THE CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS
The marriage between Science and the Bible, brought about by Mary Baker Eddy, has given birth to a most prosperous sect. In this amalgam, the Christianity is not of the purest, and the Science appears rather in the form of the negation of its own principles; but so great is humanity's desire for the union of revelation and experience that believers crowd from all parts to range themselves behind the hew banner.
There is something almost disconcerting in the ardour and devotion of Mrs. Eddy's followers. Truly, in the success of Christian Science we see one more proof of the ease with which a new religion can be started if, in addition to faith, it concerns itself with man's earthly welfare.
The founder of the sect was a clever woman. Well aware of the power and fascination of the mysterious, she exploited it with a profound understanding of the human heart. She mingled the realities of life with the mysteries of thought, and the sun of her revelations is always veiled by intangible clouds. From her gospel one might cull at random scores of phrases that defy human understanding. "Evil is nothing, no thing, mind or power," she says in Science and Health. "As manifested by mankind, it stands for a lie, nothing claiming to be something." And again—"Mortal existence has no real entity, but saith 'It is I.'"
The nonsensicalness of her phraseology can find no comparison save in the inconceivable chaos of her teachings. She goes so far as to imply that the supreme effort of a woman's spirit should suffice to bring about conception. Jesus Christ having been conceived of the Holy Ghost, she suggests that man should follow this example, and renounce the lusts of the flesh. "Proportionately as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal, harmonious being will be spiritually discerned"—and in another place, "When this new birth takes place, the Christian Science infant is born of the spirit, born of God, and can cause the mother no more suffering."
In the explanations of the Bible given in her Key to the Scriptures we are told that when we come upon the word "fire," we are to translate it as "fear," and the word "fear" as "heat"; while we must remember that Eve never put the blame for her sin upon the serpent, but, having "learnt that corporeal sense is the serpent," she was the first to confess her misdeed in having followed the dictates of the flesh instead of those of the spirit.
Like all prophets and saviours, Mrs. Eddy was crucified during her lifetime. She had to engage in a continuous struggle with the envy and jealousy of those who sought to misrepresent her teachings and bring her glory to the dust. But she was far from being an ordinary woman, and even in childhood seemed to be marked out for an exceptional career. At the age of eight, like Joan of Arc, she heard mysterious voices, and her mother, who was of Scottish origin and subject to "attacks of religion," remembered the story of the Infant Samuel and encouraged her to speak with the Lord. But Mary was alarmed by the voices, and wept and trembled, instead of replying to them like a good child.
About her forty-fifth year, however, being in the grip of a serious illness, she did hold converse with the Lord, who told her how she might be cured. She listened and obeyed, and was cured. This was her "great initiation." She then retired from the world, and spent several years engaged in meditation and prayer, while her study of the Bible revealed to her the key to all mysteries, human and divine.
The deductions of her philosophy are often characterised by an astonishing naïveté. "God being All-in-all, He made medicine," she tells us; "but that medicine was Mind. . . . It is plain that God does not employ drugs or hygiene, nor provide them for human use; else Jesus would have recommended and employed them in His healing."
She frequently makes use of ingenious statements whose very candour is disarming, but she had considerable dialectical gifts, and can argue persuasively, especially against spiritualism. In Science and Health she violently denies the authenticity of spiritualistic phenomena, "As readily can you mingle fire and frost as spirit and matter. . . . The belief that material bodies return to dust, hereafter to rise up as spiritual bodies with material sensations and desires, is incorrect. . . . The caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful insect, is no longer a worm, nor does the insect return to fraternise with or control the worm. . . . There is no bridge across the gulf which divides two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incorporeal, and the physical, or corporeal."