Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/75

Rh the breath of praise to do more than he has already done.”

Thus with one rude stroke, but with a great flourish of philosophy and rhetoric, this would-be originator of a new religion would make prayer and praise, the heart of all worship and the spring of all piety, ridiculous and impossible except in the ignorant and superstitious. What man with sense will stand up to praise a being or a thing that is indifferent or bow down to ask for what he knows he cannot by virtue of the asking obtain? Here the sarcasm as well as the logic of Henry Ward Beecher is to the point. “I cannot say my prayers to the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, any more than I could to a proposition in Euclid. You might as well tell me that three angles make a triangle, ‘Now worship!’ ”

In nothing more than in the matter we are now considering is the anti-Christian character of Christian Science revealed. From these sentences alone one may see that it is pure and simple infidelity.

But we are concerned only secondarily with the truth or falsity of Mrs. Eddy's doctrine and primarily with her claim that she discovered it inside the Bible or received it as a direct revelation from God. Everybody who knows enough to talk on the subject, knows that this metaphysical vagary is not in the Bible; and the other question is settled for us when we discover that it is a