These wonderful beneficences, which fairly startle Mr. Hanna, and which cost Mrs. Eddy $5,002, and Hanna says were “worth” $90,000, left her with a right, under certain circumstances, to take absolute possession of the land and the church, which cost her nothing and cost others over two hundred thousand dollars, guaranteed to her pleasant and permanent business quarters without expense of any kind, gave her complete control, amounting to ownership, of the Christian Science Journal, and made her the dictator and authoritative head, if she wishes to be, of the business end of Christian Science as conducted at the headquarters of the Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston. This was Mrs. Eddy’s own benefit from her outlay of $5,002, and yet the Honorable Septimus J. Hanna, with upturned eyes, piously exclaims:
“Let us endeavor to lift up our hearts in thankfulness to God for His goodness to us and our cause and to His servant, our Mother in Israel, for these evidences of a generosity and self-sacrifice that appeal to our deepest sense of gratitude, even while surpassing our comprehension.”
In a published statement, Mr. Farlow has said:
“As to Mrs. Eddy’s wealth, I want to say she has given away, during the past five years, more than double the sum total of the entire profits from the sale of her books from their first publication to the present time.”
I denounce this statement of Mr. Alfred Farlow’s as utterly false, and I defy him to name the beneficiaries of these hundreds of thousands of dollars he says his employer has given away. I challenge this official prevaricator of Mrs. Eddy’s religio-commercial enterprise to give the public the particulars of these alleged gifts. He cannot give them. They do not exist, and his falsehood is only one of many fabrications boldly put forth to bolster the tottering structure that has so long afforded him and his colleagues in fraud a comfortable financial refuge.
The public will be wise if it decline to accept, without verification, any statement that Mrs. Eddy or Mr. Hanna or Mr. Farlow may make. Mrs. Eddy, it would seem, cannot tell the truth, and Messrs. Hanna and Farlow, it would seem, are paid to tell lies.
But the story is only half told, and what follows is more damning than what has gone before.
The Eddy Ban on Marriage
I have said that Mrs. Eddy’s influence as the founder of Christian Science is not confined to the religious activities of her followers, but extends into their domestic and marital relations and even their business affairs. One of the harmful results of Mrs. Eddy’s “inspired” teachings consists in the estrangement so frequently caused between husband and wife where either one or the other of them is a Christian Scientist. If both happen to be fast in the faith, the occasion for disharmony between them is not so great; for then the marital relation is suspended by mutual consent.