Chapter 10

But as to who invented the idea of pain and whence came the superstition that we must have lungs to breathe and that the heart is necessary to life, Mrs. Eddy maintains a discreet silence. Sin, sickness, and death, she says, are beliefs which originated in mortal mind. And how and when did mortal mind originate? Mortal mind does not exist, she answers, therefore it had no origin. This reasoning satisfies her; she believes it perfectly adequate.

It is not only the diseased body which is to be disregarded and put out of mind, but all hygienic precautions. Mrs. Eddy particularly objects to diets, and she says that one food is as good as another. God gave man "dominion not only over the fish in the sea, but over the fish in the stomach also," she once said.

There is no such thing as fatigue: "You would not say that a wheel is fatigued; and yet the body is just as material as the wheel. If it were not for what the human mind says of the body, the body would never be weary, any more than the inanimate wheel."

Mrs. Eddy denies that physical exercise strengthens the muscles. "Because the muscles of the blacksmith's arm are strongly developed, it does not follow that exercise has produced this result, or that a less-used arm must be weak.... _The trip-hammer is not increased in size by exercise._ Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron?"

Constant bathing, Mrs. Eddy says, received a "useful rebuke from Jesus' precept, 'Take no thought ... for the body,' We must beware of making clean merely the outside of the platter."

_A Sensationless Body the Goal of Existence_

"A sensationless body," Mrs. Eddy says, is the ultimate hope of Christian Science. Since insensibility to pain is the ultimate good which her system of philosophy offers, it is natural that she should often point us to the lower forms of animal life for our exemplars. "The conditions of life become less imperative in lower organisms, or where there is less mind and belief on this subject." She points out hopefully that certain marine animals multiply their species by self-division. "The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again." If we but believed that matter has no sensation, "then the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster's claw." She points out the fact that flowers produce their seed without pain. "The snowbird sings and soars amid the blasts; he has no catarrh from wet feet."

"Obesity," Mrs. Eddy says, "is _an adipose belief of yourself as a substance_."

_Mrs. Eddy's Physiology_

The most discouraging thing about Mrs. Eddy's dissertations upon anatomy and physiology is that she seems to know so little about the physical facts and laws which she despises. She says, for instance, that a father "plunged his infant babe, only a few hours old, into water for several minutes and repeated this operation daily until the child could remain under water for twenty minutes, moving and playing without harm, like a fish." Does Mrs. Eddy actually believe that a child could live under water for twenty minutes? Again: "The supposition that we can correct insanity by the use of purgatives and narcotics is in itself a species of insanity." Where did Mrs. Eddy get the idea that such treatment was ever supposed to cure "insanity"? Mrs. Eddy says the fact that a finger which has been amputated continues to hurt is proof that nerves have nothing to do with pain, because, she states, "_the nerve is gone_"!

Mrs. Eddy says that when we burn a finger, not fire but mortal mind causes the injury. To this statement she adds: "Holy inspiration has created states of mind which are able to nullify the action of the flames, as in the Bible case of the three young Hebrew captives, cast into the Babylonian furnace; while an opposite mental state might produce spontaneous combustion." That is, if mortal mind worked hard enough, we could burn our fingers without any fire, or we could produce the fire by willing it.

The action of drugs depends entirely upon the belief of mortal mind. Stimulants, narcotics, poisons, affect the system solely because they are reputed to do so. And yet, with all her ingenuity, Mrs. Eddy has to admit that if a man took arsenic unknowingly it would probably kill him. This, she says, is because of the consensus of opinion that arsenic is deadly. Such would probably be her explanation of the destructive processes which go on in the world without the knowledge of man; fire consumes the forest, the tiger kills the antelope, and the bite of the cobra kills the tiger because the human mind has attributed such tendencies to fire, to the tiger, and to the cobra.

_Mrs. Eddy's View of History_

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 amoeba 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.

Mrs. Eddy's one original elemental contribution to Quimbyism, was her doctrine of Malicious Animal Magnetism; a grewsome superstition born of her own vindictiveness and distrust. Mrs. Eddy's more enlightened followers have for years tried to divert attention from this one of her doctrines, and there are hundreds of Christian Scientists in the field who know and think very little about it. But it has been a very important consideration in the lives of those who have come into personal contact with Mrs. Eddy. Between 1875 and 1888 many of Mrs. Eddy's students left her because in her lectures and conversation she dwelt more upon the malign power of mesmerism than upon the salutary power of truth. In her contributions to the _Journal_ during those years she frequently took up Animal Magnetism; she tells her followers over and over again that she will denounce it, and that she will not be silenced. For several years there was a regular department in the _Journal_ with the caption "Animal Magnetism," but the crimes which were charged to mesmerists were by no means confined to this department. "_Also they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleasure, and we are in great distress_," the _Journal_ again and again affirms.

_Poverty a False Belief_

Mrs. Eddy surmounts economics as easily as she does physics and chemistry and physiology. Poverty is only a form of "error," a false belief. It can be abolished as readily as sin or disease or old age. She advertised the first edition of "Science and Health" as a book that "affords an opportunity to acquire a profession by which you can accumulate a fortune." "In the early history of Christian Science," Mrs. Eddy says, "among my thousands of students few were wealthy. Now, Christian Scientists are not indigent; and their comfortable fortunes are acquired by healing mankind morally, physically, and spiritually." Her healers should be well paid, she says. "Christian Science demonstrates that the patient who pays what he is able to pay, is more apt to recover than he who withholds a slight equivalent for health." In Mrs. Eddy's book[12] she publishes a long testimonial from a man who relates how Christian Science has helped him in his business.

This view of poverty has been generally accepted among Mrs. Eddy's followers. One contributor to the _Journal_ writes: "We were demonstrating over a lack of means, which we had learned was just as much a claim of error to be overcome with truth as ever sickness or sin was."[13]

Another contributor writes: "The lack of means is a lupine ghost sired by the same spectre as the lack of health, and both must be met and put to flight by the same mighty weapons of our spiritual warfare."[14]

In the files of the _Journal_ there are many reports of the material prosperity of individual Christian Scientists. It is an evidence of "at-oneness" with God to prosper in business just as it is to overcome disease.

In the _Journal_ of September, 1904, a contributor says:

"Is it reasonable to believe, as we have believed, that popular fancy, whims, climate, the state of politics, any or all of a hundred lawless elements, are able to ruin a man's business while he stands by and doesn't know enough even to make an intelligent protest?"

Government, civilization, and even "climate" are demonstrated to be unreal, but the reality and importance of "business" is never questioned, and that each and every Christian Scientist should get on in the world remains a matter of indubitable moment, even to Mrs. Eddy herself.

_Mrs. Eddy's Views on Marriage_

Among the many incidental ideas which Mrs. Eddy has added to Quimbyism are her theory that the Godhead is more feminine than masculine, and her qualified disapproval of matrimony. Quimby himself had a large family and saw nothing unspiritual in marriage. In defining the real purpose of marriage Mrs. Eddy says nothing about children; "to happify existence by constant intercourse with those adapted to elevate it, is the true purpose of marriage." In her chapter on marriage she says: "The scientific _morale_ of marriage is spiritual unity.... Proportionately as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal harmonious being will be spiritually discerned."

In her chapter called "Wedlock" in Miscellaneous Writings (1897) Mrs. Eddy, after a vague and evasive discussion of the subject, squarely puts the question: "Is marriage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge inculcates that it is, while Science indicates that it is _not_." In the same chapter she further says: "Human nature has bestowed on a wife the right to become a mother; but if the wife esteems not this privilege, by mutual consent, exalted and increased affections, she may win a higher."

Mrs. Eddy apparently believes that Jesus Christ taught us to ignore family relations: "Jesus acknowledged no ties of the flesh. He said: 'Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your father which is in heaven.' Again he asked: 'Who is my mother, and who are my brethren but they who will do the will of my father?' We have no record of his calling any man by the name of father."

_Future of Christian Science_

Whoever has watched the amazing growth of the Christian Science sect must feel some curiosity as to its future. Mrs. Eddy's followers are by no means the only people who are trying to meet, by suggestive treatment, nervous diseases and the many functional disorders which result from overwork, worry, and discouragement. The foremost neurologists of all countries are employing more and more this suggestive method which is the essential reality in Christian Science healing. The followers of the "New Thought" school apply this principle in their own way, and the hundreds of unaffiliated "mind curists" and "mental healers" are each applying it in ways more or less honest and legitimate.

In October, 1906, Dr. Elwood Worcester and Dr. Samuel McComb, the rector and the associate rector of the Emmanuel (Episcopal) Church of Boston, organized the Emmanuel Church Health Class, for the treatment of nervous disorders. Believing that, as Professor William James has said, "the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith," the workers at Emmanuel Church have been endeavoring to cure nervous disorders by putting the patient at peace with himself. Every patient is examined by a physician, and if the root of his disorder proves to be nervous (hysteria, alcoholism, a drug habit, insomnia, or any one of the many forms of neurasthenia) he is admitted into the Health Class for psycho-therapeutical treatment. Here he is encouraged to unburden himself of the distress or perplexity which haunts him, and is given the kind of suggestive treatment which seems best adapted to his disorder. Dr. Worcester studied psychology under Wundt, in Germany, and taught it for six years at Lehigh University. Dr. McComb studied psychology at Oxford. The records of the Emmanuel Health Class show that of the 178 cases treated between March, 1907, and November, 1907, the condition of seventy-five patients has been improved, forty-eight have not been helped at all, while in fifty-five cases the result is unknown.[15]

_Mrs. Eddy's Opposition to the Mind Cure Movement_

Mrs. Eddy and her followers have given a demonstration too great to be overlooked, of the fact that many ills which the sufferer believes entirely physical can be reached and eradicated by "ministering to a mind diseased," by persuading the sick man continually to suggest to himself ideas of health and hope and happiness and usefulness, instead of brooding upon the emptiness and unanswered needs of his life or upon his failing physical powers. Mrs. Eddy's sect, more than any other one of the cults which believe in and practise this method of bettering the patient's physical condition through his mind, has forced the most hide-bound medical practitioners to take account of this old but newly applied force in therapeutics.

But what is Mrs. Eddy's own attitude toward the general awakening to the value of psycho-therapeutics in the treatment of human diseases? She declares that every kind of mind cure and suggestive treatment except her own is dangerous and harmful. As one of Mrs. Eddy's students wrote in the _Christian Science Journal_, September, 1901, "The loyal Christian Scientist knows that neither he nor his patient should read or study the books of any other author than those of our beloved Leader in order to learn the Science of the Christ truth, which she is teaching and demonstrating to this age."

Mrs. Eddy's own editorials in the _Journal_ are never so bitter as when she is attacking the mental healers who do not practise her own copyrighted variety of mind cure. Recently the _Christian Science Sentinel_ of January 18, 1908, stated that Mrs. Eddy cannot countenance the work done at the Emmanuel Church. Mr. Archibald McClellan, the editor of that publication, published an article entitled "No Christian Psychology." He says: "Christian Psychology is equivalent to Christian phrenology, physiology and mythology, whereas Jesus predicted and demonstrated Christian healing on the basis of Spirit, God. He never complicated Spirit with matter, etc.... Her teachings (Mrs. Eddy's) show further that she cannot consistently endorse as Christianity the two distinctly contradictory statements and points of view contained in the term 'Christian psychology'--otherwise Christian materialism."

Mrs. Eddy holds that any system of healing which at all takes account of, or admits physical structure, is not Christian.

Mrs. Eddy's endeavor has been to convert a universal principle into a personal property. And she has gone a wonderfully long way toward doing it. Thousands of people believe that they owe their health and happiness to a healing principle which was revealed by God to Mrs. Eddy and by Mrs. Eddy to mankind; that since the ministry of Jesus Christ upon earth no one of the human race has understood this principle except Mrs. Eddy, and that she is the only human being now alive who fully understands it; that when she dies her works alone will stand between the world and darkness.

But all the while that Mrs. Eddy was energetically copyrighting, and pruning, and expelling, and disciplining, that other stream which came from Quimby, through Dr. Evans and through Julius Dresser and his wife, was slowly and quietly doing its work.[16] Mind Cure and New Thought grew up side by side with Christian Science. As organizations they were not nearly so effective, and their ranks, like Mrs. Eddy's, were often darkened by the adventuress and the battered soldier of fortune. But the Mental healers and the New Thought healers treated the sick on exactly the same principle which Mrs. Eddy's successful healers employed.

As to the future of Mrs. Eddy's church, her own attitude toward every attempt to investigate and to apply liberally the principle of mental healing, seems to determine that. It has been possible for her, during her own lifetime, absolutely to prohibit preaching, thinking, independent writing,--investigation or inquiry of any sort--in her churches. But after her death, when that compelling hand is withdrawn, either the church must renew itself from among the ignorant and superstitious, as Mormonism has done, or it must permit its members to use their minds. Those who use their minds will discover that Christian Science is only one method of applying a general truth, and that it is a method which is hampered by a great deal that is illogical and absurd; that if Christian Science, as Mrs. Eddy has promulgated it, were universally believed and practised, it would be the revolt of a species against its own physical structure; against its relation to its natural physical environment, against the needs of its own physical organism, against the perpetuation of its kind. The moment a Christian Scientist realizes that the helpful and hopeful principle of his religion can operate quite independently of all the inconsequential theories which Mrs. Eddy has attached to it, that moment he is, of course, lost to Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Eddy's church organization stands as a sort of dyke between the general principle of mind cure and Mrs. Eddy's very empirical, violent, and temperamental interpretation of that principle. It is the future of psycho-therapeutics that will determine the future of Christian Science. If "Mind Cure," "Christian Psychology," and regular physicians offer the benefits of suggestive treatment in a more rational and direct way than does Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy's church will find in them very formidable competition. On the other hand, if Christian Scientists throw down their barriers and join the general mind-cure movement, and the two branches of Quimbyism meet, then half of Mrs. Eddy's life-work is lost. The labor of her days has been to keep these two streams apart; to prove one the true and the other the false. Her efforts to stem the progress of all other schools of mental healing have been secondary only to her efforts to advance her own. Yet, unconsciously and against her own wish, she has been the most effective instrument in promoting the interest of the whole movement.