Chapter 14

Christian Science is, however, more than a system of mental therapeutics, it is also a religion and due allowance must be made in any just appraisal of it for the way in which it has made religion real to many for whom religion had ceased to have a working reality. It needs to be said on one side that a good deal of Christian Science religion is really taking the Ark of God to battle, using religion, that is, for comfort, material prosperity, health and just such tangible things. But Christian Science meets a demand of the time also just here. Our own age, deeply entangled in material satisfactions, has no mind to postpone the satisfactions of religion to a future life. The monk and, indeed, the generality of the devout in the medieval Church sought in self-limited earthly joy a proper discipline for the soul and a state in contrast to which the felicities for which they paid so great a price should be the more welcome. The devout of Mary Baker Eddy's time, though inclined to find in material well-being a plain mark of divine favour, none the less accepted sickness and sorrow as from the hand of God and prayed that with a meek and lowly heart they might endure this fatherly correction and, having learned obedience by the things they suffered, have a place amongst those who, through faith and patience, inherit His presence.

But our own time is not so eager to inherit promises as to enter into possession. A religion which does not demonstrate itself in actual well-being is under suspicion. The social passion now much in evidence among the churches grows out of this as well as the many cults which seek the proof of the love of God in health, happiness and prosperity. And indeed all this is natural and right enough. If religion be real the fruits of it should be manifest, though whether these are the more significant and enduring fruits of the spirit may be questioned. A religion which demonstrates itself in motor-cars and generous incomes and more than comfortable raiment may be real enough to those who profess it, but its reality is not quite the reality of the religion of the Sermon on the Mount.

Christian Science is in line with a distinct contemporaneous demand to demonstrate God's love in about the terms of Jacob's famous vow at Bethel--"If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God." This is a far cry from the noble protestation of Job which sounds still across the years: "Though he slay me, still will I trust in him."

And yet the more sensitive and richly endowed among the followers of Mary Baker Eddy have found in Christian Science other values than these. They have passed, by a sort of saving instinct, beyond its contradictions and half-truths to what is centrally best in the whole system. God, that is, has a meaning for life not hereafter but now, not in creeds but in experience, not alone in hard disciplinary ways, but in loving and intimate and helpful ways. True enough, this is no monopoly of Christian Science; Christianity holds this truth in fee simple. But unfortunately, in ways which it is perfectly possible to trace, the great emphases of Christianity have in the past been too largely shifted from this.

There has been and still is in most Protestant churches too much reticence about the meaning of God for the individual life and maybe too great hesitation in really using to the full the proffer of divine power. The accepted understandings of the place of pain and suffering in life have been, as it were, a barrier between the perplexed and their God; His love has not, somehow, seemed sufficiently at the service of men, and though Christian Science secures the unchallenged supremacy of the love of God by emptying it of great ranges of moral meaning and shutting away therefrom all the shadowed side of life, it has probably justified the love of God to multitudes who have, for one reason and another, heretofore questioned it and they have discovered in this new-found sense of God's love and presence, a reality and wealth of religious experience which they had never known before.

_It Exalts the Power of Mind But Ignores Too Largely the Processes by Which Mind Realizes Its Ideals_

There is also in Christian Science practice and philosophy the apprehension of a real truth which New Thought formulates much more clearly. Mind is creative. (Not alone mind with a capital "M" but our own every-day, human, small "m" mind.) The trouble is that Christian Science hopelessly short-circuits the creative process. Our human world is finally what we make it through our insight, our understanding and above all by our sense of values, but the actual achievement of changed purposes in a changed world is a process whose immensity is not even so much as hinted at in "Science and Health." Christian Science too largely ignores and seems commonly to deny the whole disciplinary side of life with its inevitable accompaniment of failure, fault and pain. Pain is no delusion; pain is the sign of something gone wrong in the great business of normal physical life. Nor is sin only an unreality which "seems real to human erring belief"; sin is a sign that something has gone wrong in the struggle for a normal, disciplined, moral life. Nor is the whole body of evil simply a shadow to be dismissed as easily as one turns one's back upon some darkness and faces toward the light; evil is the sign of something gone wrong, or something not yet attained in the massive progress of a humanity which combines in itself so many discordant elements, which has so long a way to go and so much to learn and so many things to conquer as it struggles upward toward a happier state.

Christian Science cannot in the end be true to the great facts of experience, which have a power beyond the force of any assertion to countervail, unless it is false to Mary Baker Eddy's philosophy, nor can it be true to its philosophy without impoverishing moral and spiritual endeavour. It is hard to find a place in the system--taken rigidly--for sympathy or tenderness or the richest of human qualities, or for those elements of wealth in character contributed by pain bravely borne or sorrow uncomplainingly accepted. There is little place in Christian Science for the Beatitudes and less still for that fine courage which is itself the one assured victory which the hard beset may win on any field of battle. The writer believes that while this severe judgment is justified by "Science and Health," it is not justified by the practical outcome of the cult in the lives of many of its disciples. They are in devotion and kindness the equal of many in the Church and superior to some. Their loyalty to their Church rebukes a good deal of orthodox easy-going. All of which proves at least that life is bigger than our theories about it and in the end subdues those who would make the best of it, to communities of experience and understanding in which we are all strangely kin. For, after all, unpleasant things cannot be thought out; they must be fought out and dug out and lived out. The whole redemptive force of society in thoroughgoing and far-reaching ways must be brought to bear upon the very sources of all the evil side of life, and the bare philosophy of Christian Science is not equal to this task.

_Is Not Big Enough for the Whole of Experience_

It is doubtful if Christian Science has ever made an appreciable change in the mortality statistics of any city and yet if the Public Health Department were to permit for forty-eight hours the milk or water supply of a city to be polluted, statistics would disclose that within ten days. This is only an illustration but it does illustrate. We must work if we are to dig up the roots of evil things and get a better growth in their stead and anything which attempts to substitute for this a denial of the reality of the evil, a mystical religious attitude and a mere formula of faith, no matter how oft repeated or how sincerely accepted, or indeed no matter how efficacious in certain selected regions among certain selected groups, is on the whole not a contribution to human well-being.

Very likely Mrs. Eddy's followers in the practical conduct of their lives are already recognizing this and gradually, and maybe unconsciously, adapting themselves to it. There are already signs of certain processes of conformity to the necessities of experience; these are likely to go farther. If Christian Science follows the history of such movements in the past, it will, after having made its own distinct assertion of whatever measure of truth it contains, be gradually swept back into the main current of religion and practice. It will maintain a nominal distinctness, but in the general conduct of life it will lose its more outstanding characteristics and become largely a distinction without a difference. Milmine, in her thoughtful criticism of Christian Science at the end of her history says that the future of Christian Science stands or falls with psycho-therapy.

That is true only on the one side. As far as Christian Science has true religious insights and approaches it will go on in spite of what happens to psycho-therapy, though there is enough in psycho-therapy to assure its future within well-defined regions if that were all. Something bigger than psycho-therapy will finally judge and dismiss Christian Science to its own place--life and experience will do that--and it is safe to say that in the end Christian Science will have to come to terms with a truth bigger than its own, with a body of experience which cannot be dealt with on the selective process of taking what you want and denying the rest, and more than that, it will have to come to terms with the whole great matter of an intellectual, moral and spiritual struggle governed by law and conditioned by the vaster world of which we are a part. This is not to deny that Christian Science and allied teachings have made contributions of real value to our common problem. It is only to affirm that here is something not big enough for the whole either of truth or experience.

VIII

NEW THOUGHT

New Thought has been defined as "an attitude of mind, not a cult." It is really both. It is necessary to include it in this study because it is a cult; it is hard justly to appraise it because it is an attitude of mind. Attitudes of mind are as elusive as the play of light on running water. We can estimate their force and direction only as we have an understanding of the main currents of thought by which they are carried along and as far as New Thought goes these main currents are far older than the cult itself.

_New Thought Difficult to Define; "An Attitude of Mind, Not a Cult"_

New Thought has never had an apostolic succession or a rigid discipline or a centralized organic form. This has given to it a baffling looseness in every direction, but has, on the other hand, given it a pervasive quality which Christian Science does not possess. It has a vast and diffuse literature and so merges into the general movement of contemporaneous thought as to make it difficult to find anywhere a distinct demarcation of channels.

New Thought is either a theology with a philosophic basis or a philosophy with a theological bias. It is centrally and quite distinctly an attempt to give a religious content to the present trend of science and philosophy, a reaction against old theologies and perhaps a kind of nebula out of which future theologies will be organized. For a great theology is always the systematic organization of a complex of forces, a massive structure wrought through the years by manifold builders subduing a rich variety of material to their purposes.

The teaching of the Scriptures, old traditions, the needs of worship and organization, political and social circumstances, changing moral ideals, the trend of philosophies and sciences, the challenge of schisms and heresies, the sanctifying power of blind custom and the mystical authority of the Church itself all combine to make a theology. Once a great theology is so constituted it possesses an immense power over life. It shapes character and ideals and gives direction to faith, orders effort and so becomes, as it were, a mould into which souls and societies are cast.

Theologies may be changed, in fact they are always in the way of being changed, but they yield slowly to transforming forces. Nothing is so persistent as organized faith and yet the very strength of a great theology is always its weakness. It is never really anything else than a crystallization of past forces. The experiences which voice themselves in theology have cooled and hardened down; the philosophy which is implicit in theology is past philosophy; the science implicit in theology is senescent science.

There is always in evidence, then, in the regions of theology a disturbing pressure occasioned by the reaction of contemporaneous movements in science and philosophy and understandings of life generally upon these old and solidly established inherited forms. Currents of thought are always, as it were, running past the great formulae since thought is free and formulae are rigid, and then returning upon them. From time to time this movement gathers great force. The old has been rigid so long, the new is so insistent that the conflict between them fills an age with its clamour, stresses souls to its travail, breaks down ancient forms without immediately building up their equivalent, and contributes uncertainties and restlessnesses everywhere in evidence.

Now this is exactly what has been happening in the region of religion in the last thirty years. An inherited order, strongly fashioned and organized and long essentially unchanged, has been compelled to take account of the forces about it. Certainly theology is not so static as an earlier paragraph would seem to indicate, none the less the great theological centralities do possess an immense power of resistance. We have already seen how little Protestantism had changed since the Reformation until it met the full impact of modern science and philosophy. We have had really until our own time and still largely continue a theology with the Creation story of the ancient Hebrews, the outlook upon life of the age of the Apostles, the philosophy of the Greek fathers, St. Augustine's conception of human nature and the expectation of the end of the world and the issues of history of the Jewish apocalypse given a Christian interpretation.

True enough, there are in all this precious and timeless qualities but there is also through all the fabric of our formulated faith the interweaving of such understandings as those who shaped our creeds had, of law and history and truth. Any far-reaching change, then, in philosophy or science was bound to profoundly affect religion and even forty years ago far-reaching modifications of the old order were overdue.

New Thought is just one outcome of the tremendous impact of contemporaneous thought upon our inherited theology; a detached fragment or rather group of fragments, for even as a cult New Thought, as has been said, is loosely organized and its varying parts have in common only a common drift. Yet that drift is significant for it has beneath it the immense force of a philosophy which has been gathering head for more than a century. It is to this, therefore, that we ought to address ourselves for any understanding of the changed outlook upon life which is carried, as it were, from the surface of profounder tides.

_"The Rediscovery of the Inner Life"_

Josiah Royce dismisses the whole of philosophy from Spinoza to Kant in one single pregnant phrase. He calls it "the rediscovery of the inner life." It is along this line that modern philosophy and religion approach each other. Religion has always been the setting forth of the inner life in terms of its relationship to God and the proofs of the reality of religion have always been found in the experiences of the soul. The mystic particularly made everything of the inner life; he lived only in its realities. For the sake of its enrichment and its empowerment he subjected himself to rigorous disciplines. Its revelations were to him all sufficient, for having found God therein he asked for nothing beside.

Wherein, then, is this new mysticism, or better, this new cult of the inner life different from the old? It is not easy to answer that question in a paragraph, though it is easy to feel the answer in any comparison of the great classics of mysticism--which are mostly spiritual autobiographies--and New Thought literature. To turn from St. Augustine to Dresser, or from St. Theresa to Trine is to change spiritual and intellectual climates. There is in the modern literature little reflection of such spiritual struggle as fills the great Confessions with the agony of embattled souls, nor any resolution of such struggle into the peace of a soul "fully awake as regards God but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself." This testimony of St. Theresa is illuminating as a contrasting background for New Thought. There the soul is very much awake, both as regards things of this world and in respect of herself.

These new cults of the inner life are far more self-conscious than the old and far more self-analytical. They seek to discern the laws in answer to which they act and utilize those laws in the practical conduct of life. They are always either appealing to underlying philosophies or else trying to make a philosophy of their own. Mysticism made everything of God and nothing of itself. It plotted its mystic way but knew nothing of psychology. New Thought seeks to discover in psychology a road to God. The centers of mysticism were emotional; the centers of New Thought are intellectual. All these cults are far more akin to Gnosticism than mysticism, though they are saved, yet not wholly, from the lawlessness of Gnosticism by a pretty constant return to the outstanding conclusions of science and philosophy.

_Spinoza's Quest_

Now if we seek to discover the real genesis of the movement and trace its development we would better begin, so deep are the roots of things, with Spinoza rather than Quimby. Here the deeper currents, upon the surface of which New Thought moves, take their rise and here also we return to Royce's phrase--"the rediscovery of the inner life"--and the philosopher who inaugurated the philosophic quest for just this discovery.

Spinoza was one of the last of the mystics and the first of the modern philosophers. He shared with the mystics of an earlier time a consuming sense of the futility of life save as life perfected itself in contemplations of an eternal excellency and communion with something far greater than itself. "After experience had taught me," he says (and this is quoted from Royce's "Spirit of Modern Philosophy"), "that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile, seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else, whether there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness."

Now there is in all this a strangely modern note--dissatisfaction with what is offered by the commonplace and the accepted, a great emphasis upon the mind as the key to the readjustments of life, a quest for some single formula which would offer "continuous, supreme and unending happiness." This is exactly what Mary Baker Eddy and all the other perplexed and bodily broken "seekers" who gathered about Quimby were really wanting and this is what, for one reason or another, the proffered religious experiences of their time failed to secure them. "This was, then," to quote Royce, "the beginning of Spinoza's Pilgrim's Progress." (As indeed it is the beginning of every Pilgrim's Progress.) "But now, for what distinguishes him from other mystics and makes him a philosopher and not a mere exhorter, he has his religious passion, he must reflect upon it ... the philosopher must justify his faith."

We have no need here to follow Spinoza along all the way, difficult and misty enough, by which he sought to justify his faith. The outstanding fact is enough. He is a mystic who reasons his way through where the elder mystic has felt his way through, and the goal which he finally reaches, though it be the goal which the earlier mystics had found by other roads,--the loss of self in God--is none the less such an achievement of reason as Spinoza was able to compass.

_Kant Reaffirms the Creative Power of Mind_

So this polisher of lenses bequeathed to the century which followed him its greatest inheritance and set for it its greatest task: the inner life as the supreme concern of the philosopher and the discovery of its laws and the interpretations of its realities the supreme task of philosophy. Those who continued his work began far enough, apparently, from the point where he left off and went a road strangely remote from his. Having taken the inner life for their study they sought to lay bare its very foundations. Nowadays, if we are so minded, we dictate to machines which write our words curiously enough in shallow lines upon wax cylinders and when the cylinders are full shave off the fragile record and begin again.

This is what the eighteenth century did for the mind. It reduced it to a virgin surface, it affirmed the reality of nothing except the impressions thereupon registered by what sense supplied. We owe to experience and to experience only "all that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it [the white paper of the mind] with an almost endless variety." We have nothing with which to begin but sensation; we have nothing to go on with but reflection. "These two, namely external, material things as the objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the objects of reflection, are the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings."[60] Such things as these are perhaps enough to begin with, but they are not enough to go on with as our thinkers soon enough discover. Some way must be found to relate the material thus supplied and to build it up into a glowing, continuous, reasonable and conscious inner life.

[Footnote 60: Locke, "Essay Concerning the Human Understanding."]

So in turn the philosophers laboured at their problem. They made much not only of reflection but of association; they found a place for memory and imagination; they discovered that we may as truly define experience in terms of ideas as of sensation; they discovered finally that by no possible process even of the most ingenious reasoning can you get the full wealth of life out of a mind which was nothing more to begin with than a piece of white paper, any more than you can get Hamlet (if we may suppose Shakespeare to have used a dictaphone) out of a wax cylinder, a needle and a diaphragm.