Christian Science

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> Christian Science


It would be a grand thing to see, and I feel a kind of disappointment
--but never mind, a religion is better and larger; and there is more to
it. And I have not been steeping myself in Christian Science all these
weeks without finding out that the one sensible thing to do with a
disappointment is to put it out of your mind and think of something
cheerfuler.

We outsiders cannot conceive of Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science Religion as
being a sudden and miraculous birth, but only as a growth from a seed
planted by circumstances, and developed stage by stage by command and
compulsion of the same force. What the stages were we cannot know, but
are privileged to guess. She may have gotten the mental-healing idea
from Quimby--it had been experimented with for ages, and was no one's
special property. [For the present, for convenience' sake, let us
proceed upon the hypothesis that that was all she got of him, and that
she put up the rest of the assets herself. This will strain us, but let
us try it.] In each and all its forms and under all its many names,
mental healing had had limits, always, and they were rather narrow ones
--Mrs. Eddy, let us imagine, removed the fence, abolished the frontiers.
Not by expanding mental-healing, but by absorbing its small bulk into the
vaster bulk of Christian Science--Divine Science, The Holy Ghost, the
Comforter--which was a quite different and sublimer force, and one which
had long lain dormant and unemployed.

The Christian Scientist believes that the Spirit of God (life and love)
pervades the universe like an atmosphere; that whoso will study Science
and Health can get from it the secret of how to inhale that transforming
air; that to breathe it is to be made new; that from the new man all
sorrow, all care, all miseries of the mind vanish away, for that only
peace, contentment and measureless joy can live in that divine fluid;
that it purifies the body from disease, which is a vicious creation of
the gross human mind, and cannot continue to exist in the presence of the
Immortal Mind, the renewing Spirit of God.

The Scientist finds this reasonable, natural, and not harder to believe
than that the disease germ, a creature of darkness, perishes when exposed
to the light of the great sun--a new revelation of profane science which
no one doubts. He reminds us that the actinic ray, shining upon lupus,
cures it--a horrible disease which was incurable fifteen years ago, and
had been incurable for ten million years before; that this wonder,
unbelievable by the physicians at first, is believed by them now; and so
he is tranquilly confident that the time is coming when the world will be
educated up to a point where it will comprehend and grant that the light
of the Spirit of God, shining unobstructed upon the soul, is an actinic
ray which can purge both mind and body from disease and set them free and
make them whole.

It is apparent, then, that in Christian Science it is not one man's mind
acting upon another man's mind that heals; that it is solely the Spirit
of God that heals; that the healer's mind performs no office but to
convey that force to the patient; that it is merely the wire which
carries the electric fluid, so to speak, and delivers the message.
Therefore, if these things be true, mental-healing and Science-healing
are separate and distinct processes, and no kinship exists between them.

To heal the body of its ills and pains is a mighty benefaction, but in
our day our physicians and surgeons work a thousand miracles--prodigies
which would have ranked as miracles fifty years ago--and they have so
greatly extended their domination over disease that we feel so well
protected that we are able to look with a good deal of composure and
absence of hysterics upon the claims of new competitors in that field.

But there is a mightier benefaction than the healing of the body, and
that is the healing of the spirit--which is Christian Science's other
claim. So far as I know, so far as I can find out, it makes it good.
Personally I have not known a Scientist who did not seem serene,
contented, unharassed. I have not found an outsider whose observation of
Scientists furnished him a view that differed from my own. Buoyant
spirits, comfort of mind, freedom from care these happinesses we all
have, at intervals; but in the spaces between, dear me, the black hours!
They have put a curse upon the life of every human being I have ever
known, young or old. I concede not a single exception. Unless it might
be those Scientists just referred to. They may have been playing a part
with me; I hope they were not, and I believe they were not.

Time will test the Science's claim. If time shall make it good; if time
shall prove that the Science can heal the persecuted spirit of man and
banish its troubles and keep it serene and sunny and content--why, then
Mrs. Eddy will have a monument that will reach above the clouds. For if
she did not hit upon that imperial idea and evolve it and deliver it, its
discoverer can never be identified with certainty, now, I think. It is
the giant feature, it is the sun that rides in the zenith of Christian
Science, the auxiliary features are of minor consequence [Let us still
leave the large "if" aside, for the present, and proceed as if it had no
existence.]

It is not supposable that Mrs. Eddy realized, at first, the size of her
plunder. (No, find--that is the word; she did not realize the size of
her find, at first.) It had to grow upon her, by degrees, in accordance
with the inalterable custom of Circumstance, which works by stages, and
by stages only, and never furnishes any mind with all the materials for a
large idea at one time.

In the beginning, Mrs. Eddy was probably interested merely in the
mental-healing detail, and perhaps mainly interested in it pecuniary,
for she was poor.

She would succeed in anything she undertook. She would attract pupils,
and her commerce would grow. She would inspire in patient and pupil
confidence in her earnestness, her history is evidence that she would not
fail of that.

There probably came a time, in due course, when her students began to
think there was something deeper in her teachings than they had been
suspecting--a mystery beyond mental-healing, and higher. It is
conceivable that by consequence their manner towards her changed little
by little, and from respectful became reverent. It is conceivable that
this would have an influence upon her; that it would incline her to
wonder if their secret thought--that she was inspired--might not be a
well-grounded guess. It is conceivable that as time went on the thought
in their minds and its reflection in hers might solidify into conviction.

She would remember, then, that as a child she had been called, more than
once, by a mysterious voice--just as had happened to little Samuel.
(Mentioned in her Autobiography.) She would be impressed by that ancient
reminiscence, now, and it could have a prophetic meaning for her.

It is conceivable that the persuasive influences around her and within
her would give a new and powerful impulse to her philosophizings, and
that from this, in time, would result that great birth, the healing of
body and mind by the inpouring of the Spirit of God--the central and
dominant idea of Christian Science--and that when this idea came she
would not doubt that it was an inspiration direct from Heaven.




CHAPTER XI

[I must rest a little, now. To sit here and painstakingly spin out a
scheme which imagines Mrs. Eddy, of all people, working her mind on a
plane above commercialism; imagines her thinking, philosophizing,
discovering majestic things; and even imagines her dealing in
sincerities--to be frank, I find it a large contract But I have begun it,
and I will go through with it.]




CHAPTER XII

It is evident that she made disciples fast, and that their belief in her
and in the authenticity of her heavenly ambassadorship was not of the
lukewarm and half-way sort, but was profoundly earnest and sincere.
Her book was issued from the press in 1875, it began its work of
convert-making, and within six years she had successfully launched a new
Religion and a new system of healing, and was teaching them to crowds of
eager students in a College of her own, at prices so extraordinary that
we are almost compelled to accept her statement (no, her guarded
intimation) that the rates were arranged on high, since a mere human
being unacquainted with commerce and accustomed to think in pennies
could hardly put up such a hand as that without supernatural help.

From this stage onward--Mrs. Eddy being what she was--the rest of the
development--stages would follow naturally and inevitably.

But if she had been anybody else, there would have been a different
arrangement of them, with different results. Being the extraordinary
person she was, she realized her position and its possibilities; realized
the possibilities, and had the daring to use them for all they were
worth.

We have seen what her methods were after she passed the stage where her
divine ambassadorship was granted its executer in the hearts and minds of
her followers; we have seen how steady and fearless and calculated and
orderly was her march thenceforth from conquest to conquest; we have seen
her strike dead, without hesitancy, any hostile or questionable force
that rose in her path: first, the horde of pretenders that sprang up and
tried to take her Science and its market away from her--she crushed them,
she obliterated them; when her own National Christian Science Association
became great in numbers and influence, and loosely and dangerously
garrulous, and began to expound the doctrines according to its own
uninspired notions, she took up her sponge without a tremor of fear and
wiped that Association out; when she perceived that the preachers in her
pulpits were becoming afflicted with doctrine-tinkering, she recognized
the danger of it, and did not hesitate nor temporize, but promptly
dismissed the whole of them in a day, and abolished their office
permanently; we have seen that, as fast as her power grew, she was
competent to take the measure of it, and that as fast as its expansion
suggested to her gradually awakening native ambition a higher step she
took it; and so, by this evolutionary process, we have seen the gross
money-lust relegated to second place, and the lust of empire and glory
rise above it. A splendid dream; and by force of the qualities born in
her she is making it come true.

These qualities--and the capacities growing out of them by the nurturing
influences of training, observation, and experience seem to be clearly
indicated by the character of her career and its achievements. They seem
to be:

A clear head for business, and a phenomenally long one;
Clear understanding of business situations;
Accuracy in estimating the opportunities they offer;
Intelligence in planning a business move;
Firmness in sticking to it after it has been decided upon;
Extraordinary daring;
Indestructible persistency;
Devouring ambition;
Limitless selfishness;
A knowledge of the weaknesses and poverties and docilities of human
nature and how to turn them to account which has never been surpassed, if
ever equalled.

And--necessarily--the foundation-stone of Mrs. Eddy's character is a
never-wavering confidence in herself.

It is a granite character. And--quite naturally--a measure of the talc
of smallnesses common to human nature is mixed up in it and distributed
through it. When Mrs. Eddy is not dictating servilities from her throne
in the clouds to her official domestics in Boston or to her far-spread
subjects round about the planet, but is down on the ground, she is kin to
us and one of us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical,
incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable,
inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly
self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the
commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass
god with clay legs.




CHAPTER XIII

In drawing Mrs. Eddy's portrait it has been my purpose to restrict myself
to materials furnished by herself, and I believe I have done that. If I
have misinterpreted any of her acts, it was not done intentionally.

It will be noticed that in skeletonizing a list of the qualities which
have carried her to the dizzy summit which she occupies, I have not
mentioned the power which was the commanding force employed in achieving
that lofty flight. It did not belong in that list; it was a force that
was not a detail of her character, but was an outside one. It was the
power which proceeded from her people's recognition of her as a
supernatural personage, conveyer of the Latest Word, and divinely
commissioned to deliver it to the world. The form which such a
recognition takes, consciously or unconsciously, is worship; and worship
does not question nor criticize, it obeys. The object of it does not
need to coddle it, bribe it, beguile it, reason with it, convince it--it
commands it; that is sufficient; the obedience rendered is not reluctant,
but prompt and whole-hearted. Admiration for a Napoleon, confidence in
him, pride in him, affection for him, can lift him high and carry him
far; and these are forms of worship, and are strong forces, but they are
worship of a mere human being, after all, and are infinitely feeble, as
compared with those that are generated by that other worship, the worship
of a divine personage. Mrs. Eddy has this efficient worship, this massed
and centralized force, this force which is indifferent to opposition,
untroubled by fear, and goes to battle singing, like Cromwell's soldiers;
and while she has it she can command and it will obey, and maintain her
on her throne, and extend her empire.

She will have it until she dies; and then we shall see a curious and
interesting further development of her revolutionary work begin.




CHAPTER XIV

The President and Board of Directors will succeed her, and the government
will go on without a hitch. The By-laws will bear that interpretation.
All the Mother-Church's vast powers are concentrated in that Board. Mrs.
Eddy's unlimited personal reservations make the Board's ostensible
supremacy, during her life, a sham, and the Board itself a shadow. But
Mrs. Eddy has not made those reservations for any one but herself--they
are distinctly personal, they bear her name, they are not usable by
another individual. When she dies her reservations die, and the Board's
shadow-powers become real powers, without the change of any important
By-law, and the Board sits in her place as absolute and irresponsible a
sovereign as she was.

It consists of but five persons, a much more manageable Cardinalate than
the Roman Pope's. I think it will elect its Pope from its own body, and
that it will fill its own vacancies. An elective Papacy is a safe and
wise system, and a long-liver.




CHAPTER XV

We may take that up now.

It is not a single if, but a several-jointed one; not an oyster, but a
vertebrate.

1. Did Mrs. Eddy borrow from Quimby the Great Idea, or only the little
one, the old-timer, the ordinary mental-healing-healing by "mortal" mind?

2. If she borrowed the Great Idea, did she carry it away in her head, or
in manuscript?

3. Did she hit upon the Great Idea herself? By the Great Idea I mean,
of course, the conviction that the Force involved was still existent, and
could be applied now just as it was applied by Christ's Disciples and
their converts, and as successfully.

4. Did she philosophize it, systematize it, and write it down in a book?

5. Was it she, and not another, that built a new Religion upon the book
and organized it?

I think No. 5 can be answered with a Yes, and dismissed from the
controversy. And I think that the Great Idea, great as it was, would
have enjoyed but a brief activity, and would then have gone to sleep
again for some more centuries, but for the perpetuating impulse it got
from that organized and tremendous force.

As for Nos. 1, 2, and 4, the hostiles contend that Mrs. Eddy got the
Great Idea from Quimby and carried it off in manuscript. But their
testimony, while of consequence, lacks the most important detail; so far
as my information goes, the Quimby manuscript has not been produced. I
think we cannot discuss No. 1 and No. 2 profitably. Let them go.

For me, No. 3 has a mild interest, and No. 4 a violent one.

As regards No. 3, Mrs. Eddy was brought up, from the cradle, an
old-time, boiler-iron, Westminster-Catechism Christian, and knew her
Bible as well as Captain Kydd knew his, "when he sailed, when he sailed,"
and perhaps as sympathetically. The Great Idea had struck a million
Bible-readers before her as being possible of resurrection and
application--it must have struck as many as that, and been cogitated,
indolently, doubtingly, then dropped and forgotten--and it could have
struck her, in due course. But how it could interest her, how it could
appeal to her--with her make this a thing that is difficult to
understand.

For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful: the power,
through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and
pains and grief--all--with a word, with a touch of the hand! This power
was given by the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the converted.
All--every one. It was exercised for generations afterwards. Any
Christian who was in earnest and not a make-believe, not a policy
--Christian, not a Christian for revenue only, had that healing power,
and could cure with it any disease or any hurt or damage possible to
human flesh and bone. These things are true, or they are not. If they
were true seventeen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago it would be
difficult to satisfactorily explain why or how or by what argument that
power should be nonexistent in Christians now.

To wish to exercise it could occur to Mrs. Eddy--but would it?

Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money,
power, glory--vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent,
pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate,
shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably
selfish--

Of course the Great Idea could strike her, we have to grant that, but why
it should interest her is a question which can easily overstrain the
imagination and bring on nervous prostration, or something like that, and
is better left alone by the judicious, it seems to me--

Unless we call to our help the alleged other side of Mrs. Eddy's make and
character the side which her multitude of followers see, and sincerely
believe in. Fairness requires that their view be stated here. It is the
opposite of the one which I have drawn from Mrs. Eddy's history and from
her By-laws. To her followers she is this:

Patient, gentle, loving, compassionate, noble hearted, unselfish,
sinless, widely cultured, splendidly equipped mentally, a profound
thinker, an able writer, a divine personage, an inspired messenger whose
acts are dictated from the Throne, and whose every utterance is the Voice
of God.

She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their
lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and
flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has
no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with a
break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into
eternity as fancies of the waking day melt into the dreams of sleep.

They believe it is a Christianity that is in the New Testament; that it
has always been there, that in the drift of ages it was lost through
disuse and neglect, and that this benefactor has found it and given it
back to men, turning the night of life into day, its terrors into myths,
its lamentations into songs of emancipation and rejoicing.

There we have Mrs. Eddy as her followers see her. She has lifted them
out of grief and care and doubt and fear, and made their lives beautiful;
she found them wandering forlorn in a wintry wilderness, and has led them
to a tropic paradise like that of which the poet sings:

"O, islands there are on the face of the deep
Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep."

To ask them to examine with a microscope the character of such a
benefactor; to ask them to examine it at all; to ask them to look at a
blemish which another person believes he has found in it--well, in their
place could you do it? Would you do it? Wouldn't you be ashamed to do
it? If a tramp had rescued your child from fire and death, and saved its
mother's heart from breaking, could you see his rags? Could you smell
his breath? Mrs. Eddy has done more than that for these people.

They are prejudiced witnesses. To the credit of human nature it is not
possible that they should be otherwise. They sincerely believe that Mrs.
Eddy's character is pure and perfect and beautiful, and her history
without stain or blot or blemish. But that does not settle it. They
sincerely believe she did not borrow the Great Idea from Quimby, but hit
upon it herself. It may be so, and it could be so. Let it go--there is
no way to settle it. They believe she carried away no Quimby
manuscripts. Let that go, too--there is no way to settle it. They
believe that she, and not another, built the Religion upon the book, and
organized it. I believe it, too.

Finally, they believe that she philosophized Christian Science, explained
it, systematized it, and wrote it all out with her own hand in the book
Science and Health.

I am not able to believe that. Let us draw the line there. The known
and undisputed products of her pen are a formidable witness against her.
They do seem to me to prove, quite clearly and conclusively, that
writing, upon even simple subjects, is a difficult labor for her: that
she has never been able to write anything above third-rate English; that
she is weak in the matter of grammar; that she has but a rude and dull
sense of the values of words; that she so lacks in the matter of literary
precision that she can seldom put a thought into words that express it
lucidly to the reader and leave no doubts in his mind as to whether he
has rightly understood or not; that she cannot even draught a Preface
that a person can fully comprehend, nor one which can by any art be
translated into a fully understandable form; that she can seldom inject
into a Preface even single sentences whose meaning is uncompromisingly
clear--yet Prefaces are her specialty, if she has one.

Mrs. Eddy's known and undisputed writings are very limited in bulk; they
exhibit no depth, no analytical quality, no thought above school
composition size, and but juvenile ability in handling thoughts of even
that modest magnitude. She has a fine commercial ability, and could
govern a vast railway system in great style; she could draught a set of
rules that Satan himself would say could not be improved on--for
devilish effectiveness--by his staff; but we know, by our excursions
among the Mother-Church's By-laws, that their English would discredit the
deputy baggage-smasher. I am quite sure that Mrs. Eddy cannot write well
upon any subject, even a commercial one.

In the very first revision of Science and Health (1883), Mrs. Eddy wrote
a Preface which is an unimpeachable witness that the rest of the book was
written by somebody else. I have put it in the Appendix along with a
page or two taken from the body of the book, and will ask the reader to
compare the labored and lumbering and confused gropings of this Preface
with the easy and flowing and direct English of the other exhibit, and
see if he can believe that the one hand and brain produced both.

And let him take the Preface apart, sentence by sentence, and searchingly
examine each sentence word by word, and see if he can find half a dozen
sentences whose meanings he is so sure of that he can rephrase them--in
words of his own--and reproduce what he takes to be those meanings.
Money can be lost on this game. I know, for I am the one that lost it.

Now let the reader turn to the excerpt which I have made from the chapter
on "Prayer" (last year's edition of Science and Health), and compare that
wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of work with the
aforesaid Preface, and with Mrs. Eddy's poetry concerning the gymnastic
trees, and Minerva's not yet effete sandals, and the wreaths imported
from Erudition's bower for the decoration of Plymouth Rock, and the
Plague-spot and Bacilli, and my other exhibits (turn back to my Chapters
I. and II.) from the Autobiography, and finally with the late
Communication concerning me, and see if he thinks anybody's affirmation,
or anybody's sworn testimony, or any other testimony of any imaginable
kind would ever be likely to convince him that Mrs. Eddy wrote that
chapter on Prayer.

I do not wish to impose my opinion on any one who will not permit it, but
such as it is I offer it here for what it is worth. I cannot believe,
and I do not believe, that Mrs. Eddy originated any of the thoughts and
reasonings out of which the book Science and Health is constructed; and I
cannot believe, and do not believe that she ever wrote any part of that
book.