The founder of Christian Science, on the contrary, is everything that Joanna Southcott was not. She is mercenary, insincere, shameless, and bold to a degree surpassing that of all other persons who have duped mankind. Upon theft and falsehood she has laid the foundations of the “religion” by the sale of which she has accumulated a fortune.
F. W. P.
The Religio-Medical Masquerade
Chapter I
The Sacrifice of Children
At the very outset of a candid consideration of Christian Science, I feel the necessity, if not of an apology, at least of an explanation. I shall with entire freedom discuss a woman and a combined religio-medical-commercial system of which she is the founder. I shall handle the one and the other without the least regard for anything but the truth. Mary Baker G. Eddy is the woman, and Christian Science, so called, is the system; but they are inseparable, identical. They have arisen and they will go down together, and I predict that they will go down much more rapidly than they have ascended.
I am going to hold up for the inspection of mankind the soul of a woman, of a woman eighty-eight years of age, and I am going to do it without regard to the fact that she is feminine and aged. There is no other way to present Christian Science in its true aspect. It rests exclusively upon Mrs. Eddy’s representations and Mrs. Eddy’s character. If everything she has claimed regarding herself and Christian Science as a religion and healing system be absolutely false, then there is no justification for the existence of Christian Science as a religion, or a healing system, every church erected in its honor is but a monument to the “Queen of frauds and hypocrites,” and every worshiper at its shrines the dupe of a designing old woman who has laughed in her sleeves at the ease with which she has gulled them.
While this is unmistakably true, it is, notwithstanding,
most distasteful to a man, if he be half a man, publicly to assail the character of a woman, and nothing under heaven can justify it, if she be in private life and not putting forth nor seeking to put forth an influence upon the lives of others; but if she have constituted herself sponsor for a religion of lies and a medical system that is a fraud and a shame, if she profess God imparted knowledge of everything needful for human bodies and souls, if she reach out her influence to all parts of the land and seek to govern hundreds of thousands of people in every detail of their daily lives, and if her influence be harmful and only harmful, it is the duty of a man, who knows the facts, to make them public, regardless of sex or age or anything whatever but the public good. And so I ask my readers to believe that while for Mrs. Eddy, the feeble and palsied old woman tottering on the very verge of the grave, I have feelings only of compassion; for Mrs. Eddy, the charlatan and adventuress, for Mrs. Eddy, the impious pretender to equality with Jesus, the fraudulent claimant of exclusive and immediate revelation from God, for Mrs. Eddy, upon whose altar of greed have been sacrificed the harmony and happiness of marriage, the natural love and tenderness of parents and the sweet lives of God only knows how many children, for Mrs. Eddy, the heartless and avaricious despot of multitudes of despoiled and demented dupes, for that woman, as there is no sympathy in my heart, so there shall be no charity in my speech.
Now, who is Mrs. Eddy, and what is this strange thing called Christian Science?