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.”