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

by Frederick William Peabody

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!