Page:The Origin of Christian Science.djvu/89

Rh an infallible rule to guide me; he is anyone whose bones are ready to protrude.

If there is ridicule in this language I remind the reader that it is sound reasoning also. It was just this supposedly deep but impractical metaphysics that produced asceticism in the church. And every student of church history and of dogmatics knows that it was not Christian theology but Platonic philosophy that created this caricature of life which was a mark of the Dark Ages and which still lingers in the institutions of monasteries and convents. It is the necessary result of the notion that mind and body are related as reality and unreality, as light and darkness. But Mrs. Eddy does not make this logical application of her principles. On the contrary she claims that she can transform a “crow bait” into a race horse; and Christian Scientists are reasonably fat and sleek. They know well how to take care of the physical man, treating it as something very precious. In this they go contrary to their principles but make a very pleasing plea for popular patronage. In this Mrs. Eddy is like Bishop Berkeley, who taught that physical objects do not exist but that we should act just as though they did. Why bother us then with all these subtleties if we are to go on living the same kind of life that we have been living, except in certain arbitrary reformations instituted by Mrs.