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.