It is, of course, a wild exaggeration. Pain and sickness are real things, and the empire of the mind over the body is very limited. Still, there is an empire and it must never be forgotten. The healthy-minded—those who work, who live their lives, who love and hate, and fight, and win and lose, to whom the world is a great arena—will laugh at Mrs. Eddy. They need not this teaching which is half a truth and half a lie. They see the false half only because they need not the true half. And the others, the mental invalids, they see the true half and not the false. It is all true to them, and it must be all true to be of use, for power lies in the exaggeration, never in the mean. This is the secret of "Christian Science." We have in our midst a terrible disease, growing daily worse, the disease of inutility, which breeds pessimism, and Mrs. Eddy's doctrine of the imaginary nature of evil is good for this pessimism. The sick seize it with avidity because they find it helps their symptoms, and in the relief it affords to their unhappiness they are willing to swallow all the rest of the formless mist that is offered to them as part of their religion.
I do not know that "Christian Scientists" differ greatly from believers in other religions in this point. It is an excellent instance of how one useful tenet will cause the acceptance of a whole mass of absurdities and even make them seem real and true. Christian Science has come as the quack medicine to cure a disease that is a terrible reality, and it is of use because it contains in all its mélange one ingredient, morphia, that dulls the pain. But the cure of this disease lies elsewhere than in Christian Science, than, indeed, in any religion.
I have given a chapter to this "Science," not because it appears to me that it is ever likely to become a real force or of real importance, but because it illustrates, I think, the reason of the success or otherwise of all religions. It exhibits in exaggerated form what is the nature of all religions.
They come to fulfil an emotional want, or wants that are imperative and that call for relief. And they succeed and persist exactly as they minister to these emotional wants. The emotion that requires religion is always a pessimism of some form or other, a weariness, a hopelessness. And the religion is accepted because it combats that helplessness and gives a hope. All religions are optimisms to their believers.
A great deal of foolishness may be included in a faith without injury to its success. Doctrine, theory, scientific theology, may be as empty and meaningless as it is in Christian Science, and still the faith will live. And the central idea must be exaggerated. It must be so exaggerated that to outsiders it appears only an immense falsehood. It is so in all the religions. Truth lies in the mean, power in the extreme. They are opposed as are freewill and destination, as are God and Law.
CHAPTER XVIII.
PERSONALITY.
There is one complaint that all Europeans make of the Burmese. It matters not what the European's duties may be, what his profession, or his trade, or his calling—it is always the same, "the Burmans will not stand discipline." It is, says the European, fatal to him in almost all walks of life. For instance, the British Government tried at one time in Burma to raise Burmese regiments officered by Europeans, after the pattern of the Indian troops. There seemed at first no reason why it should not succeed. The Burmans are not cowards. Although not endowed with the fury of the Pathan or the bloodthirsty valour of the Ghurka, the Burman is brave. He will do many things none but brave men can do; kill panthers with sharpened sticks, for instance, and navigate the Irrawaddy in flood in canoes, with barely two inches free board. He is, in his natural state in the villages, unaccustomed to any strict discipline. But then, so are most people; and if the levies of the Burmese kings were but a mob, why, so are most native levies. There seemed a priori no reason why Burmese troops should not be fairly useful. And the attempt was made. It failed.