Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/390

338 Mrs. Eddy commit a crime she should believe her own sight at fault, not Mrs. Eddy's conduct. An intelligent man told me in reference to lies he knew about, that the wrong was in us. "Was not Jesus accused of wrong-doing, yet guiltless?"

Only experience can teach these fanatics, i.e., the real believers, not the charlatans who go into it for money. . . . As for the book, if you have any edition since December, 1885, it had my supervision. Though now she is getting out an entirely new edition, with which I had nothing to do, and occasionally she has made changes whereof I did not know. The chapter B—— told you of is rather fanciful, though, to use Mrs. Eddy's language in her last note, her "friends think it a gem." It is the one called "Wayside Hints," and was added after the work was not only in type, but cast, because she wished to take out some twenty pages of diatribe on her dissenters. . . . I do not think it will greatly edify you, the chapter. As for clearness, many Christian Science people thought her early editions much better, because they sounded more like Mrs. Eddy. The truth is, she does not care to have her paragraphs clear, and delights in so expressing herself that her words may have various readings and meanings. Really, that is one of the tricks of the trade. You know sibyls have always been thus oracular, to "keep the word of promise to the ear, and break it to the hope."

There is nothing really to understand in "Science and Health" except that God is all, and yet there is no God in matter! What they fail to explain is, the origin of the idea of matter, or sin. They say it comes from mortal mind, and that mortal mind is not divinely created, in fact, has no existence; in fact, that nothing comes of nothing, and that matter and disease are like dreams, having no existence. Quimby had definite ideas, but Mrs. Eddy has not understood them.

When I first knew Christian Science, I wrote a defensive pamphlet called "Christian Science and the Bible" (though I did not believe the doctrine). . . . I found fair game in the assaults of orthodoxy upon Mrs. Eddy, and support in the supernaturalism of the Bible; but I did not pretend to give an exposition of Christian Science, and I did not know the old lady as well as I do now.

No, Swedenborg, and all other such writers, are sealed books to her. She cannot understand such utterances, and never could, but dollars and cents she understands thoroughly.

Her influence is wonderful. Mrs. R——'s husband is anxious not to have her undeceived, though her tenth cancer is forming, lest she sink under the change of faith, and I can quite see that the loss of such a faith, like loss of faith in a physician, might be injurious. . . . In the summer of 1888, some thirty of her best people left Mrs. Eddy, including her leading people, too, her association and church officers. . . . They still