How, then, explain the remarkable growth of Christian Science? But the imposing edifices, the prosperous looking disciples, the number of automobiles in front of their churches, prove only that Christian Science is fashionable—that is all. The question we are discussing is not Is Christian Science fashionable, but Is it true? Does the rapid growth and wealth of Mohammedanism, for instance, with its Alhambra and Alcazar, its illustrious and extensive conquests, prove its Divine origin? Does the progress of Mormonism, which reared a great city as if by magic in the Western wilderness, prove Mormonism to be of God? The Catholic Church at one time owned everything in Europe and ruled every one. To her belonged all the wealth, the culture, the art, and the power of Christendom. Yet Christian Scientists do not consider the Catholic Church Divine. Why should the rapid spread of one creed surprise us any more than that of another?
Moreover, it takes less courage to follow the crowd than to resist it. The crowd picks up the weak and carries them along. Was it not Horace Walpole who said, "The greater the imposition the greater the crowd"? What Matthew Arnold said of the multitude in England is true also of the American multitude: "Probably in no country is the multitude more unintelligent, more narrow-minded, and more passionate than in this. In no country is so much nonsense so firmly believed." Alas, that is true of the multitude in every country.
Again, the faith habit is an older heredity, exerting upon us the accumulated force of thousands of years, while the inquiry habit is too recent an acquisition to have much force upon the generality of peoples. That is another explanation of the greater popularity of dogma, which requires only belief, and the comparative unpopularity of a movement which demands individual thinking. "Superstition," as Goethe says, "is so intimately and anciently associated with man that it is one of the hardest things to get rid of." The only progress most people are capable of is to part with one superstition for another. The Pope is given up for Mrs. Eddy, but the idea of an infallible teacher to tell us what to believe is not outgrown. The keys of heaven and hell placed in the hands of the Vicar of Christ provoke scepticism in a Christian Scientist, but he accepts without the shadow of a doubt the key to the Scriptures delivered to Mrs. Eddy.
But how account for the presence of so many judges and lawyers among the converts of Christian Science? And how account for the judges and lawyers who are not Christian Scientists? It was not so long ago when judges condemned innocent women as witches, and sentenced them to be tortured to death. Did that make witchcraft a fact, or can it be quoted to justify the belief in witchcraft? The late Chief Justice of the United States was a Catholic. What does that prove?
Without wanting to give offence, I would say that Christian Science is, in many respects, the modern version of the witchcraft belief, which smote New England some three or four hundred years ago. If mental treatment can cure, according to Mrs. Eddy's admissions, it can also kill. Over her own signature Mrs. Eddy declares that her last husband was killed by poison "mentally administered." The devil possessed witches, too, were supposed to be able to injure and kill people mentally. Mrs. Eddy teaches that, "If the right mental practice can restore health, it is self-evident that mental malpractice can impair health." She also contends that a person may commit mental murder or "mental assassination." In theChristian Science Journalof February, 1889, she demands that "mental assassins" be turned over to the executioner.
On May 14, 1878, Mrs. Eddy, her attorney, and some twenty witnesses, appeared at the opening of the Supreme Judicial Court in Salem and practically accused a certain Mr. Daniel Harrison Spoffard of sorcery and witchcraft. Mrs. Eddy's bill of complaint recited the injuries which Spoffard was mentally, and of course by absent treatment, inflicting upon one of Mrs. Eddy's students, a Miss Lucretia Brown, and begged the Court to restrain him from giving malicious mental treatment to said Miss Brown. Does not that suggest darkest Africa? Let me give a few lines from Mrs. Eddy's bill of complaint:—
By the power of his mind he (Mr. Spoffard) influences and controls the minds and bodies of other persons, and uses his said power and art for the purpose of injuring the persons and property of others. Among the injuries Mr. Spoffard has communicated to Miss Brown are severe spinal pains, neuralgia, temporary suspension of mind.
Fortunately for the reputation of our courts, Judge Gray dismissed the charges against Mr. Spoffard, declaring, with a twinkle in his eye, that it was not within the jurisdiction of the courts to control Mr. Spoffard's mind. Had the Judge been of Mrs. Eddy's persuasion, the old regrettable Salem persecutions against so-called witches might have been revived. How well has it been explained by John Fiske that "one of the most primitive shapes which the relation of cause and effect takes in the savage mind is the assumed connection between disease or death and some malevolent personal agency."
Let us now investigate some of the other teachings of Mrs. Eddy, which are at present more or less kept in the background, or which are presented only to those who have become adepts or advanced students of the cult. A careful perusal of Mrs. Eddy's miscellaneous literature will show that she practically denies sex, marriage, birth, death, the home, the family, as well as education and morality. It seems a serious accusation to bring against any one posing as a reformer or as the founder of a religion, but the evidence warrants the charge. Has no one ever observed that Christian Science journals do not announce marriages, births, or deaths? Of course, like other people, Christian Scientists are born, marry, and die; but no official recognition of such events is permitted. There must be a reason for it. In Christian Science there is no room for sex relations and for children, even as there is no recognition of that other natural phenomenon, death. But do not Mrs. Eddy's disciples die? Is not her body buried in a cemetery, and marked by a monument raised over her remains by her admirers?
The explanation for this apparent contradiction between the profession and the practice, from the Christian Science point of view, is as follows: Every believer in Mrs. Eddy's revelation is expected to demonstrate over death as over sickness; and just as, when a practitioner fails to demonstrate over sickness, it is because of some error or belief somewhere, and not because of the insufficiency of Divine power, likewise, if a Christian Scientist dies, it is because he has not applied the new doctrine rightly, and not because the doctrine is not strong enough to prevent death. This teaching really makes of death not a beneficent economy of nature, but a crime, or a miscarriage, as it were, of Christian Science.
In the State of Michigan there is a religious sect called "the House of David." One of their doctrines is that a Christian cannot die. "But," I asked the man whom I was interviewing in Michigan, "do not the members of your sect die like other people?" His answer was that they die only when they fall from grace.
In the same way, if a Christian Scientist dies, it is because he has departed from the truth as taught by Mrs. Eddy, or because some one has killed him mentally by "malicious animal magnetism" or "mortal mind." That was how, Mrs. Eddy asserts, her husband was assassinated. If one member of a family is a Christian Scientist and the treatment he receives from a practitioner does not cure him of the complaint, the blame is liable to be thrown upon the non-Christian Science members of the family, who, by resisting the operations of "Divine" power, prevent its manifestation. It is witchcraft come back. Could anything be more inhuman than to hold an unbelieving parent responsible for the failure of Christian Science to save his child from an attack of typhus or scarlet fever after the practitioner has deprived the patient of the services of medical care and treatment? But can a "Divine" healer admit failure? Rather than confess defeat, he will accuse the nearest relatives of the patient of malpractice. I am sorry to conclude that at times Christian Science is as cowardly as it is cruel.
According to Mrs. Eddy, marriage, like death, suggests materiality, and is therefore an error. The words of Jesus, that in heaven they shall be like the angels who do not marry nor are given in marriage, are quoted to prove that sex is an illusion of mortal mind. Of course, the Eddyites marry, but only for the same reason that they die—because they are not sufficiently advanced in Christian Science to demonstrate over these errors.
In theChristian Science Sentinel, June 16, 1906, and in theChristian Science Journal, July, 1906, Mrs. Eddy calls marriage "legalized lust"—this from a woman who had been three or four times married!
"Suffer it to be so now" is the text quoted by Christian Scientists to defend their inconsistency. But how long a time does the word "now" cover? Jesus, in using the word "now," must have meant his own day, which was nearly two thousand years ago. But is it still "now"? A "now" that lasts so long might just as well mean "indefinitely."
"Suffer it to be soindefinitely" would be the real meaning of the text as the Eddyites interpret it. Accordingly, when the Christian Science dispensation shall be in full swing, marriage, birth, children, the family, as also sickness and death, will be no more. That will be, I suppose, when it is no longer "now."
I have already quoted Mrs. Eddy's belief in regard to sex: "Gender is also a quality characteristic of mind, and not of matter." She will wink at marriages "until it is learned that generation [birth] rests on no sexual basis." I do not know what kind of reasoning led her to say: "To abolish marriage and maintain generation is possible in Christian Science." Are not such foolish as well as mischievous doctrines a menace to the community? Can a man, can a woman, believe in such absurdities without becoming unbalanced mentally sooner or later?
Mrs. Eddy has banished all freedom of thought from her Church, as Luther and Calvin did from theirs. Christian Science is as distinctly hostile to the liberty of teaching as were the dogmatists of the Reformation.
In theChristian Science QuarterlyBible Lessons definite instructions are given to read the following explanatory note before reciting the lesson-sermon:—
Friends,—The Bible and the Christian Science Text-book are our only preachers... The canonical writings, together with the word of our text-book, corroborating and explaining the Bible texts in their spiritual import and application to all ages, past, present, and future, constitute a sermon undivorced from Truth, uncontaminated and unfettered by human hypotheses, and divinely authorized.
It is absolutely necessary to repeat this at every Sunday meeting. It will be seen from the formula imposed upon her followers that only Mrs. Eddy's voice is tolerated in Christian Science churches. But does she not also permit the reading of the Bible? Only assheinterprets it, no other interpretation being allowed, which makes the Bible nothing more than a medium for Mrs. Eddy's thought. Outside of her book all is contamination.Science and Healthand the book to which it is the key are alone Divine, everything else being "human hypotheses" which enslave and corrupt. Has the intellect of man ever been subjected to a greater pinch than that?
"He who does not believe my doctrine is sure to be damned," said Luther (Professor E.M. Hulme,The Renaissance, p. 363). Will Mrs. Eddy admit that there is any salvation outside her church, or that there is any other infallible guide than her ownScience and Health? And just as both John Calvin and Martin Luther called upon the civil authorities to draw the sword against heretics, so Mrs. Eddy repeatedly summoned the State to punish "mental assassins." Where there is no freedom persecution is inevitable, since there is no other effective way to suppress freedom. It was the great Swiss reformer, Beza, who congratulated Calvin on the burning of Servetus: "To claim that heretics ought not to be punished is the same as saying that those who murder father and mother ought not to be punished, seeing that heretics are infinitely worse than they." Mrs. Eddy, nearly four hundred years later, appealed to the courts in the United States to punish one Richard Kennedy, a former disciple of hers, formalicious animal magnetism, and called upon the police to avenge the death of her husband by arresting the culprit who administered poison to him "mentally."
"Oh, why does not somebody kill him?" Mrs. Eddy was heard to exclaim when she imagined herself the victim of the malpractice of one of her rivals. InScience and Health, chap. vi, p. 38, 1881 edition, Mrs. Eddy, writing of another of her dissenting disciples with all the theological fury of the Dark Ages, calls him the "Nero of to-day... he is robbing, committing adultery, and killing," etc. And on page 2, in the same chapter, she calls Kennedy a "moral leper," to be "shunned as the most prolific cause of sickness and sin." Listen to this language of Love:—
Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the sunshine of earth, that would sever friends, destroy virtue, put out truth, and murder in secret the innocent, befouling thy track with the trophies of thy guilt.
Then she predicts "a hailstorm of doom upon the guilty head" of Daniel Spoffard, another of her former students (Science and Health, 1878 edition).
Christian Science shows many of the symptoms of the early stages of the Protestant Reformation. "Justification by faith alone" was the slogan of Luther and his associates. Good works were not necessary at all. Salvation was a divine gift, and all that the sinner had to do was to accept it. Doing was a deadly thing.
Mrs. Eddy, like another Martin Luther, preached the doctrine of salvation and health by faith alone. "Quit trying to get well by your own efforts and trust in Divine Mind" was her ultimatum. Mrs. Eddy had no more use for sanitary measures or for self-help than the German reformers had for good works. And just as Mrs. Eddy taught that to resort to material means destroyed the patient's chances of being healed by Christian Science, the Lutherans declared that good works were prejudicial to salvation because they made man self-confident and boastful.
Another resemblance between Luther and Mrs. Eddy is to be found in their common contempt for human science. To Luther the intellect was the devil's bride. When he used stronger language he denounced reason as a whore. He had no use for the universities, and prayed to see them pulverized. More than once he boasted openly that there was not a dogma of Christianity that did not offend human reason. But what is human reason worth? What is it but, as Mrs. Eddy would reply, "mortal mind"? The founder of Christian Science showed even less respect for human intellect than did the reformers of the sixteenth century.
The words of Erasmus, the distinguished scholar of Holland, "The triumph of the Lutherans is the death of good learning," could also be said of the followers of Mrs. Eddy. The cause of culture, of intellectual achievements, of discovery, of political and physical advancement, is sure to be, and is, neglected by people who are too eager to demonstrate the wonders of metaphysics. Any movement which does not include the entire field of human knowledge is bound to be both narrow and sterile. Goethe believed that the Lutheran doctrine, which confined the world to one book, upon the meaning of which no two interpreters agreed, postponed the emancipation of the human intellect for a thousand years. Luther led the world out of the Catholic darkness into the Protestant fog. Of Mrs. Eddy it could be said that she has brought her people out of the land of Egypt into a pathless wilderness.
Imagine again what would happen to our educational system if it were to pass under the control of Mrs. Eddy's party. The majority of studies now pursued would be eliminated from the course. No Christian Scientist would see the need of knowing anything about physiology, anatomy, chemistry, biology, botany, geology, or any of the fundamental physical sciences. To teach these would be an admission of the reality of the material universe and a denial of the doctrine that all is illusion and error except "Divine" mind. But what would become of a nation reared in ignorance of the physical world and the laws which govern it? Industrially such a nation must slip to the bottom of the line, leaving the commerce of the world in the hands of those who study and master the physical sciences. The Eddyites would not care, since they are not interested in the material life, and would be glad to demonstrate that it is possible to maintain life without food, as it is possible to maintain generation without sex.
With the Christian Science dogma in force, every book out of harmony with it would be excluded from our public libraries. Think you a Christian Science librarian, if free to do as he thought best, would permit the reading of books filled with "mortal error," the cause of disease and death, and thereby postpone the coming of the kingdom of Mrs. Eddy? If to-day you can scarcely find a Christian Scientist who will read or hear anything opposed to his creed, and if at present Christian Scientists allow in their churches only two books—the Bible and the works of Mrs. Eddy—are they going to allow more than two books in our schools, libraries, and homes, should they acquire control of the government? People think that Eddyism is only a sort of drugless cure and no more; on the contrary, Eddyism, with its overemphasis on thedivineis the sworn foe of everything human. Huxley has well said that modern civilization rests upon physical science. "Take away her gifts, and our country's position among the civilized nations of the world is gone to-morrow. It is physical science that makes intelligence and morality stronger than brute force." How splendidly true, and how refreshing is common sense after so much nonsense!
The physical sciences are not the only studies which Christian Scientists will suppress should they come into power. History, ethics, and the humanities will also be forbidden. To a Christian Scientist the history of the centuries before Mrs. Eddy's discovery is summed up in one word—error. No Christian Scientist will teach the history of error—of illusion and "mortal mind." Even the late World War was to them only an unreality. There was, according to Mrs. Eddy's followers, no war at all, for war means disharmony, and in God's universe there is room only for harmony. It is true that young men of this faith went to war, and some of them, unfortunately, were killed in battle. Nevertheless, no Christian Scientist could be conscious of anything but harmony, and therefore no Christian Scientist logically could write of the War or of any event in history which would necessitate the recognition of evil. God himself, who is perfect harmony, did not know there was a war in Europe, said the committee on Christian Science publications in explaining the attitude of their Church on the War.
Morality, too, as a scientific study, will be banished from the schools under Eddyism. In the Infinite there is no more room for sin than there is for disease, and, since man is but the image of the Infinite, he is as free from sin as he is from disease. Mrs. Eddy practically denies the possibility of sin in Christian Science.
At the age of fifty-six, on January 1, 1877, Mrs. Eddy contracted a new marriage, this time with Mr. Asa G. Eddy, giving her age as forty, as shown by her marriage licence. With a gesture Mrs. Eddy swept aside the charge that she had suppressed the truth about her age, and justified the misrepresentation on metaphysical grounds. In herScience and Health, pp. 245-6, she asserts that a woman could not age while believing herself to be young. Eternity, according to her, has nothing to do with chronology, and "time-tables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood."
"Never record ages," she advises. But if it makes no difference to a Christian Scientist how old or how young she is, so far as the number of years is concerned, why did Mrs. Eddy under-state her age? In pretending to be younger than she really was did she not show her fear of advancing years? Perhaps Mrs. Eddy also believed thattruthas well astimehad lost all claims upon Christian Scientists. To change a lie into a truth, all that is necessary is to deny that "time-tables and calendars" have any meaning to the believer in eternity.
One could even commit murder and deny that a bullet or a knife could possibly deprive a man, who isall mind, of his life. Mrs. Eddy and her book, I suppose, will be about all the protection we shall have against the lightning, the storm, or the cold, or against hunger, ignorance, and crime. It is not difficult to imagine the kind of world this would be when stripped of everything but Mrs. Eddy's "inspired" metaphysics.
In the State of Washington the Christian Scientists, as soon as they had acquired sufficient political power to do it, abolished the law requiring the medical inspection of children in the public schools. But who will be the greatest sufferers from this foolish ordinance? The children, of course: the pupils afflicted with defective vision or throat and nose maladies will be deprived of the benefits of human knowledge and experience. Their prayer for better sight, for freer breathing and unhampered speech, will remain unheeded, upon the plea that sight, hearing, and speech are of the Mind, and that bodily obstructions cannot interfere with them. The Washington state law abolishing the physical examination of public-school children gives us an idea of what to expect under a metaphysical government.
And under Christian Science who, for example, will care for the deaf and dumb unfortunates in the community? Material science, seconded by human sympathy, has greatly helped to rob deafness and dumbness of more of their power to discourage and depress. I have met deaf people who were so well trained to read the movement of the lips as to be able to converse freely. What will Christian Science do for these unfortunates? Has it ever taken thought of them? And has Christian Science ever planned or built homes for crippled children—the poor little ones who cannot walk or move without pain? And what has metaphysics ever done in the fight against the white plague? Has it made a single discovery, or given a new weapon to man against any of the evils human flesh is heir to? With this Asiatic superstition or fatalistic belief, masquerading as Christian and scientific, in control of our institutions, all sanitary laws, such as the pure food law, the law requiring the fumigation of houses or the isolation of their inmates suffering from contagious diseases, the laws requiring the inspection of ships from plague-ridden ports, those requiring fireproof public buildings or providing for fire escapes and a hundred other safety-first measures, will receive scant attention.
To see and fight evil is wiser than to shut our eyes to it. The rose is no more real than the thorns which guard it. The tear is as natural as the smile, and equally divine. To be able to suffer for those we love, and for a cause we prize, is a privilege.
Christian Science robs people of the feeling of sympathy, without which man and marble become alike. But sympathy is born of the consciousness that there are pain and suffering, evil and error, in the world. Cognizance of evil is not permitted to a Christian Scientist. Being in Nirvana himself, the disciple of Mrs. Eddy neither sees nor feels, or at least he pretends not to see or feel, the sorrow that draws the tear. Are there not times when, as the poet Hood in hisOde to Melancholysays, the genuine tear is nobler than the artificial smile?
Oh, give her, then, her tribute just,
Her sighs and tears and musings holy!
There is no music in the life
That sounds with idiot laughter solely.
"Christian Science makes people happy" is an argument often advanced. No doubt it does. But we are not discussing "Is Christian Science Comforting?" but "Is it true?" Ignorance is bliss, it has been said; but does that prove that ignorance should be cultivated and knowledge suppressed?
I met a young woman just the day before her mother's funeral who behaved as if she and the woman who had borne her, nursed her, carried her in her arms, who had watched day and night over her cradle and risked her life for her a hundred times, were total strangers. The young woman was a Christian Scientist. Eliminate the sympathy which consciousness of a struggling and suffering world inspires, and art, literature, poetry, morality, and the humanities wither like a branch deprived of the quickening sap.
Jesus was called the man of sorrows. Could he have been a Christian Scientist?
"Jesus wept" is written in the Gospel of John. Sorrow and tears are heresies to the perpetually smiling followers of Mrs. Eddy.
Let us have men and women who fear neither the thorn nor the tear, but who use them as stepping-stones to greater strength. The way to meet evil is to grapple with it soldier-like. Man is not an ostrich, and burying one's head in the sand is a coward's policy.
To live is to act, and to act is to combat.
But darkness cannot be overcome with jargon. To conquer we need the weapons of Prometheus—knowledge and courage!