As I understand her, Mrs. Eddy is the inventor and sole proprietor of the greatest get-rich-quick concern ever conceived. Her business—there is no religion about it, and her writings may be searched from end to end without finding a line about the worship of God—her business converts into cash the very highest emotions of the human soul by an appeal to religious feeling and extorts huge sums of money from multitudes of credulous people for healing them of nothing but the delusion that there is something the matter with them. Christian Science never cured any one of anything but imaginary illness; it never relieved any one of any real evil—but his money.
Mrs. Eddy, boldly professing to have received a revelation from God, and to be the equal of Jesus Christ, has made upwards of a million and a half dollars out of her enterprise that she calls Christian Science since she reached sixty years of age; and, if some be inclined to infer therefrom the possession by her of extraordinary genius, I cannot agree with them. Mrs. Eddy has succeeded, not because of her greatness, but because of the avidity with which unreasoning people swallow the most monstrous absurdities, the shamelessness with which men and women will intellectually prostrate themselves before the coarsest vulgarity and the most patent fraud.
Let me illustrate this, if I can. It is no part of my undertaking to account for Mrs. Eddy’s following. The fact that she has some thousands of followers does not, of itself, prove the truth of any of her teachings or pretensions. There was never any religious pretender yet, who could not, with slight effort, obtain a hearing and a following. I recently observed, in one of our daily papers, an account of an amusing incident of this character in Oklahoma. A man, believing himself to be the incarnation of Almighty God, started out to convert the world to his belief, and considered it to be his mission, in the first instance, to persuade mankind to divest themselves of clothes. The first man he encountered was his next-door neighbor and the first woman his next-door neighbor’s wife, and they were easily persuaded of the man’s divine mission, and that it was God’s wish that they should revert to primitive nakedness. So the three doffed the attire of civilization and perambulated into the adjoining town, naked as they came into the world. A police officer, who encountered them upon the street, with averted eyes hustled them into a van and carted them off to the nearest police station, where they were compelled to assume at least the outward garb of decency and sanity. This only shows how true it is that the religious impostor has no difficulty in making converts, and that the first person he converts is usually the first he encounters.
I am continually met with the inquiry, “If Christian Science is an absolute fraud, how do you account for the fact that so many intelligent people are Christian Scientists?”
In the first place, many people may be intelligent enough about the ordinary affairs of life, and utterly imbecile upon religious matters. History has again and again shown that in no respect are people so easily credulous and so readily victimized as in respect to religious things. Doubtless there are intelligent people in Christian Science; but the whole cult is not numerous, and the intelligent minority is a negligible quantity.
In the latest bulletin of religious statistics, published by the Federal Government in 1909, the total number of Christian Scientists is given as 85,717; but it is stated that a large portion, at least half, of the membership of the “Mother Church” in Boston is counted twice in this estimate; for the 41,634 membership of this Boston church is largely composed of non-residents, who are also members of other churches. So at least 20,000 must be deducted from the total of 85,717 in order to get at anything like an accurate estimate, which cannot be far from 65,000. These are the government’s figures for 1906, although Mrs. Eddy definitely stated that there were a million Christian Scientists as long ago as 1883.
Now, admitting that amongst this 65,000 people there are intelligent persons, I make the affirmation boldly that not one of them ever went into Christian Science because of his intelligence but notwithstanding and in spite of it. Let me make plain this non-intelligent attitude of its devotees toward Christian Science.
The religious service in a Christian Science church contains no original utterance from the pulpit. There is no preacher connected with any Christian Science church, and the individuals officiating from the platform are called readers, the first reader being a man, who reads from Mrs. Eddy’s book, and the second reader being a woman, who reads from the Bible. The sermon consists exclusively of the alternate reading, by the second reader of passages from the Bible, and by the first reader of alleged interpretative passages from Mrs. Eddy’s book, “Science and Health,” which is called by her, “The Key to the Scriptures.”
Mr. Arthur G. Frisbie of Cleveland, Ohio, an absolutely sincere and honest man, was for many years the first reader of the leading Christian Science church in that city. He became, however, convinced, as every sincere and honest person, who retains any remnant of analytical power sooner or later must, that the thing was a monstrous fraud, and he now denounces it in no less unmeasured terms than my own. Mr. Frisbie tells me that during all the time he was officiating as first reader in the church and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book, try as hard as he might he could discover no slightest relation between the Bible passages read by the second reader and the “Science and Health” interpretative passages read by himself. Any one who cares to make the experiment may demonstrate this for himself if he will get a copy of the Christian Science Quarterly in which the so-called Sermon Lessons are outlined. Such a test will show that there is no more connection between the Biblical passages and those selected and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book than there would be if “Mother Goose” or “Robinson Crusoe” were used as interpreters of the Scriptures. And yet I have sat in a Christian Science church and seen thousands of the faithful, with nothing less than ecstatic expressions upon their countenances, listening to readings that were absolutely unintelligible to both readers and hearers. So I say that the only possible way to be a Christian Scientist is to completely subordinate intelligence to feeling and approximate as nearly as possible the ideal condition pictured by Mrs. Eddy when she says, “The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better.”
Before passing from this point, I can’t refrain from incorporating here, for the benefit of mankind, the sage summary of a man whom I regard as the very wisest of living estimators of human qualities. I refer, of course, to Mark Twain. His opinion of why Mrs. Eddy has so many followers is most informing. In a letter to me some few years ago, Mr. Clemens said: