Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/80

72 words and when not. In spite of all the props, poor Dagon falls prostrate and his head is broken off. Oh ye Philistines, gather ye together in Ashdod and consider how to piece together again your dismembered divinity.

Before concluding this chapter we recall Mrs. Eddy's fear that principle, the best name for her deity, may seem cold and distant. So it does, and her denial does not change the fact. What she means may be expressed thus: “My child, do not fear this iceberg, it may seem cold and unsympathetic, but it is not. Draw near to it. Come into its embrace. At first it may chill you. But abide there for a time and when the temperature of your body is brought into harmony with it, there will be no disagreeable sensation at all.” That is quite true. When one is frozen stiff he is apt to be without pain or feeling of any kind.

Finally these words of Beecher are again to the point: “I believe in God and never for a moment have I faltered in believing in a personal God, as distinguished from a Pantheistic God, whether it is the coarser Pantheism of materialism, believing that the material universe is God, or the more subtle view of Matthew Arnold, who holds that God is nothing but a tendency in the universe—a something that is not me that tends towards righteousness. Well, I would rather chew thistledown all summer long than to work with any such idea as that.”