Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/496

438 The propagation of their species without the male element, by butterfly, bee, and moth is a discovery corroborative of the Science of Mind, because it shows that the origin and continuance of these insects rest on Principle, apart from material conditions. An egg never was the origin of a man, and no seed ever produced a plant. . . . The belief that life can be in matter, or soul in body, and that man springs from dust or from an egg, is the brief record of mortal error. . . . The plant grows not because of seed or soil. Commenting upon this passage, Mrs. Woodbury says: To what diabolical conclusions do such deductions lead? One may well hesitate to touch this delicate topic in print, yet only thus can the immoral possibilities and the utter lack of Divine inspiration in “Christian Science” be shown.

The substance of certain instructions given by Mrs. Eddy in private is as follows:

If Jesus was divinely conceived by the Holy Ghost or Spirit, without a human father, Mary not having known her husband,—then women may become mothers by a supreme effort of their own minds, or through the influence upon them of an Unholy Ghost, a malign spirit. Women of unquestioned integrity, who have been Mrs. Eddy's students, testify that she has so taught, and that by this teaching families have been broken up; that thus maidens have been terrified out of their wits, and stimulated into a frenzy resembling that of deluded French nuns, who believed themselves brought into marital relations with the glorified Jesus, as veritably the bridegroom of his church. Whatever her denials may be, such was Mrs. Eddy's teaching while in her college; to which she added the oracular declaration that it lay within her power to dissolve such motherhood by a wave of her celestial rod.

The selfish celibacy of nuns and clergy, Christian or heathen, with consequent ecclesiastical interference in family life, have been, and are, mischief-breeding blunders, fatal alike to morals and health. One result of this interference on the part of Mrs. Eddy is that Christian Science families are notably childless.

Very tenacious is she of the paradoxical title carved on her Boston church, “The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.” Surely a “Discoverer” cannot be the “Founder” of that which he has been under the necessity of discovering; while a “Founder” would have no need of discovering her own foundation. What she has really “discovered” are ways and means of perverting and prostituting the science of healing to her own ecclesiastical aggrandisement, and to the moral and physical