Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/429

Rh society and held regular Sunday services in a schoolhouse or public hall. If this society grew and prospered, which it was almost sure to do, it became an incorporated church. A Christian Science reading-room was often established, where Mrs. Eddy's works and copies of the Journal might be obtained. If a community happened to be slow in taking up the new faith, the missionaries sometimes attributed public disasters to the prevalence of Error over Truth. One worker in an untoward field writes in the Journal of November, 1890:

The result of their closed eyes and ears has been demonstrated in a startling railroad accident and sudden deaths in our midst. On the night of the fourteenth a cloudburst caused a deluge of destruction of property in the lower streets of this village and imperilled many lives. Just now is a favourable time for work.

While the growth of Christian Science must be attributed primarily to its stimulating influence upon the sick and discontented, the low vitality of the orthodox churches undoubtedly facilitated its advance. Mrs. Eddy's teachings brought the promise of material benefits to a practical people, and the appeal of seeming newness to a people whose mental recreation was a feverish pursuit of novelty. In the West, especially, where every one was absorbed in a new and hard-won material prosperity, the healer and teacher met with an immediate response. This religion had a message of cheer for the rugged materialist as well as for the morbid invalid. It exalted health and self-satisfaction and material prosperity high among the moral virtues—indeed, they were the evidences of right living, the manifestations of a man's "at-oneness" with God. Christian Science had no rebuke for riches; it bade man think always of life, of his own worthiness and security, just as the old