company with her and absolutely devoted to her service. After the law suit by Mrs. Eddy’s sons began, all the closest friends of Mrs. Eddy in Concord (as well as elsewhere) were called upon to defend her from the attack, and, by the peculiar method of absent and silent mental treatment, both Mr. Glover and his senior counsel, Mr. Chandler, were pressed by the so-called “workers” to the utmost of the powers they supposed themselves to possess.

Miss Mary C. Tomlinson was not in the least degree unwilling to exercise her powers of absent treating of persons in order to repel the Stetson argument; nor even unwilling to treat Glover and Chandler in the ordinary way, trying to make them abandon the lawsuit; but when the decision was made at Concord, to treat Mrs. Eddy’s own son and his lawyer in hostile fashion​—​by sending arsenical poison into their veins, or otherwise putting them to death, Miss Tomlinson’s whole nature revolted. She had implicit faith in Christian Science, she worshiped Mrs. Eddy, she believed in the existence of malicious animal magnetism and its devilish power and in the methods of counter-working to prevent its evil work; but she had never before seen an attempt made to use absent treatment diabolically​—​by putting to death the enemies of the Church of Christ, Scientist. When she opened her eyes to the enormity to be practised in the name of a revengeful church, her mind revolted. She determined to leave Concord, to renounce Mrs. Eddy and all her works and to denounce the system to which she had been so earnest a servant. Indeed the intense revulsion of feeling seems to have upset her mental balance. Following up her determination, she went to Boston on April 19 and wandered about, uncertain what to do with herself, at last finding her way to the Parker House in the hands of a Christian Scientist, where her two brothers, being telegraphed for, came to take charge of her.

Here the tragedy begins. The Parker House manager wished her to be seen by Dr. Payne, the hotel physician; but did not succeed in getting him admission to her rooms. He did, however, send to her a nurse from Boothby Hospital, a Miss Telfair, who arrived about nine p.m. Later, Mr. Vincent Tomlinson, the Universalist minister, came and with the nurse took charge of his sister.

About eleven o’clock Mr. Irving C. Tomlinson, the Christian Science healer, arrived and at once took controlling charge of Miss Tomlinson​—​saying that he understood the case and knew what to do. Mr. Vincent Tomlinson left the rooms and took a room down the corridor which his brother had engaged. The nurse was not allowed to stay in the room with Miss Tomlinson but was placed out in the corridor, while Mr. Irving Tomlinson took off his shoes and coat and laid down in a connecting room. About one o’clock in the morning there was the sound of a window being raised in Miss Tomlinson’s room and the nurse entered quickly from the corridor as Irving came in from his room. They found she had opened the window, and she said to Irving, when he remonstrated, that she wanted to look out. They induced her to go back to bed and Irving then locked on the inside the door from her room into the corridor and took out the key and kept it. Miss Telfair went into the corridor again and Irving went into his own room. About three a.m., Miss Telfair heard the door connecting with Irving’s room shut and locked by Miss Tomlinson. Again she heard the window opened, but, having been locked out, could not get to Miss Tomlinson. She called for the porter and they finally got into Miss Tomlinson’s room by breaking down the door connecting it with Irving’s. They found the window wide open and the room empty. Miss Tomlinson had thrown herself down four stories to the street. She was brought back to her room, but never spoke, and died about five a.m.

She had worshiped Mrs. Eddy. She had been one of the most devoted of her disciples, and when she came to a realization of the infamies being practised in the name of Christ, life lost every ray of light and every particle of charm, and she dashed herself to death upon the stones of the streets of Boston.

Small matter for wonder that, when the bruised and mangled body had been carried to the chamber Miss Tomlinson had occupied, the Universalist minister, standing by his dead sister, should solemnly say to his brother, the renegade Universalist minister, the Christian Science healer, “Irving, the blood of our sister is upon the skirts of Mrs. Eddy!”

The story is now completely told. Of those who have followed me to the end, I ask, was it incumbent upon me, knowing the facts as I know them and as I have here presented them, to crowd them down into my soul and by suppressing them become a party to Mrs. Eddy’s monstrous imposition? Just because the author of all of this fraud, falsehood, hypocrisy, blasphemy and attempted crime is a woman, now an aged woman, should I therefore stand silently by and permit her longer to masquerade before mankind as like unto the pure and holy Jesus? I think not. That has not seemed to me to be my duty in the matter. I have done my duty as I have seen it, and I will stand by the position taken and the facts affirmed.

Is it possible for any decent person, man or woman, to peruse this book and then acknowledge himself or herself a disciple of Mary Baker G. Eddy? Is it conceivable that any sane man or woman, with full knowledge of the facts of her life, can honestly profess belief in her disgusting imposture? Can any one who feels, as I do, that Jesus is the common glory of all who bear a human heart, without resentment and without anger witness the endeavor of this vulgar creature to place herself by His side? Can any devout Christian have any other feeling than one of abhorrence for the blasphemous woman and the bunco game she dares to say is “authorized by Christ”?

If I have made good, if I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish, I ask every man and every woman who reads this book to lose no opportunity to show this hateful thing, miscalled Christian Science, in its true light to those with whom they come in contact. Let it have no quarter. Hit it every time you have a chance and hit it as hard as you can. It is not entitled to respectful treatment. Nothing is more impossible than to love Jesus, even a little, and to have the slightest, the very slightest, tolerance for Mrs. Eddy and her frauds.

A Christian Science speaker recently, in a suburb of Boston, in concluding an address exhorted her hearers to “follow Mrs. Eddy, as Mrs. Eddy follows the Saviour.” Not follow the Saviour, but follow Mrs. Eddy in Mrs. Eddy’s way of following the Saviour.

As Mrs. Eddy follows the Saviour.

By faking a revelation from God? By stealing the ideas of another and ascribing them to God’s voice in her private ear? By putting on the cloak of religion in order to pick the pockets of those whose hands are clasped in prayer? By copyrighting a “religion,” and suing those who infringe her copyright? By fixing, under the pretended guidance of God, upon the extortionate sum of three hundred dollars for twelve lessons in “the divine power that heals”? By invoking the aid of the courts to compel poor creatures to pay her, at the rate of twenty-five dollars per hour, for telling them of God, and His Christ? By organizing a church in which membership is made dependent upon activity in the sale of her puerile and profitable wares? By denouncing as vile debauchery the sweetest and purest and noblest relation of men and women? By declaring the children, in whom our souls delight, to be the offspring of “legalized lust”? By refusing to put forth her professed Godlike power to soothe any pain, even that of the sister she loved, to save any life, even that of her own grandchild? By constituting herself the veritable autocrat of the Bedlamites and reigning with despotic sway over the multitudes of her self-abased dupes? By never telling the truth, unless there was money in it, and never hesitating at a lie that would add one simple soul to the number of her victims or one soiled dollar to her bulging exchequer? By living a life of unvarying deception and uncleanness, and professing, with eyes rolled heavenward, to be “as pure as the angels”? By seeking, with Satanic zeal and hatred, the destruction of her fancied enemies, through the attempted mental infliction of disease and suffering and death?

As Mrs. Eddy follows the Saviour?

Not thus, not thus, O Saviour of mankind! not thus have followed in the royal road which thou hast trod ages of worshipers!

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