Christian science has a considerable group of authorized publications and a well-conducted department of publicity. Its public propaganda is carried on by means of occasional lectures, always extremely well advertised and through its reading rooms and periodicals. Its unadvertised propaganda is carried on, naturally, by its adherents. Every instance of obscure or protracted illness offers it an opportunity and such opportunities are by no means neglected. But the supreme authority in Christian Science is Mary Baker Eddy's work "Science and Health." This is read at every Sunday service and is the basis of all lectures and explanatory advertisements. In general its exponents do not substantially depart from the teachings of its book, nor, such is the discipline of the cult, do they dare to. There are doubtless such modifications of its more extreme and impossible contentions as every religion of authority experiences. Christian Science cannot remain unaffected by discussion and the larger movements of thought. But it has not as yet markedly departed from the doctrines of its founder and must thereby be judged.

The book in its final form represents a considerable evolution. The comparison of successive editions reveals an astonishing amount of matter which has been discarded, although there has been no real modification of its fundamental principles. References to malicious animal magnetism which fill a large place in the earlier editions, are almost wholly wanting in the last, and there has been a decided progress toward a relative simplicity of statements. The book is doubtless much in debt to Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser, Mr. Wiggins, who brought to the revision of Mrs. Eddy's writings a conscientious fidelity. One needs to stand a good ways back from the book itself in order at all to get any balanced view of its philosophy but, so seen, its fundamentals are almost unexpectedly simple.

Christian Science a Philosophy, a Theology, a Religion and a System of Healing; General Conditions Which Have Lent it Power

Christian Science is offered as a philosophy, a theology, a religion and a method for the practical conduct of life and it needs to be considered under each of these four heads. It demands also for any proper understanding of it the backgrounds of Mrs. Eddy's peculiar temperament and checkered history. It is a growth. For her fundamentals Mrs. Eddy is, beyond reasonable debate, in debt to Quimby and in some ways Quimby's original insights have suffered at her hands. None the less, in its final form "Science and Health" is what Mrs. Eddy has made it and it is what it is because she was what she was. She shared with her own generation an absorbing interest in fundamental theological problems. She inherited a religion which has reduced the whole of life to rigid and on the whole too narrow theological formulÆ. She was not able to fit her experience into the formula which her faith supplied and yet, on the other hand, her faith exercised a controlling influence over her life. She was in a small and pathetic way a kind of nineteenth century Job grappling with the old, old question given sin and, above all, pain and suffering to find God. She could not adjust either Divine love or a just Divine sovereignty to what she herself had been called upon to bear. A natural tendency toward the occult and the desperate willingness of the hopelessly sick to try anything which promises a cure, led her in many directions. So much her biography explains.

Quimby was the first teacher she found whose system seemed to offer any key at all to the intellectual and spiritual puzzle in which she found herself and when his system seemed to be proved for her by her recovery from a chronic abnormal state, she thereafter followed and elaborated what he suggested. Here a certain natural shrewdness and ingenuity of mind stood her in good stead. She was helped by her own ignorances and limitations. If she had been a trained thinker, familiar with a wide range of philosophic speculation, she would never have dared write so dogmatically; if she had been a great philosopher with the philosopher's inclusive vision, she would never have dared build so much on foundations so narrow.

Mrs. Eddy was, unconsciously to herself, a type. She thought and felt for multitudes of perplexed people unable to reconcile the more trying experiences of life with what faith they had in the love and goodness of God, unable on the other side to find the love and goodness of God in the wide sweep of law and the orderly sequence of cause and effect, and incapable under any circumstances of the patient analysis needed to trace to all their sources the threads of their strangely mingled webs of life; impressionable folk under the spell of words; speculative; at once credulous and skeptical; intellectually alert enough to want to do their own thinking and not intellectually disciplined enough to do it well; persuaded that the Bible has both a message and authority and unable to find in their traditional interpretation of it either a satisfying message or an adequately directing authority; impatient of discipline and pathetically eager for some short cut to happiness and well-being. In a very signal way Mrs. Eddy has spoken and written for this type particularly in American life. Her very style a liability as it is, when tested by either logic or the accepted standards of good writing, has, nevertheless, been an asset with those who have made her their prophetess.

The secret of Mrs. Eddy's power and the power of her system after her is most largely in her essential intellectual and spiritual kinship with such a temper and intellectual status as this, but she possessed also a real measure of creative capacity, a marked reach of speculative power, rare shrewdness and a masterful temper. Mrs. Eddy believed herself to have found her system in the Old and New Testaments—but she did not. She gradually built it up out of the suggestions which had been given her to begin with; she gave it colour and direction from her own experiences; she proved it to her own satisfaction in the healings which seemed to result from it, then fitted it all as best she could into the framework of her inherited Christian faith and read its meanings back into the Scriptures. It is a pseudo-philosophy pseudo-Christianized (if one may use the word) by a curious combination of ingenuity, devotion, main strength and even awkwardness. And though Christian Science is carrying on to-day as a religion rather than as either a philosophy or a system of healing, it will stand or fall on the intellectual side as a philosophy and not as a religion.

The Philosophic Bases of Christian Science

It is professedly an idealistic monism based on carefully selected facts and depending for its proof upon certain results in the experience of those who accept it. An idealism because there is for Mrs. Eddy no reality save in mind, a monism because there is for Mrs. Eddy only one reality and that is God. For a definition of God she offers only synonyms and affirmations though here perhaps she follows only the usual procedure of theology. God is divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind—and all these capitalized, for it makes a vast difference in the philosophy of Christian Science whether such familiar words as these are spelled with a capital letter or not. It would be possible from Mrs. Eddy's own words to pretty effectually prove what has been more than once claimed: that Christian Science does not offer a personal God, but all our terminology in this region is necessarily somewhat loose, though hers is excessively so. Some of her definitions of God are as personal as the Westminster Catechism or the Thirty-nine Articles. The writer believes, however, after such dispassionate consideration of the philosophy of Christian Science as he is able to give, that it would make absolutely no difference in its philosophic basis whether God were conceived as a person or not. If the God of Christian Science be taken merely as the exaltation of an abstract idealism or a philosophic Absolute everything would be secured which is otherwise secured.

Up to a certain point Christian Science marches with other idealistic systems. From Plato down we have had philosophers a plenty, who have sought to build for us a universe whose only realities are mind and its attributes, or perhaps more technically, consciousness and its content. It is truly a difficult enough matter to relate the world without and the world within, once we begin thinking about it (though happily and in the practical conduct of life this is not so hard as the philosophers make out, otherwise we should be in a hopeless state), and it is natural enough for one type of mind to simplify the problem by making the world within the only world. Nor have there been wanting those who have sought to reduce everything to a single reality whether matter or mind, and ever since we have had theology at all a perplexed humanity has been seeking to reconcile the goodness and the power of God with the sin and sorrow of our troubled world.

But Christian Science parts company soon enough with this great fellowship of dreamers and philosophers and takes its own line. It affirms consciousness and its content to be the only reality; it affirms the divine Mind to be the ultimate and all-conditioning reality; it affirms love and goodness to be the ultimate qualities of the divine Mind, but it meets the problem of sin and evil by denying them any reality at all. (Here it is in more or less accord with certain forms of mysticism.) But even as Christian Science cuts this Gordian knot it creates for itself another set of difficulties and involves itself in those contradictions which will eventually be the undoing of it as a philosophy.

It Undertakes to Solve the Problem of Evil. Contrasted Solutions

What Christian Science is seeking is an ideal order with a content of unqualified good and it secures this by denying the reality of every aspect of experience which either challenges or contradicts its own idealism. What is distinctive, then, in Christian Science is not its affirmations but its denials. All systems of philosophic idealism face practically the same problem and offer various solutions. They most commonly resolve evil of every sort—and evil is here used in so wide a way as to include sin and pain and sorrow—into an ultimate good.

Evil is thus an "unripe good," one stage in a process of evolution which, when it has had its perfect and all-transforming way, will reveal both moral and physical evil to have been no evil at all but simply aspects of life, trying enough at the time and puzzling enough when taken by themselves, but having their own distinct and contributory value when considered in their relation to the final whole. Such an approach as this does not in any wise diminish for the individual either the reality of pain or the unhappy consequences of sin, but it does ask him to judge the wisdom and love of God not by their passing phases but by their outcome in the wealth and worth of character.

Robert Browning sang this sturdily through a long generation riding down its difficulties by the sheer force of an unconquerable optimism and subduing argument to lyric passion.

"The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.
"And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fullness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?"

Others affirm the self-limitation of God.[30] In His respect for that human freedom which is the basis of self-regulated personal action and therefore an essential condition of character, He arrests Himself, as it were, upon the threshold of human personality and commits His children to a moral struggle justifying the inevitable incidents of moral defeat by the greatness of the ends to be attained. A vast deal of what we call evil—broadening evil to include not only moral defeat but also pain—is either a consequence or a by-product of what Henry Churchill King calls the fight for character. Such a solution as this is consistent with the love of God and the moral order; whether it is consistent with a thoroughgoing monism or not is another question. William James doubted it and so frankly adopted Pluralism—which is perhaps just a way of saying that we cannot reconcile the contending forces in our world order with one over-all-controlling power—as his solution of the problem.

Josiah Royce has valiantly maintained, through long and subtle argument, the goodness of the whole despite the evil of the incidental. "All finite life is a struggle with evil. Yet from the final point of view the Whole is good. The Temporal Order contains at no one moment anything that can satisfy. Yet the Eternal Order is perfect. We have all sinned, and come short of the glory of God. Yet in just our life, viewed in its entirety, the glory of God is completely manifest. These hard sayings are the deepest expressions of the essence of true religion."[31] He finds the root of evil in the dissatisfaction of the finite will—a dissatisfaction which on the other hand is the secret of the eventual triumph of good.

We suffer also through our involution with "the interests and ideals of vast realms of other conscious and finite lives whose dissatisfactions become part of each individual man's life when the man concerned cannot at present see how or why his own ideals are such as to make these dissatisfactions his fate." We suffer also through our associations with nature, none the less "this very presence of evil in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order." He dismisses definitely, in an argument still to be quoted, the conclusion of the mystic that an "experience of evil is an experience of unreality ... an illusion, a dream, a deceit" and concludes: "In brief, then, nowhere in Time is perfection to be found. Our comfort lies in the knowledge of the Eternal. Strengthened by that knowledge, we can win the most enduring of temporal joys, the consciousness that makes us delight to share the world's grave glories and to take part in its divine sorrows,—sure that these sorrows are the means of the eternal triumph, and that these glories are the treasures of the house of God. When once this comfort comes home to us, we can run and not be weary, and walk and not faint. For our temporal life is the very expression of the eternal triumph."

One may gravely question whether philosophy has ever so completely made out its case as Professor Royce thinks. He is affirming as the reasoned conclusion of philosophy what is rather a faith than a demonstration, but none the less, all honest thinking has hitherto been brave enough to recognize the reality of evil and to test the power of God and His love and goodness not by the actuality of present pain, or the confusion of present sin, but rather by the power which He offers us of growing through pain to health or else so bearing pain as to make it a real contribution to character and of so rising above sin as to make penitence and confession and the struggle for good and the achievement of it also a contribution to character. So St. Paul assures us that all things work together for good for those that love God. "The willingness," says Hocking, "to confront every evil, in ourselves and outside ourselves, with the blunt, factual conscience of Science; willingness to pay the full causal price for the removal of the blemish; this kind of integrity can never be dispensed with in any optimistic program."[32]

Sir Henry Jones takes the same line. "The first requisite for the solution of the contradiction between the demand of religion for the perfection of God, and therefore the final and complete victory of the good in the other, is the honest admission that the contradiction is there, and inevitable; though possibly, like other contradictions, it is there only to be solved."[33]

The Divine Mind and Mortal Mind

Christian Science solves this problem, as has been said, by denying the reality of evil, but since we have an abundance of testimony to pain and sickness, Mrs. Eddy goes a step farther. She denies the reality of the testimony of the senses wherever pain and sickness are concerned.[34] (Mrs. Eddy's denial of the reality of sin is hardly parallel to her denial of the reality of physical ills.) And here the word comes in which is made to carry a heavier load than any one poor word was ever burdened with before. All that is involved in the recognition of physical ills and indeed all that is involved in the recognition of the material side of existence is error. (Once fairly on her road Mrs. Eddy makes a clean sweep of whatever stands in her way.) What one may call the whole shadowed side of experience is not only ignored, it is denied and yet before it can be explained away it has to be explained. It is, in brief, for Mrs. Eddy and her followers the creation of mortal mind. Mortal mind, she says, "is nothing claiming to be something; mythology; error creating other errors; a suppositional material sense; ... that which neither exists in science nor can be recognized by the spiritual sense; sin; sickness; death."[35]

Mortal mind is that side of us which accepts our entanglement in the facts and forces of the world order and upon mortal mind so vaguely conceived Mrs. Eddy throws the whole burden of responsibility for all the unhappy aspects of experience and conditioning circumstances. She gives it a surprising range of creative power. It has created everything Mrs. Eddy does not like or believe in. In other words, there is not one reality but two, one the reality of well-being, the other the reality of unhappiness and suffering, but according to Mrs. Eddy the first reality is the only real reality, the second is an unreal reality which we ourselves create through false beliefs and which we may escape at any moment by simply shifting the center of our creative idealism. Mrs. Eddy makes what she means by mortal mind reasonably clear through endless repetition and some analysis, but she never for a moment accounts for its existence. It is no creation of what she calls the divine Mind; indeed she says in substance that God is not conscious of it at all; it lies entirely outside the range of His knowledge. (Page 243.)

God is Good. Since He is good He cannot have created nor be responsible for, nor even recognize pain, sorrow or suffering. "The Divine Mind cannot suffer" (page 108, also page 335), "is not responsible for physical and moral disasters" (page 119). God did not create matter (the Father mind is not the father of matter) (page 257), for matter means pain and death, nor do such things as these belong in any way to the order of the Divine Mind. They have no admitted reality in Mrs. Eddy's scheme of a true idealism. Man is "God's spiritual idea" and since he belongs by right to an order in which there is neither sin nor sorrow nor death, such things as these have no reality for him save as he admits them. What really admits them is mortal mind, the agent of another system of Belief in which humanity has in some way, which is never really explained, become entangled, and we may apparently escape from the one order to the other simply by a change in our beliefs. For all the shadowed side of life has reality only as we accept or believe in it; directly we cease to believe in it or deny it it ceases to be.

It is, as near as one can make out, a myth, an illusion, whose beginnings are lost in obscurity and which, for the want of the revelation vouchsafed through her, has been continued from age to age by the untaught or the misled. For example, Arsenic is not a poison, so we are told again and again. It is only a poison because people think it is;[36] it began to be a poison only because people thought it was, it continues to be a poison only because the majority of people think it is now and, such is the subtle and far-reaching influence of mind upon mind, it will continue to be a poison as long as any one continues to believe it to be. Directly we all believe that Arsenic is not a poison it will be no poison. Poisons, that is, are the creation of mortal mind. Pain is pain only through the same mistaken belief in the reality of it. "By universal consent mortal belief has constituted itself a law to bind mortals to sickness, sin and death." And so on at great length and almost endless repetition.

The Essential Limitations of Mrs. Eddy's System

Since matter conditions us who were born to be unconditioned and since matter is apparently the root of so many ills, the seat of so many pains, matter goes with the rest. Mrs. Eddy is not always consistent in her consideration of matter; sometimes she confines herself to saying that there is neither sensation nor life in matter—which may be true enough save as matter both affords the material for sensation and conditions its forms, which is an immense qualification,—but again and again she calls matter an illusion. Consistently the laws of physics and chemistry should disappear with the laws of hygiene and medicine, but Mrs. Eddy does not go so far as that though it would be difficult to find a logical stopping place once you have taken this line. Mortal mind is apparently the source of all these illusions.

Mrs. Eddy's disposal of matter, along with her constant return to its misleading mastery in experience is an outstanding aspect of her book. The writer is inclined to believe that Mrs. Eddy's formula: "There is ... no matter in life and no life in matter," is an echo of Tyndall's famous utterance—made about the time she was working with her system—that he found "in matter the promise and potency of all life." There is surprisingly little reference in "Science and Health" to philosophic or scientific sources. Cutter's physiology is quoted in some editions—an old textbook which the writer remembers to have found among his mother's school books. There are a few references to popular astronomy, but in general for Mrs. Eddy modern science does not exist except in the most general way as the erroneous expression of error and always with a small "s" as against the capital "S" of her own system. Nor does she show any knowledge of other philosophic idealisms nor any acquaintance with any solution of the problems she was facing save the commonplaces of evangelical orthodoxy. "Science and Health" knows nothing also of any medical science save the empirical methods of the medical science of 1860 and 1870.

But she cannot have been wholly uninfluenced—being a woman of an alert mind—by the controversy which, in the seventies and eighties, was raging about a pretty crass and literal materialism, and her writings probably reflect—with a good deal of indirection—that controversy. Here is a possible key to a good many things which are otherwise puzzling enough. She is, in her own fashion, the defender of an idealistic interpretation of reality and experience. Now all idealistic systems have had to dispose of matter in some way. In general idealists find in matter only the reflection in consciousness of the material which sense experience supplies, and since the raw material is in every way so different from the mental reflection, the idealist may defend his position plausibly in assuming matter to be, in its phenomenal aspects, really the creation of thought. But he must account for the persistency of it and the consistency of experience so conditioned. He does this by assuming the whole interrelated order to be held, as it were, in solution, in some larger system of thought which really supplies for us our environment and if he be both devout and consistent he calls this the thought God.[37] In this way he solves his problem—at least to his own satisfaction—and even supplies a basis for Theistic faith. But he does not deny the working reality of his so-called material experiences nor does he, like Mrs. Eddy, accept one aspect of this experience and deny the other. This is philosophically impossible.

A thoroughgoing theistic monism must find in matter some aspect or other of the self-revelation of God. It may be hard pressed to discover just how the psychical is "stepped down" to the physical. (That is the essential difficulty in all Creationism.) But something must be assumed to get a going concern in any department of thought and there is much in that resolution of matter into force and force into always more tenuous and imponderable forms—which is the tendency of modern science—to render this assumption less difficult to the rational imagination than perhaps any other we are asked to make. When the final elements in matter have become electrons and the electron is conceived as a strain in a magnetic field and thus the

"Cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which is inherent,"

become the projection into sensibly apprehended form of the flux of an infinite and eternal energy, it is not hard to define that energy in terms of a divine will. Indeed it is hard not to do just that. But there is no place in such a resolution as this for the conclusions of "Science and Health."

Or we may accept in one form or another a dualism in which the practical mind is generally content to rest. According to this point of view we have to do with a reality which may be known under two aspects. It is the chemical action and interaction of elements—and the mind which measures and combines them; it is the physical action and interaction of force—and the mind which directs the process. Biologically "the living creature gives an account of itself in two ways. It can know itself as something extended and intricately built up, burning away, moving, throbbing; it can also know itself as the seat of sensation, perceptions, feelings, wishes, thoughts. But there is not one process, thinking, and another process, cerebral metabolism (vital processes in nerve-cells); there is a psycho-physical life—a reality which we know under two aspects. Cerebral control and mental activity are, on this view, different aspects of one natural occurrence. What we have to do with is the unified life of a psycho-physical being, a body-mind or mind-body."[38] In short there is no philosophy or science outside the covers of her own book to which Mrs. Eddy may turn for support and though this does not prove the case against her—she might be right and the whole disciplined thought of her time be wrong—this latter supposition is so improbable as to rule it out of court.

The materialism against which she contends has ceased to exist. The matter which she denies does not exist in the sense of her denial. There was, even when she was writing, a line of which she was apparently wholly ignorant which has since been immensely developed, and of all this there is naturally no reflection at all in her work. It is more hopelessly out of touch with the laborious and strongly established conclusions of modern thought in every field than the first chapters of Genesis for there one may, at least, substitute the science of to-day for the science of 3,000 years ago and still retain the enduring insights of the faith then voiced, but there is no possible accommodation of "Science and Health" to either the science or the philosophy of the twentieth century. It must be left to a consistent Christian Scientist to reconcile his gospel with the freer movements of the world of which he is still a citizen—though perhaps this also might be urged against a deal of contemporaneous Christian faith—but it is all an arresting testimony to the power of the human mind to organize itself in compartments between which there is no communication.

Experience and Life

Beyond all this is the fact of which "Science and Health" takes no account—the conditioning of conscious life and working experience by its material environment however conceived. This is true of every phase of life and all our later emphasis upon the power of the mind in one direction and another to escape this conditioning scarcely affects the massive reality of it. Christian Science makes no attempt at all to escape this—save in the region of physical health—or else it provides an alibi in the phrase, "I have not demonstrated in that region yet." But it does not thus escape the limitation imposed upon us all and if we may dare for a moment to be dogmatic, it never will. At the best we live in a give and take and if, through discipline and widening knowledge, we may push back a little the frontiers which limit us, and assert the supremacy of soul over the material with which it is so intimately associated, we do even this slowly and at great cost and always in conformity with the laws of the matter we master.

There is a body of evidence here which can no more be ignored than gravitation, and we best dispose of association of personality with the material fabric of the body and the world of which it is a part, not by denying their mutual interdependence but by discovering therein the laws and methods of an infinite wisdom. Here are ministries through which we come to consciousness of ourselves, here are materials upon which we exercise our power, here are realities which hold us fast to normal and intelligible lives, here are masters whose rule is kind and servants whose obediences empower us. They condition our happinesses as well as our unhappinesses and supply for us the strings of that harp of the senses upon which the music of life is played. Life really gains its spiritual content through the action and interaction of the aspiring self upon its environment—whether that environment be intimate as the protest of a disturbed bodily cell or remote as Orion and the Pleiades.[39] The very words which Mrs. Eddy uses would be idle if this were not so and though a thoroughgoing defender of her system may read into its lines a permission for all this, the fundamentals of her system deny it.

Christian Science breaks down both philosophically and practically just here. It is none the less a dualism because it denies that it is. It confronts not one but two ranges of reality; it gains nothing by making mortal mind the villain in the play. It is compelled to admit the existence of the reality which it denies, even in the fact of denying it. What we deny exists for us—we could not otherwise deny it. Royce has put all this clearly, strongly, finally. "The mystic first denies that evil is real. He is asked why, then, evil seems to exist. He replies that this is our finite error. The finite error itself hereupon becomes, as the source of all our woes, an evil. But no evil is real, hence no error can be real, hence we do not really err even if we suppose that evil is real. Here we return to our starting point and could only hope to escape by asserting that it is an error to assert that we really err or that we really believe error to be real, and with a process thus begun there is indeed no end, nor at any stage in this process is there consistency."[40] All this is subtle enough, but if we are to make our world by thinking and unthinking it, all this is unescapably true.

[40] "The World and the Individual," Vol. II, p. 394.