Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/389

Rh sketch of Mrs. Eddy that will ever be written. We have no other picture of her done by so capable a hand, for no one else among those closely associated with her ever studied her with such an unprejudiced and tempered mind, or judged her from a long and rich experience of books and men, enlightened by a humour as irrepressible as it was kindly. Mr. Wiggin's criticism follows:

Christian Science, on its theological side, is an ignorant revival of one form of ancient gnosticism, that Jesus is to be distinguished from the Christ, and that his earthly appearance was phantasmal, not real and fleshly.

On its moral side, it involves what must follow from the doctrine that reality is a dream, and that if a thing is right in thought, why right it is, and that sin is non-existent, because God can behold no evil. Not that Christian Science believers generally see this, or practise evil, but the virus is within.

Religiously, Christian Science is a revolt from orthodoxy, but unphilosophically conducted, endeavouring to ride two horses.

Physically, it leads people to trust all to nature, the great healer, and so does some good. Great virtue in imagination! . . . Where there is disease which time will not reach, Christian Science is useless.

As for the High Priestess of it,. . . she is—well I could tell you, but not write. An awfully (I use the word advisedly) smart woman, acute, shrewd, but not well read, nor in any way learned. What she has, as documents clearly show, she got from P. P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, whom she eulogised after death as the great leader and her special teacher. . . . She tried to answer the charge of the adoption of Quimby's ideas, and called me in to counsel her about it; but her only answer (in print!) was that if she said such things twenty years ago, she must have been under the influence of animal magnetism, which is her devil. No church can long get on without a devil, you know. Much more I could say if you were here. . ..

People beset with this delusion are thoroughly irrational. Take an instance. Dr. R—— of Roxbury is not a believer. His wife is. One evening I met her at a friendly house. Knowing her belief, I ventured only a mild and wary dissent, saying that I saw too much of it to feel satisfied, etc. In fact, the Doctor said the same and told me more in private. Yet, later, I learned that this slight discussion made her ill, nervous, and had a bad effect.

One of Mrs. Eddy's followers went so far as to say that if she saw