The Religio-Medical Masquerade

A Complete Exposure of Christian Science

By
FREDERICK W. PEABODY, LL.B.
OF THE BOSTON BAR

THE HANCOCK PRESS
BOSTON, MASS.

The price of this book is $1.00.

Mailed to any address upon receipt of price and eight cents in stamps for postage.

The Hancock-Press, Post-Office Box 2789, Boston, Mass.

[Introduction]

[The Sacrifice of Children]
[The Detached Heart]
[Pretended Equality with Jesus]
[The Faked “Revelation”]
[The Fiction of God’s Authorship]
[A Sham “Religion”]
[A Bogus Healing System]
[Immeasurable Greed]
[The Eddy Autocracy]
[The “String” on the Gifts]
[The Eddy Ban on Marriage]
[Christian Science Witchcraft]

Introduction

Christian Science is the most shallow and sordid and wicked imposture of the ages. Upon a substratum of lies a foundation of false pretense has been laid, upon which has been built a superstructure of outward beauty in which multitudes of credulous people gather to glorify the founder as God’s chief anointed.

Never before has the world witnessed a masquerade like that of Christian Science. Being everything that Christianity is not, it puts on the garb of Christianity and seizes the name of Christ the better to attract and the more strongly to hold people of shallow mind, but sincere heart. Having nothing in it remotely worthy of the name of science, it meaninglessly appropriates scientific terms and phrases in order to parade before the world with an air of learning.

The founder of this pretended religion, this bogus healing system, audaciously and irreligiously professing equality of character and of power with Jesus, has, throughout her whole long life, been in every particular precisely antithetical to Christ. Sordid, mercenary, unprincipled, the consuming passion of her life has been the accumulation of money, and she has stopped at no falsehood, no fraud and no greater wickedness that seemed to put her in the way of adding to her accumulations, or overcoming her supposed enemies.

Jesus condemned nothing so forcefully as the mercenary spirit. With a whip he scourged the money changers from the Temple, and in language that burned as flaming fire he denounced the hypocrites and liars of his time as “like unto whited sepulchers that are indeed beautiful outward, but within are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

If the language of this book seem severe, if its denunciations are emphatic, if things are called by their right names and facts handled without the least equivocation, if contrasts are drawn between the founder of Christianity and the founder of Christian Science that seem to border upon the irreverent, let it not be assumed that there is in the heart of the author the slightest particle of personal animosity, or in his attitude toward real Christianity and Christ anything but the most complete reverence.

It is time the plain facts should be stated in plain terms, that the hand of truth should ruthlessly tear away the mask of falsehood from the face of hypocrisy and expose to the horrified gaze of mankind the hideous lineaments upon which are indelibly and unmistakably written the craft and insincerity of utter selfishness and monstrous greed, and the hardness of a cruelty almost unbelievable.

Without egotism, I may say that no other man knows, as I know, the true inwardness of Christian Science, because no other man has come face to face with it again and again on so many occasions as I have, and no other has been in the position I have to force from the lips of reluctant witnesses, under the sanction of an oath, unwilling and discrediting testimony.

Ten years ago I knew nothing and cared less about Christian Science, assuming it to be a sincere, but deluded, manifestation of the childish credulity to which the human race is prone. But ten years of investigations and repeated professional employments, in which it became my duty as a lawyer to get at the actual facts with the aid of legal process, have qualified me, as no other not having had my experience can be qualified, to set forth the amazing story in utter nakedness. In order that it may appear that I am talking from a basis of knowledge, and not of rumor or gossip or speculation, let me briefly narrate the professional experiences above referred to.

My first encounter with Christian Science came about through an employment by the Arena Company, publishers of the Arena magazine, in 1899. In the May number of the magazine for that year an article by Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury, that was in the nature of an exposé of Christian Science, was published, and instead of bringing suit against Mrs. Woodbury or the magazine for the statements contained in the article, an endeavor was made, in Mrs. Eddy’s interest, to suppress the magazine by a suit in equity to restrain its publication based upon the incorporation in the article of a photograph of Mrs. Eddy said to have been copyrighted. The Arena Company retained me to represent its interests in the litigation, and during that employment I was brought in contact with the author of the article, and from her got my first inkling of the real character of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, and her religio-medical-commercial system.

Mrs. Woodbury had been a Christian Scientist for many years, during a long portion of which time she enjoyed Mrs. Eddy’s confidence as one of her leading lieutenants. She had accumulated many letters from Mrs. Eddy, and all her published utterances, whether in book or pamphlet form, from the beginning of the movement down to that time. Mrs. Woodbury was a woman of forceful, dominating personality, of much greater culture than Mrs. Eddy and the rank and file of her following, and in course of time she attracted to herself a personal popularity and influence that so threatened Mrs. Eddy’s, that it became important, if her ascendency was to be maintained unimpaired, that Mrs. Woodbury be cast into outer darkness and her influence wholly destroyed. Occasion was readily found for this and, in due time, without warning, without a notice of the charges made against her, and without an opportunity to be heard, Mrs. Woodbury was excommunicated from the Boston Christian Science Church and cut off from fellowship with the faithful. This placed her in a position where rational reflection was forced upon her, and she speedily came to the necessary conclusion that she had been duped.

Arriving at this conclusion, with a courage much to be admired Mrs. Woodbury wrote and published in the Arena magazine the article to which I have referred, and in unmeasured terms laid open the sinister and sordid quality of the whole movement, and exposed the consummate selfishness and greed in the heart of its “founder.” The article went forth in the Arena, and Christian-Sciencedom was up in arms. Mr. Septimus J. Hanna, then editor of the Christian Science Journal, Mrs. Eddy’s organ, hastened to Concord, New Hampshire, to confer with Mrs. Eddy regarding ways and means of meeting it, and the method of squaring the account with Mrs. Woodbury was considered and determined.

Let it be remembered that the article in the Arena was published in the May, 1899, number. Almost immediately after the appearance of the article, Mrs. Woodbury’s husband, to whom she had been much devoted, died and pæans of rejoicing went up from the Christian Scientists that the Judge of all the world had thus righteously punished one who had dared to assail the sanctified personality of “God’s voice to this age.”

Mrs. Eddy’s personal opportunity came in the month of June, 1899, when, in her annual message to the “Mother Church” in Boston, she undertook to dispose once and for all of Mrs. Woodbury. In language, seldom or never before equaled for cruelty and brutality, Mrs. Eddy assailed Mrs. Woodbury. Pretending, herself, to be the woman “clothed with the sun,” spoken of in the Book of Revelation, Mrs. Eddy denounced Mrs. Woodbury as the Babylonish woman there referred to. She said:

“The doom of the Babylonish woman referred to in Revelation is being fulfilled. This woman, drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, drunk of the wine of her fornication, would enter even the church and retaining the heart of the harlot and the purpose of the destroying angel … poison such as drink of the living water.” And further: “And a voice was heard saying, come out of her my people and hearken not to her lies that ye receive not her plagues, for her sins have reached unto Heaven and God hath remembered her iniquities. Double unto her double, according to her work: in the cup which she hath filled, fill to her double. For she saith in her heart I am no widow.… Therefore shall her plague come in one day, death, mourning and famine: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. That which the revelator saw in spiritual vision will be accomplished. The Babylonish woman is fallen: and who shall mourn over the widowhood of lust, of her that hath become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and the cage of every unclean bird.”

I make no defense of Mrs. Woodbury’s absurdities when she was a Christian Scientist. She went the limit. Nothing could have exceeded her confidence in Mrs. Eddy’s teachings and her zeal for the cause; but I am absolutely certain that there was nothing in Mrs. Woodbury’s life in the slightest degree justifying the reflections upon her chastity, and Mrs. Eddy’s attack was utterly baseless and wanton and purely vengeful.

Immediately upon publication of this message and its public reading in the “Mother Church” in Boston, all Christian Scientists recognized the person thus assailed. Either from native shrewdness, or by advice of friends or perhaps of lawyers, Mrs. Eddy had abstained from using Mrs. Woodbury’s name in the message; but no Christian Scientists anywhere had any doubt that Mrs. Woodbury was the subject of Mrs. Eddy’s attack and, on every hand, Christian Scientists openly expressed their gratification that Mrs. Woodbury had thus been finally suppressed. The next day after the publication, I asked a Christian Scientist with whom I was intimately acquainted, whom Mrs. Eddy referred to in the passage quoted from her message. The unhesitating response was, “Why, that vile Mrs. Woodbury, of course.”

The acquaintance, begun with Mrs. Woodbury through my employment by the Arena Company, developed into the relationship of attorney and client after the publication of Mrs. Eddy’s message; and it was determined to bring suit against Mrs. Eddy for this attack and against other Christian Science officials responsible for its publication. Before beginning, I advised Mrs. Woodbury that, as she was not named in the article, her identity at the trial could only be established by persons who understood her to be referred to, and I asked her if she believed that prominent Christian Scientists, who had openly avowed such an understanding, could be relied upon to tell the truth upon the witness stand. She assured me of her confident belief that they could and that none of them would go upon the witness stand and deliberately commit perjury; but at the time of the trial, having called as witnesses only those close to Mrs. Eddy who had made avowal of their understanding that Mrs. Woodbury was the subject of Mrs. Eddy’s attack, none of them admitted that, at the time of the publication, they had any such understanding. As the language was wholly unintelligible to any one but Christian Scientists, the suit necessarily failed; but it would not have failed if, at that time, I had had the familiarity I now have with Mrs. Eddy’s private correspondence; for I should have been able to introduce in evidence letters of hers clearly showing that Mrs. Woodbury was the Babylonish woman of her message.

In the course of the preparation for the trial of this case, all of Mrs. Woodbury’s letters from Mrs. Eddy and all of Mrs. Eddy’s published utterances from the beginning down to that time, including every edition of her book, “Science and Health,” and every number of the Christian Science Journal, were turned over to me by my client and studied with most thorough and painstaking care. Then it was I learned that Christian Science was a deliberate fraud foisted upon mankind by Mrs. Eddy in the name of religion for the mere purpose of extorting money from credulous people. Since that time I have been intensely interested in following the matter up and adding to my store of facts, until now I am confident that no man can read this book, no man and no woman who has not parted with every scrap of sanity and who retains elemental decency in his or her heart, and not be in entire accord with my conclusions.

Some time after the Woodbury-Eddy litigation, I was retained by Rev. Minot J. Savage, then of New York City, to collect for him, and at his expense, in legally evidential form, the facts showing unmistakably Mrs. Eddy’s false pretense and fraud, and in pursuance of this employment I examined numerous individuals and took their statements under oath for Mr. Savage. Later, when McClure’s magazine undertook the publication of the facts of Mrs. Eddy’s career, I was employed to procure the sworn statements of many individuals in support of the magazine’s story, and shortly thereafter I was retained by Mrs. Eddy’s two sons, George W. Glover, born to her by her first husband, and Edward J. Foster, her son by adoption, to cooperate with their other lawyers, Hon. William E. Chandler, Ex-United States Senator from New Hampshire being senior counsel, in the prosecution in the courts of New Hampshire of a suit in equity for the appointment of a receiver to have charge of their mother’s large estate for her benefit, upon the ground that, through old age mental weakness and delusions, if not actual insanity, she was incompetent to have the care of it. This litigation never reached a determination in the courts, but the family controversy was ultimately settled by a family settlement in which the two sons were paid approximately $300,000 for a relinquishment of their prospective interest in their mother’s estate and an agreement not to contest any will or other instrument disposing of her property.

As the Massachusetts attorney in this litigation, it became my duty in the City of Boston to examine, under oath, many of Mrs. Eddy’s most intimate friends, and the highest officials of organized Christian Science, who, by legal process, were compelled to produce many hundreds of personal letters received by them from her. This last professional experience completed my understanding of Christian Science, and the facts herein set forth are, almost without exception, based, either upon Mrs. Eddy’s own published utterances, her private correspondence, the sworn testimony of witnesses, or the admissions under oath of her most confidential friends and followers; and I give my book to the world with a full understanding of the responsibility I assume and a complete willingness to justify in any legal tribunal every statement I make.

Let it not be supposed, however, that I am presenting the spectacle of a cowardly man attacking a weak and unprotected woman. Mrs. Eddy is the head and front of a powerful and rich organization, the leader of a movement that numbers many thousands of adherents, amongst them some thousands of more or less masculine men. She is Christian Science, and Christian Science is Mrs. Eddy. Anything that money can buy or fanaticism give is constantly at her disposal, and back of her, as behind the greatest and the humblest, stands the sovereign law. Whoever offends another, is accountable to the law; and if anything I say offend against her right to enjoy the reputation warranted by her life, I can and should be called to speedy and strict account. If the contents of this book are not true, I, myself, proclaim that the severest legal penalty would inadequately punish me for its publication. If, on the other hand, what I say be true, as I am confident there can be no doubt in any honest mind that follows me to the end, then decent people, men or women, can no longer afford to give the slightest countenance to Mary Baker G. Eddy and her impostures, be they called by the name of religion, or be they pretended cure-alls for the ills to which our human flesh is heir.

I challenge Mrs. Eddy and the whole Christian Science combination to dare to prosecute me for libel, and I affirm and shall continue to affirm that their omission so to do is an acknowledgment of the truth of every statement I make. She knows I am telling nothing but the truth, and that the whole truth, to be brought out upon a judicial investigation, would be more damning than the truth as I have presented it. The whole truth cannot be told outside of a judicial tribunal.

In presenting the substance of this book in the form of a lecture to the people of the country, from one ocean to the other, the only response has been slander and defamation of me, the last resort of the accused who can make no defense; but nobody has met my facts with anything like evidence, or undertaken in any serious manner to disprove the truth of my most damaging charges.

I beg every one who reads this book not to be diverted from the facts by any personal abuse of me that may follow its publication. It is the only response that has been or can be made to my presentation, and I am accustomed to it from the paid spokesmen of a cult that, so far as its ruling spirits are concerned, more resembles an organization of outlaws banded together for plunder, than a religious establishment based upon the sublime teachings of the Man of Sorrows.

The knowledge I possess I could not suppress without making myself a party to one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against the human race; and I will not, by my silence, permit myself to become an ally with Mrs. Eddy and her associates in that crime.

History is but repeated in Christian Science. “We have seen,” said Macaulay, “an old woman with no talents beyond the cunning of a fortune teller, and with the education of a scullion, exalted into a prophetess and surrounded by tens of thousands of devoted followers, many of whom were, in station and in knowledge, immeasurably her superiors, and all this in the nineteenth century, and all this in London.”

Marveling as he thus did at the success of Joanna Southcott’s parody upon religion in the early part of the last century, what would Macaulay have thought of Mary Baker G. Eddy’s utterly unintelligible hodge-podge, which she falsely calls both a discovery and a revelation, a science and a religion, and what would he have thought of her following?

Mrs. Eddy is in no respect superior to Miss Southcott in the matter of origin and education. One was as obscure and as unlearned as the other. In one respect at least the Southcott woman was superior to the Eddy woman. The former was at least honest; she believed in her mission. There is no evidence that she built up a pretended religion upon a foundation of lies. She was, at the worst, an unbalanced creature with a form of religious mania. She did not grow rich out of her followers. She did not use her supposed revelation as a business asset and sell it for what it would bring. She did not take out a copyright on her “religion,” and monopolize its sale for extraordinary profit. There was no taint of commercialism about her frenzies. She died poor.

The founder of Christian Science, on the contrary, is everything that Joanna Southcott was not. She is mercenary, insincere, shameless, and bold to a degree surpassing that of all other persons who have duped mankind. Upon theft and falsehood she has laid the foundations of the “religion” by the sale of which she has accumulated a fortune.

F. W. P.

The Religio-Medical Masquerade

Chapter I

The Sacrifice of Children

At the very outset of a candid consideration of Christian Science, I feel the necessity, if not of an apology, at least of an explanation. I shall with entire freedom discuss a woman and a combined religio-medical-commercial system of which she is the founder. I shall handle the one and the other without the least regard for anything but the truth. Mary Baker G. Eddy is the woman, and Christian Science, so called, is the system; but they are inseparable, identical. They have arisen and they will go down together, and I predict that they will go down much more rapidly than they have ascended.

I am going to hold up for the inspection of mankind the soul of a woman, of a woman eighty-eight years of age, and I am going to do it without regard to the fact that she is feminine and aged. There is no other way to present Christian Science in its true aspect. It rests exclusively upon Mrs. Eddy’s representations and Mrs. Eddy’s character. If everything she has claimed regarding herself and Christian Science as a religion and healing system be absolutely false, then there is no justification for the existence of Christian Science as a religion, or a healing system, every church erected in its honor is but a monument to the “Queen of frauds and hypocrites,” and every worshiper at its shrines the dupe of a designing old woman who has laughed in her sleeves at the ease with which she has gulled them.

While this is unmistakably true, it is, notwithstanding,

most distasteful to a man, if he be half a man, publicly to assail the character of a woman, and nothing under heaven can justify it, if she be in private life and not putting forth nor seeking to put forth an influence upon the lives of others; but if she have constituted herself sponsor for a religion of lies and a medical system that is a fraud and a shame, if she profess God imparted knowledge of everything needful for human bodies and souls, if she reach out her influence to all parts of the land and seek to govern hundreds of thousands of people in every detail of their daily lives, and if her influence be harmful and only harmful, it is the duty of a man, who knows the facts, to make them public, regardless of sex or age or anything whatever but the public good. And so I ask my readers to believe that while for Mrs. Eddy, the feeble and palsied old woman tottering on the very verge of the grave, I have feelings only of compassion; for Mrs. Eddy, the charlatan and adventuress, for Mrs. Eddy, the impious pretender to equality with Jesus, the fraudulent claimant of exclusive and immediate revelation from God, for Mrs. Eddy, upon whose altar of greed have been sacrificed the harmony and happiness of marriage, the natural love and tenderness of parents and the sweet lives of God only knows how many children, for Mrs. Eddy, the heartless and avaricious despot of multitudes of despoiled and demented dupes, for that woman, as there is no sympathy in my heart, so there shall be no charity in my speech.

Now, who is Mrs. Eddy, and what is this strange thing called Christian Science?

As I understand her, Mrs. Eddy is the inventor and sole proprietor of the greatest get-rich-quick concern ever conceived. Her business—there is no religion about it, and her writings may be searched from end to end without finding a line about the worship of God—her business converts into cash the very highest emotions of the human soul by an appeal to religious feeling and extorts huge sums of money from multitudes of credulous people for healing them of nothing but the delusion that there is something the matter with them. Christian Science never cured any one of anything but imaginary illness; it never relieved any one of any real evil—but his money.

Mrs. Eddy, boldly professing to have received a revelation from God, and to be the equal of Jesus Christ, has made upwards of a million and a half dollars out of her enterprise that she calls Christian Science since she reached sixty years of age; and, if some be inclined to infer therefrom the possession by her of extraordinary genius, I cannot agree with them. Mrs. Eddy has succeeded, not because of her greatness, but because of the avidity with which unreasoning people swallow the most monstrous absurdities, the shamelessness with which men and women will intellectually prostrate themselves before the coarsest vulgarity and the most patent fraud.

Let me illustrate this, if I can. It is no part of my undertaking to account for Mrs. Eddy’s following. The fact that she has some thousands of followers does not, of itself, prove the truth of any of her teachings or pretensions. There was never any religious pretender yet, who could not, with slight effort, obtain a hearing and a following. I recently observed, in one of our daily papers, an account of an amusing incident of this character in Oklahoma. A man, believing himself to be the incarnation of Almighty God, started out to convert the world to his belief, and considered it to be his mission, in the first instance, to persuade mankind to divest themselves of clothes. The first man he encountered was his next-door neighbor and the first woman his next-door neighbor’s wife, and they were easily persuaded of the man’s divine mission, and that it was God’s wish that they should revert to primitive nakedness. So the three doffed the attire of civilization and perambulated into the adjoining town, naked as they came into the world. A police officer, who encountered them upon the street, with averted eyes hustled them into a van and carted them off to the nearest police station, where they were compelled to assume at least the outward garb of decency and sanity. This only shows how true it is that the religious impostor has no difficulty in making converts, and that the first person he converts is usually the first he encounters.

I am continually met with the inquiry, “If Christian Science is an absolute fraud, how do you account for the fact that so many intelligent people are Christian Scientists?”

In the first place, many people may be intelligent enough about the ordinary affairs of life, and utterly imbecile upon religious matters. History has again and again shown that in no respect are people so easily credulous and so readily victimized as in respect to religious things. Doubtless there are intelligent people in Christian Science; but the whole cult is not numerous, and the intelligent minority is a negligible quantity.

In the latest bulletin of religious statistics, published by the Federal Government in 1909, the total number of Christian Scientists is given as 85,717; but it is stated that a large portion, at least half, of the membership of the “Mother Church” in Boston is counted twice in this estimate; for the 41,634 membership of this Boston church is largely composed of non-residents, who are also members of other churches. So at least 20,000 must be deducted from the total of 85,717 in order to get at anything like an accurate estimate, which cannot be far from 65,000. These are the government’s figures for 1906, although Mrs. Eddy definitely stated that there were a million Christian Scientists as long ago as 1883.

Now, admitting that amongst this 65,000 people there are intelligent persons, I make the affirmation boldly that not one of them ever went into Christian Science because of his intelligence but notwithstanding and in spite of it. Let me make plain this non-intelligent attitude of its devotees toward Christian Science.

The religious service in a Christian Science church contains no original utterance from the pulpit. There is no preacher connected with any Christian Science church, and the individuals officiating from the platform are called readers, the first reader being a man, who reads from Mrs. Eddy’s book, and the second reader being a woman, who reads from the Bible. The sermon consists exclusively of the alternate reading, by the second reader of passages from the Bible, and by the first reader of alleged interpretative passages from Mrs. Eddy’s book, “Science and Health,” which is called by her, “The Key to the Scriptures.”

Mr. Arthur G. Frisbie of Cleveland, Ohio, an absolutely sincere and honest man, was for many years the first reader of the leading Christian Science church in that city. He became, however, convinced, as every sincere and honest person, who retains any remnant of analytical power sooner or later must, that the thing was a monstrous fraud, and he now denounces it in no less unmeasured terms than my own. Mr. Frisbie tells me that during all the time he was officiating as first reader in the church and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book, try as hard as he might he could discover no slightest relation between the Bible passages read by the second reader and the “Science and Health” interpretative passages read by himself. Any one who cares to make the experiment may demonstrate this for himself if he will get a copy of the Christian Science Quarterly in which the so-called Sermon Lessons are outlined. Such a test will show that there is no more connection between the Biblical passages and those selected and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book than there would be if “Mother Goose” or “Robinson Crusoe” were used as interpreters of the Scriptures. And yet I have sat in a Christian Science church and seen thousands of the faithful, with nothing less than ecstatic expressions upon their countenances, listening to readings that were absolutely unintelligible to both readers and hearers. So I say that the only possible way to be a Christian Scientist is to completely subordinate intelligence to feeling and approximate as nearly as possible the ideal condition pictured by Mrs. Eddy when she says, “The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better.”

Before passing from this point, I can’t refrain from incorporating here, for the benefit of mankind, the sage summary of a man whom I regard as the very wisest of living estimators of human qualities. I refer, of course, to Mark Twain. His opinion of why Mrs. Eddy has so many followers is most informing. In a letter to me some few years ago, Mr. Clemens said:

“Have I given you the impression that I was combating Xn Science? or that I am caring how the Xn Scientists ‘hail’ my articles? Relieve yourself of those errors. I wrote the articles to please MYSELF; and it had not occurred to me to care what the ‘Scientists’ might think of them. I am not combating Xn Science—I haven’t a thing in the world against it. Making fun of that shameless old swindler, Mother Eddy, is the only thing about it I take any interest in. At bottom I suppose I take a private delight in seeing the human race making an ass of itself again—which it has always done whenever it had a chance. That’s its affair—it has the right—and it will sweat blood for it a century hence, and for many centuries thereafter.

“It distresses me a little to hear you talk about ‘sanity in the affairs of men.’ So far as I know, men have never shown any noticeable degree of sanity in their affairs, and to me it seems rather large flattery to intimate that they are capable of it.

“See them get down and worship that old creature. A century hence, they’ll all be at it. Sanity—in the human race! This is really fulsome.”

There is no other possible explanation than this of Mrs. Eddy’s success. It is based, as Mark Twain says, upon the irresistible propensity of the human race to make an ass of itself every time it gets a chance. It is astounding, but it is a fact, that by many thousands of people in the United States in the year of grace 1910 this aged, illiterate, unprincipled, vulgar woman is regarded as the agent and representative of the Almighty God. I do not know how many times I have been told that because I have endeavored to make the people of the country understand that Christian Science is based wholly upon Mrs. Eddy’s falsehoods, I am therefore irreverently assailing the Almighty upon His throne. I confess I am not much disturbed by this particular criticism, because I feel that, if it be a fact, the Almighty will deal with me indulgently, knowing the integrity of my motives, and that, however aggressive I may become, the Almighty is in no danger.

The more I have studied and learned of the life of this strange creature and the more closely I have observed her effect upon the lives of those who come under her sway, the more strongly I am convinced of the harmfulness of her influence. It is literally derationalizing thousands of people, it is turning multitudes from the pursuit of knowledge and steeping them in a superstition worse than that of the Middle Ages. It is remorselessly separating husband and wife, parent and child. It is the mother and promoter of a new-old witchcraft which has so taken possession of the minds and lives of people that they live in constant terror of its supposed baneful work. This Christian Science witchcraft has reached the proportion amongst the faithful almost of panic, and of it more hereafter. But of all of the harmful influences of this alleged medical science, which is an unmitigated nonsense or deviltry, and of this alleged religion which, so far as its founder is concerned, is the very quintessence of irreverence and hypocrisy, of all of the evil consequences of the life and work of this monumental imposture, the unrelieved suffering of helpless children is the worst.

Mrs. Eddy teaches and her followers believe that God has revealed to her, as absolute truth, that sickness, pain and suffering do not in reality exist, and many are the deluded mothers upon whom this belief has taken so fast a hold that they permit their helpless children to suffer and to die without the slightest effort to alleviate the suffering, and with the continued iteration and reiteration of the insane notion that the child cannot be sick and cannot suffer, because sickness and suffering are unreal. Meantime the sickness of the child is real, the suffering terribly real, and after protracted suffering it dies without the turning of a hand to relieve its pain or to save its life. Those sane parents who have endured the anguish of seeing their child suffer, say from abscess in the ear, or from any one of the other forms of torture with which nature stretches our little ones upon beds of pain, will appreciate the enormity of this crime.

I recently talked with a lady who had been visiting her Christian Science sister whose little boy, eight or ten years of age, became sick during my friend’s visit. He went to his mother and said, “Mother, I have a terrible pain and feel very sick, and think I ought to have a doctor.”

What did the Christian Science mother do? Did she coddle the little fellow, take off his clothes and put him to bed and tell him the good doctor would soon be there and that he would be all well again very shortly? Nothing of the kind. “Richard,” she said, “it is very wrong of you to talk that way, when you have that error of belief. You know you are not sick, Richard, and cannot be sick; you know how to treat yourself when you have that false belief. Treat yourself, run away and play, and don’t bother me any more.”

Little Richard turned from his Christian Science mother and resumed his play, so long as he could stagger about on his little feet and keep up the sad pretense. And when he could not keep on his feet any longer, he sat down upon the floor with his toys about him, moaning with pain and holding his hand upon his side. Meantime his Christian Science mother busied herself about her family duties, totally ignoring him.

The time came when little Richard could not any longer sit up and completely lost interest in his toys; and then he fell over upon the floor, and died—died with his clothes on, died with his toys about him, died absolutely neglected by his mother in his extremity, died without the slightest sane endeavor to save his life.

And so it is everywhere in Christian Science families throughout the length and breadth of this land. Nothing but the employment of a fool-man or a fool-woman, called a Christian Science healer, to administer a Christian Science treatment, which consists only of the inaudible repetition of Mrs. Eddy’s meaningless jargon, can be done by a Christian Science parent to save the life of his child without repudiating Mrs. Eddy’s fundamental teaching that sickness is unreal and giving the lie to her “inspired” insanity that there are no such things as pain and death.

Who has not, for years past, read such items as these in the daily papers? “Christian Science parent arrested. Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin’s twelve years’ old child died without medical attendance.”

Again: “Jail term for Christian Scientist Brine, who let his six-year-old child die without medical attendance.”

Again: “No medicine for dying boy. Public prosecutor to take up case of year-old son of Frank A. Black, who died on Saturday without medical attendance.”

Again: “Mr. and Mrs. Edwin M. Watson, Christian Scientists, convicted of voluntary manslaughter for failure to provide medical attendance for their seven-year-old child, Granville.”

Again: “Little Esther Quimby, the seven-year-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Quimby, Christian Scientists, allowed to die of malignant diphtheria without attendance

of a doctor.”

There was in this country in the neighborhood of 5,000 advertising Christian Science healers, so called, and their patients are largely women and children. If each of them has but one patient a day, there are over a million and a half lives annually placed under their senseless and impotent ministrations. As they doubtless average many more than one a day, their patients are in the aggregate many millions a year, largely women, still more largely children. There are no statistics showing the mortality of such patients, for it is the practice of these healers to conceal their operations by calling in a physician at the last moment to qualify him to give the necessary death certificate, in order that there may be no investigation of their criminal practices. It cannot be doubted, however, that the sacrifice of child life to this stupid and cruel monster runs up into the hundreds, if not the thousands, annually. Could anything be more hideous?

But what, may I ask, does Mary Baker G. Eddy care about the sacrifice of children, so only that her bank account continue to grow and grow and grow?

Her concern for children generally may be somewhat judged by her regard for the only child she ever brought into the world. Mrs. Eddy, when she was Mrs. Glover, in September, 1844, gave birth to her only child, a son, whom she named after his father, George Washington Glover. As a young infant, George lived at his aunt’s house with his mother, who, however, frequently sent him on long visits to the family of John Varney, the hired man (in whose lap it was her custom, when a young widow, to be rocked to sleep at night), and also to Mahala Sanborn, who had attended her at the boy’s birth.

When he was seven years old, Miss Sanborn, who had become Mrs. Cheeney, took him, at his mother’s request, permanently to live with her in North Groton, New Hampshire, where he was from 1851 to 1857, when the Cheeneys moved to Enterprise, Minnesota, taking George with them. During the larger part of his life in North Groton, Mrs. Eddy lived in the same town, but she seldom saw him, and did nothing for him. She abandoned him, in other words, to an entirely illiterate person who had lived as a servant in her father’s family. As her father said, she acted “just like an old ewe sheep that would not own its lamb.”

Mrs. Eddy now pretends that she was obliged to give up her child because her second husband, Patterson, would not have him in the house. This seems to me a poor reason for a woman to abandon her infant child, but it is not true in Mrs. Eddy’s case, because she did not acquire Mr. Patterson until years after she had permanently abandoned her child. So complete was her neglect, so utter her abandonment of him that at the age of sixty-five this man, born of New England parents, can neither read nor write! A mother who is so unmotherly as Mrs. Eddy was toward her only child when it was little more than a baby, cannot be expected to give herself great concern over the sacrifice of the children of strangers that is incidental to the accumulation of her fortune.

If the adult prefer foolishness to wisdom, if he prefer suicide to life, by the Christian Science or any other method, he may enjoy his preference. It is no business of mine to come between him and the grave; but no man and no woman has any right, whatever be the motive or the relation, to stand silently by and permit a child needlessly to suffer and needlessly to die. The laws of the land should provide, as they do in some States, for the punishment of such cruel offences; and to the extent that my opposition and my protest may avail, no man and no woman shall be permitted to murder little children by a wilful neglect that is based upon an insane belief in the wicked teachings of a wicked woman, in her cruel, greedy fraud, in her brazen, murderous lies.

If any one be disposed to feel that my language sounds extravagant thus early in the narrative, I beg that judgment may be suspended until I have concluded, when the moderation of my speech will, I think, be cause for wonder.

Chapter II

The Detached Heart

Mary Baker Glover Eddy was born in the town of Bow, New Hampshire, on July 16, 1821, of good New England parentage; but never received anything but the most rudimentary education. The stories of her higher education are all fables. She pretends to have studied the classic languages, and to have been familiar with Hebrew. She has never known anything of any of these languages, and any one who has been compelled, as I have, to peruse her unedited personal correspondence knows that she has never been on any, but the most distant of speaking terms, with her mother tongue. She was graduated, she says, from Dyer H. Sanborn’s Academy at Tilton, New Hampshire; but her old schoolmates, still living, say there was no such academy, although Sanborn did teach a few children each year in a room over the district school. There was no regular course of study and were no graduations. According to these same schoolmates, Mary Baker completed her education upon reaching long division in arithmetic, and her culture, in advanced years, may be somewhat gauged by her written attribution in her seventieth year, when, if ever, one’s education may be assumed to have made some little progress, of the authorship of Irving to the Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens. “The language is decaying as fast,” she says, “as that of Irving’s Pickwick Papers.”

One may be moved, by this reflection upon our poor speech, to something like commiseration for the language that has been so useful to us for centuries past. But it is consoling to reflect that the race may have access, throughout coming ages, to Mrs. Eddy’s exhaustless well of English undefiled as it appears in her various immortal publications. Her private correspondence, it must be admitted, however, does not exhibit any considerable degree of excellence in the matter of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization; but an inspired person may be excused for a little carelessness in the use of words.

Mrs. Eddy accounts for her amazing deficiency of education and entire lack of culture by an ingenious fairy tale. “After my discovery of Christian Science,” she says, “most of the knowledge I had gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined, that grammar was eclipsed.” If any scraps of knowledge were ever possessed by this peculiar creature, vanished, dreamlike or otherwise, they surely did; and without quite assenting to the illumination of learning hypothesis, I find no ground for dissenting from the view that, at some time or other, grammar underwent total eclipse.

The first fifty years of her life were lived in great poverty and complete obscurity. Before her alleged discovery of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy at one time eked out a precarious existence in and about Boston as a Spiritualist medium, giving public seances for money. Sweet converse with the illustrious dead could be had of Mrs. Eddy at any time by any one who had the price. Her interest in the dead seems to have been strictly confined to the illustrious departed.

In December, 1843, when twenty-two years of age, she married George W. Glover, a young bricklayer by trade, and with him, shortly after the marriage, went to Wilmington, North Carolina, where wages were somewhat higher than in New Hampshire. There Glover, three months after the marriage and six months before the birth of her only child, died of yellow fever. He was buried in Wilmington, but the spot is, to this day, unknown even to his widow.

Mrs. Eddy has for many years been exceeding rich in this world’s goods. In her personal conversation, and in her published works, she has spoken in terms of the highest praise of this her first husband, “whose tender devotion to his young wife was remarked,” she says, “by all observers.” He was the father of her only child, yet all that is mortal of him has for nearly seventy years lain with the unclaimed, forgotten and abandoned dead at Wilmington, North Carolina.

Some years ago, friends of Mrs. Eddy at Wilmington erected a stone to the memory of Mr. Glover over a grave supposed to be his; but a descendant of the person really buried there ruthlessly tore the stone from the place he believed it to desecrate, and poor Glover’s final resting place remains unknown and unnoticed.

After reaching the dignity of leader of a great religious movement, Mrs. Eddy elevated the poor bricklayer husband to the proud position of Colonel of Volunteers, and she thus glorified him for approximately forty years. Sad to relate, however, he is “Colonel” no longer. In the recent litigation, instituted by Mrs. Eddy’s sons, one of the witnesses I was examining produced in evidence a letter from Mrs. Eddy in which she said, “I called my late husband” (she should have said late first husband, as a second, a third and perhaps a fourth had then intervened), “I called my late husband Colonel, because he was connected with the militia, and I had got mixed on his rank.” She might just as well have called him General for the same reason.

As a matter of fact, if Glover ever belonged to the militia, he never arose beyond the dignity of high private and having been a man of simple life and honest purpose would, no doubt, if he could know of it, be a little uncomfortable in his narrow bed at the undreamed military distinction thrust upon him by his famous widow; but it would sadden him a little to know that, after having elevated him to the exalted rank of Colonel, she should in later years have reduced him to the less imposing position of Major, by which military title he now is distinguished in Mrs. Eddy’s conversation.

As a second matrimonial venture, Mrs. Eddy in 1853 allied herself with one Daniel Patterson, who in her autobiographical sketches has been completely ignored, although he shared twenty years of connubial life with her. He does not seem to have left behind him the sweet aroma of the more chivalrous Glover, who survived the marriage only three months. Patterson was an itinerant dentist of little or no practice, and life with him does not appear to have been a pathway strewn with flowers.

It profits not to dwell upon the Patterson episode. When he was not pursuing the elusive dollar that perpetually fled away, he appears to have been chasing the festive bullfrog whose dismal croak jarred upon his wife’s sensitive nerves. Suffice it to say that Daniel and Mary endured one another, with what serenity and fortitude they might, for twenty long, weary years, when, in 1873, a divorce was granted her for his desertion. Mrs. Eddy says the divorce was granted for a different cause, but the record contradicts her. The record always contradicts her. She has declared herself to be opposed to divorce for any but the single Biblical cause; but the record of the Superior Court at Salem shows her to have obtained a divorce from Patterson for desertion seven years after the time God, as she says, had revealed to her the final religion.

Mrs. Eddy does not believe in marriage—for others. She was inspired of God to teach that it is not good—for others—to marry and she has inspired into the minds of her faithful followers the belief that marriage is of the earth very earthy indeed, and that life in the realm of spirit is impossible to those in the holy estate of matrimony. But so far as she herself was concerned, it cannot be denied that she seems to have had a distinct fancy for marriage, and I may go so far as to say something approaching fondness for variety in the marriage state.

In any event, after the termination by operation of law of the second marriage, that is to say on January 1, 1877, Mrs. Eddy made another and third venture into marriage and conferred upon one Gilbert Asa Eddy the proud and happy distinction of successor to the deceased Glover and the departed Patterson. The record of this marriage (another record, be it noted) discloses the amusing fact that Mrs. Eddy’s age was given as forty years, the marriage having been celebrated fifty-six years from the date of her birth; so that instead of blossoming and blooming in garlands gay for a fair, young, winsome thing of forty summers, the roads were decked with garlands somewhat somber for the third glad nuptials of the blushing bride of fifty-six. But what is a little matter of sixteen years in the life of a person who is superior to time and of whose life here in the flesh there shall be no end?

After years of toil and trouble, of conflict and disharmony, of stress and strain, in which some of Mrs. Eddy’s early friends strongly sympathized with Mr. Eddy, who complained that neither he nor God Almighty could please his exacting spouse, this husband, too, was gathered to his fathers and Mrs. Eddy was for a third time a widow.

In her efforts to impose upon the credulity of simple-minded people, Mrs. Eddy has not hesitated to claim the power to triumph over death, and to have actually restored the dead to life. To her intimates she has claimed to have thus twice restored to life this lamented third husband, Asa G. Eddy.

If Mrs. Eddy has, or had, this power, the mind of the incredulous will wonder why the poor man is now dead, why his potent helpmate did not restore him to life the third time he died. Presumably, Mrs. Eddy reasoned with herself that it was really expecting too much of a woman, even a woman Messiah, that she should recall from death the third husband three times, and as husbands had become, to some extent, a matter of habit with her, it is not, perhaps, remarkable that she consented finally to part with this one after such unmistakable evidence of his persistent desire to be separated from her even by death.

Mrs. Eddy has in her book, “Miscellaneous Writings,” modestly given us this husband’s estimate of her in these words: “Perhaps the following words of her husband, the late Dr. Asa G. Eddy, afford the most concise, yet complete, summary of the matter, ‘Mrs. Eddy’s works are the outgrowth of her life. I never knew so unselfish an individual.’” So, perhaps, she let Eddy go, finally, out of pure unselfishness. Sweet as was his companionship, she could not keep him by her side when repeatedly assured of his unalterable wish to go hence.

The first husband, Glover, survived the marriage but a few months; the second husband, Patterson, unappreciative wretch that he was, ran away, and, as Mrs. Eddy tells us, found consolation in the affection of the “wealthy lady” who ran away with him (although it must be said that no corroboration whatever of the “wealthy lady” feature of Mrs. Eddy’s story exists); and the third husband, Eddy, after having been twice recaptured, finally escaped by death’s door.

There is another singular, grewsome incident connected with the death of Mr. Eddy, husband number three. He died of heart disease. There was no manner of doubt about that; but Mrs. Eddy had professed to have the power to cure heart disease in the most advanced stage, and she must find an explanation of her husband’s death consistent with the possession, by her, of such power. So she said that Eddy did not die of heart disease after all. He died of poison, of arsenical poison, that’s what he died of; and he didn’t die of arsenical poison mixed with his food or drink or otherwise in chemical form smuggled into his organism. He died of arsenical poison mentally administered, thought into him by her enemies.

Now even a woman Messiah could not be on the lookout all the time against these malicious thoughts directed at her third husband and, in a moment of inadvertence, one of them got by and killed Eddy, and killed him dead.

To confirm her singular notion and prove the presence of the symptoms of arsenical poison in the body, Mrs. Eddy procured the performance of an autopsy upon her late husband’s remains.

Dr. Rufus K. Noyes of Boston, who performed the autopsy, tells me that, having removed the diseased organ from Mr. Eddy’s breast, he exhibited it upon a platter to the sorrowing widow, who craved the ocular demonstration, and pointed out to her curious and eager inspection the precise cause of death in its diseased condition. And it was after, and notwithstanding, her close scrutiny of the physical heart that had so robustly throbbed with love of her, that, much to Dr. Noyes’ amusement, Mrs. Eddy gave out the statement, to the extent of a column or more in the newspapers, that arsenical poison mentally administered by absent treatment had in fact torn her loved one a third time, and finally, from her clinging grasp.

How sweet, how charming, is the wifely devotion, that, kissing the lips of death, speedily and forever loses track of the sacred ashes of the beloved first husband, rushes into the divorce court for freedom from the truant second, and, having twice restored the adored third to life, when a third time he thus eludes her refuses, positively and coldly refuses, to bring him back and looks with calm and critical eyes upon the formerly attached, but now, alas, detached heart!

To the soft impeachment of these three several marriages, this pronounced opponent of marriage pleads a bashful guilty, but many are they who believe there was yet a fourth marriage, and that the widow Eddy in course of time became, and is today, the wife of one, Calvin A. Frye.

Frye is, ostensibly, at least, Mrs. Eddy’s servant, her man of all work. He is her footman, and in the livery of a footman rides upon the driver’s seat of her carriage when she goeth forth for her daily drives. He is also her private secretary, who handles her mail, and, at his pleasure, permits her to peruse, or throws into the waste-paper basket, communications addressed to Mrs. Eddy. He is her major-domo, master of ceremonies in her pretentious establishment and director of her large retinue of assistant secretaries, literary experts, personal healers, mental protectors and domestic servants. These positions Mr. Frye has adorned, as a resident member of Mrs. Eddy’s family, occupying an adjoining room, for upwards of thirty years. But not only is Mr. Frye Mrs. Eddy’s servant, her footman, her secretary, her man-of-all work, he, strangely it would seem, has for years at a time held the legal title to the capacious residence in which she has lived at Concord, New Hampshire, and to all the highly cultivated grounds about it, and to all the personal property upon the place. And not only has Mr. Frye been Mrs. Eddy’s servant and secretary, her footman and the owner of her lands and houses, her horses and carriages, the furniture within the houses, and the crops upon the extensive acres, he was for years the legal owner of her costly jewels, of the diamond cross which she wore at her throat. Her footman, owner of the house in which she lived, of the carriage in which he took her to drive and of the jewels she wore! This condition of affairs was not changed until I called attention to it a few years ago, when Mr. Frye reconveyed to, shall I say Mrs. Frye? all the property standing in his name.

All of these circumstances, taken with the confident opinion of one long a member of her household that, if Mrs. Eddy isn’t the wife of Frye, she ought to be, are to my mind strong indication that Mrs. Eddy ought to be called Mrs. Frye and her credulous followers not Eddyites, but Fryeites or Frytes; and I predict that, if Frye survive Mrs. Eddy and be not amply provided for by her will or settled with by her executors, he will go into the Probate Court and proclaim himself to be her surviving husband, entitled to one-third of her estate.

I do not state this fourth marriage as a fact, but offer it as the only possible and creditable explanation of the facts.

As has been said, Mrs. Eddy has one son born to her who was totally and unfeelingly abandoned by her in his early infancy, who lives in a western State, and seldom or never visits his famous mother. No member of her family ever believed in her, ever placed the slightest credence in her preposterous pretentions. Mrs. Eddy also has an adopted son. Some years ago she legally adopted a male child, a medical man named Foster, then forty years old, who, to acquire a mother by adoption, took the name of E. J. Foster-Eddy, and became a member of Mrs. Eddy’s family; but, after a too brief period of harmonious cohabitation, the sweet domestic relation was, for reasons not made public, interrupted, and now he also finds it agreeable to live elsewhere than with his adopted mother and is heard of no more in Christian-Science-dom.

From a humble position of dependence, Mrs. Eddy has arisen to a proud position of great opulence, and from complete obscurity, devoid of influence and power, has placed herself at the head of the most phenomenal “religious” movement of this or any other time, and made herself believed to be the God-anointed successor to Jesus Christ, and His equal in attributes and power; and this she has accomplished through a lie, a deliberate, wilful, wicked lie.

Chapter III

Pretence of Equality with Jesus

Coming now to what makes it worth our while to consider the career of this remarkable woman, let me present the facts regarding her relation to the life and to the activities of the world of today, and how and by what very devious means she has reached and maintains the position she now holds.

What does Mrs. Eddy claim to be, and what is she believed to be by many thousands of people who have made her their religious leader and guide, and reverence her as the devout Christian reverences Christ?

Mrs. Eddy claims that she is the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, that she and her book are specifically referred to and prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

She says, “My attention is especially called to the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse or Revelation of Saint John, on account of its suggestiveness in connection with this nineteenth century. In this opening of the sixth seal, there is one distinctive feature which has special reference to the present age, and the establishment of Christian Science in this period. ‘And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’”

With eyes downcast, with “bated breath and whispering humbleness,” bashfully pointing to herself, in low tones that inspire awe, she says, “The woman clothed with the sun, Mary Baker G. Eddy.”

Again, she says: “Saint John writes in the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation: ‘And I saw another mighty angel come down from Heaven, clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was, as it were, the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. And he had in his hand a little book, open, and he set his right foot upon the earth.’ Is this angel, or message from God, Divine Science that comes in a cloud? This angel had in his hand a little book open for all to read and understand. Then will a voice from harmony cry, Go and take the little book. Take up Divine Science. Study it, ponder it. It will be indeed sweet at its first taste when it heals you, but murmur not over Truth if you find its digestion bitter.”

The “little book,” “Science and Health,” of God’s authorship, but copyrighted by Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy, and to be had of her publisher in Boston by any one who has three dollars or more, according to binding, to pay for it!

Intentionally vague as are these oracular utterances, we cannot but catch her evident meaning: In me behold the woman clothed with the sun; in my book, the “little book” sent down from Heaven, and in Christian Science the message from God contained in the little book held in the hand of the angel!

Christian Scientists get this down without so much as a murmur! This is one of the easy things she has given them to swallow.

Besides this, Mrs. Eddy has distinctly authorized the claim in her behalf that she herself is the chosen successor to and equal of Jesus, that her mission is to complete the religion of Christ.

In the earlier days she placed her mission above that of Jesus, inasmuch as the idea of God given by her was, she said, “higher, clearer and more permanent than before.” But, later, she seems to have been satisfied with equality only, and says, “The second appearing of Jesus is unquestionably the second advent of the advancing idea of God as in Christian Science.”

She, however, patronizingly points out the short-comings of Jesus. “Our Master healed the sick, practiced Christian healing, and taught the generalities of this divine principle to his students, but he left no definite word for demonstrating his principle of healing and preventing disease. This remained to be discovered through Christian Science,” and “Had wisdom characterized all his sayings, he would not have prophesied his own death and thereby hastened or caused it.” While in speaking of herself she said, “The works I have written on Christian Science contain absolute truth and my necessity was to tell it. I was a scribe under orders, and who can refrain from transcribing what God indites?” So wisdom did not characterize all of the sayings of Jesus; but Mrs. Eddy speaks absolute truth!

In the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, when it was her property and published by her, and upwards of twenty years after the time she says God had selected her to complete the religion of Jesus, it was claimed for her, and with her sanction, that she was equal with Jesus, and elaborate effort was made to establish the claim. “Now a word about the horror many good people have of our making the author of ‘Science and Health’ equal with Jesus!” says the writer, and in the first paragraph of the article, the question is asked, “Do we, then, say that the author of ‘Science and Health’ is equal with Jesus?” A little further on appears the statement, “Jesus demonstrated over all the beliefs of this false sense of life, even over the belief of death, the last enemy to be overcome.” And further, “Mrs. M. B. G. Eddy has worked out for us, as on a blackboard, every point in the demonstrations, or so-called miracles of Jesus, showing us how to meet and overcome the one, and perform the other” and, throughout the article, its whole clearly apparent purpose is to carry the conviction that in attributes and power Mrs. Eddy is the entire equal of Jesus.

In an illustrated “poem” entitled “Christ and Christmas,” written by Mrs. Eddy, and published and copyrighted by her in 1894, there is a picture labeled “Christian Unity,” in which Jesus is represented as seated upon a stone holding the right hand of Mary—Mary Baker G. Eddy. In the left hand of the woman is a scroll bearing the legend “Christian Science,” and about the head of each figure, that of Jesus and that of the Christian Science woman, there is a halo. The picture is illustrative of these lines on the opposite page:

“As in blessed Palestine’s hour, so in our age

’Tis the same hand unfolds His Power and writes the page.”

At the time this book was announced by Mrs. Eddy, in December, 1893, she publicly said of it, “‘Christ and Christmas’ voices God through song and object lesson.” The price of the book was three dollars. How convenient to be able to command a market by voicing God! How kind God has been to Mrs. Eddy’s business ventures!

At the time of this publication, Mrs. Eddy, who claimed to have shared in making the illustrations (which her man Hanna called “exquisite bits of art,” but which are, doubtless, the vulgarest products of the art of book-making of many years), at this time, I say, Mrs. Eddy unquestionably wished this “Christian Unity” illustration to signify the unity of Christianity and Christian Science, as represented by the founder of Christianity and the founder of Christian Science, and about her own head, as about the head of Christ, she hangs a halo! The two Messiahs, masculine and feminine, and representing “Our Father and our Mother God,” hand in hand, absolute equality. Christian Unity!

Her private correspondence has been full of pretensions to direct meditation with God, and her followers have been induced unquestioningly to comply with her wishes regarding the most trivial things because she but voiced a wish communicated to them through her by God.

“God, our God has just told me,” she says, “who to recommend to you for editor of the Christian Science Journal,” And, “No man or woman has told me of this obnoxious feature, but my Father has, and it shall be stopped by His servant who has given His word to the world.” And, “God’s law ‘to feed my sheep,’ to give Science and Health at once to those hungering for it, must be obeyed.” (To those hungering three dollars worth!) And, “I ought not to have consulted with man on the copyright of God’s Book.” And, “Come to see me next Saturday, a.m., on nine o’clock train, and God will settle this matter.” And, “Now what can I do, only to spread His word of warning and wait for all students to grow up to understand His ways, and mine when God directed.” And, “God will not let me be silent relative to your business here yesterday, but demands me to answer, reminding you of your feelings toward me.” And, “Push the Book to as fast as possible completion. It is God’s Book, and he says give it at once to the people.” (At three dollars per copy!) And, “You know they cannot be made sick for printing and binding God’s Book.”

But Jove nods; Mrs. Eddy stumbles. Sometimes it is the Christian Science devil that, impersonating God, whispers to her. “I regret,” she says, “having named the one I did to you for editor. It was a mistake, he is not fit. It was not God evidently that suggested that thought, but the person who suggests many things mentally; but I have before been able to discriminate.” This incident suggests the importance of one, who is the channel of wireless telegraphy from God, being able to discriminate between messages from Heaven and messages from Hell, and having the power to prevent satanic interference with the medium of communication.

In a late edition of “Science and Health” Mrs. Eddy speaks of Jesus as “the masculine representative of the spiritual idea,” and says, “the impersonation of the spiritual idea had a brief history in the earthly life of our Master, but of His Kingdom there shall be no end, for Christ’s, God’s idea, will eventually rule all nations and people, imperatively, absolutely, finally,—with Divine Science. This immaculate idea, represented first by man and last by woman, will baptize with fire,” etc.

By “Divine Science,” Mrs. Eddy, of course, means Christian Science, as the terms are used interchangably with her, and with characteristic modesty she places herself by the side of the Master—He being the first and masculine, and she the last and feminine, representative of the “immaculate idea.”

What marvelous presumption! What ineffable audacity!

The Mary Baker G. Eddy, who in speaking of a woman she disliked savagely exclaimed, “I’d like to tear her heart out and trample it under my feet!” who, at Lynn, because of her abuse of her husband and violent outbursts of temper, was known as the “she devil”; who, four years after the time of her pretended selection by God for a divine mission, being denied hospitality she had abused in the Wentworth household at Stoughton, left in a fury of passion after having, with obvious intent, put live coals from her stove upon a heap of newspapers in the closet; who figured first as a spiritualist medium, giving public séances for money, and later as the president of a bogus medical college issuing illegal degrees; who unfeelingly abandoned the only child born to her, and looked with unflinching eyes upon the detached heart of her deceased husband; who has become the champion fraud and impostor of the age; who in the livery of heaven has for forty years wrought in the direct interest of hell,—this Mrs. Eddy, the self-constituted representative with Jesus of the immaculate idea! this woman and the immaculate Jesus mentioned in the same breath!

Chapter IV

The Faked Revelation

Back in 1877 Mrs. Eddy placed her mission, as I have said, above that of Jesus. In a personal letter to a friend, she said, “I know the crucifixion of one who presents Truth in its higher aspect will be this time through a bigger error, through mortal mind instead of its lower strata or matter, showing that the idea given of God this time is higher, clearer, and more permanent than before.” But of late years she has contented herself with claiming only equality, in all respects, with Jesus, and has not hesitated boldly and in so many words to declare her teachings to have been expressly “authorized by Christ.”

We must go into this matter with some particularity, and I crave indulgence while I present certain essential details. I want to leave no doubt in any orderly mind as to just what Mrs. Eddy claims to be, and shall then show, with an abundance of evidence that will not permit of the slightest doubt, just exactly the manner of woman she has been and is. When the most corrupt tree in the orchard brings forth the sweetest and most beautiful fruit of all, it will be believed that Mary Baker G. Eddy can be the channel through which God has revealed Himself to mankind, and it will not be believed until then.

I am of those who believe that there can be no religion but a religion based upon revelation. Either God reveals himself to us, or He remains unknown and unknowable. “No man by searching can find out God.” Reason alone cannot attain unto Him. God hides Himself from the wise, and the mightiest intellect approaches no nearer to Him than the simple mind of a child.

This great truth has been and is the common belief of mankind, and every unprincipled person, who has appealed to human credulity along religious lines, knowing mankind to so believe, has faked a revelation from God. Mrs. Eddy has put herself in a class by herself by the boldness, the irreverence, the recklessness, the blasphemy of her pretended intimacy with God.

In express terms, the founder of Christian Science claims to have received from the Almighty a revelation which she has incorporated in her book entitled “Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures.” Speaking of this book, in January, 1901, she said: “I should blush to write of ‘Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures’ as I have, were it of human origin and I, apart from God, its author, but as I was only a scribe echoing the harmonies of Heaven in divine metaphysics, I cannot be super-modest of the Christian Science Text-book.”

Nothing could be plainer or more unequivocal than that. There is a distinct avowal that the book entitled “Science and Health” was the work of Almighty God, and, preposterous as the claim may seem to any rational being who has ever undertaken to read the book, slanderous as it is upon Omniscience, some thousands of people in the United States today believe it precisely as made. They believe that God literally dictated the contents of this book to Mrs. Eddy, and that it is in every part as much the word of God as the most devout Christian believes the Bible to be in any part the word of God.

This is the sacrilegious lie upon which Mary Baker G. Eddy has reared her whole fraudulent

superstructure, which she had denominated Christian Science, and which has become the religious belief of thousands. It is because of this lie that Christian Science flourishes like a green bay tree; that the old faith does not hold its believers; that real scientific knowledge in medicine is losing the confidence it ought to enjoy. It is because of this lie that Christian Science wives separate themselves from their husbands; that Christian Science mothers abandon their children; that young women believers put marriage behind them as lustful and unclean and inconsistent with true spirituality of life and character. It is because of this lie, this cruel and wicked lie, that children are permitted needlessly to suffer and needlessly to die without any intelligent perception that they are suffering, and after a resolute withholding

by their deluded parents of trained medical skill that would alleviate suffering and save life. And this odious lie, I purpose, while strength abides with me, to hold up to the enduring detestation of mankind.

I am going to show, with absolute conclusiveness, that Mrs. Eddy’s claim to revelation is wholly false. And when I have shown that, I shall have shown that the “religious” phase of Christian Science is a fraud and a sham; I shall have shown that it is a veritable parody upon religion, a caricature upon Christianity; I shall have shown that every beautiful temple erected for the worship of the Christian Science God is a monument to Mrs. Eddy’s success in imposing upon mankind, and that all of the thousands upon thousands of pure and simple-minded people, who acclaim her God’s messenger, are the victims of a mercenary old schemer who has amazed herself at the gullibility of her worshipers.

I am not dealing in exaggeration. I am not speaking without knowledge when I say that no sane person can follow me through this narrative and not agree with me that Christian Science as a religion is a sham, as a healing system is a fraud; that it kills the sweetest and tenderest emotions in the human heart by rooting out sympathy and charity and compassion; that there is no other hatred and vindictiveness equal to the hatred and vindictiveness of its founder and her leading votaries; that there is no other cruelty, no other greed that can be compared with theirs, and that the “inspired” teaching of Mary Baker G. Eddy regarding the most sacred institution established amongst men, I refer to the institution of marriage, is so low and so vile that decent people, when they come to understand it, must repudiate the woman and the thing from overwhelming shame.

Insanity is not responsible for indecency, but those Christian Scientists who have not parted with their sanity, and are not Christian Scientists for revenue only, will turn with horror from the woman and her work when they know what they are.

I say that Mrs. Eddy’s claim to having received an inspiration from God is fraudulent. Now, what are the facts?

That God had nothing to do with Mrs. Eddy’s book is abundantly proven by the book itself, to any person of sufficient understanding to be at large outside of Bedlam. Who but a person of weak or disordered mind could believe that God is the author of this, “The condition of the stomach, bowels, food, clothing, etc., is of no serious import to your child”?

Can any not absolutely insane parent believe that God communicated that “absolute truth” to Mrs. Eddy?

Again: “The less we know of or think about Hygiene, the less we are predisposed to sickness.”

That is to say, the more we know about how to keep well and how to avoid conditions breeding disease, the more likely we are to be sick.

Again: “Treatises on anatomy, physiology and health sustained by what is termed material law, are the promoters of sickness and disease. It is proverbial that as long as you read medical works you will be sick.”

We have all observed the truth of this inspired utterance in the fact that the physicians, as a body, are almost constantly in bed of one disease or another. The wonder is that any of them ever survive

the courses of preparatory study.

Again: “Not because of muscular exercise, but because of the blacksmith’s faith in muscle, his arm becomes stronger.”

All one has to do to develop his biceps is to have faith that his biceps will develop, if Mrs. Eddy really speak by inspiration of God.

Again: “You say or think because you have partaken of salt fish that you are thirsty, and you are thirsty accordingly; while the opposite belief would produce the opposite result.”

That is to say, you may partake of all the salt fish you please; but if you persistently say and believe it cannot cause thirst, thirst is the last sensation that will afflict you.

Again: “Question. Do not brains think and nerves feel, and is there no intelligence in matter? Answer. Not if God be true and mortal man a liar.”

In other words, if God be true, brains do not think and nerves do not feel. That brains do not think, Mrs. Eddy, when she contemplates her foolish following, may have some reason to believe; but she will have some difficulty in satisfying the rest of us that brains do not possess the function of thought. I think, therefore I am not a Christian Scientist.

Again: “The blood, heart, lungs, brain, etc., have nothing to do with life.”

When this impressive passage was first presented to my darkened mind, I was inclined to believe it to contain no element of truth; but I am persuaded that there is a grain of truth in it. I have sat in a Christian Science church repeatedly and have seen some thousands of people with open mouths and ecstatic expressions listening to material from the platform wholly unintelligible to those who read it and wholly unintelligible to every person in the building who heard it; and I have come slowly, very slowly and regretfully, to the conviction that it is true, that amongst large masses of people there are times when the brain has absolutely nothing to do with life. As to the blood, heart and lungs, I am still of my early prejudice that they have something to do with life, notwithstanding Mrs. Eddy’s affirmation that God has informed her to the contrary.

Again: “Gender also is a quality, a characteristic of mind and not of matter.”

It is all in your mind. You are a man or a woman according as you think you are a man or a woman, and not otherwise. If a man thinks he is a woman, and if a woman thinks she is a man, that settles it; they are.

Again: “The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again. If the science of life were understood, it would be found that the senses of mind are never lost and that matter has no sensation. Then the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster’s claw.”

This makes it plain that, from Mrs. Eddy’s standpoint

, the less mind, the better; the less mind, the more Christian Scientists; the more Christian Scientists, the more revenue; the more revenue, the greater glory for impostors and charlatans. And, oh, wonder of wonders! God here informs us, if Mrs. Eddy speak the truth, that the loss of a human leg will be but a temporary inconvenience when man has advanced to the high stage attained by the wholly mindless lobster!

Again: “Man is the same after, as before, a bone is broken or a head chopped off.”

And so, the head follows the lungs, and the blood, and the heart, and the brains, and the stomach, and the bowels, as useless members of the human body, if Mrs. Eddy speak the words of truth and inspiration.

Again: “That life is sustained by food, drink, air, etc., that it is organic or in the least dependent upon matter or sustained by it, is a myth.”

Mrs. Eddy teaches that there is no reality in matter. When she sits down at her table three times a day and puts into her immaterial and nonexistent stomach unrealities in the shape of bread and butter and beef steak and tea and coffee, and so on, life is sustained by the belief that the food sustains life, and not by the food itself. It would be interesting to have Mrs. Eddy demonstrate in her own daily life that the partaking of what we grosser persons regard as food indispensable to the survival of the physical organism could be wholly dispensed with and life, notwithstanding, continue.

And, finally, and I commend this precious gem of truth to those of my readers who are parents, be they fathers or mothers, and who agree with me that the loveliest of all lovely things in the world is the wholesome baby enjoying his morning bath: “The daily ablutions of an infant are no more natural or necessary than would be the process of taking a fish out of the water every day and covering it with dirt, in order to make it thrive more vigorously thereafter in its native element.”

To bathe a baby is the same thing as to grab a fish out of the water and rub it all over with mud! If it were of mere “human origin,” Mrs. Eddy would “blush” to deliver herself of that beautiful and “absolute” truth.

This twaddle inspired of God! And these selections, taken at random from Mrs. Eddy’s book of which, she says, not she but God was author, are of a piece with the thing as a whole.

I am told, as I have said, that there are intelligent persons in Mrs. Eddy’s following, and yet such things as those I have quoted slap intelligence in the face from every page of her book; and her friends, nevertheless, persist in affirming, “Lo, the Lord’s anointed, God’s voice to this age!”

“I cannot see,” says Mark Twain, “how any one contemplating Mrs. Eddy’s career can deny to the Divine Being the possession of a sense of humor.” God is so amused by Mrs. Eddy’s accomplishments that He is provoked to laughter, and Christian Science thus escapes the consuming fire of Divine wrath.

Chapter V

The Fiction of God’s Authorship

God, we are told, is without variableness or shadow of turning, and yet, if He were the author of Mrs. Eddy’s book, He would be as changeable as a weathercock, for the book, throughout its numerous editions, has in the past thirty-five years undergone continuous change and revision at the hands of the literary expert, and the final product is so unlike the original as to be almost unrecognizable. Chapters have been dropped, chapters have been added and chapters have been shifted about from one place to another, and the book has been as coherent at the end as at the beginning of the process. Early editions, with compromising contents, have been suppressed at great expense, and the book, as now published, is Mrs. Eddy’s work only in part. She says herself that read backward it has, in part, as much meaning as read forward; and those of you, who have attempted to read it forward, have discovered that, so read, it has precisely as little meaning as if read backward.

James Henry Wiggin, an ex-Unitarian minister, recently deceased, was for years Mrs. Eddy’s literary expert, putting all her productions, including her book, into good English, and into as coherent a form as she would permit. He wrote a sermon for Mrs. Eddy to preach, which she preached as her own, and subsequently incorporated, with some easily perceptible additions that conspicuously marred Mr. Wiggin’s work, in her God-inspired book, as a chapter entitled “Wayside Hints.” This chapter is left out of the latest editions, but it was given to the world with the rest in the “thirty-sixth” edition, as of God’s authorship.

Mr. Wiggin’s story of the manner in which a sermon of his became a part of her inspired volume is not a little amusing.

While acting as Mrs. Eddy’s literary friend and guide and helper, an edition of “Science and Health” was prepared for publication, completely written and completely set up in type and electrotyped; but as it contained a chapter that Mr. Wiggin regarded as in the nature of a libel upon several living persons, who were referred to and attacked by name, he endeavored to prevent the publication until that chapter had been eliminated. As the whole book had been electrotyped, the fifteen pages composing this chapter could not be taken out, unless fifteen others were inserted in their place, without involving new plates of all the succeeding pages, and a large consequent expense. So the publication was withheld, until in some manner fifteen pages could be furnished in substitution for the objectionable chapter.

Just at this time it happened that Mr. Wiggin prepared a sermon for Mrs. Eddy to preach. He attended the service at which the sermon was delivered by Mrs. Eddy as her own composition, although she read it from a manuscript furnished by him. As Mrs. Eddy attempted to read without spectacles, which she never used in public and always used in her private intercourse with Mr. Wiggin, her rendering of the sermon was, in Mr. Wiggin’s opinion, halting and ineffective, and it irritated him not a little that a production of his should be subjected to such handling in public. But after the service was over, Mr. Wiggin, walking down the aisle to speak with Mrs. Eddy, on every hand heard exclamations of approval in more or less superlative terms. “Wasn’t it grand! Wasn’t she inspired today! How beautiful her sermons are!” and so on, until Mr. Wiggin’s irritation was quite allayed, and he concluded Mrs. Eddy had not done badly after all. Reaching the platform, Mrs. Eddy leaned over and whispered, “How did it go off?” “Splendidly,” said Mr. Wiggin, “I have an idea.” “What is it?” inquired Mrs. Eddy. “This sermon is just what we need for those fifteen pages. All of these people have heard you preach it today, it will be assumed that you wrote it, and it will just about fill the space we want to fill in the book, and the publication need be no longer delayed.” “Fine idea!” said the preacher of Mr. Wiggin’s sermon. “Will you make it fit in those fifteen pages, so it can just take their place?” He said he would. He did, and it appeared as a chapter entitled “Wayside Hints,” in the thirty-sixth and some later editions.

Many a time have I heard Mr. Wiggin say, with a chuckle of amusement, that it was a source of much mirth to him to hear from time to time Mrs. Eddy’s devotees exclaim, with pious earnestness, that the chapter he had written, at so much per word, was the very most divinely-inspired portion of the divine volume.

Mrs. Eddy does not hesitate to declare herself the authorized interpreter of the Bible, authorized expressly by Christ himself. The rules of the Christian Science organization and the “Mother Church” were all formulated by Mrs. Eddy as under divine guidance, and she reaches so far into the proceedings of the so-called branch churches all over the land as to dictate every detail of the religious services, and has required that every so-called sermon in a Christian Science church shall be preceded by the following declaration: “The canonical writings, together with the word of our text-book [her book “Science and Health”], corroborating and explaining the Bible

texts in their spiritual import and application to all ages, past, present and future, constitute a sermon undivorced from truth, uncontaminated and unfettered by human hypotheses, and authorized by Christ.”

That is either true or false. If it is true, all mankind should know it. If it is false, it is as wicked a falsehood as was ever told.

Having lectured to immense crowds upon Christian Science from one end of this country to the other, I have repeatedly had occasion to demand of official Christian Scientists in the audience, especially first readers, so called, in Mrs. Eddy’s churches, who as such had read the declaration I have just quoted, standing face to face with them, that they arise and give some scintilla of warrant or authority for the making of the declaration that Mrs. Eddy’s book was “authorized by Christ” as an interpretation of the Bible; but I have never had the slightest response, for the reason, of course, that no evidence can in any form be produced of the truth of this declaration falsely formulated and by her sacrilegiously required to be publicly read at every Sunday service in every Christian Science Church. All of these official Christian Scientists know that this declaration is without warrant, all of them know it is utterly false; and Mrs. Eddy herself makes it, deliberately knowing it to be untrue, knowing that she has and can produce no scrap of any kind of warrant for it, and she makes it and compels its repetition in her churches only to carry out her fraud and imposition that there is a sacred character to, and a Christian warrant for, her utterly bogus “religion.”

This, I think, is one of the most audacious things this utterly unprincipled woman in her whole career has dared to do; and I cannot conceive of any real Christian entertaining toward her, because of it, feelings other than those of pronounced resentment and indignation.

Nothing but an insane mind, a degenerate mind or a mind possessed of an overmastering passion to perpetrate a monstrous fraud upon the human race could, with the aid of the literary expert, have written “Science and Health,” and then have declared God to be its author; and no one but an utterly irreligious, irreverent, wicked person could invent the fiction of Christ’s authorization and compel its promulgation at “religious” services. But Mrs. Eddy has done precisely these things and her followers believe her irreverent and audacious claims.

Truly, “The absurdity the human race can’t swallow, hasn’t been invented yet!”

After Eddyism it may be assumed, I think, that man’s greatest ingenuity is unequal to the invention of an absurdity so immense as to exceed human gulpability. The more monstrous it is, the more eagerly it is clutched; and the more unintelligible it is, the greater is the certainty that it must have emanated from the All-wise.

But let me do Mrs. Eddy full justice. I think I have read everything she has written, and one sentence does indeed stand out vividly by itself, a solitary and perfect star of purest ray serene. Apropos of her basic contention (upon which the whole Christian Science superstructure rests, and without which it would fall to the ground) that there is no sensation in matter, she deprecates the spanking of children, because, she wisely says, “the use of the rod is virtually a declaration to the child’s mind, that sensation belongs to matter.”

Impossible as I have found it to reach the understanding of Christian Scientists by arguments addressed to their intelligence, I strongly incline to the idea that the spanking process would be likely to induce more or less vague impressions that sensation does actually reside in the material of which these living bodies are composed; and I respectfully submit that it would seem to follow that the most effective way of reaching Mrs. Eddy’s childish followers and curing them of their strange distemper would be the considerate, not too vigorous, application, all around, after the manner of the old woman who lived in a shoe, of the corrective maternal slipper.

Chapter VI

A Sham “Religion”

Mrs. Eddy describes herself, and has made her followers believe her to be, the “discoverer and founder of Christian Science.”

It is very easy to disprove her claim to discovery, and to show her foundation stones to have been theft and falsehood and fraud. As a pretended “religion” it is all hers, and no one else lays claim to it; as a mental healing system, it is none of it hers and her pretensions to originality are wholly fictitious.

Let it be remembered, always, that on the first page of her book, “Science and Health,” as published in 1898, and in many other editions, Mrs. Eddy makes her claim to originality and revelation in the following unequivocal terms:

“In the year 1866 I discovered the science of metaphysical healing and named it Christian Science. God had been graciously fitting me during many years for a final revelation of the absolute principle of scientific mind healing.”

If, prior to 1866, God had been “graciously fitting” her during many years for the “final revelation,” it appears that, years afterwards, God’s work was not quite completed and her character entirely sublimated. Some of her friends in Lynn, in 1881, fifteen years after the date of her alleged revelation, became of the opinion that she was not, even then, absolutely perfect and withdrew from her church there, giving, in writing, as their reason, “her departure from the straight and narrow road which alone leads to growth of Christ-like virtue, made manifest by frequent ebullitions of temper, love of money and the appearance of hypocrisy.” How accurate was this early estimate of the woman as shown by every known act of her life!

The writer of the series of articles in McClure’s Magazine on Christian Science told me she had heard the criticism that it contained only the bad things about Mrs. Eddy, and she had been asked why she had not incorporated such good things as might be said of her. She assured me she had searched the whole of Mrs. Eddy’s life for a kindly, a generous, an unselfish, a fine womanly deed, and would have been only too glad to have recorded it, but had not found one—not one such act in the long life of more than fourscore years.

Mrs. Eddy claims discovery, and commits herself not only as to the time of her “discovery,” but as to the manner of it, and each claim, that of discovery, that of the time and that of the manner, is wholly and demonstrably false.

In October, 1862, Mrs. Mary M. Patterson (now Mary Baker G. Eddy) placed herself in the hands of Dr. Phineas P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, for treatment, with the result described by herself over her own signature in the Portland Evening Courier, of November 7, 1862, as follows:

“Three weeks ago I quitted my nurse and sickroom en route for Portland. The belief of my recovery had died out of the hearts of those who were most anxious for it. With this mental and physical depression, I visited P. P. Quimby, and in less than one week from that time I ascended by a stairway of one hundred and eighty-two steps to the dome of the City Hall, and am improving ad infinitum. This truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if received understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their normal action and the mechanism of the body goes on undisturbed. That this is a science capable of demonstration, becomes clear to the minds of those patients who reason upon the process of their cure. The truth which he establishes in the patient, cures him (although he may be wholly unconscious thereof), and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease.”

This was Mrs. Patterson-Eddy’s professed understanding of Dr. Quimby’s “science,” in 1862, after having been three weeks under his treatment, and any one familiar with Christian Science will not need to be told that it is the same thing. This “truth,” which Mrs. Patterson-Eddy in 1862 said Quimby opposed to the “error” of placing intelligence in matter and which, when established in the patient, cured him, is the very same “truth” which in her book, with tireless iteration, Mrs. Eddy opposes to the very same alleged “error,” which thereupon effects the same alleged “cure.” Every “Scientist” will at once recognize the A B C of “divine science.”

Dr. Quimby, who is spoken of by a lady, who knew him well at the time Mrs. Patterson-Eddy was taking his treatment and stealing his system, as a man of “absolute sincerity and purity of thought and life,” died in January, 1866, and Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Patterson, not having conceived the plan of appropriating to herself the ideas and theories she had learned from him, almost immediately after his death wrote and published some verses about him, in which she compared Quimby with Jesus. She now speaks of him as a vulgar mesmerist or magnetic healer whose scribblings she put into grammatical form; she then, in 1866, glorified him as the Christian glorifies only the Saviour.

These verses, as here presented, are copied from a copy in Mrs. Eddy’s own handwriting, now in the possession of Mrs. Sarah Crosby of Waterville, Maine, to whom, in 1866, upon the death of Dr. Quimby, she sent them:

“Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, who Healed the Sick as did Jesus, in contradistinction to all Isms.

“Did Sack-cloth clothe the sun, and day grow night,

All matter mourn the hour with dewy eyes,

When Truth receding from our mortal sight,

Had paid to error her last sacrifice?

“Can we forget the power that gave us life?

Shall we forget the wisdom of our way?

Then ask me not amid this mortal strife—

This keenest pang of animated clay,

“To mourn him less! To mourn him more were just,

If to his memory ’twere a tribute given

For every earnest, solemn, sacred trust,

Delivered to us ere he rose to Heaven.

“Heaven but the happiness of his calm soul,

Growing in stature to the throne of God;

Rest should reward him who hath made us whole,

Seeking, ’tho tremblers, where his footsteps trod.”

M. M. Patterson.

Comment cannot add to the force of these verses. Inferior as poetry, they constitute proof and argument not all the falsehoods and sophistries in the imagination of Mrs. Eddy and her corps of official defenders can meet and overcome.

In 1866, Mrs. Eddy reverently declared that Dr. Quimby had “healed the sick as Jesus did;” today speaking slightingly of the good old man, she says, “his healing was never considered anything but mesmerism.” Then she gratefully acknowledged that he had made her “whole”; now she says that his mesmeric treatment gave her but slight, temporary relief. Then, not having contemplated the great theft, she spoke of the “earnest, solemn, sacred trust” delivered to her and others by the trustful man; now she repudiates him altogether, and denies that she received any helpful suggestion from him. Then she spoke of herself as “seeking, though a trembler, where his footsteps trod;” now she scornfully says, “I used to take his scribblings and fix them over for him and give him my thoughts and language which, as I understand it, were far in advance of his.”

Can anything Mrs. Eddy says be believed, after this? Could ingenuity contrive a more violent contradiction in human speech? Standing absolutely alone, would anything more be needed to convict her, out of her own mouth, of the basest ingratitude and the most reckless fraud? But this is only one of a thousand items in the accumulated proof!

If Christian Science healing is, as Mrs. Eddy and all other Christian Scientists claim, a revival of the method employed by Jesus, then Mrs. Eddy here, in her own handwriting, admits that she learned it from Quimby. There is no possible escape from one horn or the other of the dilemma—either it is not Christian, or it is not Mrs. Eddy’s. It requires even less intelligence than Mrs. Eddy’s friends bring to bear upon her teachings to comprehend the conclusiveness of this demonstration.

Mrs. Eddy did not discover the Christian Science method of attempting to heal. Let me make this a little clearer by demonstrating the falsity of her story as to the manner in which she made the discovery.

Dr. Quimby died on January 16, 1866, and the first day of February, 1866, Mrs. Patterson-Eddy, then living in Swampscott, a suburb of Lynn, fell upon the icy sidewalk and injured herself; and she now fixes upon her alleged miraculous recovery from this injury as the precise way in which she made her great discovery and received her revelation.

In a sketch, published by her concern, The Christian Science Publishing Society of Boston, and endorsed and approved by her as an authorized statement, is the following account of how Mrs. Eddy discovered Christian Science:

“The manner of the discovery has been vividly described. In company with her husband, she was returning from an errand of mercy, when she fell upon the icy curbstone, and was carried helpless to her home. The skilled physicians declared that there was absolutely no hope for her, and pronounced the verdict that she had but three days to live. Finding no hope and no help on earth, she lifted her heart to God. On the third day, calling for her Bible, she asked the family to leave the room. Her Bible opened to the healing of the palsied man, Matt. ix. 2. The truth which set him free she saw. The power which gave him strength she felt. The life divine which healed the sick of the palsy restored her, and she rose from the bed of pain healed and free.”

In her autobiography, “Retrospection and Introspection,” she says:

“It was in Massachusetts, February, 1866, and after the death of the magnetic doctor, Mr. P. P. Quimby, whom spiritualists would associate therewith, but who was in no wise connected with this event, that I discovered the science of Divine Metaphysical healing, which I afterward named Christian Science. The discovery came to pass in this way. During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.

“My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself and how to make others so.

“Even to the homeopathic physician who attended me, and rejoiced in my recovery, I could not then explain the modus of my relief. I could only assure him that the Divine Spirit had wrought the miracle, a miracle which later I found to be in perfect Scientific accord with divine law.”

Unfortunately for her reputation for veracity and fortunately for the truth of history. Dr. Alvin M. Cushing, the physician who attended Mrs. Eddy, or Patterson, upon this particular occasion, is still living and as an honored member of the profession is now practising in Springfield, Mass. Dr. Cushing expressly, and under oath, denies that he at any time believed or said that Mrs. Patterson was in a critical condition, or that there was no hope for her, or that she had but three or any other limited number of days to live, and he, with great positiveness, says that she did not, on the third day or any other day of her illness, say, or suggest, or pretend, or in any way whatever intimate that she had miraculously recovered or been healed, or that, discovering or perceiving the truth of the power employed by Christ to heal the sick, she had, by it, been restored to health, and he further says that, on the contrary, on the third day and later days of this illness, he himself gave her medicine, and again in August of the same year called upon her four or five times and gave her medicine.

Dr. Cushing still has his record book in which he, at the time, recorded each visit, every symptom and every particular of his treatment.

It must be a peculiar type of mind that can believe Mrs. Eddy’s story of this illness and recovery, after having the disinterested version of the attending physician. There is no reason why Dr. Cushing’s version should be doubted. There is no reason whatever why Mrs. Eddy’s should be believed.

But Mrs. Eddy herself furnishes, as usual, the most conclusive evidence of the falsity of this story of her miraculous cure. Her inventive faculty has ever been more remarkable than her memory, and what she has forgotten contradicts her.

On “the third day,” according to her latest version, she “arose from the bed of pain, healed and free,” but in a letter dated February 15, 1866, two weeks after the accident and while she was still suffering from its effects, she complained that she was then “slowly failing,” and implored Mr. Julius Dresser, to whom the letter was written, to help her.

Here is her story of the incident as written at the time:

Lynn, Feb. 15, 1866.

“Mr. Dresser,—

“Sir: I enclose some lines of mine in memory of our much-loved Friend, which perhaps you will not think over-wrought in meaning, others must of course.

“I am constantly wishing that you would step forward into the place he has vacated. I believe you would do a vast amount of good, and are more capable of occupying his place than any other I know of.

“Two weeks ago I fell on the sidewalk and struck my back on the ice and was taken up for dead, came to consciousness amid a storm of vapors from cologne, chloroform, ether, camphor, etc., but to find myself the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby.

“The physician attending said I had taken the last step I ever should, but in two days I got out of my bed alone, and will walk, but yet I confess I am frightened, and out of that nervous heat my friends are forming, spite of me, the terrible spinal affection from which I have suffered so long and hopelessly.… Now can’t you help me. I believe you can. I write this with this feeling: I think I could help another in my condition, if they had not placed their intelligence in matter. This I have not done and yet I am slowly failing. Won’t you write me if you will undertake for me if I can get to you?…

“Respectfully,

“Mary M. Patterson.”

Not to comment upon the singularity of the administration of chloroform and ether to an unconscious person, it sufficeth to call attention to the manner in which again Mrs. Patterson contradicts Mrs. Eddy. She furnishes the most effective kind of corroboration of Dr. Cushing, and the whole thing is clearly seen to be an invention, so far as any unusual or peculiar or miraculous features are concerned. It is clear that Mrs. Eddy did not discover Christian Science in the manner claimed.

So much for that particular, and particularly silly perversion of the truth, and invention of the fictitious.

Mrs. Eddy has herself made it especially easy to prove her revelation to be a fraud and has supplied us with a form of proof especially convincing. It is conceivable that a claim to revelation, however intrinsically idiotic, might be made, the legal disproof of which might be difficult; but if I today say God revealed something to me a year ago, and if you find many persons of excellent character who tell you that three, four, five, six and seven months ago I openly, by word of mouth, and in writing, times without number, admitted having learned the whole thing from John Smith, it will be impossible to believe that God revealed it to me and to me alone. This is precisely the case with Mrs. Eddy and her Christian Science “religion.” Her oft-repeated admissions of appropriation disprove her “revelation” completely.

Absolutely conclusive evidence of the fraudulent character of Mrs. Eddy’s claim to originality, either by discovery or revelation, has come to light, and any one, who will take the trouble to examine it, will have no difficulty in arriving at positive certainty in the matter.

Now, remembering Mrs. Eddy’s claim to discovery by revelation from God in 1866, let us see what she was doing in 1867, 1868, 1869 and 1870, the years immediately following her alleged discovery.

Some years ago I delivered an address in Boston upon Christian Science that was extensively reported in the newspapers, and a day or two following the delivery of the lecture a gentleman called at my office and introduced himself as Horace T. Wentworth of Stoughton, Mass. He asked me if I knew that in 1868, 1869 and 1870 Mrs. Eddy had lived with his mother, Mrs. Sally Wentworth, at Stoughton.

I assured Mr. Wentworth that I had not heard of it, and asked him what she was doing while there.

“Why, she was teaching my mother Dr. P. P. Quimby’s system of mental healing,” said Mr. Wentworth, “and I have in my pocket my mother’s copy of the manuscript from which Mrs. Eddy taught.”

Mr. Wentworth pulled the manuscript out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was entitled, on the front page, “Extracts from Dr. P. P. Quimby’s Writings.” I glanced through the manuscript and discovered that it was copiously corrected and interlined in Mrs. Eddy’s handwriting and contained an introduction signed by her name. Perusal of it showed it to be in every particular precisely the same thing as Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science teachings regarding the cure of disease.

This was a most interesting discovery, and I carefully investigated the whole situation, made several trips to Stoughton for the purpose, and talked with many residents of the place who had known Mrs. Eddy well, and were perfectly familiar with her history while there. I subsequently procured the whole story in writing, under oath, by those who knew it personally. Since then, others following my published accounts, have detailed the Stoughton episode and McClure’s Magazine published it in full.

It appears that in 1867, Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Patterson, went to Stoughton to live. She had separated from her second husband, Daniel Patterson, and not having then married her third husband, Eddy, called herself, and was known by the name of her first husband, Mary M. Glover.

Mrs. Glover first lived at Stoughton with one Hiram Crafts, and taught Crafts from manuscript a system of mental healing she told Crafts she had learned from Dr. P. P. Quimby. After learning it, Crafts undertook to practise it and had announcements printed and circulated declaring his system to have been the discovery of Dr. Quimby.

But Mrs. Glover and Mrs. Crafts did not seem to find one another’s society especially enjoyable, and for a time, Mrs. Crafts left Mrs. Glover in possession. In 1868, upon the invitation of Mrs. Sally Wentworth, Mrs. Glover moved to the Wentworths’ house at Stoughton, where she continued to live until 1870.

Mrs. Eddy’s writings will be searched in vain for any reference to Mrs. Wentworth, or to the fact that she spent about three years in the Wentworths’ house at Stoughton; but, in characteristic fashion, she hides the facts under this obscure and oracular utterance:

“I then (1866), withdrew from society, about three years, to ponder my mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind that should take the things of God and show them to the creature, and reveal the great Curative Principle, God.”

Mrs. Wentworth invited Mrs. Glover to live with her and teach her the Quimby science of mind healing, and that is what Mrs. Glover did during the three years she was a member of Mrs. Wentworth’s family. She “pondered her mission,” etc., by avowedly teaching Dr. Quimby’s alleged science of mind healing, and she gave Mrs. Wentworth a copy of her, Mrs. Glover’s, manuscript copy of Quimby’s writings. This copy of Mrs. Eddy’s copy of what she then said were Quimby’s writings, in Mrs. Wentworth’s handwriting and containing corrections and interlineations in the handwriting of Mrs. Glover-Eddy, is the manuscript now in the possession of Mrs. Wentworth’s son, Horace T. Wentworth of Stoughton, Mass.

During Mrs. Glover’s sojourn at Mrs. Wentworth’s, the household consisted, besides Mrs. Wentworth and her guest, of her husband, Mr. Alanson C. Wentworth, and their two children, Lucy and Charles O. Wentworth. Mr. and Mrs. Wentworth died in 1882, but Lucy and Charles O. and Horace T. Wentworth are still living, and they, with their cousin, Mrs. Catherine I. Clapp, who was much at their house during Mrs. Glover’s visit, have stated the facts under oath and in such a manner that they must be believed.

Lucy Wentworth, now Mrs. Arthur L. Holmes, was about seventeen years of age when Mrs. Glover left her mother’s house. Mrs. Holmes, who still lives at Stoughton, says that she well remembers Mrs. Glover’s visit, and that she was teaching her mother a system of mental healing she said she had learned from Dr. Quimby.

“‘It wasn’t safe for anybody to say anything to me against Mrs. Glover,’ says Mrs. Holmes. ‘She spent all her time teaching my mother her new science. I was around her constantly, would rather be with her than with any one else, and I often used to hear her say, “I learned this from Dr. Quimby.” It is one of the distinct recollections of my childhood.’”

Charles O. Wentworth, now of Avon, Mass., says he, too, well remembers Mrs. Eddy’s visit during the years 1868, 1869 and 1870, and that he many times heard her say she had learned her mental science from Dr. Quimby. He says she avowed it openly, and always spoke of it as Dr. Quimby’s system.

Horace T. Wentworth, who was married and so not living at home with his parents, but who was often at their house, adds his positive testimony. He says:

“Never at any time during the years she was at our house, from 1868 to 1870, did Mrs. Glover give the slightest hint that any one other than Dr. Quimby had had any share in the origin of the system of mental healing she was teaching my mother. It could not then have entered her mind to claim it for herself. That was an afterthought. I heard Mrs. Glover over and over again say she got it all from Quimby.”

Mrs. Clapp’s statement is even more specific than the others. She is own cousin to the Wentworths and frequented their house at the time Mrs. Glover was visiting them, and knew that Mrs. Glover was teaching Mrs. Wentworth the Quimby system.

When Mrs. Clapp was recently asked if she had ever heard Mrs. Glover-Eddy say that she learned her system from Dr. Quimby, she replied:

“Yes, and I am not likely to forget it. It is fixed in my memory by a very reprehensible proceeding of my own. You see, Mrs. Glover used to say this to everybody who came in. She wasn’t content with mentioning once or twice that she had learned this from Dr. Quimby, she repeated it so often that we girls got deadly tired of hearing it.

“Now Mrs. Glover not only said it to the point of wearying us, but she had a peculiar way of saying it, and I am ashamed to say that I used to mock her—I, a young lady grown, who ought to have known better than to make fun of a person so much older.

“She always tried to be very gracious to everybody and she tried so hard that it gave her graciousness a ridiculous touch. She would fold her hands softly in her lap, smile gently, nod her head slowly at almost every word, and say in a sweet voice, ‘I learned this from Dr. Quimby and he made me promise to teach it to at least two persons before I die.’

“Well, this tiresome iteration, always with the same emphasis and the same exaggerated graciousness, used to excite the derision of the girls, and when Mrs. Glover wasn’t in hearing, I would take her off. I would say, ‘I learned this from Dr. Quimby,’ etc., at the same time nodding my head with a great exaggeration of Mrs. Glover’s gentle inclination, and putting tremendous emphasis on the words she emphasized, and wearing a fixed smile.

“I know it was an awful thing to do,” added Mrs. Clapp, penitently, “especially for a grown-up girl, but it used to make my cousins laugh and that made me feel that I had done something clever. Anyway, you see how it has fixed it on my memory.”

Mrs. Clapp well remembered seeing Mrs. Wentworth copy Mrs. Glover’s copy of Dr. Quimby’s writing.

“I once went to the Wentworths’ to get something,” she said, “and Mrs. Wentworth was busy copying this manuscript. I went to the buttery to get what I wanted, but couldn’t find it, and called Mrs. Wentworth. She got up to get it for me, but before doing so she put Mrs. Eddy’s copy of the Quimby manuscript in the desk and locked it. I suppose I looked surprised that she should take such pains when she was only stepping across the room, for a moment, and she noticed my look, and said, ‘Mrs. Glover made me promise never to leave this manuscript even for a moment without locking the desk.’”

While Mrs. Wentworth was copying the Quimby manuscript, Mrs. Clapp was employed by Mrs. Glover to copy a manuscript of her own for publication. This manuscript contained the first expression of the ideas subsequently given to the world by Mrs. Eddy. When the book was completed, Mrs. Glover paid Mrs. Clapp for the work and took it to Boston, but could not get a publisher to accept it.

Mrs. Clapp was quite familiar with the appearance of the Quimby manuscript from seeing Mrs. Wentworth copying it—she was Mrs. Wentworth’s niece—and also from seeing Mrs. Glover take it out to correct some of the work which Mrs. Clapp was doing. That would happen in this way. Mrs. Clapp would complete the copying of a page of Mrs. Glover’s book. Mrs. Glover would appear to be dissatisfied with it; she would take from her desk the original Quimby manuscript, the one from which Mrs. Wentworth had been copying, and compare this original with the work Mrs. Clapp had done. Then she would tear up Mrs. Clapp’s page and write it all over again, consulting the Quimby manuscript as she did so, and Mrs. Clapp would have the copying to do over again.

The unmistakable inference was that Mrs. Eddy was making her book out of the ideas contained in the original Quimby manuscript. Mrs. Clapp, with the irreverence of girlhood, had scant respect for the weighty ideas contained in the Quimby-Glover book, and there was one particular idea which she used to scoff at and make fun of to her intimates. It was to this effect:

“The daily ablutions of an infant are no more natural or necessary than would be the process of taking a fish out of water every day and covering it with dirt to make it thrive more vigorously thereafter in its native element.”

Years afterward, Mrs. Clapp picked up a copy of “Science and Health,” and opened it to this identical sentence which had so often excited her girlish derision. It is on page 41, edition of 1898.

When Mrs. Wentworth died, in 1882, and the property was divided, the son Horace laid claim to the copy of the Quimby manuscript. He wanted it because it was in his mother’s handwriting (with the exception of Eddy’s corrections), and it would be a souvenir of her. He kept it with no other thought until now.

“But of late years,” said Mr. Wentworth, “as I have seen the amazing spread of this delusion, and the way in which men and women are offering up money and the lives of their children to it, I have felt that it is a duty I owe to the public to make it known.

“I have no hard feelings against Mrs. Eddy, no axe to grind, no interest to serve, I simply feel that it is due the thousands of good people, who have made Christian Science the anchorage of their souls and its founder the infallible guide of their daily life, to keep this no longer to myself. I desire only that people who take themselves and their helpless children into Christian Science shall do so with a full knowledge that this is not a divine revelation, but simply the idea of an old-time Maine healer.”

It may be assumed then, as proven, that as in 1868, 1869 and 1870 Mrs. Glover (Eddy) was teaching a system of mental healing she, at the time, said she had learned from Dr. P. P. Quimby, she couldn’t have discovered it herself in 1866. It now becomes interesting to know if there is any similarity between what we may call Quimbyism and Christian Science, between the teaching of Mrs. Glover-Eddy in 1870 and her teaching now.

On the outside, this Quimby-Glover manuscript is entitled, “Extracts From Doctor P. P. Quimby’s Writings,” and at the head of the first page, on the inside, it is further entitled, “The Science of Man, or The Principle Which Controls all Phenomena.”

There is a preface of two pages with Mary M. Glover’s name signed at the end. The “Extracts” are in the form of fifteen questions and answers, covering about thirty large pages, and are labeled, “Questions by Patients and Answers by Dr. Quimby.” The document contains an elaboration of Dr. Quimby’s mental healing system as taught by Mrs. Eddy, by her own acknowledgment, as late as 1870.

The contents of this Quimby-Glover manuscript having been communicated to Mr. George A. Quimby of Belfast, Maine, son of Dr. P. P. Quimby, he says, having compared it with his father’s writings in his possession, that it is a precise copy of them. He further says that an opportunity was afforded Mrs. Eddy to copy his father’s writings, as his father was accustomed to lend his manuscript to his patients, one of whom Mrs. Eddy was.

A perusal of this manuscript in comparison with Mrs. Eddy’s “Science and Health” shows, that every basic idea of Christian Science as a healing system was bodily appropriated by her from Dr. Quimby’s manuscripts and not obtained, as she says, by revelation from God. As contained in the manuscript and as taught by Dr. Quimby, there was no suggestion of a religious character to his teachings; the religious phase was an afterthought of Mrs. Eddy’s, as a means of facilitating the sale and distribution of her profit-yielding, copyrighted and “inspired” writings.

It may be here remarked that, at the outset, Mrs. Eddy especially deprecated the giving to Quimbyism, or Christian Science, a religious character, as I shall hereafter show in more detail, and she goes so far as to criticise the disciples of Jesus for founding, as she says, religious organizations and church rites.

Thus, at first, healing was the only phase of Christian Science. The religious feature was a subsequent invention.

Quimbyism, as contained in Mrs. Wentworth’s copy of Mrs. Glover’s copy of Dr. Quimby’s “Science of Man,” as revised and corrected in Mrs. Glover’s own handwriting, is compared with Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science as contained in her “Science and Health” in the following parallel passages from the two. A glance will show Dr. Quimby’s system of mental healing, as taught by Mrs. Glover, later Mrs. Eddy, in 1870, to be no other than the “Science of Metaphysical Healing” that Mrs. Eddy, formerly Mrs. Glover, now says was revealed to her in 1866:

Quimby: From Quimby’s “Science of Man,” as Expounded by Mrs. Eddy at Stoughton, 1868-69-70.

“If I understand how disease originates in the mind and fully believe it, why cannot I cure myself?”

Disease being made by our belief or by our parents’ belief or by public opinion, there is no one formula of argument to be adopted; but every one must fit in their particular case. Therefore it requires great shrewdness or wisdom to get the better of the error.” ....

Eddy: From Mrs. Eddy’s “Science and Health,” the Text-Book of the “Christian Science” She now Claims to have Discovered in 1866.

“Disease being a belief, a latent delusion of mortal mind, the sensation would not appear if this error was met and destroyed by Truth.”—Page 61, edition of 1898.

“Science not only reveals the origin of all disease as wholly mental, but it also declares that all disease is cured by mind.”—Page 62, edition of 1898.

Quimby:

“I know of no better counsel than Jesus gave to His disciples when He sent them forth to cast out devils and heal the sick, and thus in practice to preach the Truth, ‘Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.’ Never get into a passion, but in patience possess ye your soul, and at length you weary out the discord and produce harmony by your Truth destroying error. Then it is you get the case. Now if you are not afraid to face the error and argue it down, then you can heal the sick.”

Eddy:

The Religio-Medical Masquerade: A Complete Exposure of Christian Science

The Religio-Medical Masquerade

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Sacrifice of Children

The Detached Heart

Pretence of Equality with Jesus

The Faked Revelation

The Fiction of God’s Authorship

A Sham “Religion”