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.