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Title: The Religio-Medical Masquerade - A Complete Exposure of Christian Science
Author: Peabody, Frederick William
Language: English
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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
I. The Sacrifice of Children
II. The Detached Heart
III. Pretended Equality with Jesus
IV. The Faked “Revelation”
V. The Fiction of God’s Authorship
VI. A Sham “Religion”
VII. A Bogus Healing System
VIII. Immeasurable Greed
IX. The Eddy Autocracy
X. The “String” on the Gifts
XI. The Eddy Ban on Marriage
XII. 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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