Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/36

28 about “healing, disease, death”, etc., it should be understood that this is only an application of her principles. She calls it metaphysical healing, which means curing and preventing disease by the realizing of truth or true principles. And since she denies the existence of disease in the body, the healing she offers is not after all for the body but for the mind. But if the application of the unreality of matter to healing be anything new, the credit for it belongs to P. P. Quimby, not to Mrs. Eddy.

So this one new thing that might possibly be claimed for her vanishes also. Christian Science is a theory, not a practice. It is a system of principles, of metaphysics as she is proud to call it. If she had named it pagan philosophy, which it is, instead of Christian Science, which it is not, she would have killed it with the weight of its proper name. But Mrs. Eddy, as her literary adviser, Rev. J. H. Wiggin, said, “is nobody's fool.”

If, then, there is anything new or original in Christian Science it must be found in its metaphysical principles as such. To investigate this question and to show that Mrs. Eddy has discovered nothing is the object of this essay.

The method pursued in this discussion is scientific. It is the method of literary or higher criticism. The ideas of the two systems are compared. The general rule is to give quotations from Mrs. Eddy and then follow them with