Quimby was the first teacher she found whose system seemed to offer any key at all to the intellectual and spiritual puzzle in which she found herself and when his system seemed to be proved for her by her recovery from a chronic abnormal state, she thereafter followed and elaborated what he suggested. Here a certain natural shrewdness and ingenuity of mind stood her in good stead. She was helped by her own ignorances and limitations. If she had been a trained thinker, familiar with a wide range of philosophic speculation, she would never have dared write so dogmatically; if she had been a great philosopher with the philosopher's inclusive vision, she would never have dared build so much on foundations so narrow.
Mrs. Eddy was, unconsciously to herself, a type. She thought and felt for multitudes of perplexed people unable to reconcile the more trying experiences of life with what faith they had in the love and goodness of God, unable on the other side to find the love and goodness of God in the wide sweep of law and the orderly sequence of cause and effect, and incapable under any circumstances of the patient analysis needed to trace to all their sources the threads of their strangely mingled webs of life; impressionable folk under the spell of words; speculative; at once credulous and skeptical; intellectually alert enough to want to do their own thinking and not intellectually disciplined enough to do it well; persuaded that the Bible has both a message and authority and unable to find in their traditional interpretation of it either a satisfying message or an adequately directing authority; impatient of discipline and pathetically eager for some short cut to happiness and well-being. In a very signal way Mrs. Eddy has spoken and written for this type particularly in American life. Her very style a liability as it is, when tested by either logic or the accepted standards of good writing, has, nevertheless, been an asset with those who have made her their prophetess.
The secret of Mrs. Eddy's power and the power of her system after her is most largely in her essential intellectual and spiritual kinship with such a temper and intellectual status as this, but she possessed also a real measure of creative capacity, a marked reach of speculative power, rare shrewdness and a masterful temper. Mrs. Eddy believed herself to have found her system in the Old and New Testaments—but she did not. She gradually built it up out of the suggestions which had been given her to begin with; she gave it colour and direction from her own experiences; she proved it to her own satisfaction in the healings which seemed to result from it, then fitted it all as best she could into the framework of her inherited Christian faith and read its meanings back into the Scriptures. It is a pseudo-philosophy pseudo-Christianized (if one may use the word) by a curious combination of ingenuity, devotion, main strength and even awkwardness. And though Christian Science is carrying on to-day as a religion rather than as either a philosophy or a system of healing, it will stand or fall on the intellectual side as a philosophy and not as a religion.
The Philosophic Bases of Christian Science
It is professedly an idealistic monism based on carefully selected facts and depending for its proof upon certain results in the experience of those who accept it. An idealism because there is for Mrs. Eddy no reality save in mind, a monism because there is for Mrs. Eddy only one reality and that is God. For a definition of God she offers only synonyms and affirmations though here perhaps she follows only the usual procedure of theology. God is divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind—and all these capitalized, for it makes a vast difference in the philosophy of Christian Science whether such familiar words as these are spelled with a capital letter or not. It would be possible from Mrs. Eddy's own words to pretty effectually prove what has been more than once claimed: that Christian Science does not offer a personal God, but all our terminology in this region is necessarily somewhat loose, though hers is excessively so. Some of her definitions of God are as personal as the Westminster Catechism or the Thirty-nine Articles. The writer believes, however, after such dispassionate consideration of the philosophy of Christian Science as he is able to give, that it would make absolutely no difference in its philosophic basis whether God were conceived as a person or not. If the God of Christian Science be taken merely as the exaltation of an abstract idealism or a philosophic Absolute everything would be secured which is otherwise secured.
Up to a certain point Christian Science marches with other idealistic systems. From Plato down we have had philosophers a plenty, who have sought to build for us a universe whose only realities are mind and its attributes, or perhaps more technically, consciousness and its content. It is truly a difficult enough matter to relate the world without and the world within, once we begin thinking about it (though happily and in the practical conduct of life this is not so hard as the philosophers make out, otherwise we should be in a hopeless state), and it is natural enough for one type of mind to simplify the problem by making the world within the only world. Nor have there been wanting those who have sought to reduce everything to a single reality whether matter or mind, and ever since we have had theology at all a perplexed humanity has been seeking to reconcile the goodness and the power of God with the sin and sorrow of our troubled world.
But Christian Science parts company soon enough with this great fellowship of dreamers and philosophers and takes its own line. It affirms consciousness and its content to be the only reality; it affirms the divine Mind to be the ultimate and all-conditioning reality; it affirms love and goodness to be the ultimate qualities of the divine Mind, but it meets the problem of sin and evil by denying them any reality at all. (Here it is in more or less accord with certain forms of mysticism.) But even as Christian Science cuts this Gordian knot it creates for itself another set of difficulties and involves itself in those contradictions which will eventually be the undoing of it as a philosophy.
It Undertakes to Solve the Problem of Evil. Contrasted Solutions
What Christian Science is seeking is an ideal order with a content of unqualified good and it secures this by denying the reality of every aspect of experience which either challenges or contradicts its own idealism. What is distinctive, then, in Christian Science is not its affirmations but its denials. All systems of philosophic idealism face practically the same problem and offer various solutions. They most commonly resolve evil of every sort—and evil is here used in so wide a way as to include sin and pain and sorrow—into an ultimate good.
Evil is thus an "unripe good," one stage in a process of evolution which, when it has had its perfect and all-transforming way, will reveal both moral and physical evil to have been no evil at all but simply aspects of life, trying enough at the time and puzzling enough when taken by themselves, but having their own distinct and contributory value when considered in their relation to the final whole. Such an approach as this does not in any wise diminish for the individual either the reality of pain or the unhappy consequences of sin, but it does ask him to judge the wisdom and love of God not by their passing phases but by their outcome in the wealth and worth of character.