A GREAT "METAPHYSICAL" NOVEL.

As shown by our last chapter, Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Eddy, whatever divine attributes may have perched upon her, has been endowed with some very human qualities. But in one gift she has been strangely lacking—a good memory. For, in spite of her association with Dr. P. P. Quimby, his renovation of her broken system, and all the mellifluous prose and poetry she devoted to him in his day, the fruitful "mother," "discoverer," and "founder" of "Christian Science," when she came to set up her new religion, entirely forgot that her old friend, Quimby, was the real suggestion of her whole Shekinah. She not only failed to mention the fact, but she has been so miraculously forgetful, ever since, as to repudiate her own record of it, and to attempt the obliteration of it from sacred and profane history.

Mother Eddy's lack of memory, however, has had its plenary compensation. Her imagination has more than made up for it. The surcharge of this illimitable faculty has enabled her to produce one of the greatest works of fiction ever conceived on earth, or possible to any other planet. This arch-angelic romance, dimly and very distantly founded on fact, bears the esoteric title of Retrospection and Introspection. It is not in the usual form of a novel, but was evaporated by Mrs. Eddy as her corporal and spiritual biography, after she had dropped Dr. Quimby from her powers of research, and had built up her grand theological and financial industry, "Christian Science." From an attentive reading of this personally conducted and authorized volume, we know the light in which the hallowed lady wishes to appear, and we know a good deal more if we read between the lines.

At eight years of age—if we can only credit true piety hitched up with lost memory—a heaven-selected little girl, Mary Baker, "repeatedly heard a voice," calling her "distinctly by name, three times in an ascending scale." At first she thought it was a human voice; but in due season—for the call came many times—she, her mother and her cousin, Mehitable Huntoon, learned better. Then her mother read to her the Hebrew story of little Samuel, and advised her to respond to the voice, saying, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." Finally the chosen virgin took this advice, whereupon the voice "came no more" to her "material senses." Its mission had been fulfilled.

Such is the opening legend told to the marines of the Church Scientist, in that juicy book, Retrospection and Introspection.[17]

Still, in these days of "Spiritual manifestations," the numerous believers in messages from "the summer land" would account, in a quite simple way, for the voices calling little Hebrew Samuel and little New-England Mary. But not so Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy. "Am I a believer in Spiritualism?" she asks. "I believe in no ism.... As I understand it Spiritualism is the antipode of Christian Science."[18]

Ah, it was no voice of common, finite spirit, that came to the high and mighty founder of an "absolutely scientific religion." So there is but one conclusion she gives us to draw: the voice was directly the voice of God. The Infinite and Omniscient, the All-in-All, spake to the girl of nine years, as a miraculous call to her divine work. At that time, she tells us, her father thought her "brain" was "too large for her body."[19] The old gentleman was doubtless right. It looks, too, as if the brain of his blessed daughter, with the entire head containing it, has been rapidly enlarging ever since.

From the metaphysical adventures of Saint Mary Baker, as told in her Retrospection and Introspection,[20] we find that when twelve years old she was admitted to the "Orthodox Church" of New England, though she declined to accept the doctrine of predestination—a doctrine which so troubled her that a doctor was called, who pronounced her "stricken with fever." It is told of Martin Luther that when a theological student once came to him half-crazy over the same doctrine, the doughty reformer ordered him to go and get "well drunk." In the case of Robert Ingersoll, his soul could only find relief from the tenet by such hard swearing that it brought him peace. But we are assured by our divine lady of the "Church Scientist" that she took the better as well as the usual course prescribed for such trials. She "wrestled in prayer." For she felt sure that the Creator of the Universe, who had once descended in person and spoken to her by name, could not fail to possess the faculty of hearing and the usefulness of help. Behold it was so! Instantly the fever was gone and health was restored. "The physician marveled," she says, and John Calvin "lost his power."

In 1878 Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy was called to preach at the Baptist Tabernacle of Boston. The congregation increased beyond the capacity of the pews, and it was no uncommon occurrence for the sick to be healed by her sermons. Cancers were cured, and "many pale cripples went into the church, leaning on crutches, who went out carrying them on their shoulders." Mrs. Eddy says so.[21]

By the same authority—in her Retrospection and Introspection—it is stated that her "Science of Divine Metaphysical Healing," otherwise "Christian Science," was "discovered" by her in 1866. The day and date are not given. But it was some time after February 15th; for at that time one Mary M. Patterson was occupied in putting on poetic mourning for Dr. P. P. Quimby, and in begging Mr. Julius A. Dresser to visit Lynn and heal an injury to her back from a fall on the ice.

It is not well to wear mourning too long. In the spring of 1866 it must have occurred to Mrs. Eddy that weeds of poetry would not pay, and she hustled them off. Dr. Quimby having gone "to heaven" and slipped out of a decayed memory, his obituary poetess just then realized that she had spent "twenty years" in tracing "physical effects to a mental cause." Then came the "scientific certainty" that "all causation" is "Mind," and that "every effect is a mental phenomenon."[22]

What "Christian Scientists" mean by "scientific certainty" is proof by "healing." Take the revered principle of cosmogony that "the moon is made of green cheese." If one who holds the doctrine, "heals" anybody, the proposition is "demonstrated." Mrs. Eddy's "scientific works" are all filled with this unanswerable logic. "Mortal Mind"—a thing which she utterly reprobates—may find difficulty in accepting the conclusion; but it is doubtless quite as well founded as most of the "healing" itself.

Mrs. Eddy's own case is an illustration in point. A bed-ridden invalid for years, she was snatched from death, she has told us, by Dr. Quimby, and within a week of his first mental treatment she climbed to the top of a city hall. The writer has read a series of Mrs. Eddy's unpublished letters, which show that for some time she had varied nervous and spinal relapses. When not with Dr. Quimby, she wrote to him for "absent treatments," and sometimes saw him appear to her—or said she did—in response. Finally she was cured. Then she fell on an icy sidewalk, was nearly frightened to death, and wrote her letter beseeching Mr. Dresser to "undertake" for her. But, having been taught mind-healing by Dr. Quimby, she "demonstrated" over herself, and got up. The Doctor's original cure appears to have been so effective that her fall on the ice was mostly a jar of her imagination and a contusion on her veracity. For, in her Retrospection and Introspection, she solemnly affirms that her accident caused an injury far beyond the reach of "medicine" or "surgery," which she repaired by application of the Divine Spirit. This experience, says Mrs. Eddy ("scientist"), was a "falling apple of discovery" to her. Thereupon she went out into the wilderness of Boston—"withdrew," that is, from society—for three years—that she might search the Scriptures and find "Science."[23] At the end of her retirement, she had learned that "Mind reconstructs the body," and that "nothing else can." How it is done, she adds, "the Spiritual Science of Mind must reveal." Her charge for a course of ten lessons in this "divine science" was soon fixed at "only three hundred dollars."[24]

Of the genuine original "Christian Science"—the sole and undivided "discovery" of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy—she says:"I named it Christian because it is compassionate, helpful, and spiritual. God I called Immortal Mind. That which sins, suffers, and dies, I named mortal mind. The physical senses, or sensuous nature, I called error and shadow. Soul I denominated Substance, because Soul alone is truly substantial. God I characterized as individual entity, but his corporeality I denied. The Real I claimed as eternal; and its antipodes, or the temporal, I described as unreal. Spirit I called the reality; and matter, the unreality."[25]

On the hash and rehash of theology, here announced, we need not dwell just now, but will consider, for the moment, how much of Mrs. Eddy's individually discovered and copyrighted creed was first expounded, though not copyrighted, by one P. P. Quimby.

Dr. Quimby never thought of pushing his thought and work under the special name of "Christian Science," though his writings show that he used the term.[26]He was not in pursuit of money by truckling to current preconception or prejudice. We recollect, however—for our own memory has not been laid in the tomb of our piety—that after "his truth was discovered" he "found his new views all portrayed and illustrated in Christ's teachings." We recollect that he said of his practise, "It belongs to a Wisdom that is above man as man. It was taught eighteen hundred years ago, and has never had a place in the heart of man since." He said, "There is a bread which, if a man eat, he is filled; and this bread is Christ or Science." In 1865 the Portland Advertiser said of Dr. Quimby:

"By a method entirely novel and at first sight quite unintelligible, he has been slowly developing what he calls the 'Science of Health'; that is, as he defines it, a science founded on principles that can be taught and practised like that of mathematics, and not on opinion or experiments of any kind whatsoever."

Prior to the issue of Mrs. Eddy's Retrospection and Introspection she had, of course, written her other great and better-known work of religious fiction, called Science and Health. Now the title of that book—the term "Science and Health"—is quite different from Dr. Quimby's term, "The Science of Health." Still, the chief distinction between them, considering what Dr. Quimby taught, is that the latter came first and the former afterwards.

It does not appear that God—who in our day has been personally known by Mrs. Eddy only—and in an interview which He took the trouble to seek—was ever technically defined by Dr. Quimby as "Immortal Mind," or "characterized as individual entity," with "corporeality denied." It may have been so; for all the obligations derived by Mrs. Eddy from Dr. Quimby have not yet been published. By all competent theologians and metaphysicians, since the beginning at least of human records, God has been conceived and proclaimed as Infinite Spirit, one with "Immortal Mind," and above "corporeality," which has been accounted a temporary phase of finite things. Plato was pretty nearly made of this conception in philosophy, and St. John in religion. P. P. Quimby was neither a Plato nor a Saint John; but he "agreed" with them, in his literal, honest fashion, as he said he did with Bishop Berkeley.

If Mrs. Eddy had ever read a history of philosophy before she instituted a religion, she would have found that Spinoza honored her advent, some two hundred years in advance of it, by postulating "Substance" as the "Soul" of things. Incidentally, too, he postulated "matter" as an "unreality of sense," and thus, in a way, as "error" and "shadow"—the product of "mortal mind." Dr. Quimby said, with the utmost possible distinctness, "I believe matter to be nothing but an idea belonging to the senses"; and it will be found, when his writings get published, that he said the same thing in some hundreds of different ways. But all this was known to the thought of India, even before books were written, and the original authorities for it had then been lost.

But now: in one point of doctrine—and to her the most important one—Mother Mary Baker G. Eddy does stand completely "original," solitary and alone. She holds of "matter" that it is not only not what it seems, but is nothing at all save "unreality." To recognize it as anything whatever, beyond "shadow" and "error," is to be buried in disease, sin, and death. Absolutely to deny the most palpable fact of daily existence is to Christian Science the one road to health and salvation.

To Dr. Quimby, matter was a state of things "reduced from mind," but the state and the things were here. They were perfectly actual as a condition, though not as an unrelated fixture of all time and eternity. Every "idealist," in every age, has taken this view, excepting only Mrs. Eddy. Of her own view, no human being out of a refuge for imbeciles or the Church Scientist, could possibly begrudge her the sole copyright. In due order Mrs. Eddy's theological speculation will be further considered.

From the Arabian Nights tales of Retrospection and Introspection, we learn that, before setting up her new church, the revelator "wandered through the dim mazes of Materia Medica." She "found," in Jahr's two hundred and sixty-two remedies, the one pervading secret that the less matter and the more mind, the better the work. Homeopathy taught her that in the higher attenuations of its drugs, "matter is rarefied to its fatal essence, mortal mind." Her conclusion was that "mortal belief," instead of any "drug," governs the action of material medicine. "I claim," says she, "for healing scientifically," that "it does away with all material medicine, and recognizes the antidote for all sickness, as well as sin, in the Immortal Mind; and mortal mind as the source of all ills which befall mortals.... The mortal body being but the objective state of the mortal mind, this mind must be renovated to improve the body."[27]

Considering the high moral perch on which Mrs. Eddy has set herself, and contemplating the cerulean nest in which she has laid the eggs of "science," it is really painful here to study her case of fatty degeneration of the memory. For, apart from mere phraseology and acquaintance with Jahr, Dr. P. P. Quimby had reached the principle and practise of "healing scientifically," more than twenty years before she proclaimed it in Science and Health, and he had applied it to Mrs. Eddy herself, thirteen years prior to that publication, which descended from heaven in 1875. He did not mention "mortal mind"—by name, that is—for he called the fact of it "opinion of the natural man," in "the state of matter," and so far of "error." He did not use the term, "Immortal Mind"; for he designated it as "Wisdom," "Science," and the "Christ," as distinguished from "the man, Jesus." Adopting the Christ principle, Dr. Quimby aimed to follow, persistently but humbly, in the footsteps of Jesus. Dr. Quimby, in fact, was covering, both theoretically and practically, the whole true and essential field of "Christian Science," while avoiding its nonsense and its humbugs, at a time when Mrs. Eddy, as "Mary B. Glover," was a writer of love stories for "Peterson's Magazine."[28]