In order thoroughly to understand Christian Science, it is necessary to understand Mary Baker Eddy. Hence, I have found it necessary, reluctantly, to give a brief account of some of the important events of her life. Should these events show her to be a mercenary, selfish woman, it would tend to explain a great deal that she and her followers have failed to explain.

Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, was born the year that Napoleon died, 1821. In her younger days, she lived in an atmosphere of mysticism. Mesmerism was everywhere in evidence, and much had been said about "Animal Magnetism," "Power of Mind over Matter," "the Shakers," "Faith Healing," etc., long before Mrs. Eddy had thought or heard of these things. She married George W. Glover in 1842, who died the following year, leaving Mrs. Eddy a widow at twenty-three. From that time until about 1870, Mrs. Eddy lived a sad and sordid life of ill health, poverty and unhappiness. In 1853, she had married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist, but this proved an unhappy union and they were much separated, and finally divorced. During all this time she had drifted from one place to another, wearing out her welcome at every place she went, and usually leaving each place after having caused family discord in the household. She was practically an invalid during this period, which may account for her peevishness, ill-temper, domestic selfishness, and want of consideration for those who had befriended her.

In 1862, being then forty-one years old and a nervous wreck, and attracted by the stories of wonderful cures by Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Mrs. Eddy visited that famous occultrist at Portland, Maine. Dr. Quimby had learned much of his philosophy, and all of his mesmeric tricks, from Charles Poyen, whom he had followed about from place to place. About three years before Mrs. Eddy called on him, Quimby had perfected his system of mental healing and had reduced it to writing, having discarded the mesmeric part of it. Various disinterested persons are still living who have given reliable testimony to these facts, as also to the following: (1) When Mrs. Eddy first visited Quimby she was a physical wreck; (2) After three weeks' treatment from Quimby she was a well woman; (3) She borrowed, and had in her possession for a long time, a copy of Quimby's manuscripts; (4) She never gave Quimby credit for one bit of her "Discovery"; and even went so far as to abuse him for the rest of her life.

Please remember the dates: Mrs. Eddy first called on Quimby in 1862. In February, 1866, she slipped on an icy sidewalk and sustained a severe nervous shock. On the same day she called on Dr. A. M. Cushing for medical treatment. Dr. Cushing says she continued to take his medicines until she was cured. Mrs. Eddy denies that she took any of the medicines after the first visit, and says that she cured herself in a miraculous way and rose as one from the dead, and that she depended solely on God. Yet, she called on this same Dr. Cushing the following August to be treated for a cough!

During these days it is known that she spent much of her time writing, and reading the New York Ledger, and, if we are to believe what she wrote to a friend, she also read "Irving's Pickwick Papers." She apparently did not like Dickens.

In 1869 (please note the date) she taught Mrs. Wentworth the Quimby theory for the sum of $300, to be taken out in board, and at that time she made no pretense that it was her own theory. She even permitted Mrs. Wentworth to copy from a manuscript which has been proven to be identical with the original Quimby manuscript. Several witnesses testify that she "talked Quimby till every one grew dead tired of hearing him," and she often remarked: "I learned this from Dr. Quimby, and he made me promise to teach it to at least two persons before I die." It is also known that Mrs. Eddy "shrank instinctively, like any other nervous woman, from the sick-bed of others, and had shown such a morbid fear of death that Mrs. Wentworth often wondered what there could be in her past to make death seem so dreadful."

Mrs. Eddy did not practice healing. What she now wanted was to publish and teach Quimbyism and to find some one to demonstrate the healing theory. In 1870 she found just what she wanted in the person of Richard Kennedy, with whom she went into partnership, and in six months they had made $6,000. This was the sharp turning point of her life. She now discarded Quimby forever, and her ambitions led her in time to discard even Kennedy, her greatest benefactor. Everything was now Mrs. Eddy. She next started a school or college where students paid her $100 each plus a promise to pay her a life annuity of ten per cent. of all their future earnings. She also made them give a bond for $3,000 which was to be forfeited if they allowed any one to see or to copy the manuscripts that she lent them. The college so prospered that she raised the price to $300 for twelve lessons, induced, she says, "by a strange providence."

In 1877, at the age of fifty-six (although her age appears as forty in the marriage license), she married Asa Gilbert Eddy, then forty years old. He was "a man willing to be taught; he would even turn docility into self-effacement." He died five years later. Even Mrs. Eddy could not save him. Mrs. Eddy never had another husband, but "in Calvin A. Frye, steward, bookkeeper, secretary, coachman, her 'man of all work,'" as she herself called him, she has had the while one singularly devoted to her and to her interests. To serve her he gave up all at the outset. Family ties were relinquished. Friendships were allowed to languish. It is said that never since the day he came, has he been beyond the reach of her voice for a whole day! A few years ago Dr. E. J. Foster, whom she adopted in 1882 as her son, was driven out of his home by Frye. Her own son she seems to have forgotten entirely for long years at a time.

In 1875, Mrs. Eddy issued the first edition of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures." Other editions came out in 1881, 1883, 1888, 1898, 1905, and 1906, and also other books and writings by the same author, in all of which she claimed that her great discovery and revelation came to her in 1866 (note the date). Meanwhile her college was prospering and students flocked to it from all parts of the world, each paying $300 for a three weeks' course, and in 1889 there were no less than 300 on the waiting list. In 1894 she erected a building at a cost of $221,000, which now stands as a frontispiece to the colossal temple which was completed in 1906 at a cost of $2,000,000. The Mother Church in Boston reported June 11, 1907, a membership of 43,876, and the total membership of the 645 branch churches was 42,846.

On December 18, 1890, Mrs. Eddy said that Science and Health was "God's Book and He gave it at once to the people." Yet the book was sold by Mrs. Eddy for over $3 a copy, while a copy of the Bible may be bought for a few cents, and if anybody cannot buy it, he can get a copy presented to him free by any preacher or Sunday School teacher. Mrs. Eddy also says that it pays to be a Christian Scientist and that the professionals have made "their comfortable fortunes." When Mrs. Eddy died, her private fortune was considerably in excess of a million dollars, yet she persistently tried to evade paying her share of taxes.

This in brief is the life history of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. Her's was a stormy career, filled with troubles, quarrels, lawsuits, internal dissentions, fears, revenge, ill health, sorrows, unhappy marriages, rivalries, disloyalties, and selfishness. She had many thousands to admire and to worship her, but few to love her. Those who knew her best loved her least. That she was one of the most remarkable women who ever lived, few will doubt. Her career is almost as spectacular as that of Joan of Arc, who, like Mrs. Eddy, rose from a poor girl to be a world-famous leader of men. Neither had anything like an education, and both had a poor start in life, but, out of sheer force of personality and persistency, both accomplished wonders. Their lives read like fiction. While history is full of examples where men have risen from nowhere, and claimed that they were inspired, or Divine, or Sons of God, or prophets, there is no parallel to the career of Mrs. Eddy, who has won both the scholar and the ignoramus. No, not ignoramus, for the ignoramus is not the kind to fall a victim to Mrs. Eddy's doctrine. It requires a person of brains to "grasp" it. While it is true that people unschooled in philosophy, science and theology are quickest to accept Science and Health, and that those who read earnestly and think loosely can get just enough glimpse of an imagined something that they cannot quite grasp, yet which they feel is there somewhere, still, it must be said that the average Christian Scientist is generally a person of unusual intelligence. Were it not so, the doctrine would never have become so popular. Was it not Lord Bacon who said something like this?—"While a little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, depth in philosophy inclineth men's minds to religion." And so with Christian Science. Given a good mind, and a good understanding, and an investigating disposition, feed it Science and Health and it will have a tendency to accept it as truth, provided it is not allowed to hear the other side, and provided it has not been previously trained to reason correctly along scientific lines. There is just enough truth in it to make it all sound plausible and there is just enough mysticism to make the mind doubt its own acumen. Belief in Christian Science is a form of intellectual hypnotism.

The hypothesis of Mrs. Eddy's doctrine is stated as follows: "The only realities are the Divine Mind and its ideas. That erring mortal views, misnamed mind, produce all the organic and animal action of the mortal body * * * Rightly understood, instead of possessing sentient matter, we have sensationless bodies * * * Whence came to me this conviction in antagonism to the testimony of the human senses? From the self-evident fact that matter has no sensation; from the common human experience of the falsity of all material things; from the obvious fact that mortal mind is what suffers, feels, sees; since matter cannot suffer."

Here are a few of Mrs. Eddy's favorite, oft-repeated assertions: "God is supreme; is mind; is principle, not person; includes all and is reflected by all that is real and eternal; is Spirit, and Spirit is infinite; is the only substance; is the only life. Man was and is the idea of God; therefore mind can never be in man. Divine Science shows that matter and mortal body are the illusions of human belief, which seem to appear and disappear to mortal sense alone. When this belief changes, as in dreams, the material body changes with it, going wherever we wish, and becoming whatsoever belief may decree. Human mortality proves that error has been engrafted into both the dreams and conclusions of material and mortal humanity. Besiege sickness and death with these principles, and all will disappear."

This theory, that there is no reality except thought, is merely a distinctive form of idealism that is as old as the hills, and Mrs. Eddy's doctrine is the resultum of a confusion of isolated thoughts. Read Plato, Hegel, Democritus, the Zend-Avesta, Spinoza, Kant, Bishop Berkeley, Lotze, Hume, and various other works and you will find the threads from which Mrs. Eddy's fabric is woven. But don't imagine that the philosophers named ever believed any such things as Mrs. Eddy has laid down in her books. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists speak of the supremacy of mind over matter, and all modern physicians recognize the power of the mind over the body; but none of these ever maintained that the discovery of those facts was made by Divine revelation by order of God, to be given to the people at a certain time, at so much per lesson or book.

Mrs. Eddy says that the one reality is God, whose name is Mind or Spirit; that God is All-in-all; that all is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestations; that matter is unknown in the Universe of Mind. Now, if we take all this as mere speculation, all is well. But when we are asked to make these ideas our Bible, our code of human conduct, our bread and butter, our Divine law, that is where we should stop. What matter if all of that is true or false? The world will go around just the same. If Mrs. Eddy had stopped right there, she would not have invited such a storm of criticism as she had to face. But she did not. The critics began their deadly work soon after the first edition of her book came out, and she met it courageously, proceeding to amend her theories to suit the occasion. Constant and frequent changes were made in Science and Health and in her teachings, which was all right except that it disproves her contention that the whole plan came to her as a revelation in 1866, and that it was "God's book and He gave it at once to the people." It really makes but little difference to most of us whether Mrs. Eddy is right in her theory that there is no such thing as matter and that all is spirit, for we are all compelled to act every day as if matter were matter, and, to all intents and purposes, it is. Of course, we are glad to have the truth, but it would be idiotic for a man, who had discovered that there is no such thing as sound, to try to persuade the world that his discovery was so important that a new system of religion must at once be founded on it to regulate the daily affairs of the whole world. Some of the truths in Christian Science are important, but it does not follow that we are to discard all our other religions, beliefs, and modes of living; for Christian Science is only a speculation, and it does not concern most of us. It rightly is no more a religion than is the theory of evolution, which, by the way, Mrs. Eddy did not seem to understand, for she said: "Theorizing about man's development from mushrooms to monkeys and from monkeys to men, amounts to nothing in the right direction, and very much in the wrong."

Mrs. Eddy says that "God is not in the things He hath made"; and, in the next breath she says that since things are matter, and that there is no matter, then there can be no things. In her final revelation of 1866, expressed in 1875, she says that "God is Principle, not person"; yet later, in a later final revelation she says that "Life, Truth, and Love constitute the triune person called God." Again, she says, "Jesus is the human man and Christ is the divine, hence the duality of Jesus, the Christ." And, in 1894, and at other times, she has stated quite plainly that she and Christ were one and the same.

Be all this as it may, Christian Science rests mainly on the hypothesis that sin, sickness, disease and death are not real—that they exist only in thought; that Christian Science can remedy these seeming evils. Had it not been for the curing and healing part of the doctrine, Christian Science would never have become the fad that it has. All the rest of the doctrine would have been looked on merely as an interesting speculation, had not Mrs. Eddy injected the claim that Christian Science cured everything—that it cured even sin as well as suffering. Here, then, was something to interest everybody, and she made the invitation all the more desirable when she added that doctors were "flooding the world with diseases," that the fewer the doctors, the less disease the world would suffer from, and that "as long as you read medical books you will be sick." We all know of thousands of cases where doctors have been of great assistance to humanity, and we know, too, of many serious medical mistakes. We all know that medicine has been much overworked, yet we must all admit that doctors and medicine have made this world vastly better and more healthful. But what has Christian Science done? Mrs. Eddy failed to give to the world the complete, authenticated record of one single case of disease that she cured. True, she said that she had cured certain diseases, but we are left in the dark as to whether they were diseases or what they were. She refused to have medical tests made. She even announced that she had no time to give personal treatments and consultations. At that time she was busy teaching, at $300 a pupil. Besides, according to her theory, there was no such thing as a body, or disease, or pain. She doubts even that Jesus suffered pain on the cross, although the Bible says that He cried out in pain. Either Jesus did suffer pain, or He falsely made those around Him think that He did, and we know that He was incapable of deception. Yet, Jesus Christ and Mrs. Eddy are one and the same.

Christian Science seeks to eliminate pain, whereas most physicians recognize pain as a blessing. It is a danger signal. It warns us of decay, of disease, and of disorders. Were it not for pain, we would allow our teeth to decay, our eyesight to be impaired, and various other organs to degenerate. When we live wrongly, or eat too much, or overtax our powers, Nature warns us to halt, but Christian Science says there is no such thing as suffering, discomfort and pain, except in our imagination.

And thus we could go on for hours pointing out the inconsistencies of Mrs. Eddy's theories, but a short article like this will not permit. Take for example her statement that "Science can heal the sick who are absent from the healers, as well as those present, since space is no obstacle to mind"; and the assertion that "Christian Science divests material drugs of their imaginary power * * * When the sick recover by the use of drugs, it is the law of a general belief, culminating in individual faith that heals, and according to this faith will the effect be"; and "The not uncommon notion that drugs possess absolute, inherent curative virtues of their own involves an error. Arnica, quinine, opium, could not produce the effects ascribed to them except by imputed virtue. Men think they will act thus on the physical system, consequently they do." Does anybody doubt that if the writer of those words walked into a drugstore blindfolded and, unseen by anybody, drank opium, not knowing what it was, she would not immediately feel the effects of that drug? And that if she took any other drug, the effects would not be about the same as they are known to be in practically all cases? Yet who would say, under those circumstances, that Mind has endowed those drugs with the powers to act on the system as they do? If Mind can so act, medicine is just what we want, for Mind can be made to make drugs do even greater things than they have yet done, perhaps to raise the dead.

But why go to greater length to point out the fallacies of this fad that is nothing more than a superstition founded on a truth. Science and Health is simply words, words, words. It is a tangled mass of assembled philosophy from various sources that has but little practical value. That mind, suggestions and imagination have great influence over the body nobody will deny, but nobody but Mrs. Eddy ever attempted to form a religion out of that old fact. Science and Health is founded on the Bible, and pretends to be a key to it. It is a "key," but it is one that breaks and distorts rather than opens. It is an interpretation, and it treats the Book as if it were a puzzle that God left unsolved until He inspired Mrs. Eddy to reveal its secrets, after having kept it from the world for nearly 2,000 years. From the standpoint of a promoter, Mrs. Eddy was wise in calling her doctrine Christian Science and in founding it on the Bible. That many have been helped by Christian Science nobody will deny, but the same can be said of a hundred other theories and beliefs, some of which are admittedly absurd. Some people can be cured with sugar pills and some by an Indian medicineman. Christian Science contains much that is true and good, and much that is false and bad, and perhaps the harm that it has done may not outweigh the good. Nobody knows. Those who get pleasure and satisfaction and peace out of it should not be disturbed, but they should be warned not to let it run away with them.

The Epicureans handed down to us some questions which have never been quite satisfactorily answered, except by the Christian Scientists—who are quite satisfied with their answer. If God is able to prevent evil, and is not willing, where is His benevolence? If God is willing, but not able, where is His power? If God is both able and willing, whence then is evil? The Scientists say there is no evil, and that settles the whole question. The blind man sees nothing. The Occulist teaches us to see: the Scientist teaches us not to see. Excellent thought! When the thief comes, we close our eyes, and lo! we do not see him, for he is not there—and when we open our eyes, nothing else is there.

Consider for a moment the folly of holding that sickness, pain and disease are products of the mind, and that they have no real existence. To say this is to declare that there are no germs and microbes; and to declare that mind causes disease and death is to upset the whole accepted theory of creation and of evolution. Are not animals affected by disease as well as man? If so, who would say that their meager minds could cause it? and if it be said that human minds caused it, how about the millions of animals who suffered pain, disease and death thousands of years before man ever appeared upon earth? Does the Scientist know that there are hundreds of different kinds of microbes, fighting and combatting one another, that the big fish are eating the little ones, that if there were no microbes there could be no putrefaction and that if there were no putrefaction there could be no breaking down of the dead bodies of animals and plants, and that the earth would be encumbered with the dead bodies of these animals and plants of past generations, and that very soon all the organic elements—all the carbon and nitrogen, if not all the hydrogen and oxygen—on the face of the earth would be fixed in these corpses and that all life would perish for want of sustenance? In short, germs and death are just as important, and just as inevitable, as joy and life.

The Christian Scientists, New Thoughtists and other dreamy faddists, who would eliminate all death, sorrow, pain and suffering, by bringing heaven to earth all in a day, are respectfully introduced to a paragraph from John Ploughman: "There is a sound reason why there are bones in our meat and stones in our land. A world where everything was easy would be a nursery for babies, but not at all a fit place for men. Celery is not sweet till it has felt a frost, and men don't come to their perfection till disappointment has dropped a half-hundred weight or two on their toes. Who would know good horses if there were no heavy loads?"