Back in 1877 Mrs. Eddy placed her mission, as I have said, above that of Jesus. In a personal letter to a friend, she said, “I know the crucifixion of one who presents Truth in its higher aspect will be this time through a bigger error, through mortal mind instead of its lower strata or matter, showing that the idea given of God this time is higher, clearer, and more permanent than before.” But of late years she has contented herself with claiming only equality, in all respects, with Jesus, and has not hesitated boldly and in so many words to declare her teachings to have been expressly “authorized by Christ.”

We must go into this matter with some particularity, and I crave indulgence while I present certain essential details. I want to leave no doubt in any orderly mind as to just what Mrs. Eddy claims to be, and shall then show, with an abundance of evidence that will not permit of the slightest doubt, just exactly the manner of woman she has been and is. When the most corrupt tree in the orchard brings forth the sweetest and most beautiful fruit of all, it will be believed that Mary Baker G. Eddy can be the channel through which God has revealed Himself to mankind, and it will not be believed until then.

I am of those who believe that there can be no religion but a religion based upon revelation. Either God reveals himself to us, or He remains unknown and unknowable. “No man by searching can find out God.” Reason alone cannot attain unto Him. God hides Himself from the wise, and the mightiest intellect approaches no nearer to Him than the simple mind of a child.

This great truth has been and is the common belief of mankind, and every unprincipled person, who has appealed to human credulity along religious lines, knowing mankind to so believe, has faked a revelation from God. Mrs. Eddy has put herself in a class by herself by the boldness, the irreverence, the recklessness, the blasphemy of her pretended intimacy with God.

In express terms, the founder of Christian Science claims to have received from the Almighty a revelation which she has incorporated in her book entitled “Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures.” Speaking of this book, in January, 1901, she said: “I should blush to write of ‘Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures’ as I have, were it of human origin and I, apart from God, its author, but as I was only a scribe echoing the harmonies of Heaven in divine metaphysics, I cannot be super-modest of the Christian Science Text-book.”

Nothing could be plainer or more unequivocal than that. There is a distinct avowal that the book entitled “Science and Health” was the work of Almighty God, and, preposterous as the claim may seem to any rational being who has ever undertaken to read the book, slanderous as it is upon Omniscience, some thousands of people in the United States today believe it precisely as made. They believe that God literally dictated the contents of this book to Mrs. Eddy, and that it is in every part as much the word of God as the most devout Christian believes the Bible to be in any part the word of God.

This is the sacrilegious lie upon which Mary Baker G. Eddy has reared her whole fraudulent superstructure, which she had denominated Christian Science, and which has become the religious belief of thousands. It is because of this lie that Christian Science flourishes like a green bay tree; that the old faith does not hold its believers; that real scientific knowledge in medicine is losing the confidence it ought to enjoy. It is because of this lie that Christian Science wives separate themselves from their husbands; that Christian Science mothers abandon their children; that young women believers put marriage behind them as lustful and unclean and inconsistent with true spirituality of life and character. It is because of this lie, this cruel and wicked lie, that children are permitted needlessly to suffer and needlessly to die without any intelligent perception that they are suffering, and after a resolute withholding by their deluded parents of trained medical skill that would alleviate suffering and save life. And this odious lie, I purpose, while strength abides with me, to hold up to the enduring detestation of mankind.

I am going to show, with absolute conclusiveness, that Mrs. Eddy’s claim to revelation is wholly false. And when I have shown that, I shall have shown that the “religious” phase of Christian Science is a fraud and a sham; I shall have shown that it is a veritable parody upon religion, a caricature upon Christianity; I shall have shown that every beautiful temple erected for the worship of the Christian Science God is a monument to Mrs. Eddy’s success in imposing upon mankind, and that all of the thousands upon thousands of pure and simple-minded people, who acclaim her God’s messenger, are the victims of a mercenary old schemer who has amazed herself at the gullibility of her worshipers.

I am not dealing in exaggeration. I am not speaking without knowledge when I say that no sane person can follow me through this narrative and not agree with me that Christian Science as a religion is a sham, as a healing system is a fraud; that it kills the sweetest and tenderest emotions in the human heart by rooting out sympathy and charity and compassion; that there is no other hatred and vindictiveness equal to the hatred and vindictiveness of its founder and her leading votaries; that there is no other cruelty, no other greed that can be compared with theirs, and that the “inspired” teaching of Mary Baker G. Eddy regarding the most sacred institution established amongst men, I refer to the institution of marriage, is so low and so vile that decent people, when they come to understand it, must repudiate the woman and the thing from overwhelming shame.

Insanity is not responsible for indecency, but those Christian Scientists who have not parted with their sanity, and are not Christian Scientists for revenue only, will turn with horror from the woman and her work when they know what they are.

I say that Mrs. Eddy’s claim to having received an inspiration from God is fraudulent. Now, what are the facts?

That God had nothing to do with Mrs. Eddy’s book is abundantly proven by the book itself, to any person of sufficient understanding to be at large outside of Bedlam. Who but a person of weak or disordered mind could believe that God is the author of this, “The condition of the stomach, bowels, food, clothing, etc., is of no serious import to your child”?

Can any not absolutely insane parent believe that God communicated that “absolute truth” to Mrs. Eddy?

Again: “The less we know of or think about Hygiene, the less we are predisposed to sickness.”

That is to say, the more we know about how to keep well and how to avoid conditions breeding disease, the more likely we are to be sick.

Again: “Treatises on anatomy, physiology and health sustained by what is termed material law, are the promoters of sickness and disease. It is proverbial that as long as you read medical works you will be sick.”

We have all observed the truth of this inspired utterance in the fact that the physicians, as a body, are almost constantly in bed of one disease or another. The wonder is that any of them ever survive the courses of preparatory study.

Again: “Not because of muscular exercise, but because of the blacksmith’s faith in muscle, his arm becomes stronger.”

All one has to do to develop his biceps is to have faith that his biceps will develop, if Mrs. Eddy really speak by inspiration of God.

Again: “You say or think because you have partaken of salt fish that you are thirsty, and you are thirsty accordingly; while the opposite belief would produce the opposite result.”

That is to say, you may partake of all the salt fish you please; but if you persistently say and believe it cannot cause thirst, thirst is the last sensation that will afflict you.

Again: “Question. Do not brains think and nerves feel, and is there no intelligence in matter? Answer. Not if God be true and mortal man a liar.”

In other words, if God be true, brains do not think and nerves do not feel. That brains do not think, Mrs. Eddy, when she contemplates her foolish following, may have some reason to believe; but she will have some difficulty in satisfying the rest of us that brains do not possess the function of thought. I think, therefore I am not a Christian Scientist.

Again: “The blood, heart, lungs, brain, etc., have nothing to do with life.”

When this impressive passage was first presented to my darkened mind, I was inclined to believe it to contain no element of truth; but I am persuaded that there is a grain of truth in it. I have sat in a Christian Science church repeatedly and have seen some thousands of people with open mouths and ecstatic expressions listening to material from the platform wholly unintelligible to those who read it and wholly unintelligible to every person in the building who heard it; and I have come slowly, very slowly and regretfully, to the conviction that it is true, that amongst large masses of people there are times when the brain has absolutely nothing to do with life. As to the blood, heart and lungs, I am still of my early prejudice that they have something to do with life, notwithstanding Mrs. Eddy’s affirmation that God has informed her to the contrary.

Again: “Gender also is a quality, a characteristic of mind and not of matter.”

It is all in your mind. You are a man or a woman according as you think you are a man or a woman, and not otherwise. If a man thinks he is a woman, and if a woman thinks she is a man, that settles it; they are.

Again: “The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again. If the science of life were understood, it would be found that the senses of mind are never lost and that matter has no sensation. Then the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster’s claw.”

This makes it plain that, from Mrs. Eddy’s standpoint, the less mind, the better; the less mind, the more Christian Scientists; the more Christian Scientists, the more revenue; the more revenue, the greater glory for impostors and charlatans. And, oh, wonder of wonders! God here informs us, if Mrs. Eddy speak the truth, that the loss of a human leg will be but a temporary inconvenience when man has advanced to the high stage attained by the wholly mindless lobster!

Again: “Man is the same after, as before, a bone is broken or a head chopped off.”

And so, the head follows the lungs, and the blood, and the heart, and the brains, and the stomach, and the bowels, as useless members of the human body, if Mrs. Eddy speak the words of truth and inspiration.

Again: “That life is sustained by food, drink, air, etc., that it is organic or in the least dependent upon matter or sustained by it, is a myth.”

Mrs. Eddy teaches that there is no reality in matter. When she sits down at her table three times a day and puts into her immaterial and nonexistent stomach unrealities in the shape of bread and butter and beef steak and tea and coffee, and so on, life is sustained by the belief that the food sustains life, and not by the food itself. It would be interesting to have Mrs. Eddy demonstrate in her own daily life that the partaking of what we grosser persons regard as food indispensable to the survival of the physical organism could be wholly dispensed with and life, notwithstanding, continue.

And, finally, and I commend this precious gem of truth to those of my readers who are parents, be they fathers or mothers, and who agree with me that the loveliest of all lovely things in the world is the wholesome baby enjoying his morning bath: “The daily ablutions of an infant are no more natural or necessary than would be the process of taking a fish out of the water every day and covering it with dirt, in order to make it thrive more vigorously thereafter in its native element.”

To bathe a baby is the same thing as to grab a fish out of the water and rub it all over with mud! If it were of mere “human origin,” Mrs. Eddy would “blush” to deliver herself of that beautiful and “absolute” truth.

This twaddle inspired of God! And these selections, taken at random from Mrs. Eddy’s book of which, she says, not she but God was author, are of a piece with the thing as a whole.

I am told, as I have said, that there are intelligent persons in Mrs. Eddy’s following, and yet such things as those I have quoted slap intelligence in the face from every page of her book; and her friends, nevertheless, persist in affirming, “Lo, the Lord’s anointed, God’s voice to this age!”

“I cannot see,” says Mark Twain, “how any one contemplating Mrs. Eddy’s career can deny to the Divine Being the possession of a sense of humor.” God is so amused by Mrs. Eddy’s accomplishments that He is provoked to laughter, and Christian Science thus escapes the consuming fire of Divine wrath.