Some time after the Woodbury-Eddy litigation, I was retained by Rev. Minot J. Savage, then of New York City, to collect for him, and at his expense, in legally evidential form, the facts showing unmistakably Mrs. Eddy’s false pretense and fraud, and in pursuance of this employment I examined numerous individuals and took their statements under oath for Mr. Savage. Later, when McClure’s magazine undertook the publication of the facts of Mrs. Eddy’s career, I was employed to procure the sworn statements of many individuals in support of the magazine’s story, and shortly thereafter I was retained by Mrs. Eddy’s two sons, George W. Glover, born to her by her first husband, and Edward J. Foster, her son by adoption, to cooperate with their other lawyers, Hon. William E. Chandler, Ex-United States Senator from New Hampshire being senior counsel, in the prosecution in the courts of New Hampshire of a suit in equity for the appointment of a receiver to have charge of their mother’s large estate for her benefit, upon the ground that, through old age mental weakness and delusions, if not actual insanity, she was incompetent to have the care of it. This litigation never reached a determination in the courts, but the family controversy was ultimately settled by a family settlement in which the two sons were paid approximately $300,000 for a relinquishment of their prospective interest in their mother’s estate and an agreement not to contest any will or other instrument disposing of her property.
As the Massachusetts attorney in this litigation, it became my duty in the City of Boston to examine, under oath, many of Mrs. Eddy’s most intimate friends, and the highest officials of organized Christian Science, who, by legal process, were compelled to produce many hundreds of personal letters received by them from her. This last professional experience completed my understanding of Christian Science, and the facts herein set forth are, almost without exception, based, either upon Mrs. Eddy’s own published utterances, her private correspondence, the sworn testimony of witnesses, or the admissions under oath of her most confidential friends and followers; and I give my book to the world with a full understanding of the responsibility I assume and a complete willingness to justify in any legal tribunal every statement I make.
Let it not be supposed, however, that I am presenting the spectacle of a cowardly man attacking a weak and unprotected woman. Mrs. Eddy is the head and front of a powerful and rich organization, the leader of a movement that numbers many thousands of adherents, amongst them some thousands of more or less masculine men. She is Christian Science, and Christian Science is Mrs. Eddy. Anything that money can buy or fanaticism give is constantly at her disposal, and back of her, as behind the greatest and the humblest, stands the sovereign law. Whoever offends another, is accountable to the law; and if anything I say offend against her right to enjoy the reputation warranted by her life, I can and should be called to speedy and strict account. If the contents of this book are not true, I, myself, proclaim that the severest legal penalty would inadequately punish me for its publication. If, on the other hand, what I say be true, as I am confident there can be no doubt in any honest mind that follows me to the end, then decent people, men or women, can no longer afford to give the slightest countenance to Mary Baker G. Eddy and her impostures, be they called by the name of religion, or be they pretended cure-alls for the ills to which our human flesh is heir.
I challenge Mrs. Eddy and the whole Christian Science combination to dare to prosecute me for libel, and I affirm and shall continue to affirm that their omission so to do is an acknowledgment of the truth of every statement I make. She knows I am telling nothing but the truth, and that the whole truth, to be brought out upon a judicial investigation, would be more damning than the truth as I have presented it. The whole truth cannot be told outside of a judicial tribunal.
In presenting the substance of this book in the form of a lecture to the people of the country, from one ocean to the other, the only response has been slander and defamation of me, the last resort of the accused who can make no defense; but nobody has met my facts with anything like evidence, or undertaken in any serious manner to disprove the truth of my most damaging charges.
I beg every one who reads this book not to be diverted from the facts by any personal abuse of me that may follow its publication. It is the only response that has been or can be made to my presentation, and I am accustomed to it from the paid spokesmen of a cult that, so far as its ruling spirits are concerned, more resembles an organization of outlaws banded together for plunder, than a religious establishment based upon the sublime teachings of the Man of Sorrows.
The knowledge I possess I could not suppress without making myself a party to one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against the human race; and I will not, by my silence, permit myself to become an ally with Mrs. Eddy and her associates in that crime.
History is but repeated in Christian Science. “We have seen,” said Macaulay, “an old woman with no talents beyond the cunning of a fortune teller, and with the education of a scullion, exalted into a prophetess and surrounded by tens of thousands of devoted followers, many of whom were, in station and in knowledge, immeasurably her superiors, and all this in the nineteenth century, and all this in London.”
Marveling as he thus did at the success of Joanna Southcott’s parody upon religion in the early part of the last century, what would Macaulay have thought of Mary Baker G. Eddy’s utterly unintelligible hodge-podge, which she falsely calls both a discovery and a revelation, a science and a religion, and what would he have thought of her following?
Mrs. Eddy is in no respect superior to Miss Southcott in the matter of origin and education. One was as obscure and as unlearned as the other. In one respect at least the Southcott woman was superior to the Eddy woman. The former was at least honest; she believed in her mission. There is no evidence that she built up a pretended religion upon a foundation of lies. She was, at the worst, an unbalanced creature with a form of religious mania. She did not grow rich out of her followers. She did not use her supposed revelation as a business asset and sell it for what it would bring. She did not take out a copyright on her “religion,” and monopolize its sale for extraordinary profit. There was no taint of commercialism about her frenzies. She died poor.