President Mary Baker G. Eddy and her faculty, which, when it did not consist of herself alone, included her third husband and adopted son, do not seem to have needed a bargain counter for marked down educations. Marked up educations in Christian Science were the ones that sold best, as Mrs. Eddy wisely foresaw. So, after only a couple of years of the God-established rate of three hundred dollars for twelve lessons, Mrs. Eddy and her learned faculty concluded to set aside God’s judgment and raise the rates. They thriftily, and “shrinkingly,” of course, resolved that three hundred dollars for so many as twelve lessons, although advised by God, was in truth not a fair “financial equivalent for an impartation of a knowledge of that divine power which heals,” and in the Christian Science Journal for December, 1888, twenty-two years after God had, as she says, freely revealed it to her, Mrs. Eddy published the following notice:
“Having reached a place in teaching where my students in Christian Science are taught more during seven lessons in the primary class than they were formerly in twelve, and taught all that is profitable at one time, hereafter the primary class will include seven lessons only. As this number of lessons is of more value than twice this number in times past, no change is made in the price of tuition, three hundred dollars. Mary Baker G. Eddy.”
Three hundred dollars for seven lessons, forty-two dollars per lesson, from each person in the primary class of unalloyed humbug, by a rank impostor! Over two thousand dollars for each single lesson to classes of fifty, and thousands of people living in the most enlightened portion of the world, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, willing to pay it! Verily there is ground for humbleness of spirit in such a display of credulity, not to say imbecility, or, as Mark Twain would say, asininity, in this so-called enlightened age!
Does not, in all sincerity, I ask, does not Mrs. Eddy’s “shrinking” suggest in an impressive and beautiful way the chaste hesitancy of the hungry pig as he scrambles on all fours into the replenished trough!
Recall the picture of the haloed Mrs. Eddy standing by His side and holding the Saviour’s hand, as illustrative of equality and “Christian Unity”; and imagine, if imagination be equal to the task, Jesus availing Himself of His communion and kinship with the Father to accumulate money. Fancy His Sermon on the Mount being imparted, after the payment to Him by each disciple of a financial equivalent of the proportions of the Eddy exaction. See Him crowding into the courts those poor unfortunates who were unable to pay, and by the employment of legal process seeking to wrest it from them. Imagine His requiring all His disciples to sign a contract to pay so much in advance, such a percentage of their annual income from healing, and one thousand dollars forfeit if they were indisposed to heal after having been taught. Hear Him instructing His disciples to go into all the world, teach the gospel to every creature for cash strictly in advance, to lay hands upon the sick and assure them that they would be more likely to be healed after having paid whatever they were able to pay for the service.
Again, may we hear the burst of divine indignation at the impious and infamous pretensions of this sordid creature! Again the words, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers! How can ye escape the damnation of hell”!
But teaching was not Mrs. Eddy’s only bonanza, and her income from teaching was only a fraction of her total income.
In 1875, or thereabouts, Mrs. Eddy had a book on her hands that she had most laboriously written, and for which she must create a market. The book was the veriest rubbish and, with only her name to back it, was utterly without value to any one. In course of time, it not selling readily, the idea seems to have dawned upon her that, if she could make people believe that this book, this crude, incoherent jumbling together of meaningless terms, was in very deed the Word of God, the Infallible, the All-wise, and that its mere perusal would cure disease, a market would be created for it and her fortune would be made. Acting upon this theory, little by little she advanced the idea that the contents of the book came to her by revelation, and she soon reached a point where she did not hesitate to declare that it is, in its details and in its completeness, the “Word of God” in precisely the same sense and to precisely the same extent that the Christian believes the Scriptures to be the word of God.
She would blush, she says, to speak of “Science and Health” as she does, “were it of human origin” and she “apart from God its author,” and “No human pen or tongue taught me the Science contained in this book and neither tongue nor pen can overthrow it;” and she boldly affirms it to have been expressly “authorized by Christ” as an interpreter of the Bible. Referring to its curative properties, she said, “The perusal of the author’s publications heals sickness.”
With these affirmations the humbug was consummated and the book placed upon a parity with, nay, upon a higher plane than, the Bible, for I think it has never been said that the mere reading of the Bible cures disease; but never for a moment did the shrewd woman relax her hold upon her copyright or permit the publication, outside the covers of her copyrighted books, of even so much as her so-called spiritual interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer or the tenets of the faith. Everybody must pay her a royalty for access even to her prayers and her creed. Mrs. Eddy has been wise in her day and generation. She knew how large a part of the public likes to be fooled all the time, and she has fooled and now fools a very considerable part to the very top of its bent.