Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/34

26 him according to his philosophy. Mrs. Eddy, with the aid of the same philosophy, makes the same disposal of him. The refined and scholarly infidelity of our age owes more to Spinoza and to David Hume, the great English historian and empirical philosopher, than to all other persons combined.

That Mrs. Eddy borrowed from Bishop Berkeley or David Hume is a most superficial suggestion. That she resembles Ralph Waldo Emerson is true, for he is little more than a Neoplatonist. That she has reproduced ideas of certain German philosophers, as Fichte and Hegel, is also true, many of whose conceptions were also Neoplatonic.

That Mrs. Eddy's system is derived from Indian philosophy, Brahmanism and Buddhism, is rather a guess, the general points of similarity thereto being also in Neoplatonism.

That Mrs. Eddy is dependent on Plato is obvious to all who are acquainted with the thought of both. But it is Platonism as developed and modified by the Nepolatonists, that is, Platonism as used to characterize theology, that we find in Christian Science. Christian Science is an offshoot, that is, a sucker, of Platonism.

Again this, the mightiest thinker of the world, rises before us in a modern theological movement. The world has not yet freed itself