In this letter Mrs. Eddy said:
“I challenge the world to disprove what I hereby declare. After my discovery of Christian Science, I healed consumption in its last stages, that the M.D.’s, by verdict of the stethoscope and the schools, declared incurable, the lungs being mostly consumed. I healed malignant tubercular diphtheria and carious bones that could be dented by the finger, saving them when the surgeon’s instruments were lying on the table ready for their amputation. I have healed at one visit a cancer that had so eaten the flesh of the neck as to expose the jugular vein so that it stood out like a cord.”
She manufactured new lungs, offhand. She healed carious bones, instantaneously. She put forth the divine power God had conferred upon her, and at one visit healed that most frightful of all diseases, a malignant cancer.
This statement is either true or false. If it is true, the whole world should know it, for its truth would prove Mrs. Eddy to have the power to triumph over death, and when the king, or the queen, of death shall come to earth, all knees will touch the ground. No one can love another very much and not be willing to go upon his knees before the man or the woman who can protect that loved one forever from the hand of death; and I should want to be the very first to prostrate myself in all humility and gratitude before the conqueror of death. And if, on the other hand, Mrs. Eddy’s statement is false, absolutely false, a fiction made out of whole cloth, then it is important that such falsity should be clearly shown, and shown throughout the world that all mankind may know the wickedness of her falsification. I affirm, and shall show, it to be false in every particular.
Mrs. Eddy’s statement gives no names, dates, localities, nor any substantial thing to enable any one to investigate any of these professed miracles, and every effort to induce her to particularize ended, as always, in failure. There would have been as much, and as little, sense in a challenge to the world to disprove the green-cheese hypothesis of the structural composition of the moon.
In the issue of the Sun of January 1, 1899, Dr. Charles A. L. Reed, a prominent physician of Cincinnati, published a challenge to Mrs. Eddy to prove the truth of her miraculous cures. He offered to furnish her cases identical with those she said she had healed, and he said that, if she would heal any one of them, he would proclaim her omnipotence from the housetops; and if she would cure all or half of them, he would cheerfully crawl upon his knees that he might but touch the hem of her garment.
But dumbness possessed Mrs. Eddy from that time forth. Probably she didn’t want to be glorified from the housetops; she didn’t wish to have any mere medical man crawling at her feet.
As Mrs. Eddy furnishes no specifications, it is impossible, of course, to meet her allegations in the ordinary way; but I purpose, nevertheless, to satisfy every intelligent mind that there is not an atom of truth in her professed miracles.
If you have the power over life and death here claimed by Mrs. Eddy, when do you employ it? You employ it, do you not, when some one you greatly love is suffering, when some one dear to you is approaching the grave? If you have the power to save human life, you save the life, first of all, of those whom you most love; and if you know those you dearly love to be suffering torture from frightful disease and that, if the progress of the disease is not stopped, the hand of death will inevitably snatch them, if you know these things and put forth no particle of power, make no effort to allay the suffering or stay the progress of the disease, then it becomes clear that you have no such power, or that you are a monster of inhumanity, does it not?
This is the case with Mrs. Eddy. If she has had the power she claims, she has the most unfeeling heart that ever beat in a human breast; for she has never put forth the power to save those she most loved as they stood on the very edge of the grave.