"Science and Health" is offered, among other things, as a key to the Scriptures, and along with her interpretation of both the Old and the New Testaments in terms of her peculiar philosophy Mrs. Eddy rewrites the great articles of the Christian creeds. A careful student of Mrs. Eddy's mental processes is able in this region to understand them better than she understood them herself. She had, to begin with, an inherited reverence for the Bible as an authority for life and she shared with multitudes of others a difficulty to which reference has already been more than once made. For what one may call the typical Protestant consciousness the Bible is the final revelation of God, governing, if only we can come to understand it, both our faith and our conduct of life, but the want of a true understanding of it and, above all, the burdening of it with an inherited tradition has clouded its light for multitudes of devout souls.

Science and Health Offered as a Key to the Scriptures

Such as these have been almost pathetically eager to accept any interpretation, no matter how capricious, which seemed to read an intelligible meaning into its difficult passages, or reconcile its contradictions, or make it a more practical guide in the conduct of life. Any cult or theory, therefore, which can seem to secure for itself the authority of the Bible has obtained directly an immense reinforcement in its appeal to the devout and the perplexed, and Mrs. Eddy has taken full advantage of this. Her book is veined with Scripture references; two of her chapters are expositions of Biblical books (Genesis and Revelation); and other chapters deal with great doctrines of the Church.

It Ignores All Recognized Canons of Biblical Interpretation. Illustrations

Mrs. Eddy naturally sought the authority for her philosophy between the covers of the Scriptures. Beyond debate her teachings have carried much farther than they otherwise would, in that she claims for them a Scriptural basis, and they must be examined in that light. Now there are certain sound and universally recognized rules governing the scholarly approach to the Old and New Testaments. Words must be taken in their plain sense; they must be understood in their relation to their context. A book is to be studied also in the light of its history; the time and place and purpose of its composition, as far as these are known, must be considered; no changes made in the text save through critical emendation, nor any translations offered not supported by accepted texts, nor any liberties be taken with grammatical constructions. By such plain tests as these Mrs. Eddy's use of the Scriptures will not bear examination. She violates all recognized canons of Biblical interpretation on almost every page.[42]

Her method is wholly allegorical and the results achieved are conditioned only by the ingenuity of the commentator. It would require a body of citation from the pages of "Science and Health," not possible here, to follow through Mrs. Eddy's peculiar exegesis. One needs only to open the book at random for outstanding illustrations. For example, Genesis 1:6, "And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters." The word "firmament" has its own well established connotation gathered from a careful study of all its uses. We can no more understand the earlier chapters of Genesis without an understanding of Hebrew cosmogony than we can understand Dante without a knowledge of medieval cosmogony. But, given this knowledge which is the common possession of all sound scholarship, we can at least understand what the passage means, even though we have long left behind us the naÏve conception of the vaulted skies to which it refers.

All this is a commonplace not worth repeating at the cost of the white paper upon which it is printed, save as the ignoring of it leads to such an interpretation of the passage as that which Mrs. Eddy offers: "spiritual understanding by which human conception material mind is separated from Truth is the firmament. The Divine Mind, not matter, creates all identities and they are forms of Mind, the ideas of Spirit apparent only as Mind, never as mindless matter nor the so-called material senses" (page 505). Comment is not only difficult but impossible in the face of a method like this. If such an interpretation were an exception it might seem the unfair use of a hypercritical temper to quote this particular expression of Mrs. Eddy's mind. But her whole treatment of Scripture suffers from the same method.

Everything means something else. The Ark is "the idea, or reflection of truth, proved to be as immortal as its Principle." Babel is "self-destroying error"; baptism is "submergence in Spirit"; Canaan is "a sensuous belief"; Dan (Jacob's son) is "animal magnetism"; the dove is "a symbol of divine Science"; the earth is "a type of eternity and immortality"; the river Euphrates is "divine Science encompassing the universe and man"; evening "the mistiness of mortal thought"; flesh "an error, a physical belief"; Ham (Noah's son) is "corporeal belief"; Jerusalem "mortal belief and knowledge obtained from the five corporeal senses"; night, "darkness; doubt; fear"; a Pharisee, "corporeal and sensuous belief"; river is "a channel of thought"; a rock is "a spiritual foundation"; sheep are "innocence"; a sword "the idea of Truth."[43]

Mrs. Eddy does not hesitate to make such textual modifications of passages as suit her purpose and even when she is not dealing with her texts in such ways as these, she is constantly citing for her proofs passages which cannot by any recognized canon of interpretation possibly be made to mean what she says they mean. Beneath her touch simple things become vague, the Psalms lose their haunting beauty, even the Lord's Prayer takes a form which we may reverently believe the author of it would not recognize.

Its Conception of God

It was quite as inevitable that she should undertake to fit her speculations into the fabric of the theology in which she and most of her followers had been trained, as that she should try to secure for her speculation the weight of the authority of the Bible. She would have to take for her point of departure the centrality of Christ, the outstanding Christian doctrines, markedly the Incarnation and the Atonement and she would need somehow to dispose of the Sacraments. All this is inevitably implied in the persistent designation of her whole system as a Christian system.

The chapter headings in "Science and Health" and the sequence of chapters are the key to the movement of her mind; they are determined by her association of interests. Marriage is on the same level with Prayer, Atonement and the Eucharist, and Animal Magnetism with Science, Theology and Medicine. It is hard to know where to begin in so confused a region. She is handicapped, to begin with, by the rigidity of her idealism and actually by her limitation both of the power and personality of God. This statement would probably be as sharply contradicted by Mrs. Eddy's apologists as anything in this study, but it is not hastily made. Philosophically He is for Mrs. Eddy only an exalted ideality into relation with which we may think ourselves by a change in our system of belief. Actually, as we shall see, this conception yields to emotional and devotional needs—it is bound to—but in theory it is unyielding.

Now the accepted Christian conception of God is entirely different. Both the Old and New Testaments conceive a God who is lovingly and justly conscious of all our need, who is constantly drawing near to us in manifold appeals and approaches and who has, above all, in the Incarnation made a supreme and saving approach to humanity. He is no more rigid than love is rigid; His attitude toward us, His children, changes as the attitude of a father toward the changing tempers of a child. Now all this may be true or it may be only the dream of our strangely sensitive personalities, but whether it be true or not, it is the Christian conception and any denial of this or any radically different substitution for it cannot call itself Christian save as it writes into the word Christian connotations to which it has heretofore been utterly strange.

Mrs. Eddy's Interpretation of Jesus Christ

Mrs. Eddy begins, therefore, with the handicap of a philosophy which can be adjusted to Christian theology only through fundamental modifications of that theology. It is hard to systematize the result. Mrs. Eddy distinguishes between Jesus and Christ. Her conception of Jesus is reasonably clear whether it be historically true or not, but her conception of the Christ is vague and fluctuating. Jesus was apparently the first Christian Scientist, anticipating, though not completely, its philosophy and demonstrating its practices. His teachings are so interpreted as to be made to yield a Christian Science content. When He urged the commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" what He really meant was, "Thou shalt have no belief of Life as mortal; thou shalt not know evil, for there is one Life."[44] "He proved by His deeds that Christian Science destroys sickness, sin and death. Our Master taught no mere theory, doctrine or belief; it was the divine Principle of all real being which He taught and practiced."[45] "He taught His followers the healing power of Truth and Love"[46] and "the proofs of Truth, Life and Love which Jesus gave by casting out error and healing the sick, completed His earthly mission."[47] "The truth taught by Jesus the elders scoffed at because it demanded more than they were willing to practice."[48] They, therefore, crucified Him and He seemed to die, but He did not. Apparently He was not dead when He was entombed and His three days in the tomb gave Him "a refuge from His foes, a place in which to solve the great problem of being." In other words He demonstrated His own healing in the tomb. "He met and mastered, on the basis of Christian Science, the power of mind over matter, all the claims of medicine, surgery and hygiene. He took no drugs to allay inflammation; He did not depend upon food or pure air to resuscitate wasted energies; He did not require the skill of a surgeon to heal the torn palms and bind up the wounded side and lacerated feet, that He might use those hands to remove the napkin and winding sheet and that He might employ His feet as before."[49]

"His disciples believed Jesus to be dead while He was hidden in the sepulchre, whereas He was alive, demonstrating within the narrow tomb the power of the spirit to overrule mortal, material sense." His ascension was a final demonstration in which He "rose above the physical knowledge of His disciples and the material senses saw Him no more." He attained this perfection of demonstration only gradually and He left behind Him an incomplete revelation which was to wait for its full illumination for the coming of Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science. Perhaps more justly He left behind Him, according to Mrs. Eddy and her followers, a body of teaching which could not be clearly understood until she came to complete the revelation. At any rate, Christian Science is really His second coming.

Christian Science His Second Coming

In an advertisement printed in the New York Tribune on January 23, 1921, Augusta E. Stetson says: "Christ in Christian Science is come to the understanding of those who looked for His reappearing." And if certain sentences which follow mean anything, they mean that, in the thought of Mrs. Eddy's followers, she completes what Jesus began and fulfills the prophecy of His reappearing. "Her earthly experience runs parallel with that of her Master; understood in a small degree only by the few who faintly see and accept the truth, she stood during her earthly mission and now stands on the mount of spiritual illumination toward whose heights no feet but those of the blessed Master have so directly toiled, first in agony and finally, like Jesus Christ the masculine representative of the Fatherhood of God, she as the feminine representative of the motherhood of God, will appear in triumphant demonstration of divine power and glory as the combined ideal man in God's image and likeness."

And, indeed, there are not wanting intimations in "Science and Health" which give to Mrs. Eddy a certainty in this region which Jesus Himself did not possess. He falters where she firmly trod. No need to dwell upon the significant omissions which such an interpretation of the historic Jesus as this demands. The immensely laborious and painstaking scholarship which has sought, perplexedly enough it must be confessed, to discover behind the Gospel narratives the fundamental facts and realities of His life, is entirely ignored. Mrs. Eddy has no place for the social aspects of the teachings of Christ, indeed His whole system of ethic could be "blacked out"; as far as her teaching is concerned it would make absolutely no difference.

Mrs. Eddy distinguishes, in theory at least though there is no consistency in her use of terms, between Jesus and the Christ. "Jesus is the human man, and Christ is the divine idea; hence the duality of Jesus, the Christ" (page 473). "Jesus is the name of the man who, more than all other men, has presented Christ, the true idea of God, healing the sick and the sinning and destroying the power of death" (page 473). "In an age of ecclesiastical despotism, Jesus introduced the teaching and practice of Christianity ... but to reach His example and test its unerring Science according to His rule, ... a better understanding of God as divine Principle, Love, rather than personality or the man Jesus, is required" (page 473).

It is difficult enough to know just what this means, but as one stands far enough back from it all it seems to reduce Jesus historically to the first outstanding Christian Science teacher and healer. "Jesus established what He said by demonstration, thus making His acts of higher importance than His words. He proved what He taught. This is the Science of Christianity. Jesus proved the Principle, which heals the sick and casts out error, to be divine" (page 473). He is, therefore, historically of chiefest value as the demonstrator of Christian Science, the full philosophy of which apparently awaited a later revelation.

"Christ is the ideal Truth, that comes to heal sickness and sin through Christian Science, and attributes all power to God" (page 473). "He unveiled the Christ, the spiritual idea of divine Love" (page 38). The Christ of Christian Science, then, is an ideal Truth, a spiritual idea, apparently an abstraction. But Mrs. Eddy is not consistent in her use of these two names. On one page Christ is "the spiritual idea of divine Love"; on the next page "we need Christ and Him crucified" (page 39), though how an ideal truth or a spiritual idea could possibly be crucified we are not told. In many of her passages Mrs. Eddy uses the familiar phrase, Jesus Christ, in apparently its ordinary connotations.

The Incarnation: Christian Theology and Christian Science Belong Really to Different Regions

The Incarnation is disposed of in the same vague way. "Those instructed in Christian Science have reached the glorious perception that God is the only author of man. The virgin mother conceived this idea of God and gave to her ideal the name of Jesus."[50] "The illumination of Mary's spiritual sense put to silence material law and its order of generation, and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth. The Holy Ghost, or divine Spirit, overshadowed the pure sense of the Virgin-mother with the full recognition that being is Spirit."[51] "Jesus was the offspring of Mary's self-conscious communion with God."[52] Now all this is neither honest supernaturalism nor the honest acceptance of the normal methods of birth. It is certainly not the equivalent of the Gospel account whether the Gospel account be accepted or rejected. To use a phrase which has come into use since "Science and Health" was written, this is a "smoke screen" under cover of which Mrs. Eddy escapes the necessity of either accepting or denying the testimony of the Gospels.

Something of this, one must confess, one may find in not a little religious teaching old and new, but it is doubtful if there is anywhere so outstanding an instance of what one may call the smoke screen method in the consideration of the Incarnation, as in the passages just quoted. As a matter of fact all this is simply the attempt to fit the idealistic dualism, which is the real philosophic basis of Christian Science and which, in so far as it is capable of explanation at all, can be as easily explained in two pages as two hundred, into the theology in which Mrs. Eddy was nurtured and which was a background common to both herself and her disciples. Christian Science would carry far less weight in the race it is running if it frankly cut itself clear of a theology with which it has fundamentally no affinity. This indoctrination of an idealistic dualism with a content of Christian theology probably heightens the appeal of the system to those who are most at home in a new faith as they discover there the familiar phrases of their older faith, but it weakens the fundamental Christian Science apologetic. I think, however, we ought justly to recognize this as simply an inevitable aspect in the transition of Christian Science from the orthodox faith and experience of historic Christianity to a faith and experience of its own.

Seen as a curious half-truth development made possible by a whole group of forces in action at the end of the nineteenth century, Christian Science is reasonably intelligible, but as a system of doctrine built upon the hitherto accepted bases of Christian fact and teaching, it is not intelligible at all and the long controversy between the Christian theologian and the Christian Science lecturer would best be ended by recognizing that they have so little in common as to make attack and counter-attack a movement in two different dimensions. The one thing which they have in common is a certain set of words and phrases, but these words and phrases have such entirely different meanings on the one side and the other as to make the use of them hopelessly misleading.

The Atonement. The Cross of Christian Science and the Cross of Theology

There are passing references to the Cross in "Science and Health," but the word is used generally in a figurative and sentimental way. Mrs. Eddy's cross is simply the pain of being misunderstood and criticised in the preaching and practice of Christian Science, though indeed the Cross of Jesus was also the outcome of hostilities and misunderstandings and a final and terribly fierce method of criticism. One feels that mainly she is thinking of her own cross as a misunderstood and abused woman and for such suggestion she prefers the Cup as a figure to the Cross. As for the Atonement "every pang of repentance and suffering, every effort for reform, every good thought and deed will help us to understand Jesus' Atonement for sin and aid its efficacy."[53] "Wisdom and Love require many sacrifices of self to save us from sin." All this seems to be in line with the moral theory of the atonement until we see that in such a line as this there is no recognition of the fact that again and again we suffer and that largely for others, and when she adds that "Its [the atonement] scientific explanation is that suffering is an error of sinful sense which Truth destroys, and that eventually both sin and suffering will fall at the feet of everlasting love" (page 23), those passages cancel one another, for if suffering be "an error of sinful sense" it is hard to see how any pang of it can help us to understand Jesus' atonement unless His suffering be also "an error of sinful sense," and this is to reduce the atonement to a like error.

In another connection Mrs. Eddy finds the efficacy of the Crucifixion "in the practical affection and goodness it demonstrated for mankind." But this turns out to be nothing more than that the Crucifixion offers Christ a needed opportunity for the instruction of His disciples to triumph over the grave. But since in another connection we are told He never died at all (chapter Atonement and Eucharist, paragraph "Jesus in the tomb") even this dissolves into unreality. Moreover the "eternal Christ in His spiritual selfhood never suffered."[54] Whichever road she takes here Mrs. Eddy reaches an impasse. It ought to be said, in justice to Mrs. Eddy, that her treatment of the atonement reflects the difficulty she found in the theology in which she had been trained as a girl and that there are many true insights in her contentions. She was at least seeking a vital and constructive interpretation and doubtless her observations, confused as they are, have been for her followers a real way out of a real difficulty. Here, as in so many other regions, "Science and Health" is best understood by its backgrounds.

As a matter of fact there is in Christian Science absolutely no soil in which to plant the Cross as the Cross is understood in Christian theology. There is no place in Christian Science for vicarious atonement, whether by God or man; there is little place in Christian Science for redemptive suffering; there is a rather narrow region in which suffering may be considered as instructive, a guide, perhaps, to lead us out of unhappy or shadowed regions into the regions of physical and, maybe, spiritual and moral well-being, and to quench the love of sin.[55] Mrs. Eddy sometimes speaks of Christ as the Saviour but if her system be pressed to a logical conclusion she must empty the word of all the associations which it has hitherto had and make it simply the equivalent of a teacher or demonstrator.

Sin an Error of Mortal Mind

Sin along with sickness and death are the projections of mortal error, the creations of mortal mind; sin, sickness and death are to be classified as effects of error. Christ came "to destroy the belief of sin." All this is to root sin simply in the mind. No intimation at all here of the part which a perverted will may play in the entanglements of life; no intimation of the immense force of the emotional side of life; no intimation here of the immense part which sheer selfishness plays. Mrs. Eddy's sin is far too simple. There is, once more, a sound reason for that. Mrs. Eddy is twice-born, if you will, but the struggle from which she finally emerged with whatever measure of victory she attained was not fought out with conscience as the field of battle, or in the final reconciliation of a divided self finding unity and peace on some high level.

If Mrs. Eddy's true struggle was of the soul and not of complaining nerves she has left no record of it anywhere. It was rather the reaction of a speculative mind against the New England theology. Her experience is strangely remote from the experience of Saul of Tarsus, or Augustine, or John Bunyan. This is not to deny that in the practical outcome of Christian Science as evidenced in the life of its adherents there is not a very real power of helpful moral adjustment, but the secret of that must be sought in something else than either its philosophy or its theology. Christian theologians themselves have been by no means agreed as to what sin really is. Under their touch it became too often a theological abstraction rather than entanglement of personality caught in manifold urgencies and pulled this way and that by competing forces battling in the will and flaming in passion and desire. But a sin which has no reality save through a mistaken belief in its existence is certainly as far from the fact of a world like ours as is a sin which is only one factor in a scheme of redemption.

But at any rate, if sin have no reality except our mistaken persuasion that it be true and if we are delivered from it directly we cease to believe in it and affirm in the stead of it the reality of love and goodness, then while there may be in such a faith as this both the need and possibility of the recasting of our personal lives, there is in it neither need nor possibility of the Christian doctrine of the atonement. Naturally since man is incapable of sin, sickness and death, he is unfallen, nor is "his capacity or freedom to sin any part of the divine plan." "A mortal sinner is not God's man. Mortals are the counterfeits of immortals; they are the children of the wicked one, or the one evil which declares that man begins in dust or as a material embryo" (page 475).

Here also is an echo from an early time and a far-off land. It is not likely that Mrs. Eddy ever heard of Mani or Manicheeism, or knew to what a travail of soul St. Augustine was reduced when he fought his way through just a kindred line of teaching which, to save God from any contact with or responsibility for evil, affirmed our dual genesis and made us on one side children of darkness and on the other the children of light, without ever really trying to achieve in a single personality any reconciliation of two natures drawn from two entirely different sources. Nor does Mrs. Eddy know that one Eusebius, finding much evidence of this faith in the Christianity of the fourth century, dismissed it briefly enough as "an insane heresy." Heresy it certainly was for all those who were fighting their way out of their paganism into an ordered Christian faith and whether it be insane or no, it is of all the explanations which have been offered for the presence of evil in a world supposedly ruled by the love and goodness of God, the one which will least bear examination. It has been dead and buried these thousand years.

We may deny, if we are so minded, any freedom of the will at all, so involving ourselves in an inevitable sequence of cause and effect as to make us also simply weather-vanes driven east or west by winds of inheritance and environment which we have no power to deflect and to which we can only choose to respond. But to deny us the freedom to sin and so to shut us up to a determinism of goodness is no more in accord with the facts than to deny us the power to be good and shut us up to a determinism of sin. If we are free at all we are free in all directions.

The Sacraments Disappear. Mrs. Eddy's Theology a Reaction from the Rigid Evangelicism of Her Youth

"Science and Health" deals in the same radical way with the sacraments. Nothing at all, apparently, is made of baptism save that Mrs. Eddy says our baptism is a purification from all error. In her account of the Last Supper the cup is mostly dwelt upon and that only as showing forth the bitter experience of Jesus. The bread "is the great truth of spiritual being, healing the sick" and the breaking of it the "explaining" it to others. More is made of what is called the last spiritual breakfast with the Disciples by Lake Galilee than of the Last Supper in the upper room. "This spiritual meeting with our Lord in the dawn of a new light is the morning meal which Christian Scientists commemorate" (page 35). "Our bread," she says, "which cometh down from heaven, is Truth; our wine, the inspiration of Love" (page 35). All this is of a piece with the general allegorical use of the Old and New Testaments in "Science and Health," but it is a marked departure from the sacrament of the Lord's Supper even in the simple memorial way in which it is kept by non-liturgical churches.

Mrs. Eddy's theology, then, is in part a reaction from the hard phrasing of the evangelical doctrines in which she was trained and it is indeed in part a reaching out toward the interpretation of these doctrines in terms of life and experience, but as a theology it is extraordinarily loose and even though the familiar phrases of Protestant and Catholic faiths are employed, what is left is wholly out of the current of the main movement of Christian theology heretofore. The central articles of the historic creeds practically disappear under Mrs. Eddy's treatment.

Here, then, is a philosophy which will not bear examination, a use of Scripture which can possibly have no standing in any scholarly fellowship, and a theology which empties the central Christian doctrines of the great meanings which have heretofore been associated with them. And yet in spite of all this, Christian Science gets on and commends itself to so considerable a number of really sincere people as to make it evident enough that it must have some kind of appealing and sustaining power. Where, then, is the hiding of its power? Partly, of course, in its spaciousness. There are times when a half-truth has a power which the whole truth does not seem to possess. Half truths can be accepted unqualifiedly; they are capable of a more direct appeal and if they be skillfully directed toward needs and perplexities they are always sure of an acceptance; they make things too simple, that is one secret of their hold upon us. This, of course, is more largely true among the spiritually undisciplined and the mentally untrained, but even the wisest folk find it easier upon occasion to accept a half truth which promises an easy satisfaction or deliverance than a whole truth which needs to be wrestled with and may be agonized over before it brings us into some better estate.

The Real Power of Christian Science is in Neither Its Philosophy Nor Its Theology

We have already seen what predisposing influences there were in the breaking down of what we have called the accepted validations of historic Christianity—due, as we have seen also, to many contributing causes—to offer unusual opportunity to any new movement which promised deliverance. But one must seek the conditions which have made possible so many strange cults and movements in America, not only in the breakdown of the historic faiths, but also in the state of popular education. Democracy tends, among other things, to lead us to value a movement by the number of people whom it is able to attract. We are, somehow, persuaded that once a majority has accepted anything, what they have accepted must be true and right. Even a strong minority always commands respect. Any movement, therefore, which succeeds in attracting a considerable number of followers is bound to attract others also, just because it has already attracted so many. One has only to listen to the current comment on Christian Science to feel that this is a real factor in its growth.

Democracy believes in education, but has not commonly the patience to make education thoroughgoing. Its education is very much more likely to be a practical or propaganda education than such training as creates the analytical temper and supplies those massive backgrounds by which the departures of a day are always to be tested. In America particularly there is an outstanding want of background. It needs history, philosophy, economic understanding and a wealth of racial experience to give to any people either the power to quickly discriminate between the truth and the half-truth, or to carry itself with poise through a transitional period. But one may not dispose of the distinct hold of Christian Science upon its followers by such generalizations. The real inwardness of no religion can ever be known from its theology. A sincere devotion may attend a most deficient theology and we need to be charitable in judging the forms which other people's faith takes. What seems unreasonable to one may seem quite right to another and whatever carries a sincere faith deepening into a positive spiritual experience accomplishes for the moment its purpose. These studies of Christian Science are severe—for one must deal with it as honestly as he knows how—but the writer does not mean that they should fail in a due recognition of the spiritual sincerity of Christian Scientists. We must therefore go in to what is most nearly vitally central in the system to find the real secret of its powers. It continues and grows as a system of healing and a religion.