Immeasurable Greed
Let us now go with some particularity into these charges that I make against Mrs. Eddy. I charge that she has been and is wholly mercenary; that her pretended revelation, her pretended exceptional character as successor to Jesus, her pretended marvelous curative powers, are dishonestly invented and put forth, first, as a means of making money, and then as a means of acquiring despotic power.
First, as to the mercenary motive.
Mrs. Eddy’s activity as a teacher of Christian Science began in the year 1870, after leaving Stoughton and going to Lynn, Massachusetts. She was then in her fiftieth year, and from the time of her marriage to Glover in 1843 had been extremely poor. Christian Science, at the very outset, took on a money-making character. Her familiarity with Quimby’s teachings, transformed into a discovery of her own, and then into a revelation from God, became with her a business asset to be utilized for revenue only.
In the introduction to her “Science and Health,” published in 1898, Mrs. Eddy says that her “first pamphlet on Christian Science was copyrighted in 1870, but it did not appear in print until 1876, as she had learned that this science must be demonstrated by healing before a work on the subject could be profitably published.” I emphasize the word “profitably.” At the very start there was the resolution in the woman’s heart that this “science,” ultimately to become a “religion,” was not to be given to the world until it could be published with profit to her, and from the beginning, until now, profit has been her first and main consideration.
In the Banner of Light, the organ of the spiritualists, of July 4, 1869, and three years after the date she now claims as the time of the “revelation,” Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Glover, published the following advertisement:
“Any person desiring to learn how to heal the sick can receive of the undersigned instruction that will enable them to commence healing on a principle of science with success far beyond any of the present modes. No medicine, electricity, physiology or Hygiene required for unparalleled success in the most difficult cases. No pay is required unless the skill is obtained. Address Mrs. Mary B. Glover, Amesbury, Mass., Box 61.”
One is reminded of the flaunting advertisements of the cut-rate drug stores, guaranteeing a cure by a liberal use of patent medicines or a return of the money.
Mrs. Eddy started out with the guarantee system, no skill imparted, no money required; but it may be believed that the guarantee system was speedily abandoned. There was no money in a guarantee of skill to heal disease through Mrs. Eddy’s teachings, and a change was speedily made to the permanently-adopted system of “cash in advance.”