Christian Science

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


"Without money and without price." Those used to be the terms. Mrs.
Eddy's Annex cancels them. The motto of Christian Science is, "The
laborer is worthy of his hire." And now that it has been "demonstrated
over," we find its spiritual meaning to be, "Do anything and everything
your hand may find to do; and charge cash for it, and collect the money
in advance." The Scientist has on his tongue's end a cut-and-dried,
Boston-supplied set of rather lean arguments, whose function is to show
that it is a Heaven-commanded duty to do this, and that the croupiers of
the game have no choice but to obey.

The Trust seems to be a reincarnation. Exodus xxxii. 4.

I have no reverence for the Trust, but I am not lacking in reverence for
the sincerities of the lay membership of the new Church. There is every
evidence that the lay members are entirely sincere in their faith, and I
think sincerity is always entitled to honor and respect, let the
inspiration of the sincerity be what it may. Zeal and sincerity can
carry a new religion further than any other missionary except fire and
sword, and I believe that the new religion will conquer the half of
Christendom in a hundred years. I am not intending this as a compliment
to the human race; I am merely stating an opinion. And yet I think that
perhaps it is a compliment to the race. I keep in mind that saying of an
orthodox preacher--quoted further back. He conceded that this new
Christianity frees its possessor's life from frets, fears, vexations,
bitterness, and all sorts of imagination-propagated maladies and pains,
and fills his world with sunshine and his heart with gladness. If
Christian Science, with this stupendous equipment--and final salvation
added--cannot win half the Christian globe, I must be badly mistaken in
the make-up of the human race.

I think the Trust will be handed down like Me other Papacy, and will
always know how to handle its limitless cash. It will press the button;
the zeal, the energy, the sincerity, the enthusiasm of its countless
vassals will do the rest.




CHAPTER VIII

The power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal it or make
it sick is a force which none of us is born without. The first man had
it, the last one will possess it. If left to himself, a man is most
likely to use only the mischievous half of the force--the half which
invents imaginary ailments for him and cultivates them; and if he is one
of these--very wise people, he is quite likely to scoff at the beneficent
half of the force and deny its existence. And so, to heal or help that
man, two imaginations are required: his own and some outsider's. The
outsider, B, must imagine that his incantations are the healing-power
that is curing A, and A must imagine that this is so. I think it is not
so, at all; but no matter, the cure is effected, and that is the main
thing. The outsider's work is unquestionably valuable; so valuable that
it may fairly be likened to the essential work performed by the engineer
when he handles the throttle and turns on the steam; the actual power is
lodged exclusively in the engine, but if the engine were left alone it
would never start of itself. Whether the engineer be named Jim, or Bob,
or Tom, it is all one--his services are necessary, and he is entitled to
such wage as he can get you to pay. Whether he be named Christian
Scientist, or Mental Scientist, or Mind Curist, or King's-Evil Expert, or
Hypnotist, it is all one; he is merely the Engineer; he simply turns on
the same old steam and the engine does the whole work.

The Christian-Scientist engineer drives exactly the same trade as the
other engineers, yet he out-prospers the whole of them put together.

Is it because he has captured the takingest name? I think that that is
only a small part of it. I think that the secret of his high prosperity
lies elsewhere.

The Christian Scientist has organized the business. Now that was
certainly a gigantic idea. Electricity, in limitless volume, has existed
in the air and the rocks and the earth and everywhere since time began
--and was going to waste all the while. In our time we have organized
that scattered and wandering force and set it to work, and backed the
business with capital, and concentrated it in few and competent hands,
and the results are as we see.

The Christian Scientist has taken a force which has been lying idle in
every member of the human race since time began, and has organized it,
and backed the business with capital, and concentrated it at Boston
headquarters in the hands of a small and very competent Trust, and there
are results.

Therein lies the promise that this monopoly is going to extend its
commerce wide in the earth. I think that if the business were conducted
in the loose and disconnected fashion customary with such things, it
would achieve but little more than the modest prosperity usually secured
by unorganized great moral and commercial ventures; but I believe that so
long as this one remains compactly organized and closely concentrated in
a Trust, the spread of its dominion will continue.




CHAPTER IX

Four years ago I wrote the preceding chapters. I was assured by the wise
that Christian Science was a fleeting craze and would soon perish. This
prompt and all-competent stripe of prophet is always to be had in the
market at ground-floor rates. He does not stop to load, or consider, or
take aim, but lets fly just as he stands. Facts are nothing to him, he
has no use for such things; he works wholly by inspiration. And so, when
he is asked why he considers a new movement a passing fad and quickly
perishable, he finds himself unprepared with a reason and is more or less
embarrassed. For a moment. Only for a moment. Then he waylays the
first spectre of a reason that goes flitting through the desert places of
his mind, and is at once serene again and ready for conflict. Serene and
confident. Yet he should not be so, since he has had no chance to
examine his catch, and cannot know whether it is going to help his
contention or damage it.

The impromptu reason furnished by the early prophets of whom I have
spoken was this:

"There is nothing to Christian Science; there is nothing about it that
appeals to the intellect; its market will be restricted to the
unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not think."

They called that a reason why the cult would not flourish and endure. It
seems the equivalent of saying:

"There is no money in tinware; there is nothing about it that appeals to
the rich; its market will be restricted to the poor."

It is like bringing forward the best reason in the world why Christian
Science should flourish and live, and then blandly offering it as a
reason why it should sicken and die.

That reason was furnished me by the complacent and unfrightened prophets
four years ago, and it has been furnished me again to-day. If
conversions to new religions or to old ones were in any considerable
degree achieved through the intellect, the aforesaid reason would be
sound and sufficient, no doubt; the inquirer into Christian Science might
go away unconvinced and unconverted. But we all know that conversions
are seldom made in that way; that such a thing as a serious and
painstaking and fairly competent inquiry into the claims of a religion or
of a political dogma is a rare occurrence; and that the vast mass of men
and women are far from being capable of making such an examination. They
are not capable, for the reason that their minds, howsoever good they may
be, are not trained for such examinations. The mind not trained for that
work is no more competent to do it than are lawyers and farmers competent
to make successful clothes without learning the tailor's trade. There
are seventy-five million men and women among us who do not know how to
cut out and make a dress-suit, and they would not think of trying; yet
they all think they can competently think out a political or religious
scheme without any apprenticeship to the business, and many of them
believe they have actually worked that miracle. But, indeed, the truth
is, almost all the men and women of our nation or of any other get their
religion and their politics where they get their astronomy--entirely at
second hand. Being untrained, they are no more able to intelligently
examine a dogma or a policy than they are to calculate an eclipse.

Men are usually competent thinkers along the lines of their specialized
training only. Within these limits alone are their opinions and
judgments valuable; outside of these limits they grope and are lost
--usually without knowing it. In a church assemblage of five hundred
persons, there will be a man or two whose trained minds can seize upon
each detail of a great manufacturing scheme and recognize its value or
its lack of value promptly; and can pass the details in intelligent
review, section by section, and finally as a whole, and then deliver a
verdict upon the scheme which cannot be flippantly set aside nor easily
answered. And there will be one or two other men there who can do the
same thing with a great and complicated educational project; and one or
two others who can do the like with a large scheme for applying
electricity in a new and unheard-of way; and one or two others who can do
it with a showy scheme for revolutionizing the scientific world's
accepted notions regarding geology. And so on, and so on. But the
manufacturing experts will not be competent to examine the educational
scheme intelligently, and their opinion about it would not be valuable;
neither of these two groups will be able to understand and pass upon the
electrical scheme; none of these three batches of experts will be able to
understand and pass upon the geological revolution; and probably not one
man in the entire lot will be competent to examine, capably, the
intricacies of a political or religious scheme, new or old, and deliver a
judgment upon it which any one need regard as precious.

There you have the top crust. There will be four hundred and
seventy-five men and women present who can draw upon their training and
deliver incontrovertible judgments concerning cheese, and leather, and
cattle, and hardware, and soap, and tar, and candles, and patent
medicines, and dreams, and apparitions, and garden trucks, and cats, and
baby food, and warts, and hymns, and time-tables, and freight-rates, and
summer resorts, and whiskey, and law, and surgery, and dentistry, and
blacksmithing, and shoemaking, and dancing, and Huyler's candy, and
mathematics, and dog fights, and obstetrics, and music, and sausages, and
dry goods, and molasses, and railroad stocks, and horses, and literature,
and labor unions, and vegetables, and morals, and lamb's fries, and
etiquette, and agriculture. And not ten among the five hundred--let
their minds be ever so good and bright--will be competent, by grace of
the requisite specialized mental training, to take hold of a complex
abstraction of any kind and make head or tail of it.

The whole five hundred are thinkers, and they are all capable thinkers
--but only within the narrow limits of their specialized trainings. Four
hundred and ninety of them cannot competently examine either a religious
plan or a political one. A scattering few of them do examine both--that
is, they think they do. With results as precious as when I examine the
nebular theory and explain it to myself.

If the four hundred and ninety got their religion through their minds,
and by weighed and measured detail, Christian Science would not be a
scary apparition. But they don't; they get a little of it through their
minds, more of it through their feelings, and the overwhelming bulk of it
through their environment.

Environment is the chief thing to be considered when one is proposing to
predict the future of Christian Science. It is not the ability to reason
that makes the Presbyterian, or the Baptist, or the Methodist, or the
Catholic, or the Mohammedan, or the Buddhist, or the Mormon; it is
environment. If religions were got by reasoning, we should have the
extraordinary spectacle of an American family with a Presbyterian in it,
and a Baptist, a Methodist, a Catholic, a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, and a
Mormon. A Presbyterian family does not produce Catholic families or
other religious brands, it produces its own kind; and not by intellectual
processes, but by association. And so also with Mohammedanism, the cult
which in our day is spreading with the sweep of a world-conflagration
through the Orient, that native home of profound thought and of subtle
intellectual fence, that fertile womb whence has sprung every great
religion that exists. Including our own; for with all our brains we
cannot invent a religion and market it.

The language of my quoted prophets recurs to us now, and we wonder to
think how small a space in the world the mighty Mohammedan Church would
be occupying now, if a successful trade in its line of goods had been
conditioned upon an exhibit that would "appeal to the intellect" instead
of to "the unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not
think."

The Christian Science Church, like the Mohammedan Church, makes no
embarrassing appeal to the intellect, has no occasion to do it, and can
get along quite well without it.

Provided. Provided what? That it can secure that thing which is worth
two or three hundred thousand times more than an "appeal to the
intellect"--an environment. Can it get that? Will it be a menace to
regular Christianity if it gets that? Is it time for regular
Christianity to get alarmed? Or shall regular Christianity smile a smile
and turn over and take another nap? Won't it be wise and proper for
regular Christianity to do the old way, Me customary way, the historical
way--lock the stable-door after the horse is gone? Just as Protestantism
has smiled and nodded this long time (while the alert and diligent
Catholic was slipping in and capturing the public schools), and is now
beginning to hunt around for the key when it is too late?

Will Christian Science get a chance to show its wares? It has already
secured that chance. Will it flourish and spread and prosper if it shall
create for itself the one thing essential to those conditions--an
environment? It has already created an environment. There are families
of Christian Scientists in every community in America, and each family is
a factory; each family turns out a Christian Science product at the
customary intervals, and contributes it to the Cause in the only way in
which contributions of recruits to Churches are ever made on a large
scale--by the puissant forces of personal contact and association. Each
family is an agency for the Cause, and makes converts among the
neighbors, and starts some more factories.

Four years ago there were six Christian Scientists in a certain town that
I am acquainted with; a year ago there were two hundred and fifty there;
they have built a church, and its membership now numbers four hundred.
This has all been quietly done; done without frenzied revivals, without
uniforms, brass bands, street parades, corner oratory, or any of the
other customary persuasions to a godly life. Christian Science, like
Mohammedanism, is "restricted" to the "unintelligent, the people who do
not think." There lies the danger. It makes Christian Science
formidable. It is "restricted" to ninety-nine one-hundredths of the
human race, and must be reckoned with by regular Christianity. And will
be, as soon as it is too late.






BOOK II

"There were remarkable things about the stranger called the Man
--Mystery-things so very extraordinary that they monopolized attention
and made all of him seem extraordinary; but this was not so, the most of
his qualities being of the common, every-day size and like anybody
else's. It was curious. He was of the ordinary stature, and had the
ordinary aspects; yet in him were hidden such strange contradictions and
disproportions! He was majestically fearless and heroic; he had the
strength of thirty men and the daring of thirty thousand; handling
armies, organizing states, administering governments--these were pastimes
to him; he publicly and ostentatiously accepted the human race at its own
valuation--as demigods--and privately and successfully dealt with it at
quite another and juster valuation--as children and slaves; his ambitions
were stupendous, and his dreams had no commerce with the humble plain,
but moved with the cloud-rack among the snow-summits. These features of
him were, indeed, extraordinary, but the rest of him was ordinary and
usual. He was so mean-minded, in the matter of jealousy, that it was
thought he was descended from a god; he was vain in little ways, and had
a pride in trivialities; he doted on ballads about moonshine and bruised
hearts; in education he was deficient, he was indifferent to literature,
and knew nothing of art; he was dumb upon all subjects but one,
indifferent to all except that one--the Nebular Theory. Upon that one
his flow of words was full and free, he was a geyser. The official
astronomers disputed his facts and deeded his views, and said that he had
invented both, they not being findable in any of the books. But many of
the laity, who wanted their nebulosities fresh, admired his doctrine and
adopted it, and it attained to great prosperity in spite of the hostility
of the experts."--The Legend of the Man-Mystery, ch. i.




CHAPTER I

JANUARY, 1903. When we do not know a public man personally, we guess him
out by the facts of his career. When it is Washington, we all arrive at
about one and the same result. We agree that his words and his acts
clearly interpret his character to us, and that they never leave us in
doubt as to the motives whence the words and acts proceeded. It is the
same with Joan of Arc, it is the same with two or three or five or six
others among the immortals. But in the matter of motives and of a few
details of character we agree to disagree upon Napoleon, Cromwell, and
all the rest; and to this list we must add Mrs. Eddy. I think we can
peacefully agree as to two or three extraordinary features of her
make-up, but not upon the other features of it. We cannot peacefully
agree as to her motives, therefore her character must remain crooked to
some of us and straight to the others.

No matter, she is interesting enough without an amicable agreement. In
several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the
most extraordinary. The same may be said of her career, and the same may
be said of its chief result. She started from nothing. Her enemies
charge that she surreptitiously took from Quimby a peculiar system of
healing which was mind-cure with a Biblical basis. She and her friends
deny that she took anything from him. This is a matter which we can
discuss by-and-by. Whether she took it or invented it, it was
--materially--a sawdust mine when she got it, and she has turned it into
a Klondike; its spiritual dock had next to no custom, if any at all: from
it she has launched a world-religion which has now six hundred and
sixty-three churches, and she charters a new one every four days. When
we do not know a person--and also when we do--we have to judge his size
by the size and nature of his achievements, as compared with the
achievements of others in his special line of business--there is no other
way. Measured by this standard, it is thirteen hundred years since the
world has produced any one who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy's waistbelt.

Figuratively speaking, Mrs. Eddy is already as tall as the Eiffel tower.
She is adding surprisingly to her stature every day. It is quite within
the probabilities that a century hence she will be the most imposing
figure that has cast its shadow across the globe since the inauguration
of our era. I grant that after saying these strong things, it is
necessary that I offer some details calculated to satisfactorily
demonstrate the proportions which I have claimed for her. I will do that
presently; but before exhibiting the matured sequoia gigantea, I believe
it will be best to exhibit the sprout from which it sprang. It may save
the reader from making miscalculations. The person who imagines that a
Big Tree sprout is bigger than other kinds of sprouts is quite mistaken.
It is the ordinary thing; it makes no show, it compels no notice, it
hasn't a detectible quality in it that entitles it to attention, or
suggests the future giant its sap is suckling. That is the kind of
sprout Mrs. Eddy was.

From her childhood days up to where she was running a half-century a
close race and gaining on it, she was most humanly commonplace.

She is the witness I am drawing this from. She has revealed it in her
autobiography not intentionally, of course--I am not claiming that. An
autobiography is the most treacherous thing there is. It lets out every
secret its author is trying to keep; it lets the truth shine unobstructed
through every harmless little deception he tries to play; it pitilessly
exposes him as a tin hero worshipping himself as Big Metal every time he
tries to do the modest-unconsciousness act before the reader. This is
not guessing; I am speaking from autobiographical personal experience; I
was never able to refrain from mentioning, with a studied casualness that
could deceive none but the most incautious reader, that an ancestor of
mine was sent ambassador to Spain by Charles I., nor that in a remote
branch of my family there exists a claimant to an earldom, nor that an
uncle of mine used to own a dog that was descended from the dog that was
in the Ark; and at the same time I was never able to persuade myself to
call a gibbet by its right name when accounting for other ancestors of
mine, but always spoke of it as the "platform"--puerilely intimating that
they were out lecturing when it happened.

It is Mrs. Eddy over again. As regards her minor half, she is as
commonplace as the rest of us. Vain of trivial things all the first half
of her life, and still vain of them at seventy and recording them with
naive satisfaction--even rescuing some early rhymes of hers of the sort
that we all scribble in the innocent days of our youth--rescuing them and
printing them without pity or apology, just as the weakest and commonest
of us do in our gray age. More--she still frankly admires them; and in
her introduction of them profanely confers upon them the holy name of
"poetry." Sample:

"And laud the land whose talents rock
The cradle of her power,
And wreaths are twined round Plymouth Rock
From erudition's bower."

"Minerva's silver sandals still
Are loosed and not effete."

You note it is not a shade above the thing which all human beings churn
out in their youth.

You would not think that in a little wee primer--for that is what the
Autobiography is--a person with a tumultuous career of seventy years
behind her could find room for two or three pages of padding of this
kind, but such is the case. She evidently puts narrative together with
difficulty and is not at home in it, and is glad to have something
ready-made to fill in with. Another sample:

"Here fame-honored Hickory rears his bold form,
And bears a brave breast to the lightning and storm,
While Palm, Bay, and Laurel in classical glee,
Chase Tulip, Magnolia, and fragrant Fringe-tree."

Vivid? You can fairly see those trees galloping around. That she could
still treasure up, and print, and manifestly admire those Poems,
indicates that the most daring and masculine and masterful woman that has
appeared in the earth in centuries has the same soft, girly-girly places
in her that the rest of us have.

When it comes to selecting her ancestors she is still human, natural,
vain, commonplace--as commonplace as I am myself when I am sorting
ancestors for my autobiography. She combs out some creditable Scots, and
labels them and sets them aside for use, not overlooking the one to whom
Sir William Wallace gave "a heavy sword encased in a brass scabbard," and
naively explaining which Sir William Wallace it was, lest we get the
wrong one by the hassock; this is the one "from whose patriotism and
bravery comes that heart-stirring air, 'Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.'"
Hannah More was related to her ancestors. She explains who Hannah More
was.

Whenever a person informs us who Sir William Wallace was, or who wrote
"Hamlet," or where the Declaration of Independence was fought, it fills
us with a suspicion wellnigh amounting to conviction, that that person
would not suspect us of being so empty of knowledge if he wasn't
suffering from the same "claim" himself. Then we turn to page 20 of the
Autobiography and happen upon this passage, and that hasty suspicion
stands rebuked:

"I gained book-knowledge with far less labor than is usually requisite.
At ten years of age I was as familiar with Lindley Murray's Grammar as
with the Westminster Catechism; and the latter I had to repeat every
Sunday. My favorite studies were Natural Philosophy, Logic, and Moral
Science. From my brother Albert I received lessons in the ancient
tongues, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin."