What's What in America

by Eugene V. Brewster

During these days it is known that she spent much of her time writing, and reading the New York Ledger, and, if we are to believe what she wrote to a friend, she also read "Irving's Pickwick Papers." She apparently did not like Dickens.

In 1869 (please note the date) she taught Mrs. Wentworth the Quimby theory for the sum of $300, to be taken out in board, and at that time she made no pretense that it was her own theory. She even permitted Mrs. Wentworth to copy from a manuscript which has been proven to be identical with the original Quimby manuscript. Several witnesses testify that she "talked Quimby till every one grew dead tired of hearing him," and she often remarked: "I learned this from Dr. Quimby, and he made me promise to teach it to at least two persons before I die." It is also known that Mrs. Eddy "shrank instinctively, like any other nervous woman, from the sick-bed of others, and had shown such a morbid fear of death that Mrs. Wentworth often wondered what there could be in her past to make death seem so dreadful."

Mrs. Eddy did not practice healing. What she now wanted was to publish and teach Quimbyism and to find some one to demonstrate the healing theory. In 1870 she found just what she wanted in the person of Richard Kennedy, with whom she went into partnership, and in six months they had made $6,000. This was the sharp turning point of her life. She now discarded Quimby forever, and her ambitions led her in time to discard even Kennedy, her greatest benefactor. Everything was now Mrs. Eddy. She next started a school or college where students paid her $100 each plus a promise to pay her a life annuity of ten per cent. of all their future earnings. She also made them give a bond for $3,000 which was to be forfeited if they allowed any one to see or to copy the manuscripts that she lent them. The college so prospered that she raised the price to $300 for twelve lessons, induced, she says, "by a strange providence."

In 1877, at the age of fifty-six (although her age appears as forty in the marriage license), she married Asa Gilbert Eddy, then forty years old. He was "a man willing to be taught; he would even turn docility into self-effacement." He died five years later. Even Mrs. Eddy could not save him. Mrs. Eddy never had another husband, but "in Calvin A. Frye, steward, bookkeeper, secretary, coachman, her 'man of all work,'" as she herself called him, she has had the while one singularly devoted to her and to her interests. To serve her he gave up all at the outset. Family ties were relinquished. Friendships were allowed to languish. It is said that never since the day he came, has he been beyond the reach of her voice for a whole day! A few years ago Dr. E. J. Foster, whom she adopted in 1882 as her son, was driven out of his home by Frye. Her own son she seems to have forgotten entirely for long years at a time.

In 1875, Mrs. Eddy issued the first edition of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." Other editions came out in 1881, 1883, 1888, 1898, 1905, and 1906, and also other books and writings by the same author, in all of which she claimed that her great discovery and revelation came to her in 1866 (note the date). Meanwhile her college was prospering and students flocked to it from all parts of the world, each paying $300 for a three weeks' course, and in 1889 there were no less than 300 on the waiting list. In 1894 she erected a building at a cost of $221,000, which now stands as a frontispiece to the colossal temple which was completed in 1906 at a cost of $2,000,000. The Mother Church in Boston reported June 11, 1907, a membership of 43,876, and the total membership of the 645 branch churches was 42,846.

On December 18, 1890, Mrs. Eddy said that Science and Health was "God's Book and He gave it at once to the people." Yet the book was sold by Mrs. Eddy for over $3 a copy, while a copy of the Bible may be bought for a few cents, and if anybody cannot buy it, he can get a copy presented to him free by any preacher or Sunday School teacher. Mrs. Eddy also says that it pays to be a Christian Scientist and that the professionals have made "their comfortable fortunes." When Mrs. Eddy died, her private fortune was considerably in excess of a million dollars, yet she persistently tried to evade paying her share of taxes.

This in brief is the life history of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. Her's was a stormy career, filled with troubles, quarrels, lawsuits, internal dissentions, fears, revenge, ill health, sorrows, unhappy marriages, rivalries, disloyalties, and selfishness. She had many thousands to admire and to worship her, but few to love her. Those who knew her best loved her least. That she was one of the most remarkable women who ever lived, few will doubt. Her career is almost as spectacular as that of Joan of Arc, who, like Mrs. Eddy, rose from a poor girl to be a world-famous leader of men. Neither had anything like an education, and both had a poor start in life, but, out of sheer force of personality and persistency, both accomplished wonders. Their lives read like fiction. While history is full of examples where men have risen from nowhere, and claimed that they were inspired, or Divine, or Sons of God, or prophets, there is no parallel to the career of Mrs. Eddy, who has won both the scholar and the ignoramus. No, not ignoramus, for the ignoramus is not the kind to fall a victim to Mrs. Eddy's doctrine. It requires a person of brains to "grasp" it. While it is true that people unschooled in philosophy, science and theology are quickest to accept Science and Health, and that those who read earnestly and think loosely can get just enough glimpse of an imagined something that they cannot quite grasp, yet which they feel is there somewhere, still, it must be said that the average Christian Scientist is generally a person of unusual intelligence. Were it not so, the doctrine would never have become so popular. Was it not Lord Bacon who said something like this?—"While a little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, depth in philosophy inclineth men's minds to religion." And so with Christian Science. Given a good mind, and a good understanding, and an investigating disposition, feed it Science and Health and it will have a tendency to accept it as truth, provided it is not allowed to hear the other side, and provided it has not been previously trained to reason correctly along scientific lines. There is just enough truth in it to make it all sound plausible and there is just enough mysticism to make the mind doubt its own acumen. Belief in Christian Science is a form of intellectual hypnotism.

The hypothesis of Mrs. Eddy's doctrine is stated as follows: "The only realities are the Divine Mind and its ideas. That erring mortal views, misnamed mind, produce all the organic and animal action of the mortal body * * * Rightly understood, instead of possessing sentient matter, we have sensationless bodies * * * Whence came to me this conviction in antagonism to the testimony of the human senses? From the self-evident fact that matter has no sensation; from the common human experience of the falsity of all material things; from the obvious fact that mortal mind is what suffers, feels, sees; since matter cannot suffer."

Here are a few of Mrs. Eddy's favorite, oft-repeated assertions: "God is supreme; is mind; is principle, not person; includes all and is reflected by all that is real and eternal; is Spirit, and Spirit is infinite; is the only substance; is the only life. Man was and is the idea of God; therefore mind can never be in man. Divine Science shows that matter and mortal body are the illusions of human belief, which seem to appear and disappear to mortal sense alone. When this belief changes, as in dreams, the material body changes with it, going wherever we wish, and becoming whatsoever belief may decree. Human mortality proves that error has been engrafted into both the dreams and conclusions of material and mortal humanity. Besiege sickness and death with these principles, and all will disappear."