"Thank you, dear Mr. Howard. Let me see if I can tell you what it is and what it has done for me. It is the theory of mind over matter, put in practice and lived up to. It teaches us to understand before we are called upon to believe. It is the study of Christian metaphysics, or metaphysics spiritualized. It takes all the impossible out of the Scriptures, and makes them understandable, not to a fool, but to the wise man,--the man capable of understanding a great matter. Having done this for the brain, it teaches so absolutely a God of Love, a God who is both father and mother in the love and yearning tenderness of His thought toward us, that it eliminates all fear from our lives. All fear! Can you take that in at once? It makes the ninety-first psalm a personal talk between a father and his dearly loved child. To me it sounds just as if daddy were talking to me from the Beyond. That would be just his attitude toward me if he possessed God's power. And if you believe it,--if you can once let yourself believe it, it makes this earth instantly into heaven."
"Yes, yes, I can see that it would," said Mr. Howard. "But do not Scientists believe that it also prospers you in a worldly sense?"
"Are you giving Kate everything that heart could wish now, and are you going to leave her all your money when you die?" asked Carolina.
"That knocked his eye out," murmured Kate, in an aside to St. Quentin, but he observed that she looked singularly pleased when Carolina scored a point.
Mr. Howard waved his hand in a slightly deprecatory way.
"Ah, that is just it!" cried Carolina. "You are thinking, 'Oh, but, Carolina, I am Kate's own father, and God is just God!' Heavenly Father doesn't mean a thing to most Christians. Christian Scientists can't shirk their beliefs. If they do, they are just as they were before,--pretending or rather trying to believe what they feel that they ought to believe, but getting no satisfaction and no comfort from it. A Scientist who does not put his belief into practice can neither heal his own body nor others. So he is literally forced to be honest."
"Well," said St. Quentin, "I can easily see where the supreme and slightly irritating happiness of Christian Scientists comes in. I could be supremely happy myself if I could believe in it."
"So could I," declared Kate. "A-and I suppose it is sheer envy on my part, when I see their Cheshire-cat grins, to want to slap their faces for being happier than I am!"
"But what makes them so happy?" asked Mrs. Winchester, plaintively. "Why should they be any happier than we are? We both have the same Bible, and I flatter myself that I am just as capable of understanding it as any self-styled priestess of a new religion."
"But do you understand it, Cousin Lois?" asked Carolina, gently.