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 526 Popular Bibles her back to health. But this is not unique and is no proof of plagiarism. Like every other original thinker, she was con- sciously or unconsciously affected by the times in which she lived and adapted to new uses older phraseology. After she came into her own and found the success for which she had striven sweet, outreaching, somewhat bewildering, she sometimes showed a disposition to lay less stress on Quimby- ism. But masterful as Queen Elizabeth, at last lonely as "a solitary star," so God-absorbed as sometimes to appear to regard herself as coequal with Jesus and not simply his inter- preter, possessing such an aptitude for business leadership as to be the only woman in history to put a religious organization on a sound and successful basis, in her last days as she looked down the long years of the past to her youth when aged men were still talking about the American Revolution, she realized — as many now outside her fold are realizing — ^how httle after aU the final outcome was predetermined by mesmerism, Shaker- ism, transcendentalism, and Quimbyism. In all this there is nothing to surprise. Christian Science as it is today is really its founder's crea- tion. Where she got this idea, or where that, little matters. As a whole the system described in Science and Health is hers, and nothing that can ever happen will make it less than hers. No court need pronounce her still an active officer of the church. Priority of origination, endurance of influence, no judicial ac- tion can establish or demonstrate. Facts are the final appeal. Because they are human, those responsible for interpretation and explanation, now that the Founder has "passed on," may differ as to what she thought or would have thought. That is not tmcommon in the history of the race. It bears not on the subject at hand. When she began as early as 1862 first to restate and then to improve upon the Quimby theory, her English was often turgid and vague. Even when her efforts took shape in the earlier editions of her book, terms slipped in which are no longer there, and sentences appeared as meaningful when read for- ward as when read backward. Her conception was so cosmic that with unresting zeal to make a book as comprehensive as the Bible, she now and then fell into a Sophomoric style which the modem college woman sheds in Freshman English. Mes-