All the emanations of mortal mind are evil. Our redemption, Mrs. Eddy says, lies in Divine Mind, of which we are a part. "Spirit imparts the understanding which leads into all Truth.... This understanding is not intellectual, is not aided by scholarly attainments." There is no mistaking Mrs. Eddy's meaning; the thing in us which is capable of cultivation and expansion, that which inquires and investigates and reasons, is mortal mind, and is therefore evil. All the physical sciences are the harmful inventions of mortal mind, and the slow and painful accumulation of exact knowledge has been but the harmful activity of the baser element in human nature. There was never such a discouraging view of human history.
It is scarcely necessary to remark that everything which civilization most cherishes has been the direct result of that spirit of inquiry and of those inductive processes of reasoning which Mrs. Eddy despises. If the morality of the civilized world is higher to-day than it was in the fifth century, it is not because men know any more about moral laws than they did two thousand years ago, but because this same spirit of inquiry has made cleaner living possible and imperative. Mrs. Eddy says that Christian Science would abolish war; but the diminution of war has come about, not through any growth of "Divine Mind" but, as Buckle pointed out, through three triumphs of the experimental tendency of the intellect;—the discovery of gunpowder, the discovery that war was detrimental to trade and to the best economic conditions, and the improvement in methods of transportation. Contemplating the history of civilization from Mrs. Eddy's point of view, we have simply gone on developing this injurious thing, "mortal mind"—applying our intelligence to the study of the physical universe—and have gone on piling up false belief on false belief. It is "matter" that is our great delusion and that stands between us and a full understanding of God; and matter exists, or seems to exist, only because we have invented it and invented laws to govern it and have given properties to its various manifestations. The more we know about the physical universe, the heavier do we make our chains; our progress in the physical sciences does but increase the dose of the drug which enslaves us. And there have been but two breaks in this jumbled dream of "error": the first when Jesus Christ "demonstrated the nothingness of matter," the second when Mrs. Eddy proclaimed its nothingness from Lynn.
With a "sensationless body" for the goal of existence, the savage was certainly much higher in "the scale of being" than the nations of modern Europe, and Mrs. Eddy is perfectly right when she refers us to the amœba and crustacea. Happy, indeed, the lobster who thinks so little about his anatomy that his lost claw is replaced by another!
From all her flights Mrs. Eddy comes back to her starting-point: physical well-being. Not for a single page are we permitted to forget that her religion is primarily a kind of "doctoring"; therapeutics made religion, or religion made therapeutics. She makes the fact that Christ healed the sick the principal feature of his mission, and makes it authority for her assumption that religion and therapeutics are essentially one. Certainly the burden of the New Testament is not that man may avoid suffering, but that he may suffer with noble fortitude.
Lack of Religious Feeling in Mrs. Eddy's Book
But it is before such a word as fortitude that Mrs. Eddy's book takes on its most discouraging aspect. Her foolish logic, her ignorance of the human body, the liberties which she takes with the Bible, and her burlesque exegesis, could easily be overlooked if there were any nobility of feeling to be found in "Science and Health"; any great-hearted pity for suffering, any humility
or self-forgetfulness before the mysteries of life. Mrs. Eddy professes to believe that she has found the Truth, and that all the long centuries behind her have gone out in darkness and wasted effort, yet not one page of her book is tinged with compassion. "Oh that mine head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" If there were one sentence like that in "Science and Health" no one would stop to quarrel with Mrs. Eddy's metaphysics.
But if there is little intelligence displayed in Mrs. Eddy's book, there is even less emotion. It is not exaggeration to say that "Science and Health" is absolutely devoid of religious feeling. God remains for Mrs. Eddy a "principle" indeed, toward which she has no attitude but that of a somewhat patronizing and platitudinous expositor. She discusses sin and death and human suffering as if they were curves or equations.
Malicious Animal Magnetism
In all the editions of Mrs. Eddy's book there is the same shiftiness, the same hardness, and the same astonishing complacency, and the text of the first three editions is disfigured by innumerable ebullitions of spite and hatred. In the first edition the first fifteen pages of the chapter on "Healing the Sick" are given up to an attack upon Richard Kennedy, the young man who was her first practitioner, and of whose personal popularity she was so bitterly jealous. The second edition, a small volume, is largely made up of denunciations of Daniel Spofford. The third edition opens with a preface (signed Asa G. Eddy) attacking Edward Arens, and contains the famous chapter on "Demonology" in which Mrs. Eddy devotes forty-six pages to settling scores with half a dozen of her early students, charging one and another with theft, adultery, murder, blackmail, etc. The Reverend Mr. Wiggin, when he revised Mrs. Eddy's book in 1885, persuaded her to omit these vituperative passages on the ground that they were libelous.