The truth is, Mrs. Eddy’s miraculous cures are all frauds, every one of them, and the failure of attempted healings would prove them to be frauds, and she does not wish to so discredit herself. She never healed any one of any serious disease. She never in her life had any curative power whatever, and she has been wise indeed not to advertise the fact by attempting to cure. Her man, Alfred Farlow, the official, highly paid and carefully coached spokesman of her cult, and its leading press agent, admitted, in response to my questioning and when testifying recently under oath and subject to cross examination, that he did not know of any cure ever having been made by Mrs. Eddy of any organic disease in her life, but stiff leg; and he said that, in his understanding as a high practitioner of the Christian Science art of healing, a stiff leg is an organic disease.
When I entered upon my investigation of the matter, I believed in the reality of some of the professed cures of Christian Science, even of organic disease, but closer acquaintance with the subject has satisfied me that they are, without exception, false pretensions or honest delusions. I have known of the most honest, but erroneous, belief in cure by Christian Science, I have known people so resolutely to deny to themselves the reality of disease, that they have come to believe in its unreality; and one case has come to my notice of a poor woman’s insistence with her dying breath that she had been healed of an incurable disease and was then perfectly well, while her death within a few hours was the sad witness to the delusive character of her “cure.”
Perhaps the most impressive case of this delusive cure of incurable disease is that of the Earl of Dunmore. He was Christian Science’s show convert. His personality was always in the foreground, he always sat in the front row upon the platform and his name was always in the papers.
In March, 1907, he published in the Cosmopolitan Magazine an account of his conversion to Christian Science, which was due, he said, to his having been healed by it of a disease an eminent London surgeon had pronounced incurable. The Earl of Dunmore, when he published that article, doubtless believed it was true. He was perfectly sincere, but his death, within a few weeks after the publication of his conversion through cure, his death of the very disease pronounced incurable by the London doctor, was pathetic and convincing testimony to his mistaken opinion that he had been cured and to the accuracy of the medical diagnosis that his disease was incurable.
Again and again the most persistent effort has been made to induce Christian Science healers to give some reasonable proof of their powers; but they as persistently refuse to submit any alleged cures to anything like scientific scrutiny. There has never been a scientifically established Christian Science cure. The “healers” confess that they are, nay even boast that they are, incompetent to diagnose disease. If they can’t determine the presence of disease, how then can they determine its cure? Mrs. Eddy herself goes so far as to say that ignorance of all departments of the science of medicine is an aid in the cure of disease, according to her system. What value then is to be attached to anything any of them say about disease, if they are completely ignorant concerning it? And it being a fundamental article of their faith to deny the reality of disease, how can they admit its reality, however manifest in their patients, without stultifying themselves? Is it not superlatively absurd to be in the slightest degree influenced by anything any of these monomaniacs, or fakers, can possibly say upon a subject of which they openly profess to know, and boast that they know, absolutely nothing?
Besides, and let me emphasize this statement, there is not a Christian Science healer, in good and regular standing anywhere in the world, who tells the truth, or tries to tell the truth, or could tell the truth if he tried. They know that suffering is real, they know disease is real, they know that death is the most positive of all realities, and yet they perpetually affirm the unreality of all these things. Every former healer, who has reformed, or recovered his sanity and given up pretending to heal by denying the reality of a condition he is attempting to change, will tell you he lied perpetually when practising so-called Christian Science; for to admit the reality of disease or suffering or death, however confident of its existence, is to deny the faith and pronounce Mrs. Eddy to be a fraud.
Let me here, parenthetically, call attention to another phase of this thing. Not only are these unrealities proclaimed, but the reality of sin is in like manner denied. If sin is unreal, to commit sin is nothing, and no iniquity is so great as to be morally reprehensible. There is no such thing as morality or immorality, if sin is unreal; and any one who proclaims the unreality of sin, if he have any influence in the community, is about as harmful a member of society as can exist.
The denial of suffering and death, the denial of poverty and sin, have had a markedly observable effect in Christian Science circles in drying up the springs of the sweetest and tenderest of human feelings. If none of these things really exist, there can be no occasion for charity, for compassion, for sympathy, and to give expression to any of these sentiments is to admit the reality of the things Mrs. Eddy affirms to be unreal. One cannot be a Christian Scientist and have in his heart the Christ-like emotions of sympathy and charity and compassion. It is said that the faces of Christian Scientists wear a perpetual smile. It is the stereotyped smile of affected cheerfulness and it covers a heart from which the most humane and attractive qualities have been, as nearly as may be, rooted out. But to return to the healers.
I know a woman who was a successful healer for fifteen years and as conscientious as any of them, and she is now frank enough to say that she never healed any one of any real disease or serious indisposition in all that time, and doesn’t know of any other healer who did. They simply fool themselves and their patients by denying the reality of disease so long as there is breath in the body, and when death occurs and actually confronts them, they deny the reality of death. Could absurdity further go?
Perhaps it is due to their belief in the unreality of death, that they permit no funerals in their churches; perhaps, also, it may be due to their unwillingness, from a business standpoint, to admit that Christian Scientists, young and old, die just as do the benighted people who have not bowed down to Mrs. Eddy.