Christian Science Part 18

To some extent, yes--speaking cautiously. But it is nothing, really nothing; Mrs. Eddy is only a little way behind, and if her inspirer lives to get her Annex to suit him that Catholic record will have to "go 'way back and set down," as the ballad says. Listen to the boastful song of Mrs. Eddy's organ, the Christian Science Journal for March, 1902, about that year's revamping and half-soling of Science and Health, whose official name is the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, and who is now the Official Pastor and Infallible and Unerring Guide of every Christian Science church in the two hemispheres, hear Simple Simon that met the pieman brag of the Infallible's fallibility:

"Throughout the entire book the verbal changes are so numerous as to indicate the vast amount of time and labor Mrs. Eddy has devoted to this revision. The time and labor thus bestowed is relatively as great as that of--the committee who revised the Bible.... Thus we have additional evidence of the herculean efforts our beloved Leader has made and is constantly making for the promulgation of Truth and the furtherance of her divinely bestowed mission," etc.

It is a steady job. I could help inspire if desired; I am not doing much now, and would work for half-price, and should not object to the country.

PRICE OF THE PASTOR-UNIVERSAL

The price of the Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, called in Science literature the Comforter--and by that other sacred Name--is three dollars in cloth, as heretofore, six when it is finely bound, and shaped to imitate the Testament, and is broken into verses. Margin of profit above cost of manufacture, from five hundred to seven hundred per cent., as already noted In the profane subscription-trade, it costs the publisher heavily to canva.s.s a three-dollar book; he must pay the general agent sixty per cent. commission--that is to say, one dollar and eighty-cents. Mrs. Eddy escapes this blistering tax, because she owns the Christian Science canva.s.ser, and can compel him to work for nothing.

Read the following command--not request--fulminated by Mrs. Eddy, over her signature, in the Christian Science Journal for March, 1897, and quoted by Mr. Peabody in his book. The book referred to is Science and Health:

"It shall be the duty of all Christian Scientists to circulate and to sell as many of these books as they can."

That is flung at all the elect, everywhere that the sun s.h.i.+nes, but no penalty is shaken over their heads to scare them. The same command was issued to the members (numbering to-day twenty-five thousand) of The Mother-Church, also, but with it went a threat, of the infliction, in case of disobedience, of the most dreaded punishment that has a place in the Church's list of penalties for transgressions of Mrs. Eddy's edicts--excommunication:

"If a member of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, shall fail to obey this injunction, it will render him liable to lose his members.h.i.+p in this Church. MARY BAKER EDDY."

It is the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition.

None but accepted and well established G.o.ds can venture an affront like that and do it with confidence. But the human race will take anything from that cla.s.s. Mrs. Eddy knows the human race; knows it better than any mere human being has known it in a thousand centuries. My confidence in her human-beings.h.i.+p is getting shaken, my confidence in her G.o.ds.h.i.+p is stiffening.

SEVEN HUNDRED PER CENT.

A Scientist out West has visited a bookseller--with intent to find fault with me--and has brought away the information that the price at which Mrs. Eddy sells Science and Health is not an unusually high one for the size and make of the book. That is true. But in the book-trade--that profit-devourer unknown to Mrs. Eddy's book--a three-dollar book that is made for thirty-five or forty cents in large editions is put at three dollars because the publisher has to pay author, middleman, and advertising, and if the price were much below three the profit accruing would not pay him fairly for his time and labor. At the same time, if he could get ten dollars for the book he would take it, and his morals would not fall under criticism.

But if he were an inspired person commissioned by the Deity to receive and print and spread broadcast among sorrowing and suffering and poor men a precious message of healing and cheer and salvation, he would have to do as Bible Societies do--sell the book at a pinched margin above cost to such as could pay, and give it free to all that couldn't; and his name would be praised. But if he sold it at seven hundred per cent.

profit and put the money in his pocket, his name would be mocked and derided. Just as Mrs. Eddy's is. And most justifiably, as it seems to me.

The complete Bible contains one million words. The New Testament by itself contains two hundred and forty thousand words.

My '84 edition of Science and Health contains one hundred and twenty thousand words--just half as many as the New Testament.

Science and Health has since been so inflated by later inspirations that the 1902 edition contains one hundred and eighty thousand words--not counting the thirty thousand at the back, devoted by Mrs. Eddy to advertising the book's healing abilities--and the inspiring continues right along.

If you have a book whose market is so sure and so great that you can give a printer an everlasting order for thirty or forty or fifty thousand copies a year he will furnish them at a cheap rate, because whenever there is a slack time in his press-room and bindery he can fill the idle intervals on your book and be making something instead of losing. That is the kind of contract that can be let on Science and Health every year. I am obliged to doubt that the three-dollar Science and Health costs Mrs. Eddy above fifteen cents, or that the six dollar copy costs her above eighty cents. I feel quite sure that the average profit to her on these books, above cost of manufacture, is all of seven hundred per cent.

Every proper Christian Scientist has to buy and own (and canva.s.s for) Science and Health (one hundred and eighty thousand words), and he must also own a Bible (one million words). He can buy the one for from three to six dollars, and the other for fifteen cents. Or, if three dollars is all the money he has, he can get his Bible for nothing. When the Supreme Being disseminates a saving Message through uninspired agents--the New Testament, for instance--it can be done for five cents a copy, but when He sends one containing only two-thirds as many words through the shop of a Divine Personage, it costs sixty times as much. I think that in matters of such importance it is bad economy to employ a wild-cat agency.

Here are some figures which are perfectly authentic, and which seem to justify my opinion.

"These [Bible] societies, inspired only by a sense of religious duty, are issuing the Bible at a price so small that they have made it the cheapest book printed. For example, the American Bible Society offers an edition of the whole Bible as low as fifteen cents and the New Testament at five cents, and the British Society at sixpence and one penny, respectively. These low prices, made possible by their policy of selling the books at cost or below cost," etc.--New York Sun, February 25, 1903.

CHAPTER IX

We may now make a final footing-up of Mrs. Eddy, and see what she is, in the fulness of her powers. She is:

The Ma.s.sachusetts Metaphysical College Pastor Emeritus; President; Board of Directors; Board of Education; Board of Lectures.h.i.+ps; Future Board of Trustees, Proprietor of the Publis.h.i.+ng-House and Periodicals; Treasurer; Clerk; Proprietor of the Teachers; Proprietor of the Lecturers; Proprietor of the Missionaries; Proprietor of the Readers; Dictator of the Services; sole Voice of the Pulpit; Proprietor of the Sanhedrin; Sole Proprietor of the Creed. (Copyrighted.); Indisputable Autocrat of the Branch Churches, with their life and death in her hands; Sole Thinker for The First Church (and the others); Sole and Infallible Expounder of Doctrine, in life and in death; Sole permissible Discoverer, Denouncer, Judge, and Executioner of Ostensible Hypnotists; Fifty-handed G.o.d of Excommunication--with a thunderbolt in every hand; Appointer and Installer of the Pastor of all the Churches--the Perpetual Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, "the Comforter."

CHAPTER X

There she stands-painted by herself. No witness but herself has been allowed to testify. She stands there painted by her acts, and decorated by her words. When she talks, she has only a decorative value as a witness, either for or against herself, for she deals mainly in unsupported a.s.sertion; and in the rare cases where she puts forward a verifiable fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses to furnish to anybody else. Also, when she talks, she is unstable, she wanders, she is incurably inconsistent; what she says to-day she contradicts tomorrow.

But her acts are consistent. They are always faithful to her, they never misinterpret her, they are a mirror which always reflects her exactly, precisely, minutely, unerringly, and always the same, to date, with only those progressive little natural changes in stature, dress, complexion, mood, and carriage that mark--exteriorly--the march of the years and record the acc.u.mulations of experience, while--interiorly--through all this steady drift of evolution the one essential detail, the commanding detail, the master detail of the make-up remains as it was in the beginning, suffers no change and can suffer none; the basis of the character; the temperament, the disposition, that indestructible iron framework upon which the character is built, and whose shape it must take, and keep, throughout life. We call it a person's nature.

The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally--with his hands; but not with his heart. The man born kind and compa.s.sionate can have that disposition crushed down out of sight by embittering experience; but if it were an organ the post-mortem would find it still in his corpse. The man born ambitious of power and glory may live long without finding it out, but when the opportunity comes he will know, will strike for the largest thing within the limit of his chances at the time-constable, perhaps--and will be glad and proud when he gets it, and will write home about it. But he will not stop with that start; his appet.i.te will come again; and by-and-by again, and yet again; and when he has climbed to police commissioner it will at last begin to dawn upon him that what his Napoleon soul wants and was born for is something away higher up--he does not quite know what, but Circ.u.mstance and Opportunity will indicate the direction and he will cut a road through and find out.

I think Mrs. Eddy was born with a far-seeing business-eye, but did not know it; and with a great organizing and executive talent, and did not know it; and with a large appet.i.te for power and distinction, and did not know it. I think the reason that her make did not show up until middle life was that she had General Grant's luck--Circ.u.mstance and Opportunity did not come her way when she was younger. The qualities that were born in her had to wait for circ.u.mstance and opportunity--but they were there: they were there to stay, whether they ever got a chance to fructify or not. If they had come early, they would have found her ready and competent. And they--not she--would have determined what they would set her at and what they would make of her. If they had elected to commission her as second-a.s.sistant cook in a bankrupt boarding-house, I know the rest of it--I know what would have happened. She would have owned the boarding-house within six months; she would have had the late proprietor on salary and humping himself, as the worldly say; she would have had that boarding-house spewing money like a mint; she would have worked the servants and the late landlord up to the limit; she would have squeezed the boarders till they wailed, and by some mysterious quality born in her she would have kept the affections of certain of the lot whose love and esteem she valued, and flung the others down the back area; in two years she would own all the boarding-houses in the town, in five all the boarding-houses in the State, in twenty all the hotels in America, in forty all the hotels on the planet, and would sit at home with her finger on a b.u.t.ton and govern the whole combination as easily as a bench-manager governs a dog-show.

It would be a grand thing to see, and I feel a kind of disappointment--but never mind, a religion is better and larger; and there is more to it. And I have not been steeping myself in Christian Science all these weeks without finding out that the one sensible thing to do with a disappointment is to put it out of your mind and think of something cheerfuler.

We outsiders cannot conceive of Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science Religion as being a sudden and miraculous birth, but only as a growth from a seed planted by circ.u.mstances, and developed stage by stage by command and compulsion of the same force. What the stages were we cannot know, but are privileged to guess. She may have gotten the mental-healing idea from Quimby--it had been experimented with for ages, and was no one's special property. [For the present, for convenience' sake, let us proceed upon the hypothesis that that was all she got of him, and that she put up the rest of the a.s.sets herself. This will strain us, but let us try it.] In each and all its forms and under all its many names, mental healing had had limits, always, and they were rather narrow ones--Mrs. Eddy, let us imagine, removed the fence, abolished the frontiers. Not by expanding mental-healing, but by absorbing its small bulk into the vaster bulk of Christian Science--Divine Science, The Holy Ghost, the Comforter--which was a quite different and sublimer force, and one which had long lain dormant and unemployed.

The Christian Scientist believes that the Spirit of G.o.d (life and love) pervades the universe like an atmosphere; that whoso will study Science and Health can get from it the secret of how to inhale that transforming air; that to breathe it is to be made new; that from the new man all sorrow, all care, all miseries of the mind vanish away, for that only peace, contentment and measureless joy can live in that divine fluid; that it purifies the body from disease, which is a vicious creation of the gross human mind, and cannot continue to exist in the presence of the Immortal Mind, the renewing Spirit of G.o.d.

The Scientist finds this reasonable, natural, and not harder to believe than that the disease germ, a creature of darkness, perishes when exposed to the light of the great sun--a new revelation of profane science which no one doubts. He reminds us that the actinic ray, s.h.i.+ning upon lupus, cures it--a horrible disease which was incurable fifteen years ago, and had been incurable for ten million years before; that this wonder, unbelievable by the physicians at first, is believed by them now; and so he is tranquilly confident that the time is coming when the world will be educated up to a point where it will comprehend and grant that the light of the Spirit of G.o.d, s.h.i.+ning un.o.bstructed upon the soul, is an actinic ray which can purge both mind and body from disease and set them free and make them whole.

It is apparent, then, that in Christian Science it is not one man's mind acting upon another man's mind that heals; that it is solely the Spirit of G.o.d that heals; that the healer's mind performs no office but to convey that force to the patient; that it is merely the wire which carries the electric fluid, so to speak, and delivers the message.

Therefore, if these things be true, mental-healing and Science-healing are separate and distinct processes, and no kins.h.i.+p exists between them.

To heal the body of its ills and pains is a mighty benefaction, but in our day our physicians and surgeons work a thousand miracles--prodigies which would have ranked as miracles fifty years ago--and they have so greatly extended their domination over disease that we feel so well protected that we are able to look with a good deal of composure and absence of hysterics upon the claims of new compet.i.tors in that field.

But there is a mightier benefaction than the healing of the body, and that is the healing of the spirit--which is Christian Science's other claim. So far as I know, so far as I can find out, it makes it good.

Personally I have not known a Scientist who did not seem serene, contented, unhara.s.sed. I have not found an outsider whose observation of Scientists furnished him a view that differed from my own. Buoyant spirits, comfort of mind, freedom from care these happinesses we all have, at intervals; but in the s.p.a.ces between, dear me, the black hours!

They have put a curse upon the life of every human being I have ever known, young or old. I concede not a single exception. Unless it might be those Scientists just referred to. They may have been playing a part with me; I hope they were not, and I believe they were not.

Time will test the Science's claim. If time shall make it good; if time shall prove that the Science can heal the persecuted spirit of man and banish its troubles and keep it serene and sunny and content--why, then Mrs. Eddy will have a monument that will reach above the clouds. For if she did not hit upon that imperial idea and evolve it and deliver it, its discoverer can never be identified with certainty, now, I think.

It is the giant feature, it is the sun that rides in the zenith of Christian Science, the auxiliary features are of minor consequence [Let us still leave the large "if" aside, for the present, and proceed as if it had no existence.]

It is not supposable that Mrs. Eddy realized, at first, the size of her plunder. (No, find--that is the word; she did not realize the size of her find, at first.) It had to grow upon her, by degrees, in accordance with the inalterable custom of Circ.u.mstance, which works by stages, and by stages only, and never furnishes any mind with all the materials for a large idea at one time.

In the beginning, Mrs. Eddy was probably interested merely in the mental-healing detail, and perhaps mainly interested in it pecuniary, for she was poor.

She would succeed in anything she undertook. She would attract pupils, and her commerce would grow. She would inspire in patient and pupil confidence in her earnestness, her history is evidence that she would not fail of that.

There probably came a time, in due course, when her students began to think there was something deeper in her teachings than they had been suspecting--a mystery beyond mental-healing, and higher. It is conceivable that by consequence their manner towards her changed little by little, and from respectful became reverent. It is conceivable that this would have an influence upon her; that it would incline her to wonder if their secret thought--that she was inspired--might not be a well-grounded guess. It is conceivable that as time went on the thought in their minds and its reflection in hers might solidify into conviction.

She would remember, then, that as a child she had been called, more than once, by a mysterious voice--just as had happened to little Samuel.