Surely, if the healings of Christian Scientists were realities, once a convert would mean always a convert; but it is a fact that people are coming out of Christian Science as rapidly as they are going in, and the more intelligence they have the more quickly they abandon the thing when they come to understand what it is. If you are all right in the region of the brain and all right in the region of the heart, you won’t tarry very long in the Christian Science camp. I know many ex-Christian Scientists who denounce it as roundly as I do and declare it to be a fraud in all its aspects. I could name hundreds of people, formerly zealous followers of Mrs. Eddy, who now repudiate her with scorn and contumely. Would they do this if she were in fact the miracle worker she claims to be, and if Christian Science were in fact the sovereign antidote to sickness, sin and death?
The following is taken from a letter recently received from a gentleman of exceptional intelligence:
“I have been connected with that church for five years and have lately had my eyes opened to the most cold-blooded skin game conceivable under the guise of a religion. Having conducted a Christian Science sanitarium for three years, I am in possession of facts unknown to any but Christian Scientists, and to only a few of the inner circle of grafters. I was a student of medicine at Harvard in the 70s, am a B.A. of the University of New Brunswick, Canada, and ought to have known better—but there are others.”
Christian Science is a “skin game” and the powers that be in Christian Science are the “inner circle of grafters”! Strange language this to be applied to a “religion” and its leading officials by a former believer; but it is precisely as former Christian Scientists, men and women, speak of the thing and the people they have repudiated.
Cures of real or imaginary illness are sometimes effected in very extraordinary ways. Being recently in San Francisco, I talked with a friend, a lawyer, there who had gone through the experience of the earthquake. The house in which he was born and in which he lived was burned to the ground after its contents had been dragged out and heaped up upon a vacant lot, and he turned from his law office, his library shelves crowded with books, no one of which he had an opportunity to save from the devastating flames. The experience was an intensely distressing and exhausting one. For two days and two nights he did not get a wink of sleep. Prior to the earthquake and fire, he had been a constant sufferer from the most excruciating headaches. Not a headache has he had since! Cured by earthquake!
I talked with another gentleman, and he told me that his mother-in-law had been bedridden for five years, and not once in that time had put her foot upon the floor. She had not attempted to walk because she was positive she was unable to walk and her death was daily expected. As the flames approached the region of her residence, my friend and his wife started off in different directions to find some form of conveyance to carry their mother to a place of safety, and when they returned, in about an hour, she had vanished. Unaided, she had gotten up, dressed herself, and walked between two and three miles! Cured by conflagration!
Marvelous cures these, almost in the nature of miracles; and yet even a Christian Scientist would smile disdainfully if earthquake and conflagration were seriously prescribed for headache and paralysis.
No doubt people have recovered of illness while under Christian Science treatment; just as they have when under no treatment; but the Christian Science inane treatment was no more the cause of the recovery than was the absence of treatment of any kind.
There is a great deal of delusive sickness, which is easily cured by a putting away of the delusion, and there was never yet any, but a delusive, cure by Christian Science of an organic disease—not one. Will Mrs. Eddy and all her healers and followers throughout the world be able to add one moment, one breath, to the life of Mrs. Eddy herself, when the hour of her death has arrived? No, deny the reality of disease and death as they may, it comes to them one and all, just as to others, when the angel of death approaches and beckons from the darkness that closes upon their drooping eyes.
I am sure that there can be no doubt in any honest, clear-thinking mind that has followed me thus far, that all of these monstrous and irreverent pretensions of the leader and founder of Christian Science are wholly false, and I am equally confident that I shall establish in the mind of those who go with me to the end of my showing, that Mrs. Eddy’s frauds have had their incentive in a purely mercenary motive; that she has claimed to have received a revelation from God and equality with Jesus and the performance of miracles for the purpose alone of fooling people into placing an extraordinary value upon her valueless teachings for which she has made extortionate charges; that she has claimed to be the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, “the woman clothed with the sun,” and that her book, “Science and Health,” was the little book held in the hand of the angel, that she is herself the feminine impersonation, as Jesus was the masculine impersonation, of the immaculate idea, and that, not she, but God was the author of her book, solely and only that she might build up a powerful organization and a large fortune. Money and power are the explanations of Mrs. Eddy’s frauds, her lies, her blasphemies, I will even say of her crimes, for when crime could, as she believed, be accomplished through mental effort, maliciously employed for the destruction of her enemies, she has not hesitated so to seek its accomplishment, and her whole career, for thirty or forty years past, has been the crime of obtaining money by false pretenses.