it. 
 
 Sertioa 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES OF 
 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD C. FARNS WORTH 
 
 PORTLAND, MAINE 
 
 Smith & Sale, Printers 
 
 1909 
 
COPYRIGHT 1909 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD C. FARNSWORTH 
 
M 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 ATERIALISM, that old enemy so 
 often worsted by Idealism, has mar- 
 shalled his armies for perhaps a final 
 stand. " Progress ! " is his war-cry, and his 
 pride is in the visible, the palpable works of 
 his hands. Yonder stand the embattled hosts 
 of Idealism whose rallying-shout like that 
 of the other is *' Progress!" She too has 
 achieved, but not the outward, the splendour 
 of cities, the wealth of nations, the commerce 
 of the navigated sea. Men and women are 
 her showing, eternal temples of the living 
 God when the desert claims the city, and the 
 nations are humbled to a name, a memory, 
 and the sea itself has vanished, sunken from 
 its central deeps. 
 
 But who is the champion of Idealism, the 
 Lord's anointed, empowered to overthrow 
 the arrogant Goliath of Materialism? Some 
 are with confidence asserting that Christian 
 Science is that champion ; notwithstanding 
 which, it should be remembered that when 
 
PREFACE 
 
 many of the goodly sons of Jesse had passed 
 before Samuel ; the prophet, at first deceived, 
 was lead to ask if there were not others. 
 
 Of Christian Science it must be said that, 
 aside from its claim to heal disease, it little 
 appeals to the great mass of the irreligious. 
 As a religion its sway is chiefly over people 
 once affiliated with the various sects of Protes- 
 tantism, from the most conservative even to 
 those known as the most liberal. The progres- 
 sive thinker will hail any evolution of thought 
 and its reaction on antequating conceptions of 
 Truth ; but he laments chimera-chasing in 
 all things, religion included. Investigating 
 Christian Science, he discovers in its teach- 
 ing that which allures the uncritical and the 
 ungrounded of widely differing religious views. 
 For the Trinitarian, Christian Science has 
 First — Omnipresent Mind — the one God. 
 Second — Life, Truth, Love, the Christ prin- 
 ciple forever in the bosom of the Father. 
 Third — Divine Science the Holy Comforter. 
 To the Unitarian is explained that Christ and 
 the Holy Ghost are the attributes of Unity. 
 To the Universalist a novel view of his belief 
 
 VI 
 
PREFACE 
 
 in universal salvation much appeals. For the 
 Quaker, Christian Science promises to every 
 soul a direct revelation of Divine Wisdom 
 through the real man the mental image of 
 God. The Shaker will find in Christian 
 Science the Motherhood of God and the incul- 
 cation of a celibacy whose object is the 
 gradual disappearance of the earth-inhabiting 
 man. Even to the Romanist, something is 
 offered, to wit, plenary revelation and the 
 authority of a visible and infallible head. 
 
 Because of conditions which pastors, teachers 
 and physicians lament, it behooves the philo- 
 sophical thinker to summon all his powers of 
 mind to the detection and exposure of those 
 insidious errors which hide beneath the fair 
 exterior of Christian Science. 
 
 E. c. F. 
 
 vn 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 OF 
 
 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 I 
 
 IN the preface to " Science and Health" Mary 
 Baker Eddy states that the first school of 
 Christian Science Mind-healing was begun 
 by the author in Lynn, Massachusetts, about 
 the year 1867, with only one student. 
 
 Like Mohammed, she began with one disciple, 
 and, like the religion of Islam, her teachings 
 have spread with a rapidity mightily contrast- 
 ing with the growth of Christianity prior to the 
 conversion of Constantine. Mrs. Eddy says 
 of her system that in 1883 a million people ac- 
 knowledged and attested its blessings. Numer- 
 ical and financial prosperity marks the forty- 
 second year of Christian Science. The Mother 
 Church of Boston, with an enrolled membership 
 of over fifty thousand, has erected, at a cost of 
 two million dollars, a temple worthy of any 
 cathedral town of Europe. 
 
 Christian Science has lived serenely despite 
 the crass and ignorant criticism of those who, 
 in justice, should have mastered the funda- 
 mentals of a belief they would demolish ; and 
 when, from misapprehension, men of note and 
 attainment have written and spoken adversely, 
 
 3 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 it has remained untroubled, knowing that error 
 is its own refutation. Another class of oppo- 
 nents, in which is found a well-known American 
 humorist, meet the enemy with what seems their 
 only edged weapon, ridicule. Another class 
 hurl such ponderous missiles as " Thus saith 
 the Lord ! " which, together with a fusillade of 
 Bible texts, somehow flies the mark. Still 
 another class of would-be critics assail Christian 
 Science with the shafts of materialism, little 
 knowing that their puny arrows fall harmless 
 on the strongholds of the mighty, giants, like 
 Plato, in the domain of thought. 
 
 To the multitude, those who demand for 
 Deity a definable form and a fixed habitation, 
 Mrs. Eddy's conception of God as Infinite 
 Principle is a denial of His personality. When 
 in 1875 she informed her readers that " God is 
 Principle, not person," many saw not that in the 
 sentence, person meant an anthropomorphic 
 God. 
 
 That the multitude fail to grasp the meaning 
 of Christian Science is no wonder when we 
 consider its inception, a birth of idealism, a 
 religio-philosophical system appearing amidst 
 an unphilosophical people of materialistic 
 tendencies. This failure to grasp is, indeed, no 
 wonder, for, among trained reasoners in the 
 realms of the abstract, differences of opinion 
 arise in regard to the meaning of beliefs held 
 in common ; thus Nirvana is to some Indian 
 thinkers but absorption, annihilation of self in 
 
 4 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 the Divine Essence ; to others it is unlimited 
 enlarging of individuality ; therefore Buddha, 
 in the moment of enlightenment, exclaimed, 
 " The Universe grows I ! " 
 
 To the student of philosophies, especially 
 those of the idealistic succession from Plato to 
 the Neo-Platonists, and from Descartes to Spin- 
 oza and Berkeley, and from these to Schopen- 
 hauer, the revivor of Indian metaphysics, much 
 in "Science and Health" has a familiar look. 
 Philosophy, since its origin among the Ionian 
 Greeks, and the authors of the Upanishads, has 
 covered pretty much the whole sphere of spec- 
 ulative thought ; hence the present impossibil- 
 ity of devising a system not encroaching upon 
 the domain of another. 
 
 Before the days of Socrates, the Eleatics, 
 postulating one pure and unconditioned Being, 
 regarded the phenomenal world as nullity. 
 Two hundred and fifty years ago, Spinoza, 
 conceiving of a single self-sustaining Substance, 
 comprehending all Reality, called it God, and 
 also Infinite, but feared further to define, deem- 
 ing that definition materializes and minimizes 
 God. Mrs. Eddy thus defines the Infinite of 
 Spinoza, '* God is Immortal Mind, Life, Truth, 
 Love." Reality and illusion are thus defined, 
 ** The universe is filled with spiritual ideas which 
 God evolves, and they are obedient to the Mind 
 which makes them. Mortal mind transforms 
 the Spiritual into the material." Mortal mind 
 is thus defined, " Nothing claiming to be some- 
 
 5 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 thing ; Error creating other error ; the belief 
 that sensation is in matter ; the belief in sick- 
 ness, sin, death." Spiritual identity is thus 
 asserted, "The Divine Mind maintains all indi- 
 vidualities as distinct and eternal from a blade 
 of grass to a star." Of Mankind she says, " Man 
 is the infinite idea of Infinite Spirit. Man is 
 the manifest reflection of God. Perfect and 
 Immortal Mind. He is the likeness of God." 
 In support of this last is quoted the declaration 
 in the first chapter of Genesis, "And God said, 
 Let us make man in our image, after our like- 
 ness." 
 
 Mrs. Eddy says, "The fundamental proposi- 
 tions of Christian Science are summarized in 
 the four following to me, self-evident propo- 
 sitions : 1. God is All. 2. God is Good. God 
 is Mind. 3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is 
 matter. 4. Life, Good, God, omnipresent, deny 
 death, evil, sin, disease — Disease, sin, evil, 
 death, deny omnipresent God, Good, Life." 
 
 Socrates said that through logic we discover 
 the truth or falsity of a proposition ; so from 
 the arsenal of logic the present writer has 
 drawn his chief weapons. Perhaps their calibre 
 and range will warrant his belief in them. He 
 disclaims any prejudice, any mere antagonism. 
 He will accept truth from church, temple, or 
 pagoda, in fact, from all sources whatsoever. 
 Guided by the conviction that he who criticises 
 another's conception of truth should be candid 
 lest he obscure his own conception, the present 
 
 6 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 writer thinks not to offend the followers of one 
 thus admonishing them, "Whoever shrinks 
 from or opposes an impartial investigation of 
 his belief, betrays palpable lack of faith." 
 
 II 
 
 In Christian Science, man is reflection of 
 God. If so he be, then something is that holds 
 and gives permanence to the reflection. To 
 illustrate : physical light passes through the 
 glass to the layer of quicksilver which arrests 
 and turns back the sun's rays. Spiritual light, 
 like physical light, requires for its reflection 
 something on which to shine. Evidently it is 
 not the mortal, material body, for Christian 
 Science relegates the physical to the realm of 
 mere appearance. For reflection some sub- 
 stance is necessary, and, as God is All, that 
 substance must be God himself. Man is there- 
 fore reflection of God on God. So we have on 
 the one hand Immortal Mind, Life, Truth, Love ; 
 on the other hand a pure reflection of these, 
 upheld and sustained by God. Whence then the 
 origin of mortal mind ? Whence the falsities 
 of mortal mind, to wit, sin, sickness, death? 
 
 To make apparent the enigma, let the sun, 
 and that which holds its reflection, be repre- 
 sentative of God ; and let man be the light of 
 the sun. If clouds darken the sun the rays are 
 absorbed and lost. If impurities defile the 
 glass, or the quicksilver, again they are absorbed 
 
 7 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 and lost. But Christian Science rightly teaches 
 that no cloud can arise before God's all-seeing 
 eye ; nor can impurity tarnish His substance on 
 which man is reflected ; neither can His light, 
 which is man, be less pure than Himself. There- 
 fore is emphasized the query, Why and whence 
 the beliefs of mortal mind ? Why does mortal 
 mind imagine a material body and all infirmities 
 of the flesh arisen between man and his Maker ? 
 Mrs. Eddy ignores the question, and yet into 
 this unbridgable chasm many monistic philoso- 
 phies have fallen. 
 
 Our oracle says, " The origin of evil is the 
 problem of the ages. If God created only 
 the good whence comes the evil ? Christian 
 Science replies ; Evil never did exist as an 
 entity ; it is but a false belief." How simple 
 the solution ! Why did it escape the great 
 thinkers of the past ? To the student of phi- 
 losophy the answer is obvious. Those thinkers 
 would have rejected a solution which makes the 
 origin of false belief the problem of the ages. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy has learned somewhat from the 
 dilemma of those who find in the Bible texts 
 both the pro and con of their cherished beliefs; 
 therefore the two different accounts of Creation 
 found in Genesis are, to her, a wordy warfare 
 between Truth and error. So, in Isaiah, cunning 
 error, simulatmg the authority of God, speaks 
 through the prophet, " I form the light and 
 create darkness : I make peace and create evil : 
 I the Lord do all these things." 
 
 8 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 "Science and Health" avers that "animal 
 magnetism, or hypnotism, is the specific term 
 for error or mortal mind ; this magnetism is 
 either ignorant or malicious." In the next 
 paragraph one reads, " In reality there is no 
 mortal mind, and consequently no transference 
 of mortal thought and will power." Presently 
 the reader is told that "the author of this book 
 has been unjustly persecuted and belied by 
 wolves in sheep's clothing." That both she and 
 Mr. Eddy suffered much from these evils there 
 is ample evidence, and this notwithstanding 
 her own dictum, " Evil is not power, its so- 
 called despotism is but a phase of nothing- 
 ness." 
 
 Regardless of logic, Mrs. Eddy defines mortal 
 mind as " Nothing claiming to be something ; 
 error (nothing) creating other error ; the belief 
 in sickness, sin, death." It is indisputable that 
 the act of claiming demands a claimer as much 
 as the act of thought requires a thinker, even 
 though his conclusions be wholly false. Crea- 
 tion likewise necessitates a creator though he 
 create only delusions. Belief surely presup- 
 poses a believer, whatever he believes. " Noth- 
 ing" can neither claim, create, nor believe ; it 
 is, in fact, devoid of real or seeming activity, but, 
 because of the activities which Mrs. Eddy 
 assigns to nothing, error and false belief, she 
 proves them " something," and this something, 
 however insignificant, disproves the allness of 
 " Good." 
 
 9 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 Mrs. Eddy calls error the absence of Truth, 
 but how can Truth be anywhere, or at any time, 
 absent ; and how can error usurp or seem to 
 usurp its province, if God (Truth) is All? 
 Mrs. Eddy also says, " Matter is Spirit's sup- 
 posed opposite, the absence of Spirit ; " but 
 how can Omnipresent Spirit have an opposite, 
 or be absent from anything ? 
 
 Emerson says " The true doctrine of Omni- 
 presence is, that God reappears with all His 
 parts in every moss and cobweb." If *' Truth, 
 Life and Love fill immensity and are ever- 
 present," why necessary their revelation 
 through ** Science," and to whom other than 
 themselves can they be revealed ? In view 
 of the teachings, is not belief in the existence 
 of malicious animal magnetism, that dreaded 
 viper of Christian Science, an utter absurdity ? 
 
 It is impossible that the Christian Scientist, 
 who examines critically the fundamentals of 
 his belief, should account for the real or imag- 
 inary existence of evil except through extrane- 
 ous means, for instance, the beguiling of the 
 serpent ; but such admission is suicidal as it 
 contradicts his chief tenet, " God is All." 
 
 Dealing with post mortem states, Mrs. Eddy 
 says, " In Christian Science there is never a 
 retrograde step." Continuing she says, ''Jesus 
 restored Lazarus by the understanding that 
 Lazarus had never died ; not by an admission 
 that his body had died and then lived again." 
 Mrs. Eddy holds of Lazarus that he slept the 
 
 10 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 sleep by men called death. According to her 
 tenets, he had passed out of belief in a mortal 
 body. Mrs. Eddy's claim that, by raising Laz- 
 arus, Jesus proved the unreality of death, does 
 not obliterate the fact that he, the Founder of 
 Christian Science, also restored vitality to a 
 mortal body deemed by all Christian Scientists 
 a mere delusion. Evidently this much in the 
 act of Jesus was a retrograde step. 
 
 Swedenborg, always a logical reasoner, says, 
 " It is the general idea that because what is 
 finite is not capable of containing what is Infin- 
 ite, therefore finite things cannot be the recep- 
 tacle of the Infinite. That the Divine Infinite 
 is in men appears from the Word where it is 
 written, ' And God said. Let us make man in 
 our image ; ' from whence it follows that a man 
 is an organ recipient of God. The human mind, 
 according as man prepares the way, is a recep- 
 tacle of Divine influx ; if the door be fully 
 open, man becomes truly an image of God." 
 
 Though defining man to be reflection of the 
 Divine, Mrs. Eddy adds that " the Divine is no 
 more in him than man is in the mirror which 
 reflects his image." 
 
 To say that God is All, and then to assert 
 that He is not in man, is contradiction because 
 the All must be in everything ; one cannot 
 imagine a container in which nothing is. Mrs. 
 Eddy's definition of man necessarily denies to 
 him any individuality and so destroys every 
 vestige of his free will. He cannot look other- 
 
 11 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 where than Godvvard : he cannot think other- 
 wise than of God, for his thought is God's 
 thought, he being reflection of God. Because 
 he is devoid of individuality, no " I am I " 
 inheres in man. He must abnegate selfhood 
 and think thus, I am God's reflection in which 
 He is not. But this thought is illogical because 
 it implies something other than God, to wit, a 
 vacuum in which He is not. In a universe 
 where God is All, He is both thinker and 
 thought, both original and reflection ; there- 
 fore, a better definition of man would be, he is 
 part of God : But even this definition is illogi- 
 cal because God is One and indivisible ; so we 
 are driven to the conclusion that man is God. 
 Such also is the outcome of Hindoo meta- 
 physics wherein the Supreme Mind can and 
 does focus Itself in the heart of every creature. 
 Emerson tells us that " The value of the uni- 
 verse contrives to throw itself into every point." 
 " Reason and revelation declare that God is 
 both noumena and phenomenon, the first and 
 only Cause." From one who disavows and 
 denounces Pantheism, this is a startling state- 
 ment. In established usage the Noumenon is 
 the Original, the Essence, the immutable Sub- 
 stance ; the phenomena are its impressions on 
 the brain and the physical senses. Thus the 
 idealist would define matter as the phenome- 
 non of Spiritual Reality. Referring to the first 
 and only Cause, the plural, noumena, is of 
 course incorrect. Allowing to Mrs. Eddy a 
 
 12 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 special use of the word phenomenon, it can be 
 defined as meaning the spiritual universe, the 
 creation of Mind ; the total of God's thoughts 
 from the least to the greatest. Therefore Rea- 
 son and revelation declare that God is both the 
 thinker and His thoughts. This identification 
 of subject and object is a form of Pantheism. 
 
 " The theory that soul, spirit, intelligence, 
 inhabits matter is taught by the schools. This 
 theory is unscientific." Why so ? Instead of 
 an outcast, may not matter be a crude, little- 
 evolved manifestation of Spirit, one to be 
 refined until it eventuates in perfection ? This 
 view endows with divine purpose the past, 
 present, and future of mundane existence. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy inquires, " What evidence of Soul 
 have you within mortality ? What basis is 
 there for the theory of indwelling Spirit except 
 the claim of Mortal Mind ? " Because of these 
 questions, the present writer would himself 
 inquire. What evidence has " Science and 
 Health" produced of Mrs. Eddy's opposite the- 
 ory ? Although she has much to say concern- 
 ing logic, what consistent argument has she put 
 forth in support of her divinely inspired teach- 
 ing ? Which is more reasonable, that mortal 
 mind, a mere empty nothing, logically qui- 
 escent, endows an imaginary physical body 
 and brain with their seeming activities, or, that 
 unfolding soul is using its physical tenement 
 to acquire that experience which this vast and 
 teeming physical globe alone can furnish ? 
 
 13 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 III 
 
 Since the days of the exodus, orthodox 
 believers have held that, on the top of Sinai, 
 Jehovah delivered to Moses, first by word of 
 mouth and then in writing, the ten command- 
 ments. Now if Christian Science is true, how 
 could Jehovah say, " Thus saith the Lord," 
 concerning that of which by the laws of His 
 being He is inhibited from knowing? Did He 
 not reveal to the child Samuel the sins and 
 punishment of Eli's sons, and, afterward, to 
 Samuel the man, the error and forthcoming 
 dethronement of Saul? Did He not, through 
 Nathan His prophet, make David the denouncer 
 of his own crime? Did He not, through Elijah, 
 rebuke the idolatries of His chosen people ? 
 Did not Micaiah prophesy face to face against 
 Ahab because of his transgressions in the sight 
 of the Lord ? Did not Elisha foretell to 
 Hagael the evil he, as king of Syria, would yet 
 work upon the Jews ? Did not Isaiah, obeying 
 the Divine command, cry thus against a fro- 
 ward nation, " put away the evil of your doings 
 from before mine eyes ? " And Jeremiah, and 
 Ezekiel, did not the Lord God put denuncia- 
 tion into their speech ? And what of Hosea 
 and Joel and Amos and Obadiah and Micah 
 and all the rest ? Did they not announce 
 authoritatively the judgments of the Most 
 High? 
 
 14 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 In contradistinction to these mighty voices 
 of old, we have the dictum of Mrs. Eddy, " God 
 is ignorant of the existence of both mortal 
 mind and its claim." Many will deny the 
 Divine inspiration of the Hebrew Prophets, 
 and yet, such is the inconsistency of human 
 nature, some of these doubters will without 
 cavil accept Mrs. Eddy as the great light- 
 bringer to this present age. 
 
 The history of man is the record of his rise 
 from densest ignorance to that which, if not an 
 adequate comprehension of Truth, is at least a 
 praiseworthy approach to it. A little clear 
 thinking will show that prehistoric man, the 
 primal savage, sunken in the lowest deep of 
 ignorance, could never have risen if error were 
 wholly separated from Truth. If Christian 
 Science tenets may be trusted, God cannot 
 descend from Truth to uplift such as he. But 
 the fact is patent that somehow man's semi- 
 animal ancestor, in other words " error beget- 
 ting other error," did eventually produce the 
 philosopher and the sage. 
 
 A little more clear thinking will show that 
 all truth is relative, because of which the pos- 
 sibility of man's unfolding appears. God in 
 His universe is the Omnipotent and Omnipres- 
 ent Author of the Archetypal, the Real of 
 things. God, as First and Final Cause, is the 
 Source of thought and so of all thinking what- 
 soever. Therefore all belief, however per- 
 verted, is sourced in God and His realities. It 
 
 15 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 is not God's plan to compel thought toward 
 Himself, and yet, no thought independent of 
 Him, can stir a fibre of man's brain, no, not 
 even the thought which denies God. But then, 
 no thought can wholly deny God and so 
 divorce itself absolutely from the Source of 
 thought. No creature can invent a foundation- 
 less lie. At its worst, a lie is Truth distorted, 
 misinterpreted, or seen as through a glass 
 darkly. 
 
 While God is the Source of all perception, 
 no two beings perceive Him alike ; moreover, 
 the ability to know Him in His fullness is a 
 gradual process, for such is His Will. To the 
 savage his fetich stands for truth ; it is a truth 
 than which he can lift his eyes no higher. He 
 who in sincerity bows down to wood and stone, 
 prepares his heart for a better truth. He who 
 sacrifices to his tribal god, striving to do his 
 just will, shall receive a truth-seeker's reward ; 
 no longer claiming an eye for an eye, or a tooth 
 for a tooth, he shall come under the law of 
 love, the full understanding of which is knowl- 
 edge of the very essence of Being. Where 
 then does error end and truth begin ? The 
 answer is that there is no apprehensible line of 
 demarkation. If it were possible to ask of 
 beings more evolved than man, what is Truth ? 
 they would no doubt reply, " That toward 
 which we strive." 
 
 Holding that to God no dualism is in the 
 essential nature of things, Mrs. Eddy limits His 
 
 16 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 knowledge to the " Real," so denying to Him 
 knowledge of the attitude of mortal mind 
 toward those errors which hold it in servile 
 bondage. If illusion have no lesson for man, 
 surely our pilgrimage here is meaningless, a 
 waste of time and energy abhorrent to the 
 Divine Economy. Man's rounded, completed 
 knowledge must include that of Being and non- 
 being ; the Real, and what results from mis- 
 conception of the Real. 
 
 Thus only is man, the warrior, invincible in 
 every part ; no heel of Achilles shall prove his 
 bane. Having completed its mental and moral 
 evolution, having fought its way upward ; hav- 
 ing won the Real, humanity will there forever 
 hold against all attack, the fastness of Wisdom. 
 A wiser than God it becomes if God know not 
 the nature of unreality. 
 
 Should we soar to the broadest view of the 
 human problem, we would perceive that, in the 
 Divine Economy, sin itself is made minister to 
 the ends of Wisdom. Sin is deadly and disin- 
 tegrating, the antithesis of all to be attained. 
 "The soul that sinneth — remaineth in sin — it 
 shall die." Therefore must the inexperienced 
 soul, even by the harshest means, be turned 
 from sin. 
 
 A characterless uniter of boundless but latent 
 possibilities ; a dweller in God, and upheld by 
 God, the soul of man, free because individual, 
 unfree because dependent upon God, begins its 
 pilgrimage to perfection. Ignorant, it must at 
 
 17 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 all hazards, even to the eating of the fruit of 
 the tree, attain unto knowledge, and, finally, 
 unto wisdom. Negatively good, it must, at all 
 hazards, attain unto positive good and that 
 Divine Compassion for the erring which is the 
 crown of the Christ Spirit. Healthful and death- 
 less, not yet having transgressed, it must, even 
 by expulsion from Paradise ; it must, even 
 though the gates of mortal pain and death, 
 attain that Eden of health and deathlessness 
 from which, because a knower of the results of 
 violated law, it shall never again be driven 
 forth. 
 
 We read in Holy Writ, " And the Lord God 
 said. Behold, the man is become as one of us, 
 to know good and evil ; and now, lest he put 
 forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, 
 and eat, and live forever ; therefore, the Lord 
 God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to 
 till the ground." 
 
 Although Adam, having eaten, knew both 
 good and evil, the apple was yet sweet, evil 
 not having turned to bitterness in his mouth. 
 Taking of the tree of life, he would become 
 immortal in evil : so he was shut out to learn 
 the lesson of suffering. 
 
 Had primal man been endowed with faculty 
 of right seeing and right choice, there had been 
 no apparent fall. Realizing that man retains 
 of the Divine bounty nothing he has not con- 
 quered for himself, Swedenborg gave to his 
 angels mortal experience, all were once men. 
 
 18 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 No less a thinker than Carlyle remarks that 
 *• Christianity was founded on poverty, on 
 sorrow, contradiction, crucifixion, every species 
 of worldly distress and degradation. We may 
 say that he who has not known those things, 
 and learned from them their priceless lesson, 
 has missed a good opportunity of schooling." 
 
 Keener of sight than those sentimentalists 
 who see but the moment, Friedrich Nietzsche 
 truly says, '* The discipline of suffering, of great 
 suffering — know ye not that it is only this 
 discipline that has produced all the evolution 
 of humanity hitherto ? The tension of soul in 
 misfortune which communicates to it its ener- 
 gy, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, 
 enduring, interpreting, and exploiting mis- 
 fortune ; has it not been bestowed through 
 suffering, through the discipline of great suf- 
 fering ?" 
 
 Denying the purpose and reality of every evil 
 afflicting the world. Christian Science cannot 
 sorrow over Jerusalem and weep at the grave 
 of Lazarus because sorrow is delusion and joy 
 alone is real. Such attitude of sympathy is 
 affirmation of error. He who sorrows over 
 Jerusalem, confirms conditions which bring 
 about its fall. He who weeps at the tomb, 
 asserts the triumph of the grave. 
 
 According to "Science," sympathetic sorrow 
 or weeping is but a high phase of mortal mind. 
 That Jesus sorrowed or wept at the delusion of 
 those who sorrowed or wept, proved him not 
 
 19 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 yet devoid of error. And yet, in Luke's Gospel, 
 the Master's own words read thus, '* it behooved 
 Christ to suffer," and again, "Ought not Christ 
 to have suffered these things, and to enter into 
 His Glory ?" According to Christian Science, 
 Christ cannot suffer nor sorrow, neither can He 
 weep. That Jesus did all this was of Mary the 
 mortal mother of the mortal man. It was of 
 an uneliminated error betraying him into the 
 weakness of tears. Is not giving of other than 
 spiritual food to the starving beggar a conces- 
 sion to his error of belief ? Still the Christian 
 Scientist must give, for, otherwise, the beggar 
 would die. Did not the dispenser of the bread 
 of life accentuated, by the miracle of the 
 loaves and fishes, the notion of physical 
 hunger ? 
 
 If sorrow and suffering are unreal, what can be 
 said of the sublime closing acts in the life of the 
 man of sorrows ? Were not Gethsemane and 
 Calvary all that sacred history records of them ? 
 That cup of bitterness which in a mortal moment 
 the Master would have pass from him ; was one 
 drop thereof less bitter because he knew the 
 secret laws of being ? Did he at the crisis 
 refuse to drain that unmerited cup ? No ! An 
 unresisting prisoner before Pilate, he submitted 
 to gross indignity and unjust condemnation ; 
 but, having raised the dead, he could as easily 
 have stricken down the living and walked forth 
 to freedom. Mrs. Eddy cannot escape the logic 
 of the situation ; in sorrow and suffering there 
 
 20 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 is a reality and use strangely overlooked by her 
 strange philosophy. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy says, " According to Divine Law, 
 sin and suffering are not cancelled by repent- 
 ance or pardon." " Every effect and amplifica- 
 tion of wrong will revert to the wrong doer 
 until he pays his full debt to Divine Law." This 
 is, indeed, a wide departure from her early 
 orthodoxy. But has she no balm more effect- 
 ive than repentance or pardon ? Certainly. 
 " Destroy the thought of sin, sickness, death, 
 and you destroy their existence." That is to 
 say, fully accept Mrs. Eddy's demonstration of 
 Truth and you have paid in total the debt to 
 Divine Law. Morally and physically, you are 
 every whit whole although others, less-enlight- 
 ened, must continue to suffer from your wrong 
 doing. Evidently, the cardinal sin is ignorance 
 of Truth as announced by the discoverer of 
 Divine Science. Evidently, that discoverer has 
 gone farther in unreason than the doctrine she 
 so long ago repudiated as a thing against reason. 
 
 IV 
 
 Mrs. Eddy admits of the Master that " he left 
 no definite rule for demonstrating his Principle 
 of healing. This remained to be discovered 
 through Christian Science." Acceptance or 
 rejection of the second statement will depend 
 upon individual estimate of her mission. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy assures the disciple that "The 
 medicine of Science is Divine Mind." In her 
 
 21 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 method this is deemed effective because the 
 only mind. Inasmuch as she fails to prove the 
 allness of Divine Mind, the critic has cause to 
 hold her silent treatment of disease to be a 
 form of human will power, that which she calls 
 " the prayer of the unrighteous." She says, 
 •• Remember that the unexpressed belief often- 
 times effects a sensitive patient more strongly 
 than expressed thought." "The Esquimaux 
 restore health by incantations (a form of hyp- 
 notism) as consciously as do civilized practi- 
 tioners by their more studied methods." "A 
 thorough perusal of the author's publications 
 heals sickness." What, we would ask, is this 
 last but self-hypnotism? 
 
 In many instances, both Jesus and his disci- 
 ples accompanied healing with the laying on 
 of hands. Naturally enough, and as many can 
 testify, in the early days of Christian Science, 
 such procedure was recommended to the stu- 
 dent and practiced by Mrs. Eddy herself. 
 However, after the apostasy of Kennedy and 
 Spofford, it seemed wise to separate the sheep 
 from the goats; so, as a means of distin- 
 guishing the black from the white, all students 
 henceforth were taught that to touch the 
 patient during treatment is nothing less than 
 the mal-practice of the hypnotist. It is well 
 known that an expert in Suggestive Therapeu- 
 tics need not manipulate or touch his patient, 
 make passes, or throw him into the mesmeric 
 sleep. Healing, the "fruitage" of Christian 
 
 22 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 Science, shrink to this small kernel, a novel 
 form of mental suggestion. 
 
 By calling this life a dream, Mrs. Eddy but 
 emphasizes the teaching of idealism from be- 
 fore the days of Plato. That the physical 
 senses in every way cheat man is the verdict of 
 the entire idealistic succession. Why and how 
 and where this prevailing delusion, this uni- 
 versal hypnotism, originated is an inquiry 
 quite apart from our present purpose. Suffice 
 it that the all-controlling dream proves every 
 creature susceptible to suggestion in some 
 sort. The concensus of human opinion, hav- 
 ing all the rigidity of a fixed fact, must be 
 combatted single-handed by the operator. 
 
 Suggestion is that ancient giant whose mighty 
 shoulders have long upborne the world ; a 
 giant who, if only free, could overturn the 
 world and send it spinning down the abyss. 
 
 For the savage, the din of drums and the 
 practice of fantastic rites are needed to af- 
 fright and expel the devils that delight in tor- 
 menting him. For the civilized man, such 
 crude suggestion, such palpable absurdity, is 
 null and void. Milder means alone reach his 
 case. For the Christian Scientist, earnest 
 meditation or dissertation on the one Mind, and 
 the universality of Good, and the consequent 
 non-being of every evil, have proved a remark- 
 ably successful cure-all. To dignify this last 
 procedure by any name other than ''The Eddy 
 method " is unwarranted and misleading. 
 
 23 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 Examining the 1881 edition of "Science and 
 Health," we find enjoined in the chapter en- 
 titled " Healing the Sick," many precautions 
 and observances which any exponent of Sug- 
 gestive Therapeutics would recognize as both 
 necessary and valuable. Much, throughout 
 the book, must convince the critical that, hav- 
 ing practiced and taught suggestion, and 
 having surrounded herself with an atmosphere 
 of suggestion, Mrs. Eddy is reaping her reward 
 in an abnormal and even hysterical sensitive- 
 ness to counter suggestion. Such absurd and 
 frenzied imaginings as abound in the chapter 
 on Demonology can proceed from no other 
 source. 
 
 Although she condemns every method of 
 cure not her own, the present writer holds that 
 a subtle danger lurks in Mrs. Eddy's manner of 
 healing. To prove this, let us first examine 
 the operation of reward and punishment in 
 those mental and material states of conscious- 
 ness known in Christian Science nomenclature 
 as the world of mortal mind. 
 
 Assigning whatever attributes to the High- 
 est, we, descending, encounter their opposites, 
 distorted reflections of the Highest. The inva- 
 riable effect of any violation of Eternal Law is 
 proportionate reaction hurling the perception 
 of the offender into a distorted idea of Reality. 
 If to the Highest we attribute health, then 
 every violator of the laws of health is by reac- 
 tion plunged into the delusion of disease. 
 
 24 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 That this is so is not of mortal mind, as the 
 Christian Scientist asserts, but of God through 
 mortal mind, and for the final vindication of 
 Law. When one hurls himself against the 
 impregnable wall of Divine Law, rebound is 
 inevitable, but the punishment is mental because 
 material consciousness is reducible to mental 
 consciousness. Mrs. Eddy says, *' I have dis- 
 cerned disease in the human mind many weeks 
 before the so-called disease made its appearance 
 in the body." 
 
 The Christian Science healer has discovered 
 disease to be mental delusion ; hence its denial 
 is a suggestion arousing mortal mind to combat 
 and force back the delusion, and the result is 
 in appearance, but not in reality, a cure accom- 
 plished. To assert that here " there is no trans- 
 fer of mental pictures from one mortal mind 
 to another because there is but one Mind" is a 
 mischievous fallacy. 
 
 Because of his vast spiritual insight, Jesus, 
 in healing, never opposed the retributive law ; 
 nevertheless, the fact cannot be ignored that 
 he not only delegated his unique power to the 
 twelve, but, afterward, to the seventy sent forth 
 in his name. The Theosophists, who claim 
 deep knowledge in spiritual things, hold that 
 at the birth of a world-teacher, the wise ones 
 directly or indirectly associated with him in the 
 past, are reborn into the immediate, and the 
 next circle of his environment. Such were 
 they who went forth from Jesus, each endowed 
 
 26 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 in proportion to his own understanding of the 
 law of Divine Justice. These healers therefore 
 released from the bonds of pain such, and such 
 only, as the good Law allowed. After the 
 passing of Jesus, the guardians of humanity 
 gradually hid the secret of Divine healing from 
 men less and less wise in its use. However, 
 this is an explanation too occult for more than 
 limited acceptance. 
 
 That the real cause of disease is neither in 
 physical body nor yet in the mind, is the teach- 
 ing of Swedenborg. To him the heavens are 
 the Grand Man corresponding to the internal 
 structure and outward shape of the human 
 body. From the Lord, through the angelic 
 societies constituting the Grand Man, flow men- 
 tal and physical health to humanity. From 
 the hells, which are the malformed, diseased 
 correspondent of the Grand Man, and from the 
 satans and devils who have chosen the hells, 
 arises disease of body and mind. Normal body 
 and mind favor the heavenly influx ; abnormal 
 body and mind close the channels from 
 above and open the flood gates from below. 
 Thus Jesus on the cross felt the influx of the 
 hells. 
 
 Material medicine, but, better still, the ban- 
 ishing of fear and all evil emotions, and, in 
 place, the arousing of their opposites, restore 
 normal conditions of body, while surgery, by 
 resetting the break or dislocation, also favors 
 renewal of interrupted health from the Lord. 
 
 26 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 The body of the well-doer often suffers 
 because of evil heredity; but if his ancestors, or 
 rather if all men before him, had lived the life 
 of good, his interiors, like those of angels, 
 would always be open into heaven. Knowing 
 nothing of disease, man, in extreme age, would 
 pass into a body such as angels have. 
 
 '* Swedenborg shows that the brain coverings 
 are composed of threefold cells ; the first of 
 these should pour their fluids into the less fine, 
 they in turn should empty into the relatively 
 coarse. Heredity has closed the two fine sets 
 of cells, and the coarse is filled with impurity. 
 Swedenborg teaches that these finer cells may 
 be opened by regeneration, and so discharge 
 their cleansing fluids until the impurities of the 
 brain and nervous system are purged away." 
 
 The office of the true mental healer, like that 
 of the Lord at his first coming, is to restore 
 brain and bodily conditions necessary to Divine 
 influx, and so to cast out the devils drawn into 
 conjunction with the morally and physically 
 diseased. 
 
 In accord with his doctrine of " discreet 
 degrees," Swedenborg establishes hard and 
 fast bounds between natural and spiritual law. 
 Therefore, if of good physical heredity, and if 
 a conformer to natural law, the sinner may be 
 physically immune, whereas the saint, if physi- 
 cally less fortunately circumstanced, may 
 always be ill in body. Such conclusions, with 
 which a surface view of life agrees, have led 
 
 27 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 men into agnosticism and downright atheism ; 
 and no wonder, for modern ideas of what con- 
 stitutes human justice require that at least of a 
 Divine Ruler whose law is perfect Justice. 
 Evidently the Swedish seer has not fathomed 
 the cause of physical disease ; therefore we 
 may distrust his sounding of the mental laws 
 which underlie Divine healing. 
 
 In the esoteric schools of the East it is 
 taught that full submission of human will to 
 Divine Will favors unimpeded consummation 
 of Divine Justice toward the individual ; and, 
 because of this, the life of the saint may be 
 filled with sorrow and suffering. Thus is made 
 clear that dark saying, " Whom the Lord loveth 
 he chasteneth." That one holds this view of 
 disease and suffering is no reason for morbid- 
 ity. The medicine of cheerfulness and hope is 
 always consistent since the Law may at any 
 time be satisfied. On the other hand, to chafe 
 under discipline is to augment the necessity of 
 discipline. 
 
 In physical disease the mind, conforming to 
 spiritual Law, has thrown an internal discord 
 to the surface, and, until the Higher Law is 
 satisfied, the mind should persistently hold it 
 there ; but now some meddlesome Scientist 
 restores outer harmony by paralyzing the 
 physical disease, as such, and pushing it, latent 
 and in no wise healed, back into its mental 
 source. 
 
 Would the mental practitioner heal ? Would 
 
 28 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 he say, "Thy sins are forgiven thee; Arise, 
 taice up thy bed, and go unto thine house " ? 
 Then let him first explore the labyrinthian 
 hiding places of memory back therein the dim 
 past ; let him then drag forth and destroy, if 
 he can, the seemingly forgotten causes of 
 physical and mental pain ; those which the 
 soul, dimly-conscious of its own highest 
 good, remembers as, with what fortitude it 
 can muster, it undergoes the fiery purification 
 of suffering. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy's contention that materia medica 
 and hygiene are effective against disease solely 
 because mortal belief has made them so, is 
 contradicted by certain palpable facts ; to 
 illustrate : Time out of mind the treatment of 
 pulmonary troubles, and all diseases of the res- 
 piratory tract, has been along certain lines. 
 Despite the incredulity of the medical fraternity 
 at large, and the strenuous opposition of both 
 the patient and his friends, a diametrically op- 
 posite method has by its extraordinary success 
 well-nigh vindicated itself. On the other hand, 
 because of prevailing unbelief, Mrs. Eddy 
 advises her healers to leave the mending of 
 bones to the ordinary surgeon. 
 
 The more is studied the problem of sin and 
 consequent suffering, the more is it evident that 
 the world is yet facing a mystery, that of Divine 
 healing, which, with the mystery of tongues 
 and their interpretation —according to Eddy- 
 ism, the statement and understanding of Divine 
 
 29 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 Science — has, since the first centuries, eluded 
 the Christian Church. 
 
 On the other hand, the balderdash in" Science 
 and Health," to the effect that, because of their 
 faith in materia medica, *' Doctors are filling 
 the world with disease," is beneath the con- 
 tempt of a body of men that, especially during 
 the last few decades, has achieved a record 
 both in the cure of ordinary disease and in the 
 stamping out of epidemics. That record chal- 
 lenges the examination of the sceptical and 
 compels the admiration of the unprejudiced. 
 The long record of the medical profession is 
 one of conscientious duty, painstaking investi- 
 gation and priceless discovery in the domain of 
 real, ameliorating Science. It is a record to 
 which the hospital, the sanitorium and the pri- 
 vate home are daily testifying. 
 
 V 
 
 Theosophists point the finger of reproach 
 and scorn at the Christian Science healer's cus- 
 tom of requiring a fee of all able to pay. To 
 the impartial onlooker it must be evident that 
 no argument of the Sophist can place Divine 
 healing and instruction therein on a commer- 
 cial basis. If Mrs. Eddy believes that God 
 authorized her fixing a price on these, then she 
 is misled of Error, that cunning, truth-counter- 
 feiting devil ; that Eve-beguiling serpent whose 
 heel she, the new Eve, the enlightened spirit- 
 ual mother, thinks to bruise. 
 
 30 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 Those of old who were entitled to the gift of 
 Divine healing, those in fact whom Jesus called, 
 were by him admonished concerning the hard 
 and well-nigh impossible conditions to which 
 they must conform. " Freely ye have received, 
 freely give. Provide neither gold, nor silver, 
 nor brass, in your purses ; nor script for your 
 journey, neither two coats, neither shoes nor 
 yet staves ; for the workman is worthy of his 
 meat. Behold I send you forth as sheep in the 
 midst of wolves ; and ye shall be brought 
 before governors and kings for my sake." 
 
 Is it possible that Mrs. Eddy and her healers 
 realize the stupendous nature of their claim to 
 be instruments and revelators of Divine Mind? 
 Evidently not, for otherwise they would have 
 purged themselves of every semblance of 
 greed. Like St. Francis and his followers, they 
 would have been impelled to the vow of life- 
 long poverty. The argument that a fee be 
 required of patients lest ingratitude be fostered 
 in them, is a miserable sophistry, a contention 
 unwarranted by anything that can be read into 
 the Master's words. 
 
 Does such sacrifice as the vow of life-long 
 poverty seem to Mrs. Eddy, and her healers, 
 an absurdly literal following of the old in these 
 widely-different times ? Have the hearts of 
 mortals so hardened that to-day the Divine 
 healer of human ills must demand his meat or 
 starve ? Common sense spurns the insinuation, 
 but hints that the material world and its good 
 
 31 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 things are too much with these discoverers and 
 promulgators of other world conditions and 
 requirements. The fact that Christian Science 
 practitioners are densely ignorant of what con- 
 stitutes trustworthiness, proves that the sacred 
 trust of Divine healing, and instruction in Divine 
 healing, was never committed to their keeping. 
 
 That profound thinker, Immanuel Kant, calls 
 duty, "the sublime and mighty that embraces 
 nothing charming or insinuating." The " Cat- 
 egorical Imperative " of the Kantian philoso- 
 phy compels duty in those who attain to under- 
 standing of duty. He who is truly dutiful is so 
 from motives other than fear, or desire of gain. 
 These motives have ever swayed the ordinary 
 religionist, but Kant calls us to a height where 
 the conception of duty for its own sake is the 
 inward voice of God as the supreme Law-Giver. 
 
 Every copy of *' Science and Health " has 
 impressed on its cover theScriptual injunction, 
 *' Heal the sick ; raise the dead ; cleanse the 
 lepers ; cast oat devils." In the preface to the 
 edition of 1881, the reader is informed that 
 •' The author takes no patients, but takes stu- 
 dents in the treatment of disease through Mind. 
 Her tuition per pupil is $300.00." Extra les- 
 sons were later added to the course, and the 
 tuition was advanced to $800.00. After Mrs. 
 Eddy had acquired a competence through 
 teaching and the sale of her book, her prefaces 
 informed the public that " the author takes no 
 patients, and declines medical consultation." 
 
 32 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 The sophistical reason for Mrs. Eddy's ex- 
 emption from the imperative call to entire duty 
 probably is that her time and energies must be 
 given to matters of greater moment. Such 
 elastic conscience in the presence of the sub- 
 lime and mighty law of duty, was never in 
 Jesus. His brief years of ministry were crowded 
 with cares and duties, important among which 
 was the task of instructing his immediate fol- 
 lowers. Although he was surrounded by sick- 
 ness and death, never did such heartless words 
 as " I am otherwise busy," eome from the lips 
 of the Master. 
 
 Beside the bed of mortal pain the Divine 
 healer strives to picture in himself, and his pa- 
 tient, the perfect, God-manifesting man. Fail- 
 ing to cure, or even to help, he feels that his 
 inability to demonstrate Divine Science is due 
 to some error of mortal mind blurring in him- 
 self the pure reflection of Truth. "Alas ! " he 
 cries, " I have not lived the life ! " Nor has he, 
 for none is perfect save God alone. And yet, 
 O the irony of it ! his most subtle error was 
 implanted and nurtured by his infallible teacher. 
 That error is the expectation of silver and 
 gold, clean in themselves, but defiling, O how 
 defiling ! in an exchange as of one commodity 
 for another. Elisha claimed no fee of Naaman, 
 and though pressed he even refused a gift. 
 Peter laid a curse on one who thought that the 
 gift of God could be purchased with money. 
 "Thy money perish with thee," "Thou hast 
 
 33 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 neither part nor lot in this matter, for thy heart 
 is not right in the sight of God." 
 
 The Pastor Emeritus of "The first Church of 
 Christ Scientist, Boston," says, "As in Jesus' 
 time, so to-day, tyranny and pride need to be 
 whipped out of the temple and humility and 
 Divine Science welcomed in." It is recorded of 
 Jesus that in his purification of God's house he 
 overthrew the tables of the money changers. 
 Therefore O humble Scientist ; know you this ! 
 Therefore O unworldly one ; consider well ! If 
 Jesus should come to your costliest temple, 
 even your sacred Mother Church, he w^ould 
 straightway scourge from it that spirit of thrift 
 which urges the healer to realize well on his 
 money investment, and so make Christian Sci- 
 ence pay. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy says ** The physical affirmation 
 of disease should always be met with the men- 
 tal negation." In the Eddy method of healing, 
 and in all methods which heal by negation, the 
 danger is a vital one because these methods are 
 denial of God's law of reaction by which alone 
 the harmony of the universe is maintained. 
 These methods would thwart the means where- 
 by, in the providence of the All Wise, mankind 
 will attain to everlasting health. Nevertheless, 
 the Law is not thwarted. Reformation does 
 not of itself cancel the penalty of crime for, 
 never, until the penalty is fully paid, is justice 
 satisfied and disease destroyable ; then, by per- 
 mission of the Law, it ceases of itself, or, for 
 
 34 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 some purpose of God, who works ever with 
 manifold object, for instance the inculcation of 
 active human sympathy, the ministrations of 
 man become necessary to recovery. Further- 
 more, that mortals may realize their mutual 
 dependence, even the strongest are at times 
 brought by sickness to seek relief of others. 
 
 The regular practitioner can testify that often 
 after long illness, the patient's habit of think- 
 ing himself sick continues into the period of 
 convalescence. In such instance the stimulus 
 of mental suggestion is indeed a benefit. But 
 to check the mid-course of retributive Law by 
 calling it a lie, is to incur an added penalty. 
 Man is eternal, and, even should disease be 
 forced back for the term of mortal life, three 
 score and ten years are but an infinitesimal 
 curve in the mighty orbit of his being. The 
 case is, in result, like that of the hardened sin- 
 ner whose unbelief in retribution holds it at bay 
 uotil its gathered power suddenly overwhelms 
 him. 
 
 VI 
 
 The tenets of Christian Science had origin in 
 an madequate philosophy of life. Perceiving 
 God to be the fount of Life, Wisdom, Love, 
 Bliss, and all else beatific, and knowing also 
 that sin, misery, and death are on every side, 
 Mrs. Eddy deemed their reality incompatible 
 with God's overruling. To make Him consist- 
 ent King she circumscribes His knowledge. 
 
 35 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 She holds Him ignorant of human conditions, 
 arguing that if aware He would not permit. 
 
 Defining God to be Love and Wisdom, let us 
 attempt the largest view of these, a view de- 
 void of sentimentality. 
 
 The purest human love has a taint of par- 
 tiality. Far above the sublimated selfishness 
 of the mother's heart towers Divine Love. 
 All-wise, it knows not partiality because over- 
 gift to one is robbery of all others. Necessarily 
 it is Love-Wisdom ; it is rigid Justice ruling 
 the world. 
 
 Grasping this idea, one is not misled by 
 appearances, but is convinced that somehow 
 Justice is dispensed when seemingly most trav- 
 estied ; and that even unjust men are, without 
 excusing, its instruments. Innumerable judg- 
 ments of Justice, in their execution, appear not 
 to the eye, nor will they ever to any human 
 eye, for who can read the book of human life 
 and so unriddle man's hidden doings since the 
 beginning of mortal mind in the aeons of the 
 past ? Who can read the balancing of action 
 with reaction accomplished and now being ac- 
 complished ? Could we unravel those finer 
 than spider films of cause and effect which 
 girdle and cover the globe, we should see Love, 
 as remedial Justice, triumphant still, and the 
 world, despite every hindrance, steadily attain- 
 ing ; daily nearer that " One far-off divine 
 event to which the whole creation moves." 
 Then, as Mrs. Eddy declares, every object in 
 
 36 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 the material world will be resolved into spirit- 
 ual ideas. 
 
 " If disease can attack and control the body 
 without the consent of mortals, sin can do the 
 same for both are errors." This reasonin^^: is 
 wrong because the author's theory inhibits her 
 seeing that physical suffering is one of the 
 judgments of Justice which appears not always 
 on the surface of life. On the other hand, it is 
 universally agreed that sin has no control over 
 the unconsenting. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy says, " Mind is not subject to 
 growth or change." In the same connection 
 she asserts that, after the destruction of mortal 
 mind, the real man, the thought of God, "is 
 forever unfolding the endless beatitudes of 
 Being" because "Infinite progression is con- 
 crete Being." Here, as often elsewhere, the 
 author fails to grasp the import of her own 
 statements. Progress and unfolding should 
 not be predicated of Infinite Thought. Unlike 
 limited mortal thought, it reasons not from 
 cause to effect ; neither does it unfold, for at 
 once it encompasses its object. To the child 
 the alphabet is but a succession of letters. 
 These to the adult mean the printed page. To 
 the poet they signify the setting forth of his 
 fancy ; to the philosopher the amplification of 
 his abstruse theory ; to the scholar the compila- 
 tion of human knowledge. If in Christian 
 Science man were but God's creature, then 
 Divine Wisdom would seem to unfold as he 
 
 37 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 grows toward it, but, as God's thought, he is at 
 once and forever, perfect and changeless. 
 
 Our would-be teacher saj^s, '' What an abuse 
 of natural beauty to say that a rose, the smile 
 of God, can produce suffering ! " Apparently 
 she forgets that " its beauty and fragrance which 
 should uplift the thought, and dissuade any 
 sense of fear and fever ; " would not be appre- 
 hensible to mortal mind if not as much its cre- 
 ation as is the human physical body ; that 
 which painters and sculptors pronounce the 
 acme of earthly beauty. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy writes, *' To label earthly beauty 
 nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God's crea- 
 tion. In our immature sense of spiritual things 
 let us say of the beauties of the sensuous world, 
 I love your promise ; and shall know, some- 
 time, the spiritual reality and substance of 
 form, light, and color of what I now through 
 you discern dimly." The above is an acceptable 
 statement of the present writer's view ; but this 
 statement is not founded on the fundamentals 
 of Christian Science, a structure standing for 
 the absolute unlikeness of spiritual and mortal 
 mind. Surely those promises of Spiritual Real- 
 ity, the beauties of the sensuous world, are 
 perceived not only by those who are high- 
 minded, but also — though less vividly because 
 less significant to them — by the morally 
 depraved who, sunk in the falsity of mortal 
 mind, should not see them at all. Mrs. Eddy's 
 statement, turning against her, argues for the 
 
 38 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 present writer's claim that mortal mind and 
 Spiritual Mind differ in degree rather than kind. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy says, " God, without the image or 
 likeness of Himself would be a nonentity, a 
 Mind unexpressed. God would be without a 
 proof of His own nature. Spiritual man is the 
 idea of God." 
 
 Mind being the Esse of God, it is evident 
 that Mind unexpressed, an unthinking God, is 
 a nonentity ; but, after thinking from eternity, 
 God is All ; His thought has created nothing 
 new on which to think. Spiritual man, "the 
 idea of God," is consequently God's thought 
 concerning Himself. We have shown that if 
 God is All, He is both Thinker and Thought ; 
 so God is without proof of His own nature. 
 Mrs. Eddy says that God is Love, but as God 
 is All, His Love must be self-love, the very 
 apotheosis of selfishness, that against which 
 every true teacher has declared. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy says, "in reproduction the order 
 of genus and species is preserved throughout 
 the entire round of nature. This points to the 
 spiritual truth and Science of being. Error 
 relies upon a reversal of this order, asserts that 
 Spirit produces matter ; that good is the origin 
 of evil." With tiresome reiteration the author 
 of " Science and Health " would emphasize the 
 utter falsity of mortal mind, yet, with her accus- 
 tomed inconsistency, she here employs those 
 creations of mortal mind, the genus and species 
 of material nature, to illustrate the Divine order 
 
 39 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 of spiritual creation for which, according to 
 her teaching, these have been substituted. If 
 mortal mind were wholly destitute of Truth, it 
 would have wrought confusion in the material 
 world by producing a mineral from a vegetable, 
 or even a man from a brute. Truth and utter 
 falsity never move parallel, but rather in oppo- 
 site ways. In fact Mrs. Eddy's argument tends 
 to prove the material the veil of the Spiritual. 
 
 The wise Emerson, our Yankee transcen- 
 dental philosopher, withal the hard-headed 
 product of his rock-based, granite-hilled New 
 England, following his own advice hitched his 
 waggon to a star. But then he knew the nature 
 of stars, and, though to him, ** everything is 
 made of one hidden stuff " yet the material star 
 so appeared for an adequate purpose. Surely 
 yonder self-luminous orbs had established their 
 heliocentric motions, and the harmonious laws 
 governing therein, aeons before this earth was 
 v/hirled from its molten source. The obedient, 
 well-guided planets ; what of them ? What 
 mystery of life, not wholly unlike our own, has 
 recent discovery made probable ? And yet 
 by the Christian Scientist, the Astronomic 
 Universe, in toto and in parte, is held to be 
 " nothing ; " in other words it is Truth's cunning 
 counterfeit ; it is the conjuring of blind untruth ; 
 it is the vast and intricate mechanism con- 
 structed by error from the fabric of its own 
 unenlightened dream. 
 
 Every man knows of his neighbour, as of him- 
 
 40 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 self, his subjection to physical conditions not 
 yet surmounted by the race. The telescope 
 reveals that probably our Martian neighbours 
 struggle to maintain physical life amidst the 
 hard conditions imposed by their dying world. 
 This much tends to prove the error of mortal 
 mind not limited to this benighted sphere. 
 Also it would indicate that, wherever in the 
 spacial deep a sun has warmed his worlds to 
 teeming physical life, there, as here, error and 
 Truth are bound in that mysterious dualism 
 which Christian Science thinks to disprove. 
 From all this we may conclude that when Truth 
 has dissipated that phase of mortal mind which 
 created our physical planet, she has conquered 
 but a minute fraction of the material universe. 
 
 VII 
 
 Though to the founder and followers of 
 Eddyism, it towers an imposing and compre- 
 hensive system, it does not so appear to the 
 present writer. He ventures that if this pseudo 
 philosophy were formulated compactly, its 
 padded bulk would shrink to that of one of 
 Emerson's longer essays. Resting on those 
 fundamentals, the allness of Divine Mind, and 
 the nothingness of matter, Eddyism cannot 
 consistently embrace a vast and minutely elab- 
 orated cosmogony as does its rival, " Modern 
 Theosophy " as promulgated by Madam H. P. 
 Blavatsky. Eddyism, though confined to its 
 chosen sphere, attempts therein no such reve- 
 
 41 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 lations as abound in the writings of Swedenborg 
 and the now well-nigh forgotten " Pough- 
 keepsie Seer," Andrew Jackson Davis. The 
 illumination of Mrs. Eddy resulted in the met- 
 aphysics of " Mind," the beginning, middle and 
 end of her message. That she ignores the 
 material is a serious short-coming as will pres- 
 ently appear. 
 
 Plato held that the phenomenal world of 
 show, the world of flux that opposes the reality 
 of Divine Substance, originated in man's lack 
 of spiritual sight wherefore resulted what Leib- 
 nitz calls the distortion of the Image, that 
 which Plato named the Archetype ; the Divine 
 Idea of the world existing in the thought of 
 the Supreme Architect. Thus the Trinity of 
 Beauty, Truth, Good, was by man degraded 
 into its opposite ; and yet to the Divine Knower 
 the Archetype remained unchanged. Thus 
 understood, Noumenon and phenomenon are 
 one, and nature's vast complexity, that web 
 which physical science hopes yet to unravel, 
 that intelligent though far from All Wise total 
 of physical laws, originated otherwhere than in 
 the vacuous " Nothing " of Christian Science. 
 
 Because an idealist, the present writer ac- 
 knowledges that every wonder unearthed in 
 the geological strata of the globe, may have 
 existed in human thought. Moreover, he 
 admits that every yet undiscovered material 
 law, however marvelous, was formulated by 
 less than Divine Ideation. Nevertheless, he 
 
 42 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 argues that the very marvel of that law proves 
 it sourced in high intelligence. The writer 
 would reiterate that whatever is devoid of 
 Truth rises not above chaos. Therefore the 
 sequence of physical law, however material, 
 proves an intelligence derived from a higher. 
 
 Applying our argument we find, for example, 
 that because the physical law limiting the term 
 of physical life has ever, without miscarriage, 
 been executed on all flesh ; therefore that 
 intelligent law must have originated in some 
 imperative law known unto Him who from the 
 beginning saw the culmination of Divine Pur- 
 pose. 
 
 The physicists are now proclaiming as prob- 
 able that matter is a manifestation of electrical 
 energy ; that, in the material atoms, the revolv- 
 ing electrons make rigid and apprehensible, as 
 suns and planets, the subtle ether of space. To 
 illustrate : sufficient momentum in a column of 
 water renders it rigid as iron ; a swiftly whirl- 
 ing disk of soft metal cuts the hardest plate 
 steel. If, for some reason, the electrons should 
 change their rate of rotation, the density of 
 matter would be correspondingly effected, and, 
 should these become inert, then matter would 
 disappear in its substratum of supersensible 
 ether. 
 
 As to the origin of the energy exhibited by 
 the electrons, an energy absolutely inconceiva- 
 ble in its aggregate, the Christian Scientist 
 would call it mortal mind ; the Idealist calling 
 
 43 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 it mind would hold this mind to be at least 
 intelligent, and probably far more endowed 
 than any manifested by the inhabitants of our 
 planet. To disintergrate and dissipate matter 
 requires something more than mere denial. A 
 profound knowledge of the mysterious law 
 governing the motion of the electrons is 
 necessary. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy holds that the body should be 
 kept pure by mind rather than by washing, and 
 so the daily ablutions of the infant are unneces- 
 sary. She inquires, '* Is civilization only a 
 higher form of idolatry, that man should bow 
 down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, 
 exercise, and air ?" If her philosophy is indeed 
 true, then utter neglect of what civilization 
 deems indispensable hygiene may benefit the 
 "Scientist," but if, as here contended, this phi- 
 losophy rests on falsity, what then ? Why, a 
 sinking to the condition of the cave-dweller, 
 the simple life with a vengeance. Let us hope 
 that a saving sense of the ridiculous will deter 
 the " Scientist" from demonstrating that filth 
 and godliness are in any way related. 
 
 •' Science and Health " teaches " that genera- 
 tion rests on no sexual basis." The meaning 
 is that if mortal belief had not made necessary 
 the male, then conception would occur from the 
 fecundation of thought alone. It is absurd to 
 contend that the error of procreation causes 
 the pure, wise and sexless man to fall into the 
 dream of prenatal condition and physical birth, 
 
 44 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 for *' man is as perfect as the Mind which 
 formed him." 
 
 Because the Christian Scientist denies that 
 the heavenly man could so fall, the question 
 arises, What dreamer did fall into mortal mind 
 and its dream ? Evidently a denial of all rela- 
 tion between the earthly and the heavenly man 
 is the dooming of that earthly man. If a self- 
 existing error, he cannot emerge from matter 
 into spirit because in that case no bridge exists 
 between these two. For the earthly man the 
 most materialistic philosophy results in no 
 more complete extinction. 
 
 Inasmuch as Christian Science teaches that 
 the real man is wholly outside and independent 
 of the physical body, therefore of the carnal 
 man it is evident that his faculties and mem- 
 bers do but the bidding of mortal mind within. 
 Lofty thoughts and noble deeds proceed neces- 
 sarily from the exterior, real man who only 
 seems to act through the physical which, from 
 the viewpoint of "Truth," is fading into the 
 nothingness from which it sprung. 
 
 By the elaborators of the Vedanta Philosophy, 
 and also by the great sages of India, it was 
 deemed consistent with Divine Wisdom to 
 uplift rather than destroy the mortal man. In 
 Hindoo Philosophy, the bodily appetites and 
 passions are physical manifestations of eternal 
 forces. That which would debase the mortal 
 is the soiled insignia of its worth. Although 
 the eternal energies in man can be brutalized, 
 
 45 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 assuredly they are transmutable into every 
 beatific virtue ; and for this end alone they 
 exist. Man is the young Hercules of divine 
 paternity, but born of Alcmene, or Mary, or 
 Maya, — born of illusion the earth-mother. 
 Trials many and sore must test his every fibre 
 ere he as conqueror can fill his place where 
 sit the immortal ones. 
 
 Back in the fifth century, Nestorius was hum- 
 bled from his bishopric and banished to the 
 Libyan desert because forsooth he taught that 
 while Christ is unborn and eternal, Jesus was 
 but mortal. Christian Science has revived and 
 in this twentieth century is teaching that ancient 
 theory. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy says, "There never was, is not 
 now, and never can be but one Jesus of 
 Nazareth." Mrs. Eddy's explanation of the 
 Immaculate Birth is a bit of transcendentalism 
 worthy of the pen of Madam Blavatsky. In 
 the unity of Immortal Mind, the Father-Mother 
 God, dwells from eternity the Christ Principle, 
 Truth, Life, Love. In a moment of exaltation, 
 Mary, rising above all error of mortal mind, 
 conceived the Christ as a pure idea to which 
 her purest mortal love, that of the mother for 
 her babe, gave the form of the infant Jesus 
 within the womb. Therefore Jesus, The Christ, 
 is both human and divine. 
 
 In this teaching of Christian Science, the old 
 belief is reversed. Christ descended not to 
 Mary, but Mary, ascending to Christ, brought 
 
 46 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 Jesus to earth and Christ into relation with the 
 flesh. As an explanation — not necessarily a 
 solution — of a mystery of Orthodox Christian- 
 ity, this theory is ingenious as any devisable ; 
 but, in a world of one God and many Marys, 
 the question might be asked, Why can there 
 never be but one Jesus of Nazareth ? Let us 
 discover the Christian Science answer. 
 
 It was woman, because of her greater spirit- 
 uality, that, in the person of Mary, rose to the 
 conception of Life, Truth, Love. Again it was 
 woman, a later Mary, that attained to the per- 
 fect vision, the which she gave to the world, 
 not as in any wise the fruit of her body, but as 
 the fruit of her enlightened mind because Jesus, 
 having passed the gates of mortal birth and 
 death, destroyed forever the error of his mortal 
 body. This then, is the second coming by 
 Christ himself foretold; the incorporal presence 
 of Christ Jesus who judges sin, and, by means 
 of the Word, the Holy Ghost, Divine Science, 
 condemns it to the abyss of nothingness. 
 
 The above, though not formulated in " Sci- 
 ence and Health," is there between the lines, 
 and gives the true status of "Mother Mary" 
 with the enlightened of her cult. 
 
 A century and a half before the discovery of 
 Divine Science, the seer Emanuel Swedenborg 
 proclaimed the second coming as the Word of 
 which John writes, " In the beginning was the 
 Word, and the Word was with God, and 
 the Word was God." Swedenborg interpreted 
 
 47 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 the Word to mean Divine Truth as found in the 
 teachings of "The New Church." He says, 
 •' It is evident that the Lord will now appear in 
 the Word. The reason he will not appear 
 in person is, because since his ascension he is in 
 his glorified humanity, and so cannot appear to 
 any man unless the eyes of his spirit be first 
 opened." 
 
 In all history, only two women attained unto 
 an idea of the Christ Principle, but, by a 
 supreme effort of highest mortal mind, the first 
 of these carnalized that principle to a child 
 within her womb. The logical result of this is 
 an esoteric teaching, one of the beautiful truths 
 of which Christian Science has many. By a 
 supreme effort of mortal mind it is possible for 
 women to subvert the universal belief in the 
 obtaining method of human generation, and so 
 counterfeit and carnalize the heavenly man to a 
 mortal embryo. This leads into another beau- 
 tiful truth prudently kept in the background. 
 It is this. Of malicious animal magnetism, — 
 m. a. m. to those who dare not speak the name 
 in full — it is possible that, wielded by an adept 
 in the black art, it can throw upon some sus- 
 ceptible victim the condition of pregnancy so 
 that the unconsenting mother will bear a demon 
 in human form. 
 
 To discover the effect of perverted beliefs on 
 those who hold them, need we turn to darkest 
 Africa and the degraded dupes of her witch 
 doctors ? Need we turn to that damnable her- 
 
 48 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 itage of Hayti, Voodooism and its grovelling 
 slaves ? No indeed, because, for abject imbe- 
 cile fear, we need but turn to Mr. Eddy contin- 
 ually beset on every side by malign influences, 
 and whose death, it was claimed, was due to 
 arsenic mentally administered. We need but 
 turn to the high priestess herself and the imag- 
 inary deeds of her disgruntled healers ; and, 
 lastly, to the foolish precautions surrounding 
 her removal from Concord to Newton. 
 
 Now what is the hidden but sufficient cause 
 of a superstitious dread almost incredible to 
 the world at large ? Surely it is the belief 
 that evil and not God rules this lowly earth of 
 ours. Of black magic Madam Blavatsky 
 taught many wierd things, but then she also 
 taught that humanity is surrounded by mighty, 
 invisible guardians. However this may be, 
 reader, rest assured that if you and I believe 
 the Infinite God in His Heaven upholds in His 
 everlasting arms these finite conditions, then, 
 seeking to conform to the right, we may laugh 
 to scorn the peculiar besettings which so cruelly 
 torment the Eddyite. God's ruling may little 
 agree with our poor notion of wisdom and 
 justice, but let the world be abandoned, only 
 for a day, to the caprices of mortal mind, and 
 no hell within the imagination of a Dante 
 would equal the resulting horror. 
 
 49 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 VIII 
 
 A number of advanced "Scientists" are re- 
 sponsible for certain beliefs concerning their 
 leader. These beliefs are logical in the premise, 
 and so are not attacked by Mrs. Eddy's watch 
 dogs who meanwhile pounce upon and rend any 
 error from without the sheepfold. Bearing in 
 mind that Jesus alluded to the coming of a fuller 
 revelation of Truth, these esoteric disciples 
 afifirm that because Mrs. Eddy has conceived 
 from both the Fatherhood and Motherhood 
 of God, she is necessarily the superior of the 
 first Mary who conceived only from God's 
 Fatherhood. Moreover, the wholly spiritual 
 birth of Christian Science is superior to that of 
 old in that Jesus himself was mortal. Again, 
 the mortal Mrs. Eddy may be superior to the 
 mortal Jesus since, being a woman, she is over- 
 coming materiality and assimilating herself to 
 God through a knowledge not only of His 
 Fatherhood, as revealed by Jesus, but also 
 through a knowledge of that which is even 
 higher, the Divine Motherhood. 
 
 These belittlers of Jesus should first prove 
 that he knew nothing of the Divine Mother- 
 hood. Certainly that knowledge originated in 
 no wise with Mrs. Eddy, nor with the disciples 
 of Mother Ann Lee, nor yet with Theodore 
 Parker who in prayer addressed God's Father- 
 hood and Motherhood as one. Antedating the 
 Christian Era, that knowledge is old as India 
 
 50 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 where Mind was the male and Love the female 
 principle which in manifestation became the 
 Father-Mother of the worlds. Likewise, that 
 knowledge was expressed by the Egyptian Isis 
 and Osiris and their Divine Child, Horus, alle- 
 gorically pictured in the arms of his mother the 
 radiant, star-diademed Queen of Heaven ; while 
 there behind them gloomed the cross of matter, 
 the foreshadowing of sacrifice ; that mysteri- 
 ous self-limiting, that sublime self-humbling, 
 that wondrous and far down-reaehing which is 
 the central theme and very life of world-inspir- 
 ing beliefs. 
 
 Yes indeed ! sacrifice is the supreme exam- 
 ple which has ever stirred, and forever will, the 
 noblest souls to emulation. In one of the great 
 religions the compelling idea is the self-limita- 
 tion and consequent sacrifice whereby the Un- 
 manifested Logos, issuing from Absolute Light, 
 which to man is absolute darkness, becomes the 
 Manifested and Creative Word. The physical 
 sun is now His outward appearance, the Spirit- 
 ual Sun His Essence. From these are poured 
 physical and spiritual life to His progeny the 
 worlds that those therein may develop to His 
 likeness and, finally, with perfected self-con- 
 sciousness, be updrawn to Para Nirvana which 
 is Himself. 
 
 In all ancient religions was performed the 
 exoteric sacrifice of the altar, suited to peoples 
 not yet come into a knowledge of true, heart 
 sacrifice. Christian Science lacks the Divine 
 
 51 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 example of self-humbling and down-reaching, 
 for how can Truth stoop to what for it is non- 
 existent ? The mortal Jesus, representing the 
 highest phase of mortal mind, did of himself 
 attain to the Christ Principle with which he was 
 associated in his unique birth. 
 
 Human motherhood results in more or less 
 of parturition pain which is followed by that 
 self-limiting whereby the mother narrows the 
 circle of her life for her dependent offspring. 
 Meanwhile, the father must provide for the 
 many that now look to him. The Divine 
 Motherhood is sacrifice, but infinitely higher 
 than that of the human mother, while its influ- 
 ence descends to mothers of less than human 
 kind. Having misunderstood the Divine Fa- 
 therhood, Mrs. Eddy has of necessity miscon- 
 ceived the Divine Motherhood. 
 
 Of no religionist can it be expected that he 
 rise higher than the ideals of his belief ; there- 
 fore the Christian Scientist, having promulgated 
 gratuitously his '* beautiful truth," and having 
 demonstrated over a few sick folk unable to 
 pay, feels not further the imperative call to sac- 
 rifice which has swayed the noblest disciples of 
 Jesus and Buddha. To heal the sick, raise the 
 dead, and cast out devils is, in his opinion, a 
 benefit for which he should ask remuneration ; 
 and yet, among the followers of a religion 
 which he deems wholly false, are men and 
 women, in both the East and this our Western 
 world, who have vowed to labor for humanity 
 
 52 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 while the Earth endures. Never will they enter 
 into final peace until all beings are brought into 
 harmony with the good Law. 
 
 An uncompromising follower of the Master, 
 Count Leo Tolstoi has for many years preached 
 to the world the gospel of non-resistance to 
 evil. In his interpretation of those sayings of 
 Jesus in which the Society of Friends also find 
 the command to keep peace with all men, Tol- 
 stoi may be an extremist. On the other hand, 
 the American public has long laughed at the 
 absurd spectacle of a woman speaking with 
 authority, and denying in the name of the Mas- 
 ter the reality of evil, while, in her own name, 
 and for her own pecuniary interests, fighting it 
 strenuously and often in the civil courts. 
 
 In a brief work, " Unity of Good," Mrs. Eddy 
 says, " Man is the generic term for all human- 
 ity. Woman is the highest species of Man." In 
 " Science and Health" we read, "The ideal man 
 corresponds to creation, to Intelligence and 
 Truth. The ideal woman corresponds to Life 
 and Love. We have not as much authority, in 
 Divine Science, for considering God masculine, 
 as we have for considering Him feminine, for 
 Love imparts the highest idea of Deity." " Sci- 
 ence and Health" thus defines Intelligence, 
 ''Substance; self-existent and Eternal Mind." 
 
 Having assigned to Love a place higher than 
 that of Eternal Mind, and also Truth, Mrs. 
 Eddy says that because woman corresponds to 
 Love, Eve was first to confess and abandon her 
 
 53 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 fault, "The belief in the material origin of man." 
 She was first '* to discern spiritual creation. 
 This hereafter enabled woman to be the mother 
 of Jesus, and to behold at the sepulchre the 
 risen Saviour. This enabled woman to be first 
 to interpret the Scriptures in their true sense, 
 which reveals the idea of God as Love." 
 
 Of Eve's exclamation at the birth of Cain, " I 
 have gotten a man from the Lord." Mrs. Eddy 
 says, "This supposes God to be the author of 
 sin and sin's progeny." So, after all. Eve had 
 not abandoned her fault. 
 
 Evidently the argument that Love is the 
 highest attribute of God, contains the personal 
 plea of the discoverer of Divine Science ; but 
 will the argument hold water ? God is perfect, 
 therefore His attributes are those of perfection, 
 to wit, perfect attributes. To maintain that 
 Love is higher than Truth is to limit Truth and 
 to limit God through His Truth. Hence God 
 being perfect, His attributes admit of no grada- 
 tion ; each is equal of the others. Thus man 
 is the equal of woman ; a conclusion in accord 
 with common sense if not with Christian Sci- 
 ence which is itself a religion of Love divorced 
 from Truth ; a one-sided religion, a solution of 
 life's enigmas wholly from the standpoint of 
 woman. It is a religion inadequate as those 
 hard, cruel creeds wherein men, seeking for 
 Truth, divorced it from Love and so gave to 
 the world man's reading of the riddle ; a one- 
 sided religion from which the inmost heart of 
 
 54 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 woman shrank, however much she stultified her 
 mind and bowed her head in meek submission. 
 
 Many simple souls have mildly blamed the 
 Apostle, deeming that he damaged the cause of 
 temperance by his words to Timothy, "use a 
 little wine for thy stomach's sake." Now, at 
 last, Mrs. Eddy has exonerated Paul and 
 showed his wisdom, for in the text wine means 
 understanding. Evidently, Divine Science was 
 the remedy advised for Timothy's often infirm- 
 ities. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy sometimes dwarfs and even per- 
 verts a spiritual conception by conforming it to 
 a physical law ; for example, " Life is the Cre- 
 ator reflected in his creation. If he dwell 
 within what he creates, God would not be 
 reflected but absorbed, and the science of Being 
 would be forever lost." In this antithesis of 
 Swedenborg's doctrine of Divine influx, the 
 conception of a mental reflection is taken from 
 the physical law of optics. Physical light is 
 reflected from the exterior of such bodies as 
 there intercept and turn back the rays of the 
 sun. Physical light entering opaque bodies is 
 therein quenched and lost. The originator of 
 Christian Science should know that the laws of 
 spiritual light transcend those of physical light. 
 Spiritual light is reflected from the interior 
 rather than the exterior of God-encompassed 
 man. 
 
 In her strictures on '* Spiritualism " Mrs. 
 Eddy is a trifle dogmatic. " The so-called 
 
 55 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 dead and living cannot communicate together 
 for they are in separate states of existence or 
 consciousness." From the position of ideal- 
 ism, the universe is divided into states or planes 
 of consciousness. Sight, hearing, touch, taste 
 and smell limit the normal entity to his partic- 
 ular plane. Passage to another is affected by 
 the deadening in him of these senses and the 
 wakening of those which correspond to that 
 plane. Some idiosyncrasy of the nervous sys- 
 tem enables the " medium " to accomplish this. 
 Nevertheless, a worthy and progressing entity 
 would ere long gravitate to conditions quite 
 out of touch with any medium. 
 
 IX 
 
 Greek and Hebrew scholars are now making 
 havoc of Mrs. Eddy's derivation and meaning 
 of certain Scriptural proper names. This is 
 indeed unfortunate, for, on that derivation and 
 meaning, are based some of her pet theories. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy has given to the world an inter- 
 pretation of the Scriptures. Necessarily that 
 interpretation is Christian Science, for which 
 Christianity has waited these nineteen hundred 
 years. 
 
 More than a century earlier than Mrs. Eddy, 
 Swedenborg, speaking as the mouthpiece of 
 the Lord, attributed to the Bible texts a mean- 
 ing quite at variance with this latest religion of 
 Truth. Choosing from the writings of these 
 two, let us place side by side a few examples 
 
 56 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 of their exposition of both Genesis and the 
 Apocalypse. 
 
 Swedenborg assures the world that " the spir- 
 itual sense of the Word was never discovered 
 until now." "Adam and his wife mean the 
 most ancient church." "Eden means the wis- 
 dom of the men of that church." Mrs. Eddy's 
 definition of Adam is "Error; a falsity; the 
 belief in 'original sin,' sickness and death." 
 Eve means " a beginning ; mortality ; finite 
 belief." " Eden stands for the mortal, material 
 body." The mighty, descending angel of the 
 first and second verse of the tenth chapter of 
 Revelation is, to Mrs. Eddy, Divine Science ; 
 " the right foot or dominion power of which 
 was upon the sea, upon elemental error, the 
 source of error's visible forms." " The left foot 
 was upon the earth, that is a secondary power 
 was exercised upon visible error." The little 
 book in his hand is, of course, " Science and 
 Health " of which she says, " Then will a voice 
 from harmony cry, ' Go and take the little 
 book. Take it and eat it up. Take Divine Sci- 
 ence. Read it from beginning to end.' " Swe- 
 denborg explains that the angel signifies the 
 Lord in Divine Majesty and Power, and the lit- 
 tle book contains the teachings of the church 
 of the New Jerusalem. 
 
 The Woman clothed with the sun, and the 
 moon under her feet and upon her head a crown 
 of twelve stars, Rev. XII, 1, typifies, in Chris- 
 tian Science, generic man ; she also typifies the 
 
 57 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 spiritual idea of God's Motherhood. Spirit is 
 indicated by the sun ; matter by the moon 
 under her feet. "The spiritual idea crowned 
 with twelve stars" signifies that, 'nhe twelve 
 tribes of Israel, with all mortals, will through 
 much tribulation yield to the activities of the 
 divine Principle of man in the harmony of Sci- 
 ence." To Swedenborg, a woman clothed with 
 the sun, and the moon under her feet, "signi- 
 fies the Lord's New Church in the heavens, 
 which is the new heaven, and the Lord's New 
 Church about to be upon the earth, which is 
 the New Jerusalem." And upon her head a 
 crown of twelve stars, " signifies the church's 
 wisdom and intelligence from knowledge of 
 divine good and divine truth derived from the 
 Word." 
 
 Verse 2. "And she being with child, cried 
 travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered," 
 signifies the doctrine of the New Church about 
 to come forth. Its difficult reception is indica- 
 ted by the dragon described in Verse 3. Ac- 
 cording to Mrs. Eddy, the spiritual idea is 
 symbolized by a woman in travail waiting to 
 be delivered of her " sweet promise," Christian 
 Science. The dragon symbolizes human error, 
 in fact, all that opposes Christian Science. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy says of the city that lieth four- 
 square, and Cometh down from God out of 
 heaven, that " it represents the light and glory 
 of Christian Science. The four sides of our 
 city are the Word, Christ, Christianity, and 
 
 58 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 divine Science." Swedenborg calls the holy 
 city the New Church, *' four-square because a 
 quadrangle signifies what is just. By length is 
 signified the good of that church, and by breadth 
 its truth. When good and truth are equal thv:re 
 exists what is just." 
 
 According to Mrs. Eddy, " The Lamb's wife 
 represents the unity of male and female as no 
 longer two married individuals, but as two indi- 
 vidual natures in one, and reflecting God as 
 Father-Mother." According to Swedenborg, 
 the Lamb's wife is "the Lord's New Church 
 which is the New Jerusalem." 
 
 What are we to understand from the above ? 
 Do not these widely different interpretations 
 argue an earthly and sufficient hindrance to any 
 full attainment of human thought ? Always 
 the artist, however heavenward-looking, paints 
 but the idealized scene of earth. Always the 
 sculptor of Jove and Apollo and Venus, but 
 symmetrizes the human form. Always the 
 poet, however skyward-imaginative, is first a 
 mortal dependent upon human experience ; nor 
 can he, in his most ethereal fancy, wholly di- 
 vorce the mundane from the celestial. This 
 taint of mortal mind is evident in the visions of 
 revelators like St. John and Mohammed and 
 Swedenborg. It makes insecure the founda- 
 tions of every system of correspondence down 
 to the days of Mrs. Eddy. It has more or less 
 misshaped the result of every speculative phi- 
 losophy, and it has rendered disappointing the 
 
 59 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 product of man's persistent groping in the 
 regions of the unknown. 
 
 Idealistic Monism has been the dream of the 
 Idealist and the Mystic. Down the ages, the 
 chief thinkers of this class have, without flinch- 
 ing, faced the outcome of their reasoning, spec- 
 ulation and intuition. To the Buddhist and the 
 Brahmin, every man, every creature, is the in- 
 carnation of Ishwara, the Master. In the Pla- 
 tonic theory, matter is in fact the objectivised 
 divine Idea, " the other " which in ceaseless be- 
 coming would reunite with " the same," the 
 sole Reality. In the Pantheistic scheme of 
 Spinoza, both man and universal nature are 
 the ever-fluctuating phenomena of the one un- 
 knowable Substance. To Leibnitz, the human 
 monad, and every lesser, every least, is the 
 microcosm of the Macrocosm. In the Subjec- 
 tive Idealism of Fichte, the ego and the non- 
 ego shall eventuate in union; the consciousness 
 of man must yet embrace the totality of Being. 
 Penetrating the secret of Hegel, behold again 
 that esoteric Ideal which animated the sage 
 and the seer beside the Ganges and the Nile; 
 to wit, the evolving consciousness of the many 
 ever-ascending, ever attaining to the Absolute, 
 the Divine Unity. 
 
 Posing as a discoverer of Truth, Mrs. Eddy, 
 in her monism, really harks back to the infancy 
 of Greek philosophy. Her metaphysical con- 
 ception and reasoning is akin to that of Par- 
 menides, the foremost representative of the 
 
 60 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 Eleatic School. Dealinn^ with the idea of pure, 
 indivisible Being; timeless, spaceless, omni- 
 present Thought, Parmenides regards all else 
 as nothing. In his exposition, cast in form of 
 an epic poem, he discourses first from the 
 standpoint of Truth; then, in turn, mortal 
 opinion affims belief in the material. 
 
 The successors of Parmenides, Plato espe- 
 cially, saw what he himself had overlooked, to 
 wit, the material can find no place in human 
 conception if wholly apart from the one Real- 
 ity; therefore the ability to argue against the 
 material is proof of its relatedness to Spirit. 
 
 Failing to profit by the mistake of the Elea- 
 tics, the "Scientist" first calls material condi- 
 tions an erroneous belief, then, if hard-pressed, 
 he will deny the existence of false belief though 
 in the very act of arguing with one who disputes 
 his interpretation of Truth. If rallied on the 
 absurdity of his contention, then will be, from 
 a position beyond the reach of argument, rejoin 
 that he speaks in the new tongue, unknown to 
 those who differ from him, that Truth which 
 transcends the ratiocination of mortal mind 
 whose every axiom may be utterly false in the 
 light of ''Truth," for, to use the language of a 
 brother "Scientist," "In our limited sense of in- 
 telligence we have ignorantly endowed the 
 mortal, material mind with power to think." This 
 abject subordination of reason to revelation 
 identifies the Eddyite with the most unyielding 
 religious bigots of the past. Alas for the free- 
 
 61 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 dom of human thought! Alas for the progress 
 of world-enlightenment if, down the ages, such 
 as these had had their undisputed rule! 
 
 The ill-equipped discoverer, both in physics 
 and metaphysics, may unwittingly expend his 
 energies on problems already solved, and so it 
 happens that a defunct theory of spirit and 
 matter is revived and rehabilitated in these 
 days of universal truth-seeking. That in defence 
 of this theory, men and women of at least aver- 
 age intellectual endowment will calmly stultify 
 their God-given reason is no wise laughable, as 
 may at first seem, but rather is it lamentable 
 for it betrays the heart-hunger of those who will, 
 at any cost, have the spiritual food of Truth. 
 
 X 
 
 Inasmuch as certain prominent "Scientists" 
 have undertaken to bolster Mrs. Eddy's doc- 
 trines with the great name of Immanuel Kant, 
 it may be well to inquire concerning those con- 
 clusions of his Philosophy which are said to 
 coincide with Christian Science. 
 
 In "The Kritik of Pure Reason" Kant dis- 
 covers and proves that perception of both time 
 and space is a priori in human sense; also, that 
 certain pure intelligent notions of the logical 
 judgment, from which are derived the twelve 
 Kantian categories, are h priori in human under- 
 standing. Were it not for the notions, and their 
 categories, the world would be a mere chaos, 
 for the peculiar province of the categories is to 
 
 62 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 synthesize and shape, in time and space, the 
 manifold sensations which the impact of exter- 
 nal objects, or of what, because of the categories, 
 we call objects, produces in the mind. 
 
 Kant posits a Noumenon, a "Thing-in-itself," 
 an Archetype with power to move the pure will 
 to duty although that Archetype exists beyond 
 man's a priori sense perception of time and 
 space, and, therefore, beyond the reach of the 
 moulding categories. The process whereby the 
 categories unify and mould perception is a 
 complicated one notwithstanding its ease and 
 instantaneousness; but the mind which employs 
 the categories, the mind which Kant analyzes 
 exhaustively, is finite, and its knowledge he 
 would limit to phenomena. His contention is 
 that hitherto metaphysicians have claimed the 
 mind's ability, through the categories, to reach 
 the Noumenon. Now if the sage of Konigsberg 
 had deemed finite mind, with all its involved 
 procedure, the nonentity of the "Scientist," he 
 would hardly have made so much ado about 
 nothing as "The Kritik of Pure Reason" con- 
 tains. 
 
 The bulk of the Kantian metaphysic is based 
 on the notions which are held to be the original 
 furniture of the mind. But from whence was 
 the mind thus endowed? Material philosophy 
 denies such endowment, therefore Kant, in his 
 reconciliation of all schools, at once identifies 
 himself with Idealism which claims that the 
 a priori notions resulting in phenomena, are in 
 
 63 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 some way related to the Noumenon, the "Thing- 
 in-itself," for phenomena pre-supposes Noume- 
 non as their source. Phenomena are, in fact, 
 the faint, distorted impressions of Reality which 
 Noumenon conveys to mind hampered by 
 matter. And yet the fact that finite mind cog- 
 nizes even this poor showing is proof that 
 Truth exists, and who dares gainsay that evolv- 
 ing finite mind shall sometime know that which 
 moves the pure will to obey the mandate of 
 unrewarded Duty? 
 
 If phenomena are a wilful falsification of 
 Reality, as Christian Science asserts, then is all 
 philosophy and truth-seeking futile. But, on 
 the other hand, no real thinker, since the over- 
 throw of the Eleatic fallacy, has been guilty of 
 so unphilosophical a contention. The position 
 of the great thinkers is that phenomena result 
 from man's inadequate attempt to interpret the 
 Noumenon. Furthermore, Kant was not so 
 illogical as to impose conditions on his uncog- 
 enizabl "Thing-in-itself;" so, while maintaining 
 that the categories lift finite mind into no intel- 
 ligible conception of Infinite Mind, the Kantian 
 Critique furnishes no warrant for the assertion 
 of Christian Scientists that Infinite Mind in its 
 sweep of the universe cannot descend to all 
 conditions of finite mind. 
 
 Many loose reasoners would identify Chris- 
 tian Science with Hindooism; but, in fairness 
 to the Vedanta Philosophy, let us appeal to 
 authorities; first to Prof. Max Miiller whose 
 
 64 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 writings clearly show that Vedanta avoids those 
 basic errors which, when clearly seen, wholly 
 discredit Christian Science. The great Western 
 authority says, "After lifting the Self— 'the 
 heavenly man'— above body and soul, after 
 uniting heaven and earth, the Vedanta philoso- 
 phers have destroyed nothing in the life of the 
 phenomenal beings who must act and fulfill 
 their duties in the phenomenal world. On the 
 contrary, they have shown that there can be 
 nothing phenomenal without something that is 
 real." 
 
 Our other authority, the Swami Abhedananda, 
 says, "The Vedanta Philosophy holds as much 
 inducement to the human heart eager for per- 
 sonal fellowship, love, and marriage, as Christ 
 held by his life and teachings. Moreover, it 
 encourages scientific investigation and invent- 
 ive genius, but it tells the sincere seeker after 
 the highest spiritual Truth that these are on 
 the lower plane of phenomenal appearance." 
 *' Vedanta teaches that Divine Reality manifests 
 through the various stages of the evolution of 
 Nature, of Prakriti or Maya, or Divine Energy. 
 The essence of the subject and the essence or 
 the object are one on the highest spiritual plane 
 alone; the fundamental principle being Unity 
 in variety of manifestation." "The evolution of 
 Maya— phenomena— is to help each individual 
 soul to attain to the highest state of spiritual 
 perfection." 
 
 With his usual perspicuity, Emerson, who 
 
 65 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 owed much to India, thus remarks, "an inevi- 
 table dualism bisects nature, so that each thing 
 is a half, and suggests another thing to make 
 it whole. While the world is dual, so is every 
 one of its parts — This dualism underlies the 
 nature and condition of men. — Every sweet hath 
 its sour; every evil its good." Any system 
 denying the many as opposed to the One; any 
 system ignoring the law of polar opposites, 
 comes to grief because of an ineradicable dual- 
 ism hiding or flaunting in its very midst. 
 
 XI 
 
 To recapitulate; the ill concealed dualism of 
 the Eleatic Philosophy, which lead to its over- 
 throw, reappears in Christian Science, which, 
 standing for pure Monism, drops upon investi- 
 gation into a dualism because its utter inability 
 to account for mortal mind, and that error of 
 mortal mind, the inharmonious, phenomenal 
 world of sense, argues the existence of an evil 
 principle at war with God. Christian Science 
 grants to "nothing," and those so-called equiva- 
 lents, error, false belief, and malicious magnet- 
 ism, an activity inconsistent with their supposed 
 nothingness. A system holding that God is 
 All, denies the creative act and logically must 
 conclude that God's every reflection, or idea, is 
 part of Himself, or, more strictly, it is Himself 
 for the Unity of Being is indivisible. Because 
 of this outcome, Christian Science contradicts 
 its declaration that God is not in man. Cir- 
 
 66 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 cumscribing God's knowing to a knowledge of 
 his own perfection, Christian Science cannot 
 account for man's rise from savagery, nor can 
 it explain the Divine origin of the Decalogue. 
 Because its view of evil is inadequate, Christian 
 Science insults the Divine Providence by deny- 
 ing the purpose of this mortal life. Christian 
 Science has no tears of sympathy like those 
 which Jesus wept; it makes inconsistent many 
 of his greatest acts. It fails to prove its source 
 of healing to be other than mortal mind. 
 It teaches that the cardinal sin is ignorance of 
 Truth as discovered by Mrs. Eddy. It denies 
 the real lesson taught through the punishment 
 of sin. Though announcing that "To remit the 
 penalty due for evil would be for Truth to 
 pardon error." Christian Science does in fact 
 oppose retributive Justice by denying away 
 pain its penalty; and by so doing augments the 
 final penalty. Christian Science would prosti- 
 tute Divine healing to a commercial transaction. 
 It absurdly teaches that man, the great thought 
 of God, unfolds and progresses. By admitting 
 that earthly beauty is something, it uncon- 
 sciously admits that all phenomena are some- 
 thing. Holding that God requires a witness of 
 His Being and an object of His Love, it fails 
 to produce either witness or object. Filled 
 with self-satisfaction, it is unjust to such con- 
 temporaries as Theosophy and Spiritualism. 
 Christian Science fallacy perverts God's love 
 of His creatures to self-love. By admitting 
 
 67 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 th;it the order oi material nature proves the 
 Divine Order, Christian Scienec unwittingly 
 ar<^ues for the material. Christian Science 
 makes the earthly man an error procreated by 
 an error self-existent because without parent- 
 acTe. Recent astronomy renders it probable 
 that the ignorant mortal mind of Christian Sci- 
 ence obtains in a planet older and supposedly 
 more advanced than this earth. In these days 
 of numerous Elijahs, Christian Science has 
 rendered possible a new and greater Mary, and 
 hails her as the mother of the Second Coming. 
 By assuming one attribute of Deity to be higher 
 than all others, it would prove woman the high- 
 est human expression of the Divine. Christian 
 Science belittles Jesus and misconceives the 
 Divine Fatherhood and Motherhood of God. 
 Christian Science opinion that if God dwell in 
 what He creates He would be absorbed and the 
 Science of Being lost, makes the creature om- 
 nipotent, and the Creator finite. Finally, from 
 the standpoint of illogical metaphysics, Chris- 
 tian Science undertakes an interior interpreta- 
 tion of Scripture. 
 
 Against the above summary we have state- 
 ments like these, " in Christian Science there 
 are no discords nor contradictions because its 
 logic is harmonious as the reasoning of an 
 accurately stated syllogism." "Christian Sci- 
 ence is pre-eminently scientific, being based on 
 Truth, the Princi[)le of all science." "If one 
 statement in this book is true, every one must 
 
 G8 
 
OF CPfRISTIAN SCIENXK 
 
 be true for not one departs from its system and 
 rule." From the last of these quotations it is 
 evident that if one statement of Christian Sci- 
 ence is false, every one must be false. 
 
 XII 
 
 Viewing in retrospect the exploded religious 
 beliefs and theories of the past, one is surprised 
 at the credulity of the multitude, and amazed 
 because of the attitude of many minds sup- 
 posedly of the first rank. Did some wide- 
 sweeping tide of hypnotic suggestion tear the.e 
 latter from their moorings? Or did they but 
 illustrate the imperative needs of the human 
 soul, weary with questioning the unresponsive 
 night which walls the four score years of 
 mortal life? Or else did they, even as drown- 
 ing men, catch at pitiful straws? 
 
 The gift of unvarying enthusiasm is denied 
 to all save the rarest souls. For men of the 
 better sort, ideals the brightest suffer occa- 
 sional dimming. Only at intervals in the life 
 of the usual man does the ideal shine forth. 
 .Surrounded by Sabbath observances, he experi- 
 ences a temporary glow of religious feeling; 
 but, unlike the Quaker, he cannot dedicate 
 every day to the Lord. For the arousing of 
 such a man something drastic is necessary, 
 something novel, fantastic, .strange even to the 
 reversal of all previous beliefs and experiences. 
 Nothing less will transform those for whom 
 routine, however reasonable, however time- 
 G9 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 proven, has lost the seduction of the new. 
 Herein chiefly lies the compelling power of 
 fashions and fads and cults, to follow which 
 men will subscribe to every absurdity and lun- 
 acy; in fact, to doctrines repugnant to their 
 higher nature and opposed to all ethical experi- 
 ence; for instance, those doctrines constituting 
 the bulk of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietz- 
 sche. 
 
 Christian Science is not without its proportion 
 of brilliant minds capable of correct reasoning 
 in the premise. Why then their anomalous 
 position? In how many of these has constant 
 affirmation of their cherished belief induced an 
 inability to realize the nature of their fools 
 paradise? What proportion of her foremost 
 followers have discarded logic and accepted 
 Mrs. Eddy because of healing within the imme- 
 diate circle of their observation? And this 
 notwithstanding that the devout pilgrim to 
 some sacred, historic shrine; or the wrapt 
 adorer of a fragment of the true cross; or even 
 he who with faith touches or merely looks upon 
 the material relics of some cannonized mortal; 
 has, in authenticated cases, experienced a cure 
 wonderful as any that Christian Science arro- 
 gates to its own method. As for the rank and 
 file of "Scientists," it may with warrant be 
 asserted that, having enrolled themselves 
 through impulse rather than reasoned choice, 
 no argument of reason appeals to them. Having 
 denied the conclusions of mortal reason, the 
 
 70 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 "Scientist" is rudderless and adrift unless he 
 accept the infallibility of Mrs, Eddy. Even 
 his belief in mathematics and geometry will 
 depend wholly upon her dictum. 
 
 In this connection, the following from Andrew 
 Jackson Davis is pertinent. " When a human 
 being is accepted as an infallible revelator — as 
 an unerring teacher of heavenly truths — there 
 is an end to all reasoning upon the probability 
 or possibility of the reality of his revealments. 
 The mere show of reasoning is equivalent to a 
 farce, an insult to the utterance of the Lord 
 through His chosen vessel. The believer has 
 sold his judgment, his reason, his understand- 
 ing so completely that he no longer sees the 
 revelator as one mentally constituted as are 
 others. Defending his position the believer 
 says, ' It is truth entirely transcending the reach 
 of the native faculties. This truth has come to 
 me, and throned itself in the central conscious- 
 ness of my soul, bringing with it the most 
 sacred obligation to announce it to the world! ' " 
 
 The present writer realizes the futility of 
 argument with the confirmed "Scientist." What- 
 ever here written is for the unbiased investi- 
 gator, and those who^as yet are on the threshold 
 of that most empty of modern rearings, the 
 Temple of Eddyism. 
 
 Considering the counterclaim of Dr. Quim- 
 by's representatives, the critic must acknowl- 
 edge a weight of evidence to show that the 
 nucleus and original incentive of Christian Sci- 
 
 71 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 ence existed in the loosely formulated theories 
 of Mrs. Eddy's former physician. But then, 
 Dr. Quimby himself was by no means originator 
 of the transcendental metaphysics on which he 
 based his mental healing. His ideas were but 
 fragments of what India and Egypt had divined, 
 and Greece had inherited. From remote times, 
 those ideas have been the common possession 
 of the world. Around and upon them Mrs. 
 Eddy, or any other far-seeing swayer of men, 
 was free to construct a religion whose glamour 
 would enthrall the multitude. As for the bulk 
 of her book, her individuality is impressed on 
 every page and a deal of thinking is between 
 its covers. 
 
 To establish her claim as exclusive discoverer 
 of "Science," Mrs. Eddy must needs discredit 
 her old benefactor ; hence she denounced as an 
 illiterate mesmerist, one of whom she had writ- 
 ten, •' P. P. Quimby rolls away the stone from 
 the sepulchre of error and health is the resur- 
 rection." In justice to the dead, let Dr. Quimby 
 speak for himself. " I found that my senses 
 were not in my body, but that my body was in 
 my senses. My knowledge located my senses 
 just according to my wisdom. If a man's knowl- 
 edge is in matter, all there is of him is contained 
 in matter. But, if his knowledge is in wisdom, 
 then his senses and all there is of him are out 
 of matter." Plainly this is the original of Mrs. 
 Eddy's novel discovery that the real man is not 
 in the physical body. Here is a bit of Science 
 
 72 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 sound as any from the lips or pen of Mary 
 Baker Eddy, albeit Dr. Quimby is the author. 
 '* I deny disease as a truth, but admit it as a 
 deception. Disease is an evil that follows tak- 
 ing an opinion for a truth. Every disease is an 
 invention of man, and has no identity in wisdom. 
 Disease is the misery of our belief, happiness 
 is the health of our wisdom. False reasoning 
 is sickness and death. The Devil is the error 
 of mankind." 
 
 Mrs. Eddy has not improved on Dr. Quim- 
 by's definition of death whereof he says, " Death 
 is the name of an idea." " Man is dying and 
 living all the time to error, till he dies the 
 death of all his opinions and beliefs. There- 
 fore to be free from death is to be alive in truth." 
 
 The Bangor, Maine " Jeffersonian," in 1857 
 thus described the doctor's method of cure : 
 " Quimby 's theory is that the mind gives imme- 
 diate form to the animal spirit, and that the 
 animal spirit gives form to the body. His first 
 course in the treatment of a patient is to sit 
 down beside him, and put himself en rapport 
 with him, which he does without producing the 
 mesmeric sleep. With the spirit form Dr. 
 Quimby converses and endeavours to win it 
 away from its grief ; and when he succeeds it 
 disappears and reunites with the body which 
 commences its effort to come into a state of 
 accordance with it." Here is the origin of the 
 teaching that mortal mind creates the physical 
 body and is the source of all its ailments. 
 
 73 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 When the Roman Catholic missionaries in 
 the far East had found that the virgin birth and 
 the crucifixion were historic in religions older 
 than Christianity, they at once saw in this the 
 cunning work of the Devil forestalling truth, 
 and so working the discredit of that which 
 would in time appear. By like reasoning the 
 Eddyite may determine that mortal mind, the 
 cunning counterfeiter, did, in the scribblings of 
 an ignorant mesmerist, seek to forestall and so 
 discredit the Divine Revelation which gave to 
 the world the precious volume of the book 
 wherein is written the Alpha and Omega of 
 Truth. But the most adroit trick of mortal 
 mind, one that well nigh tempts us to belive in 
 the machinations of a real live devil, was the 
 mesmerizing of Mrs. Eddy herself to that ex- 
 tent that she must rush into print as an extrava- 
 gant eulogizer of mortal mind in the guise of 
 the aforesaid Quimby. 
 
 Speaking seriously, it is evident that, through 
 pondering on the theories of Dr. Quimby and 
 the life and ministry of Jesus, Mrs. Eddy came 
 into the conviction that nothing less than 
 Divine Mind was the source of cure, and that 
 Divine Mind demanded an adequate medium. 
 Hence her exaltation of man to his status in 
 her pseudo philosophy. 
 
 Constructing that error the physical body, 
 mortal mind has accustomed itself to a certain 
 routine. To maintain what is called health, it 
 believes that the various organs must perform 
 
 74 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 certain routine functions. For Mrs. Eddy, dis- 
 ease is, after all, the distress of mortal mind at 
 something which in the body obstructs routine. 
 The comfortable feeling induced by uninter- 
 rupted routine, Mrs. Eddy chooses to call a 
 nearer approach to Truth than is interrupted 
 routine. 
 
 Let us call the normal human body a com- 
 fortable error ; one that gathers to itself such 
 uncomfortable errors as sickness, accident, 
 mutilation and death. The discomfort of sick- 
 ness in his own body led Dr. Quimby to the 
 methods of cure adopted in his practice. Sick- 
 ness in her own body, and an accident thereto, 
 led Mrs. Eddy to consult Dr. Quimby. There 
 is every reason to believe that, but for these 
 uncomfortable errors, Mrs. Eddy had remained 
 in comfortable error all her days with the 
 lamentable result that " Science and Health," 
 whose every hallowed page was written as by 
 the finger of God, had never descended to her 
 on the top of the Christian Science Sinai. Nor 
 would temples have risen which, like the Ark 
 of the covenant, were fit receptacle of God's 
 sacred message. Ah ! but for those uncom- 
 fortable errors, the disciple could not now 
 repeat daily that modern incantation, "The 
 scientific statement of Being;" nor could he, 
 or any other mortal on this planet, know the 
 import of that prayer of the Christian Church in 
 all ages, " Our Father who art in heaven." 
 
 75 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 XIII 
 
 Like Swedenborg, Mrs. Eddy somewhat un- 
 derrates the average comprehension of her 
 students, for, as with him, certain important 
 statements are ever recurring in slightly altered 
 dress. To those who see at once, such repeti- 
 tion must prove hard reading. 
 
 The literary style of " Science and Health," 
 much criticised at its advent, has improved 
 steadily with every subsequent edition. In that 
 of 1907 many sentences are recast, and their 
 import is made clearer ; in fact, the hypercrit- 
 ical reader must now search for faults of diction. 
 Whether or not, and to what extent, the author 
 was aided in this improvement is perhaps a 
 secret of the inner circle. 
 
 Alexander Pope and Alfred Tennyson were 
 ever tinkering their lines, and Francis Bacon 
 many times rewrote his famous essays. But 
 these authors claimed no higher guiding than 
 is vouchsafed to Genius. Is it not strange that 
 the scribe of Mind should have halted and 
 stumbled like the ordinary literary tyro ? That 
 crude work the 1875 edition of "Science and 
 Health," announced itself as apodictical, and 
 yet nearly all of some five hundred subsequent 
 editions were doctored according to Christian 
 Science methods so that by " Chemicalization " 
 more and more of meaning was incorporated 
 into them. The result is that the edition of 
 1908 but little resembles the original revelation. 
 
 76 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 Of the numerous quotations in this artiele, 
 some are from editions of " Science and 
 Health " earlier than those of 1907. Neverthe- 
 less, the present writer deems this no injustice 
 because the apodictical principle is supposedly 
 in every edition. 
 
 Certain contributors to religious and philo- 
 sophic thought, Jacob Bohm for example, have 
 employed a terminology offensive to pedant 
 and purest, and generally misunderstood by 
 the superficial. In Christian Science usage, 
 such words as Mind, Good, and mortal mind, 
 the last confessedly a misnomer, have a special 
 meaning which eludes the hasty reader of 
 "Science and Health." To Mrs. Eddy should 
 be allowed a verbal liberty granted to Kant 
 and Hegel. This because the adequate setting 
 forth of her unique system seemed to demand 
 it. 
 
 The far and wide spread of a belief that de- 
 nies the veracity of physical sense, and there- 
 fore the existence of matter per se, is, at first 
 thought, strange in a so-called practical age, 
 but inasmuch as Christian Science offers more 
 glittering prizes than any other system, ancient 
 or modern, to wit, escape from the penalty of 
 violated law, health instead of sickness, and, 
 eventually, the overcoming of the grave ; one 
 sees why the old, torturous climbing is aban- 
 doned for a shorter and easier ascent to human 
 happiness. And yet to the true disciple, the 
 way of Christian Science is one of peculiar 
 
 77 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 renunciation, for his goal is the sexlessness of 
 the real man. Because ** masculine and femi- 
 nine genders are human concepts," sexual 
 impulse must be eradicated. As a beginning, 
 marriage should be but one remove from celi- 
 bacy. The error of the marriage relation is 
 permissible if its only object be the production 
 of a higher race, a race of celibates reuniting, 
 each in himself, the male and female principles 
 of Truth and Love. Here is translated to our 
 western world the doctrine of the Eastern 
 ascetic. This renunciation is the antithesis of 
 the teaching of Swedenborg ; it is offense and 
 folly to the ordinary man ; it is the crucial test 
 of the disciple who, except in individual in- 
 stances, will doubtless fail just here because of 
 the vast preponderance of the sexual impulse 
 which, from the Christian Science standpoint, 
 is of all beliefs the most obstinate for upon it 
 seems to depend the perpetuation of life on 
 our globe. 
 
 We have seen that to the " Scientist " the 
 error of marriage is for the present permissible 
 under certain restrictions, and for a specific 
 purpose. Mrs. Eddy says, ** Until it is learned 
 that God is the father of all, let marriage con- 
 tinue." Knowledge of the trend of Mrs. 
 Eddy's teaching forces the conclusion that, for 
 those who supposedly have learned from her 
 what constitutes the fatherhood of God, mar- 
 riage is by no means desirable. 
 
 If the Eastern ascetic be asked concerning 
 
 78 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 marriage, he will reply that for the vast major- 
 ity of mankind it is a duty to millions of wait- 
 ing souls who, because of marriage, can re-enter 
 earthly conditions necessary to their further 
 evolution. Marriage for the enlightened " Sci- 
 entist" is a hindrance to Truth's manifestation 
 for, "Proportionately as human generation 
 ceases, the unbroken links of eternal harmoni- 
 ous being will be spiritually discerned ; and 
 man, not of the earth earthy, but coexistent 
 with God will appear." That Mrs. Eddy's 
 teachings have an esoteric as well as an exoteric 
 meaning and application, the above will show. 
 
 The wholly indoctrinated Eddyite is pledged 
 to the horrible belief that the child of ordinary 
 marriage, the child of flesh and blood and brain, 
 the child beloved and loving whom the mother 
 suckles and caresses, and whose like Jesus took 
 into his arms, is the soulless fruit of legalized 
 lust. 
 
 To prove this statement, it is but necessary 
 to make clear the peculiar position "in Science" 
 of both the earthly and the heavenly man. 
 Those great thoughts of God, each of which is 
 a heavenly man, are in number infinite. At the 
 conception of every human child, mortal mind 
 counterfeits some heavenly man. The infant, 
 when born, perceives nothing save the falsities 
 which its senses picture. Having as yet no 
 more conception of Truth than a creature of 
 the earthly animal kingdom, it is opaque to the 
 glory of the heavenly man. Later, under moral 
 
 79 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 instruction, the child learns a little of Truth, 
 and so becomes less dense to that thought of 
 God whereof he is the counterfeit. In the 
 highest specimens of the race, of whom Mrs. 
 Eddy is of course the chief, the mortal form is 
 quite transparent to its heavenly original, hence 
 every act of life radiates almost pure from 
 Truth. 
 
 The above makes evident that for the sordid 
 and selfish man who has kept himself impene- 
 trable to the heavenly shining, his life and death 
 are as if he never had been; in fact he never 
 has been. But what of the infant dying as 
 such? Despite the beautiful things Mrs. Eddy 
 has written concerning marriage, this thought 
 is as a serpent sting. Yes, what of the infant 
 dying as such? The "Scientist" will say that 
 whoever loved it was lead to imagine the 
 heavenly man; still it was a counterfeit, an 
 illusion, an error begotten of error: therefore 
 ask not the "Scientist." Go, ask the mother 
 who with unnumbered tears has laid her little 
 one to rest! Go, ask the father who with tender 
 solicitude has watched through the crisis of 
 child-birth, and the dark hour of his bereaving! 
 Go, stand beside the tiny mound of green and 
 read the simple, touching words, the undying 
 love and hope of those who deem that "of such 
 is the kingdom of heaven" and then, if you 
 can, go, tell the world that there the soulless 
 fruit of lust lies buried. 
 
 For women who would escape the usual 
 
 80 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 pangs of child-birth, Christian Science has a 
 system of obstetrics concerning which its dis- 
 coverer writes, "To attend properly the birth 
 of the new child, or the divine idea, you should 
 so detach mortal thought from its material 
 conception that the birth will be natural and 
 safe." What contradiction, what nonsense this 
 that calls the new child, thus born, the divine 
 idea! As we have seen, Mrs. Eddy has quite 
 another name for the child otherwise brought 
 forth. That the divine idea is never born of 
 flesh we may be sure for has she not told us 
 that Jesus himself was mortal? 
 
 Mother Eddy is virtually a promulgator of 
 the doctrine of universal celibacy, even as was 
 Mother Ann Lee in her time. The student of 
 human nature should note that these two were 
 not young, unmarried women. Ann Lee was 
 physically a mother before spiritually so, while 
 Mrs. Eddy has had three husbands after the 
 flesh. Surely this is not the young preaching 
 to the young, but, dare we insinuate, it may be 
 the lame inveighing against the folly and sin- 
 fulness of dancing. 
 
 But, candidly, how do these theories of mar- 
 riage prosper with the members of Truth's 
 enlightened fold? If husband and wife are of 
 one faith the answer is greatly simplified; but, 
 as often happens, the man may yet be in spiritual 
 darkness; he is, as the Romanists have it, in- 
 vincibly ignorant. Straightway is aroused in 
 him the spirit of rebellion leading possibly to 
 
 81 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 some overt act as with the husband of Ann Lee, 
 of whom history saith that he took to himself 
 another woman. An extreme case, yet no 
 prudent wife should risk anything in these 
 matters. 
 
 In the early ages of this world, Divine Purpose 
 foreshadowed, in the mating of birds and in the 
 maternal instinct of animals, that knitting 
 together of human souls known as the family. 
 For six thousand years, and many times six 
 thousand, the family has been a lever uplifting 
 men, slowly and surely uplifting them from 
 brute surroundings. To fight and if need be to 
 die for wife and children, and all that to the 
 savage breast was home; this, grounded in sex, 
 was the primal impulse which long centuries 
 have refined. Love and brotherhood and self- 
 sacrifice engendered in the family, have, in the 
 choicest offspring of this soul-knitting, over- 
 flown to the neighbour, the community, the 
 nation, the human race. 
 
 Christian Science would look beyond the 
 supposed error of mortal kith and kin to a 
 spiritual family, a heavenly relationship. For 
 the progressed "Scientist" the past is dead, it is 
 under his feet. If he marry he must not beget 
 that soulless error a mortal child; moreover, 
 his wife should be to him but a sister, a sister in 
 "Science." So he resolves against marrying, 
 and his church tacitly approves his decision. 
 What means all this? Surely it means that 
 because an erroneous coming together, the 
 
 82 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 earthly family is under the ban, and therefore 
 the zealous "Scientist" should labour for the 
 early consummation of that which, if ideal, will, 
 in the Providence of God, obtain ages hence 
 when the race is spiritually prepared; in other 
 words, when mankind is as far superior to the 
 ordinary man of to-day as is he to the Bushman 
 and the Hottentot. Common sense, lacking in 
 the makeup of many, will convince its possessor 
 that any attempt to force this tremendous issue 
 invites nothing less than social anarchy. 
 
 XIV 
 
 In the decadent days of Greek philosophy, 
 the materialistic tendencies of Zeno and Epi- 
 curus, and the equivocal attitude of the Scep- 
 tics, resulted in that complete reaction known 
 as Neo-Platonism. Such hierophants as Ploti- 
 nus and Porphyry sought through interior 
 illumination, much after the manner of the 
 Eastern sages, the very fount and source of 
 highest truth. Behold, to-day, the mystical 
 tendency reacting against a crass materialistism 
 current in our midst! The names of that reac- 
 tion are Christian Science, and Theosophy, for 
 the first of which Mrs. Eddy is sponsor. 
 
 In this age of progress, woman outgrows the 
 need of Paul's admonition. No more is she 
 silent in the church, nor need she learn any- 
 thing of her husband at home. On the con- 
 trary, she would revolutionize modern religious 
 thought. In the person of Mary Baker Eddy, 
 
 83 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 and also of Helen Petrovna Blavatsky, she, like 
 Jesus of old, teaches in synagogue, mount and 
 temple, and to the chosen she expounds the 
 mysteries of the Kingdom. 
 
 Of Mrs. Eddy, after all the central interest 
 to the mass of her following — hero-worshippers 
 as their attitude of adoration proves — it may 
 with confidence be said that Christian Science, 
 but for her, had never been "discovered" and 
 '• founded." Amidst its wide contagion, the 
 immune observer is puzzled because of two 
 quite distinct estimates of Mrs. Eddy, the 
 woman. Her enemies openly accuse ; serious 
 accusations some of them, circumstantial and 
 accompanied with affidavits. On the other 
 hand, certain of her trusty disciples, men and 
 women now for many years closely knit to her, 
 easily those who should know, see in her daily 
 life the flowering of every virtue. Can these 
 opposites exist in any human heart ? If not, is 
 it yet possible to bring the above estimates of 
 Mrs. Eddy into such relation that we need not 
 quite reject the first while, in part, accepting 
 the second ? Let us see. 
 
 The mind of Mrs. Eddy bore overlong the 
 burden of a great idea ; an ever-increasing bur- 
 den for the bulk of her philosophy grew day 
 by day through those years of gestation. Dur- 
 ing the months of ordinary gestation it is always 
 humane, and often necessary, that the mother 
 be surrounded by kindness and consideration, 
 for the unusual though imperative demands on 
 
 84 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 the recourses of the body may upset its nice 
 equipoise, and the mind itself may somewhat 
 suffer from the general loss of balance. This 
 being well-known, it is charitable, it is just, it 
 is customary, during this period, to condone 
 much otherwise open to censure. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy's lot was too often cast among 
 the wholly commonplace, those of no outlook 
 whatsoever. Beyond their own petty routine, 
 all else was superfluous. What a waste of time 
 and energy ; what a throwing away of pen, ink 
 and paper, was all her scribbling ! What utter 
 foolishness her attempt to solve the riddle of 
 creation ! People had lived, and others could, 
 and the little world of each would revolve inde- 
 pendent of her success or failure. One had 
 better be practical, not shirking her share of 
 household duties especially when she is de- 
 pendent on those outside the circle of kith and 
 kin. 
 
 To one frail of body, and predisposed to neu- 
 rotic disease, and therefore unfit for prolonged 
 and severe mental effort ; to one whose mind 
 nevertheless was taxed to the utmost ; to one 
 who withal believed of her mental gestation 
 and travail that the resulting birth would be 
 Divine, an inestimable boon to millions, such 
 ingrained stupidity as usually environed her 
 must have been a bitter trial. Nothing short 
 of perfect sainthood could stand such a test, 
 and Mrs. Eddy had not then attained to the 
 beatitudes. She was still a struggling, hoping, 
 
 85 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 sagacious, indomitable woman ; a well-wisher, 
 a would-be helper of humanity, but one whom 
 poverty and actual need failed not to remind 
 that the labourer is worthy of his hire. Look- 
 ing down and back to the valley of tribulation, 
 it must seem to Mrs. Eddy almost a nightmare 
 dream of mortal mind. Now from her more 
 than royal seat she looks about on hope's ful- 
 filment. Meanwhile the tranquil years are with 
 her, those years that soften and subdue the 
 heaving tide of life till, beneath its transparent 
 flowing, is revealed whatsoever of worth and 
 beauty is imbedded in the very soul. 
 
 Having accorded to Mrs. Eddy a desire of 
 benefiting mankind, we concluded that her 
 mistakes are those of the head and not of the 
 heart. She speaks as one having authority ; so 
 likewise do Mohammed, and Swedenborg, and 
 Mother Ann Lee, and Andrew Jackson Davis, 
 author of **The Harmonial Philosophy." That 
 Mrs. Eddy speaks from conviction these words 
 would indicate ; *' I was a scribe under orders, 
 and who could refrain from transcribing what 
 God indited?" "Science and Health is the 
 voice of Truth to this age." " The true Logos 
 is demonstrably Christian Science." " Outside 
 of this Science all is unstable error." ''This 
 Science has come already, and come through 
 the one whom God called." Despite these 
 assertions, it is imperative that, before con- 
 structing an all-comprehensive philosophy, one 
 examine critically other systems. Had this 
 
 86 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 been done, Mrs. Eddy would have known, for 
 instance, that Spinoza failed because his postu- 
 lation of one pure, homogeneous Substance — 
 the totality of Being — rendered inexplicable 
 the conditioned, the diverse, the illusionary 
 many. She would have known both how and 
 where thinkers of note have made shipwreck, 
 and so she would have escaped those dangers 
 of rock and shoal awaiting the chartless voyager 
 on the sea of speculative thought. 
 
 Since thinking men as such first faced the 
 future, hope and despondency have widely sep- 
 arated them. The pessimist stands doubting 
 or bewildered amidst the mystery of his little 
 morn and noon and night. With loins girded, 
 and with pilgrim staff, the optimist, he of 
 keener vision, discerns the dim road which 
 human feet must wholly measure even to the 
 distant heights of unclouded joy. Christian 
 Science is essentially optimistic. It looks to 
 the time when some disciple, foremost of many 
 such, will surmount the error of physical death 
 to a seeming body of flesh, and hold that body 
 free from all error, save that of its own exist- 
 ence, until its nothingness is proven by the 
 unobstructed shining of the heavenly man. 
 
 The Mount of Transfiguration is therefore 
 the goal of the race, and Mrs. Eddy is the way- 
 shower. With eyes fixed on the supreme goal, 
 the Christian Scientist forgets his little ail- 
 ments ; he has transcended life's petty trials 
 and troubles, and in his mental exhilaration the 
 
 87 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 gravest misfortune is robbed of half its pain 
 and terror. 
 
 XV 
 
 Against "Scientists" in general, it is often 
 urged that they contribute little or nothing to 
 worthy and well-organized charities. On the 
 other hand, "Scientists" deem themselves more 
 effectively charitable than other Christians. 
 From the peculiar stand of Christian Science, 
 charity assumes a two-fold aspect, wherefore 
 this problem confronts the giver; whether to 
 give to the suffering poor that which is but 
 temporary relief, or, to divide what is given so 
 that, in the midst of ignorance, may be erected 
 and maintained a church whose blessed office 
 shall be to proclaim unto mortals, sunk in error, 
 the unreality of privation and suffering. Such 
 halfing of the dollar, by which Christian Science 
 churches — judging from the magnificence of 
 some — often get the larger half; such division 
 in the name of sweet Charity, may be disavowed 
 by individual "Scientists," still the logic of the 
 situation calls for, and even demands it. 
 
 The truths of Christianity, as orally taught by 
 its founder, together with the life of Jesus, 
 if written at all by the evangelists, were written 
 long after the crucifixion, and so are matters of 
 memory, as frequent dissimilarities in the four 
 Gospels would indicate. The Gospels were the 
 works not of trained theologians and meta- 
 physicians, but of men unaware of the niceties 
 
 88 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 of meaning to which their phraseology easily 
 lends itself. Simple, straightforward narrators, 
 the evangelists made clear to themselves, and 
 their direct following, that which soon resulted 
 in ever-multiplying interpretations until, to-day, 
 the Christian Church is divided into nearly two 
 hundred depositaries of what each deems the 
 unmixed truth. 
 
 When an intolerant Paganism had forced 
 Christianity into caves and catacombs, where 
 was the theological censor who, penetrating to 
 its every hiding, could crush beneath his auto- 
 cratic heel the hell-sprung buds of heresy and 
 schism? And when, notwithstanding the mar- 
 trydom of its founders, the Church Catholic fell 
 upon a corrupt day whose intolerable abuses 
 led to the schism of Luther; what happened? 
 Not merely the loss to its communion of the 
 Germanic and the English peoples, but, worse 
 than this, certain heresies obtained among the 
 Protestants, because of which the seven sacra- 
 ments wherewith, from the cradle to the grave, 
 Mother Church had ministered to the spiritual 
 needs of her children, were now reduced to 
 these two, Baptism and the Eucharist, the 
 latter being degraded from a sacrifice to a com- 
 memoration. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy is not merely wise in her genera- 
 tion; she has learned from the unwisdom and 
 impotence of the past. As the oracle of Truth, 
 she has to her utmost made plain an abstruse 
 subject; and, if he search diligently, the student 
 
 89 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 of her "revelations" will find their meaning. 
 While Christian Science should be defended 
 from foes without, Mrs. Eddy well knows that 
 its real enemies will be those of its own house- 
 hold. Some visionary Mohammed may seri- 
 ously divide the faithful, or, most dreadful of 
 possibilities, a misguided Mary will claim a 
 divinely appointed spiritual or physical birth. 
 It behooves Mrs. Eddy to be vigilant, and 
 nothing short of autocratic, to every menacer 
 within the fold. Judge, jury and executioner 
 she must be, and prompt indeed in these ofifices. 
 
 Of those who have known the iron hand, 
 some retail their grievance in book or news- 
 paper. They tell of years of service and sacri- 
 fice; they would have the public exclaim at an 
 injustice the real occasion of which they do not 
 reveal. Because outside of the Christian Sci- 
 ence cult, the great preoccupied world cares 
 nothing for such internal dissensions; with the 
 remark that over-sweet makes the sharpest 
 acid, it hurries on and straightway forgets. 
 Meanwhile, those of the inner circle fully real- 
 ize the necessity of their leader's act. 
 
 In her teaching days, Mrs. Eddy never ceased 
 to impress on her pupils that this life is but the 
 dream of mortal mind which itself is absolutely 
 nothing. If, despite her assertions, some bright 
 student not yet awed into unreasoning faith, 
 would timidly insinuate that a dream requires 
 a dreamer. Mrs. Eddy at once rose to the 
 situation. With quelling glance, and voice of 
 
 90 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 withering scorn, she would hurl the crushing 
 rejoiner, "Not another word! Error is getting 
 the better of you !" Mrs. Eddy well under- 
 stood what every "discoverer" and "founder" 
 of Truth should know, that when religious 
 argument limps and stumbles, it can have no 
 prop like the crutch of authority. 
 
 By means of an implication having all the 
 force of a specific statement, Mrs. Eddy thrones 
 herself above mere kings and queens, and in fact 
 with the spiritually supreme of the Christian 
 Ages ; evidently those to whom prayer is daily 
 offered in the Mother Church of Christendom. 
 To understand the following, and more of the 
 same tenor, one needs not the gift of interpret- 
 ing the new tongue of Christian Science. "No 
 person can take the individual place of the 
 Virgin Mary. No person can compass or fulfill 
 the individual mission of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 No person can take the place of the author of 
 'Science and Health,' the discoverer and 
 founder of Christian Science. Each individual 
 must fill his own niche in time and eternity." 
 
 Never was good Catholic of the middle ages 
 more ruled by dogma and infallibility than is 
 the Christian Scientist of to-day; he has but ex- 
 changed the Fisherman of St. Peter's for the 
 Pastor Emeritus of The Mother Church of 
 Boston. From the foregoing may be indicated 
 the ecclesiastical policy of the Christian Science 
 Denomination in the years, now inevitably near, 
 when Mrs. Eddy shall have passed from the 
 
 91 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 error of earthly body and the mind which gives 
 it semblance of life; in other words, when she 
 shall have seemed to die like an ordinary 
 mortal, or, as the faithful hint, when she shall 
 have disappeared in a way unusual as that of 
 Enoch and Elijah, those ancient worthies. 
 
 In candor it must be said of Rome that she 
 has yielded grudgingly, and inch by inch, such 
 positions as universal enlightenment and mod- 
 ern discovery have rendered intenable. For 
 reasons already given, Christian Science cannot 
 yield one jot or tittle. Its future will accord 
 with its past. Truth's vicegerent must needs 
 have a successor, or a company of successors, 
 clothed with autocratic power ; in fact a star 
 chamber above all appeal. 
 
 Despite every objection urgeable. Christian 
 Science has been promoter of much good. In 
 the presence of an enthroned materialistic 
 philosophy like that of Locke and his followers 
 down to Herbert Spencer, it asserts the claims 
 of Idealism. In the hearts of multitudes it is 
 dethroning matter by proving the kingship of 
 Mind. It emphasizes the need of cheerfulness 
 and the optimistic outlook, and, as one result, 
 the thoughts of many a spleeny imaginer have 
 been turned from self. As a novel and militant 
 heterodoxy against a narrow and inadequate 
 orthodoxy, it is forcing men from the old ruts. 
 It stands for the man that was before the 
 moment of human generation. It holds him 
 and every other creature of God to be a dweller 
 
 92 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 in Eternity, that which the earthly man has 
 divided into past, present and future. It utters 
 a wise warning against the materialistic tend- 
 encies and general harmfulness of much in 
 modern Spiritism. Its ethical requirements 
 are the highest attainable, and, to blind belief 
 in ancient dogma, it imparts that desire for 
 sight which may yet result in the perfect vision. 
 
 Christian Science is with us, but not as trans- 
 lated from some classic though obsolete tongue; 
 not as gospel so ancient that its authenticity is 
 questioned; neither is it here as Truth skillfully 
 tinkered and supplemented by zealot, bigot and 
 self-seeker; but it is here as plenary revelation 
 through Truth's yet-living medium. 
 
 Wholly sure of its perfection, the founder of 
 Christian Science has walled it round with 
 unusual safeguards. Nothing foreign can be 
 incorporated into its doctrinal structure. No 
 latitude of individual opinion, therefore no 
 incipient heresy, is allowed its interpreters. 
 No sermonizing, consequently no dangerous 
 rhetoric that wanders in flowery but diverging 
 ways, is heard in Christian Science churches- 
 Well-grounded, well-proven believers, one 
 male and one female — to represent the two- 
 foldness of Mind — read from Holy Writ, also 
 from " Science and Health," thus expounding 
 the old bible by means of the new. The entire 
 procedure is expedient since Christian Science 
 cannot be improved or modified without danger 
 of collapse; and yet, if it would endure, its 
 
 98 
 
THE SOPHISTRIES 
 
 entire foundation must be relaid, and in some- 
 thing more stable than sand. 
 
 Christian Science, which, according to Mrs. 
 Eddy, " corrects the philosopher, refutes the 
 astronomer, and exposes the subtle sophist ; " 
 Christian Science " built upon the rock of 
 Christ ;" Christian Science, "the cognomen of 
 all true religion, the quintessence of Christian- 
 ity ; the fiat of divine Intelligence ; " Christian 
 Science " whose principle and rule is the wonder 
 and harmony of heaven and earth," Christian 
 Science "which is God's right hand grasping 
 the universe," Christian Science " the Comforter, 
 the Holy Ghost, revealer of all Truth;" Chris- 
 tian Science " which erect and eternal, will go 
 down the dim posterns of time ; " fails, notwith- 
 standing all their hyperbole, yes, signally fails 
 to answer the question of questions, "What is 
 Truth ?" nevertheless, let no one doubt that to 
 the final solution of that question the universe is 
 pledged. A gradual revelation, Truth bursts 
 and blazes not on any seeker, no, not on any 
 prophet or seer. One by one the veils are torn 
 from its inmost shrine. Rung by rung, up the 
 ladder of life, man emerges into the light, 
 leaving, in the ever-deepening dark of error, 
 those old truths which once did seem to satisfy. 
 
 The Divine Architect wills that men behold 
 His creation with no falsifying eye. Therefore, 
 Truth, the Archetypal, has been the searched 
 for, the desired of highest moments, the fulfiU- 
 able dream, since sages and prophets first drew 
 
 94 
 
OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 
 
 mortal breath. And unto Truth, mankind up- 
 builds a temple lofty-domed that those afar 
 may see, and, seeing, gather nigh to worship. 
 But weakness, error, is grained in the corner- 
 stone, and in the joining of every arch, and in 
 the foundation of every pillar. Upon the fall 
 of that temple, men, wiser with purchased wis- 
 dom, build anew, and on the ruin of that build- 
 ing rear again. Surely it shall be that the 
 temple of Truth some day doth stand based 
 upon adamant, its walls unshakable and crum- 
 bling not. It fronts the rising east ; the sun of 
 Truth illumes with morn its dome of drossless 
 gold. Beheld afar, 'tis as a voice of wooing to 
 the world; " Come ye up to Jerusalem ye tribes 
 of men ! Haste ye to gather at the shrine of 
 Truth ! Let the nations tarry not, and let the 
 uttermost isles of the sea make journey to the 
 City of the Light. There evil entereth not, 
 nor any sickness or sorrow, neither hath death 
 dominion over man, for all reward of righteous- 
 ness is with the sons of God ! " 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL 
 AND MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL 
 
 AND 
 
 MODERN THEOSOPHY^ 
 I 
 
 THE disciples of the "Absolute Philoso- 
 phy" hold that through the secret of 
 Hegel is attained that fulness of truth 
 which will remedy the ills of life. Of his own 
 attaining Hegel never doubted. Had he not 
 found that " Thing-in-itself " which Kant had 
 placed beyond the bounds of human under- 
 standing, beyond the utmost reach of human 
 reason, in the realms of the unconditioned, the 
 abode of beings mentally more endowed than 
 man ? Had he not demonstrated what to the 
 cautious Kant were but articles of faith to wit, 
 God and the soul ? Beginning with those 
 abstractions. Nothing and mere empty Being, 
 he, by a dialectic process of his own, had arrived 
 at the perfected self-consciousness of the Abso- 
 lute. On his journey he had gathered to his 
 philosophizing the arts and sciences ; at his 
 conjuring had returned the old Aristotlian 
 times enriched with the glories of the modern 
 world. By his vast intellectual effort he had 
 
 ^Republished from " The Arena " by permission of B. O. 
 Flower, Editor. 
 
 99 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 solved the problem of the thinker, the meta- 
 physical riddle of the ages ; because of this, 
 philosophy was now complete. 
 
 But later days brought doubt, distrust of 
 Hegel's principle. Schopenhauer scorned that 
 ultimate truth should be realized by a rational- 
 izing method. After all. Bacon's estimate of 
 philosophy may be just, " Like a virgin con- 
 secrated to God she bears no fruit." Probably 
 Aristotle has warrant for saying that philosophy 
 itself produces nothing new. Many will agree 
 with Fichte that philosophy is but a means to 
 the knowledge of life. 
 
 In human nature is an irrepressible craving 
 which mere logic, however exhaustive and con- 
 vincing, can never satisfy. Man is born from 
 mystery unto mystery, and unto mystery he 
 returns. Through life he repeats the dying 
 words of Goethe, "More light!" Hegel, the 
 man of method, was broad enough to acknowl- 
 edge this universal need of illumination, but it 
 ill became the logician to usurp the province 
 of the seer ; it is much that he acknowledged 
 the legitimacy of such mystics as Jacob Bohm ; 
 and yet the prosaic teacher of Jena and Heidel- 
 berg was inwardly the intuitional dreamer. 
 The laborious thinker, creeping inch by inch to 
 the very summit of human thought, had, ere 
 his ascent, l)eheld a vision that allied him with 
 the sages of old India. 
 
 He had seen the beginning and the end of 
 things, the primordial Being devoid of attri- 
 
 100 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 butes, the one and the many, the many and the 
 one, indistinguishable, undifferentiated in their 
 multitude. He had seen their self-externaliza- 
 tion in the world of sense ; the growing illusion 
 of separateness necessary to the concretion of 
 their individualities ; and he had watched them, 
 in their great cycle of necessity, rising from the 
 earthly and returning whence they came, bear- 
 ing each the freight of its world experience, 
 converging each to one center, there to render 
 into the common fund of wisdom the result of 
 every separate attainment. Beholding all this, 
 he had comprehended the consummation ; the 
 self-conscious many unified as the self-conscious 
 One. 
 
 Becoming, the process whereby Infinite Unity 
 results in finite diversity, was, from the pure 
 monism of Spinoza, wholly unaccountable. 
 Moreover, a pantheism which makes of man but 
 a momentary wave on the ocean of Being, 
 satisfies in no way the " I am I," dominant and 
 insistent in human consciousness. That it be 
 neither dissipated nor annulled, human thought 
 requires a thinker persisting when the wave of 
 objective life has passed, and so, because of the 
 one-sided pantheism of Spinoza, arose the 
 monadology of Leibnitz. 
 
 In this system the monad is a positive cen- 
 ter of consciousness whose power to repel 
 proves the existence of something repelled, 
 namely, a plurality of monads. Each is a 
 microcosm capable of reflecting the universe 
 
 101 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 of monads ; each is a focal point for all 
 others. The monad is not in three-dimensional 
 space, therefore size enters not into its con- 
 sideration. 
 
 The monads exist in an ever-ascending series 
 from mineral to man. Monadic consciousness 
 sleeps in the mineral, dreams in the plant, 
 wakes to consciousness in the animal, and to 
 self-consciousness in man. The monad of 
 man is the self-conscious dweller in his body, 
 itself the congeries of less-developed monads. 
 Physical death is but the loss of the coarser 
 and by no means indispensable monads of the 
 outer body. The various organs and general 
 structure arc maintained though no longer per- 
 ceived by physical sense. What is true of 
 man's life and death applies in less and less 
 degree in the descending scale of physical be- 
 ing. Inasmuch as matter is to Leibnitz but 
 crassified spirit, he cannot well be accused of 
 materialism though he demand a vehicle for 
 every grade of consciousness. 
 
 In the time of Hegel, attention was already 
 turning to the religio-philosophical writings of 
 the remote East. Possibly, in lands other than 
 that of Thales and Pythagoras, the eye of Rea- 
 son had looked inward, and the introspection 
 had been to some purpose. 
 
 Hegel's estimate of Hindoo thought, as 
 voiced in his " Philosophy of History," would 
 by any pundit be deemed absurd. The German 
 philosopher's excuse lies in the then insufficient 
 
 102 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 knowledge of the sacred texts which in many 
 instances caution that a teacher is necessary. 
 Schopenhauer arrived nearer the truth when, as 
 he searched the Vedas and the Upanishads, he 
 half divined the secret science hidden beneath 
 an exoteric dress. 
 
 Modern Theosophy purports to be the sacred, 
 esoteric wisdom of old Egypt and India. Like 
 most ancient systems, it includes Science, Re- 
 ligion and Philosophy. Unlike Socrates, it 
 centers not attention on man, for it claims that, 
 prior to the days of Socrates, man was the 
 object of its exhaustive study. Dealing not 
 with the categories of Kant, it yet claims as its 
 olden possession all of value in his Critical 
 Philosophy. Though ignoring the dialectic of 
 Hegel, it asserts its ascent of the Himalayas 
 of reason when as yet his ancestors roamed 
 savage amidst the northern forests. It accords 
 not with much in our modern empyrical 
 science, yet it professes to possess the key to 
 riddles whose solution will reverse the attitude 
 of the physicist. Its astounding claims to 
 knowledge it would substantiate with a vast 
 and elaborated cosmogony which dwarfs the 
 dreams of Swedenborg. 
 
 The "monadology" of Leibnitz, and the 
 scheme and outcome of Hegel, exhibit much 
 in common with the teachings of Theosophy ; 
 nevertheless, the Absolute of Hegel is not the 
 Absolute of Theosophy, nor of the Vedanta Phi- 
 losophy, that more exoteric explanation of man 
 
 103 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 and the universe. The Absolute of Theosophy is 
 the *' Secondless Eternal " of Vedanta ; it is the 
 concealed Logos author of the spoken Word 
 which itself is the manifested universe in its 
 aspect as the undifferentiated monadic essence 
 from which the totality of monads was gradu- 
 ally unfolded. In its primal condition, this 
 essence is mere Being empty of meaning as 
 any digit if considered apart from its relation 
 to numbers ; this essence is, in fact, what to 
 Hegel is equivalent to nothing. The Unmani- 
 fested Word is the Father ; the Manifested 
 Word is the Son in whom are the Divine Im- 
 minence and the Divine Transcendence until 
 the great day " Be with Us," when the universe 
 is merged in its ultimate source. 
 
 The Manifested Word, the Original Emana- 
 tion, the Primal Substance, is the Sole Reality, 
 the steadfast Noumenon, which, by projecting 
 its phenomenal shadow, creates both time and 
 space, and the material conditions wherein 
 Reality may unfold its latent possibilities. 
 This original emanation hovers around the 
 mineral world in well-nigh unconscious nebu- 
 losity ; half-awakened, it projects the life and 
 shapes of trees that wave in the wind, and all 
 of the green and varied color that springs from 
 earth into the shining of the sun. Seeing now 
 the animal kingdom, its own shadow, it be- 
 comes identified with that evolution ; and then, 
 having gradually divided into the many, it 
 surrounds each animal form. In man it real- 
 
 104 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 izes itself as soul and eventually as ego. Pass- 
 ing beyond the human stage, it knows itself as 
 free ego permitted to return as world teacher 
 and uplifter, or to pursue its way toward the 
 highest Nirvana. 
 
 But what of Nirvana? Of what import this 
 word of mystery? Theosophy teaches that 
 whosoever deems Nirvana to be the Buddhistic 
 vacuum, has lost himself on the metaphysical 
 heiehts. Nirvana is the fruition of individual 
 unfolding ; the coming into touch with the 
 •' Thing-in-itself " of Kant ; the clear cognition 
 of sole Reality ; the eternal union with " the 
 silent watcher," that Original Substance which 
 enveloped the animal form ere man was man. 
 
 Since the beginning of the universal cycle, 
 evolution has been from mere potentiality to 
 complete unfolding ; this progress necessitated 
 the gradual individualizing of consciousness. 
 What an absurd supposition that the result of 
 ages of becoming is negated at the moment of 
 consummation ! Nirvana is the center in which 
 converging individualities meet ; the self-con- 
 scious realization that the many are One. In- 
 dividual attainment is there merged in general 
 attainment; seemingly each consciousness 
 gathers into itself all others. This consumma- 
 tion is not unlike that of the " Absolute Philos- 
 ophy" wherein the ego, reaching the focus of 
 thought, knows itself as all Truth attained. 
 
 Kant argues that certain ideas, or notions, or 
 judgments are a priori in man. Worldly ex- 
 
 105 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 perience furnishes the matter to which these 
 judgments are the matrix. But that gatherer 
 of knowledge the mind, cognizes through a 
 brain which knows reality as conditioned only 
 by time and space, that to which even the 
 "pure intellect" must submit. 
 
 The limitation of mere brain ability to per- 
 ception of the phenominal world, has been 
 sharply defined by all Indian thinkers ; and, in 
 accord with these, Theosophy teaches that 
 only by rising superior to the physical senses 
 into the "higher mind," only by sundering the 
 ties of time and space, does the sage attain 
 unto the Noumenon. Evidently this results 
 from more than that pure feeling, that inmost 
 conviction, that intuitive cognition, for which 
 Jacobi declares in his polemic against philoso- 
 phy in general. 
 
 In direct opposition to Locke, and more in 
 accord with Fichte, Theosophy teaches that all 
 knowledge is innate in the ego. Other egos 
 impinge upon it, and the resulting friction ex- 
 cites the ego to active unfolding of universal 
 wisdom inherited from its divine Source. In 
 every monad the Divine Imminence and 
 Transcendence announces itself as the law of 
 Cause and Effect, the law of " Karma," the law 
 of Absolute Wisdom and Justice ; therefore, 
 every thought and act, whether good or bad, 
 returns to the magnetic sphere of the monad 
 from which it emanated. The perpetual ad- 
 justments of the Karmic law are to the monads 
 
 106 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 of Theosophy what the " preestablished har- 
 mony " is to the monads of Leibnitz. 
 
 These latter, like those of Theosophy, are 
 eternal and indestructible, and, as has been 
 said, some have only mineral consciousness, 
 others plant consciousness, others again are at 
 the human stage, while the highest enjoy per- 
 fected self-consciousness. Although the high- 
 er monads dwell in physical bodies composed 
 of lesser monads, all pursue an independent 
 development, but, because of the preestab- 
 lished harmony, nothing of confusion arises ; 
 therefore the organism suffers no harm from 
 any monad. 
 
 Theosophy teaches that mutual helpfulness 
 is the great lesson of life, and yet what every 
 monad needs is not wisdom from without, but, 
 in fact, stimulation that it may sooner unfold 
 the amplitude of its own being. This result 
 the chief monad of the physical body accom- 
 plishes through the unconscious exertion of a 
 more-developed will drawing to itself the va- 
 rious groups of monads which construct the 
 organs unified by this chief monad. 
 
 Leibnitz fails to explain the definite process 
 whereby the monad rises from perception to 
 perception through the various kingdoms of 
 nature ; therefore the history of the human 
 monad, prior to physical birth, remains to his 
 readers a mystery. Theosophy would fill 
 this wide gap in the system of the German 
 savant. 
 
 107 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 Evidently an indestructible and unfolding 
 consciousness can never be without its appro- 
 priate vehicle. To the monad of Leibnitz, 
 death was but the loss of the coarsest, least- 
 developed monads of the physical body ; but a 
 central doctrine of Theosophy is that the monad 
 must submit to a series of physical reembodi- 
 ments. Unexpended effects of causes generated 
 within its own magnetic sphere, compel it back 
 to the arena of this world. That lesson of 
 lessons, the overcoming of selfish desire, it 
 learned not amidst the vast opportunities of 
 hard, unsympathetic physical environment : all 
 previous reembodiments, innumerable through 
 the ages, had been but preparation for this 
 self-conscious task. Therefore Eternal Justice 
 will cause the monadic consciousness again to 
 center itself in the old lesson and the place of 
 that lesson. 
 
 Despite his Absolute Idealism, Hegel has by 
 many been deemed one of the bulwarks of 
 Christianity. The clearest reasoner since Soc- 
 rates and Aristotle, he breached the stronghold 
 of the Kantian logic in his warring for the 
 existence of God, and the actuality of the ego. 
 Hegel remained within the fold of Luther, nor 
 deemed he stultified his mighty intellect by 
 accepting, as final, the Gospel Revelation. And 
 yet Christ was to him not the Divine of the 
 old Scholasticism, for the Reformation had 
 delivered Reason and her philosophizing from 
 the thrall of rigid dogma. Christ was to Hegel's 
 
 108 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 conception what the "Speculative Phikj)SOphy" 
 had realized as possible of every free ego, to 
 wit, attained self-conscious union with God, for 
 which end the Idea, even the Absolute Spirit, 
 in the beginning externalized itself as a pure 
 but characterless shadow. This conception of 
 Christ so nearly accords with Theosophical 
 teaching that it is a clue to the avatars of the 
 Hindoo god, and the birth of every Buddha 
 the East has known. 
 
 The full Divinity of man is necessarily the 
 outcome of Hegel ; but of Theosophy such 
 inference is, in fact, unjust. The '* Ancient 
 Arcane Wisdom" teaches that man shall reach 
 the utmost attainable in the system of which 
 our sun is the center, but the all-pervading 
 '* Atman" is "That" which emanates and sus- 
 tains every sun and system. It is "That" into 
 which these shall finally be drawn. 
 
 Our sun has its term of objective life, accord- 
 ing to Theosophy a term of enormous duration ; 
 then follows the night of subjectivity, and then 
 a new day into whose first hour man emerges 
 as regent of the evolving nebule and the future 
 planets, but not as the Universal King. In that 
 fresh dawning it will be his office of love, his 
 brotherly duty, to impress upon the plastic and 
 pure monadic essence, those laws which shall 
 guide its otherwise blind course until the first, 
 faint unfolding of mind. From thence onward 
 his divine labour shall in nowise cease, for he 
 himself was impressed and guided and watched 
 
 109 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 over on his journey from the star mist to the 
 throne of the planetary spheres. 
 
 In the pantheistic system of Spinoza, the 
 problem of good and evil is disposed of in a 
 manner unsatisfactory to most thinkers. Al- 
 though possessed of an infinity of attributes, 
 God, the " Infinite Substance," is revealed to 
 man only as spirit or thought, and extension or 
 matter. Hence man's inadequate grasp of ulti- 
 mate Truth ; hence also his incommensurate 
 view of good and evil ; a view which a knowl- 
 edge of the innumerable attributes of God 
 would wholly reverse. 
 
 Leibnitz distinguishes three kinds of evil ; 
 metaphysical evil, appointed of God, that im- 
 perfection which in finite things is the cause of 
 their finitude ; physical evil, ordered of God as 
 punishment or corrective ; moral evil, not or- 
 dered of God, but unavoidably present if 
 individual will is allowed any latitude and 
 virtue is not compulsory. Wolff, the supple- 
 mentor of Leibnitz, holds that evil exists not 
 because God so wills ; rather it originates in the 
 inevitable imperfection of human nature ; never- 
 theless, in the providence of God, evil becomes 
 a means to good. Evil, to Hegel, is but a 
 temporary wandering in the dark until the light 
 of Reason reveals the path in the progress from 
 mere Being to self-conscious Being that knows 
 Itself as the Absolute Truth of every condition, 
 material and spiritual. 
 
 Theosophy teaches that all being is a trinity 
 
 110 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 of Will, the life principle, Desire, the passional 
 nature, and Mind, the equalizing and trans- 
 forming power. In the universal unfolding, the 
 life principle as such is at once apparent ; soon 
 Desire tends to mere gratification, and eventu- 
 ally rages toward that end ; Mind, now appear- 
 ing as a feeble ray, is at once colored and 
 deflected by selfish Desire. And now the 
 battle of the ages is on and the wide world is 
 the arena. Unfolding Mind is destined to win, 
 but not by annihilating its adversary, for Desire 
 is immortal as itself. Mind shall triumph by 
 transforming self-seeking Desire into Selfless 
 Love, and to finite life it shall reveal that truly 
 it is Life Eternal veiled by the physical from 
 its only Source. 
 
 II 
 
 In his philosophy of Art, Hegel deals with 
 the Idea or Absolute Spirit risen from outward 
 restraints into a freedom the result of observ- 
 ance in both morals and the state. The Idea 
 is now apprehended by human reason as the 
 objectively beautiful. Necessarily the beauti- 
 ful can be cognized only through those limiting 
 mediums of art, the stone and wood of the 
 builder, the marble of the sculptor, the colors 
 of the painter, the gamut of the musician, and 
 the measured verse of the poet. 
 
 Back of art stands the artist, and through the 
 various mediums he renders objective the uni- 
 versal Idea as developed in him. In architec- 
 
 111 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 ture the medium is dense, rigid and fixed ; the 
 spirit shines as through a clouded glass. 
 Sculpture suggests movement, and movement is 
 life and vehicle of life. In painting the material 
 element has largely disappeared ; but, while 
 the dimensional is present, the solid is only 
 indicated. Music, most subjective of arts, 
 vibrating surface-ward from the inmost of life, 
 finds its medium ere it reaches the eye ; that 
 medium is the unseen but heard sympathetic 
 vibration of a sonorous body. Poetry is a syn- 
 thesis of all arts ; to sound it marries speech 
 the expression of a specific idea ; in the epic 
 and the drama it delineates the life of nations ; 
 with vivid touch and true it paints the doing 
 of famous deeds ; with inspired chisel it fixes 
 the doer in imperishable statuesque. 
 
 Theosophy claims not to be a system of 
 aesthetics ; it asserts never with Schelling that 
 "Art is the sole, true and eternal organum as 
 well as the ostensible evidence of philosophy ;" 
 neither does it hold with Schopenhauer that 
 the real course to philosophy is through art. 
 It has, however, somewhat to say concerning 
 the origin, nature, and possibility of color and 
 sound on which the art of painting, and also 
 that of music is based. 
 
 That primordial Substance which, in its low- 
 est and most crassified manifestation, formed 
 the material sun and planets, is far more subtle 
 and tenuous than the luminiferous ether of 
 physics. The inconceivably rapid vibrations 
 
 112 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 of that Substance are the internal impulse 
 causing those atmospheric vibrations which, to 
 the optic and the auditory nerve, arc physical 
 light and sound. The original vibration is, in 
 fact, ultimate Light and Sound. These, in 
 their universal manifestation, become fire and 
 motion, the Kosmos builders shaping the pliant 
 world-material into geometrical designs. 
 
 Architecture and sculpture deal largely with 
 the geometry of art, therefore with those 
 models on which Kosmos was constructed. 
 Painting and music deal directly with that color 
 and that sound which are the physical of orig- 
 inal Light and Sound ; but to the Light within 
 the light, and to the Sound within the sound, 
 neither the artist nor the musician can attain. 
 The sacred chants of the Sama Veda, and the 
 intoned mantras, are supposedly the potency of 
 sound guided by the definite, uttered thought 
 expressed in measured verse which suggests the 
 motion of the Great Breath of Brahm project- 
 ing the universe into finitude, only to draw it 
 back to subjectivity ; an alternation unceasing 
 forever and ever. 
 
 We have said, and to some extent have 
 shown, that modern Theosophy makes astound- 
 ing claims to knowledge. Possibly a further 
 glance at its teachings will prove not uninter- 
 esting. 
 
 Light and Sound, as vibrations of the great 
 Life Breath, are, in fact, one, though eye and 
 ear have separated them. The seven prismatic 
 
 113 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 colors composing the one solar fire, are each 
 and all creative breaths united in a center of 
 energy. Because of this sevenfold outbreath- 
 ing, the solar system, and man the synthesis of 
 nature, are sevenfold. Of the seven principles 
 of man and nature, the one known as Atma is 
 on the plane of immutable consciousness ; all 
 others are derivitives finally to be resolved into 
 its perfected life which, in the beginning, 
 infolded perfection as the acorn infolds the yet 
 unrealized oak. And as the acorn — itself a 
 sevenfold life — requires for its growth Earth's 
 material conditions, so man, amidst the terres- 
 trial, shall himself unfold. Man is therefore 
 enduring only in Atma which, in the lapse of 
 ages, he has gradually individualized to himself 
 from the universal ocean of Life. 
 
 Because the Atma of man is in its nature 
 identical with the Great Breath, its individual 
 life is commensurate with that of the Manifested 
 Universe. Each principle wherein it shadows 
 itself is vitalized by Atma ; that is to say, the 
 will to live in any of its principles coordinates 
 the monads or minute lives comprising that 
 principle. But this will encounters increasing 
 obstacles because each principle, in descending 
 series, is a more unyielding form of matter ; 
 therefore, in man's lowest principle, the will in 
 its going forth is fully exhausted in about sev- 
 enty years. Weakened, it turns in its cycle, 
 the body grows old and soon physical death 
 ensues. Then the lower lives, deprived of their 
 
 114 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 one harmonizing will, work confusion and dis- 
 integration to their host. 
 
 Within the eycle of terrestrial life are smaller 
 cycles corresponding to the axle rotation of the 
 Earth. As that giver of physical life, the sun, 
 approaches the east, the will to live of the body 
 is energized, but only to experience at night a 
 corresponding depression. This daily sinking 
 of the will is sleep ; in other words, a temporary 
 inability to maintain relation with the external 
 world ; therefore the indestructible will retires 
 into some higher principle, which, during 
 dreamless sleep, is the Higher Ego, fifth in the 
 ascending series of seven. Now is the Ego 
 free and awake and active, but not wholly so, 
 for the link between it and the physical body 
 is sundered only at the termination of the great 
 will cycle of that body. Death is, therefore, 
 but the completion of a process begun every 
 night of our lives. Evidently the principle 
 immediately higher than the physical body has 
 a longer life cycle, but this cycle must termi- 
 nate on the plane of its principle. 
 
 At the present stage of man's unfolding, his 
 individualized Atma centers its attention on the 
 more spiritualized mind, the Higher Ego. In 
 post-mortem life the normal man fully attains 
 to the plane of the Higher Ego. Here he finds 
 his heaven of rest ; here the Ego assimilates all 
 of good in the previous earth life. 
 
 Atma, the chief principle of man, is a thing 
 of incessant activity for the urge of the Abso- 
 
 115 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 lute Will is upon it. In every deep, as in every 
 height, it must contact whatsoever stimulates 
 its unfolding to universal Knowledge and Wis- 
 dom. The microscopic world proves the infinite 
 patience and thoroughness with which it has 
 unfolded its knowledge of all kingdoms culmi- 
 nating in man. Before this earth as such had 
 being, Atma had assimilated the experience of 
 super-sensible conditions which, in their down- 
 ward evolution, objectivized as physical matter. 
 
 Atma has not attained to full self-conscious- 
 ness on the plane of the higher mind because 
 that attainment demands more of human expe- 
 rience than it has as yet assimilated. The 
 Higher Ego, the present vehicle of Atma, must 
 purge itself of every impurity ; encompassed by 
 selfishness, it must wholly conquer and rise to 
 all helpfulness. Seventy or eighty years of 
 mortal life have failed to consummate the 
 imperative task ; therefore Atma, through its 
 active intermediate, again projects its con- 
 sciousness downward, reconstructing on each 
 plane of matter the appropriate human principle 
 or body, and, at last, the physical, the rind 
 which covers all. 
 
 Every variety of material body in the hum- 
 blest species, is the almost direct creation of 
 the universal, undifferentiated Atma, and nec- 
 essarily so, for all but the lowest of its inter- 
 vening principles are as yet incipient. Benign 
 intelligences, vastly superior to man, have in 
 earlier ages guided the unfolding of these lowly 
 
 116 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 entities. Now man himself, because of his 
 highly-developed will, is throned over the 
 inferior life of this planet. Whether for good 
 or ill, he is colouring the feeble ray of mind just 
 visible in the higher animal kingdom ; and on 
 him will rest the penalty of unbrotherliness to 
 these creatures destined in future ages to arrive 
 at the human stage. 
 
 This conception of man's authority over 
 Nature is more vitally and sympathetically 
 human than that of Schelling, in whose Objec- 
 tive Idealism Nature is the negative pole of the 
 human mind perceived by the senses as some- 
 thing external to that mind. Evidently the 
 laws of Nature are for Schelling those which 
 man imposes upon it. For Hegel, as for Scho- 
 penhauer, Nature is a realm wherein Reason 
 wanders from the goal to which man himself 
 must turn her feet. 
 
 Reason is by Hegel identified with Infinite 
 Substance, Infinite Form, Infinite Power. 
 These, beneath all objective life, manifest as 
 the " World Spirit" whose striving toward free 
 expression results in Universal History. The 
 unreason of Nature, on which Hegel and 
 Schopenhauer discant, and because of which 
 Socrates lamented, obtains, according to The- 
 osophy, in appearance chiefly ; but a larger, 
 longer survey than that of recorded history is 
 necessary to the full confirmation of this view. 
 
 The downfall of nations, the extinction of 
 civilizations, are, to Theosophy, no backward 
 
 117 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 steps of attaining Reason. Such seeming 
 calamity is but the breaking of old vessels no 
 longer adequate to the unfolding Spirit. For- 
 ever the antique refashions itself as the new. 
 Egypt, Greece and Rome no doubt return, but 
 not in pyramid and Sphinx, not in Pantheon 
 and Acropolis, not in palace and Forum, not in 
 manners and customs ; no, not in any external- 
 ities. Not even unto their own land do the 
 dead peoples return, but rather they come 
 reembodying afar those inner, racial character- 
 istics once the mainspring of their respective 
 world activities. 
 
 Much indeed of vice, but surely more of 
 virtue, is reclothed in flesh and lives the vacil- 
 lating human life of Reason and unreason ; but 
 looking down to the abyss of animalism from 
 whence arose our race ; looking at its upward 
 trend through empires founded on blood and 
 slaughter, and maintained by crime ; looking at 
 the master and the slave of tyrannizing Rome, 
 and the baron and the serf of once bedarkened 
 Europe long abased in feudal chains ; looking 
 at every ignorance and malice and abuse behind 
 him, who will not rejoice in our own as yet 
 unperfected day, and turn with serene faith to 
 a liberated future? 
 
 We have seen that in the system of Leibnitz 
 a preestablished harmony obtained with every 
 grade of monads, all of whom are evolving to a 
 common center. From this it is evident that 
 having once for all established the harmony, 
 
 118 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 God enjoys perpetual Sabbath. The God of 
 Leibnitz is, in fact, very like the God of Fichte's 
 earlier idealism, a mere moral order in the 
 universe. 
 
 In the Bhagavad-Gita the Supreme Spirit 
 says, "There is nothing in the universe that it 
 is necessary for me to perform, nor anything 
 possible to obtain that I have not obtained ; 
 yet I am constantly in action. If I were not 
 indefatigable in action all men would presently 
 follow my example." The God of Theosophy 
 is this Supreme Spirit, and the incessant adjust- 
 ment of finite action by Infinite Reaction 
 proceeds from the activity of Absolute Will. 
 
 As for the monads of Theosophy, the cause 
 of their unfolding is expressed by the words 
 universal brotherhood. Every monad is a 
 center of will, but, as no two wills have equally 
 developed, all are each to other as positive and 
 negative. But will develops evil-ward or good- 
 ward ; therefore every monad is a menace or an 
 aid to its weaker neighbour. Such being the 
 case, nothing short of the Divine Reaction, 
 whereby evil returns to the evil-doer, can main- 
 tain the stability of the world. 
 
 All progress depends on mutual help ; a uni- 
 versal lifting up of that which is lower. If 
 men would know their responsibilities, let them 
 read in Genesis, "And God said, Let us make 
 man in our image, after our likeness, and let 
 them have dominion over the fish of the sea, 
 and over the fowl of the air, and over the 
 
 119 
 
LEIBNITZ, HEGEL AND 
 
 cattle, and over all the earth, and over every 
 creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." 
 
 Of all logicians, Hegel has no doubt arrived 
 at the clearest and closest explanation of the 
 great problems which have puzzled the meta- 
 physicians. His verdict is that Philosophy as 
 such does not reform the world. 
 
 Theosophists believe that a clear demonstra- 
 tion of the mutual dependence of universally 
 unfolding life must appeal to men, if only to 
 their inherent instinct of self-preservation. 
 Those who profess to hold in custody the "An- 
 cient Arcane Wisdom," declare that a suicidal 
 selfishness, similar to that which destroyed vast 
 and forgotten civilizations, is now developing 
 in our midst. Moreover, these teachers assert 
 that modern investigation is nearing the dis- 
 covery of certain laws whose misuse by the men 
 of old was baneful both to themselves and all 
 associated with them. 
 
 That which Theosophy avows as its mission 
 is not the elucidation of psychic phenomena, 
 nor the explanation of pre-natal and post- 
 mortem states ; nor is it the announcing of the 
 seven-foldness of man and nature ; neither is it 
 a revelation of conditions of planetary life 
 within the solar system. Theosophy has for 
 object not the mere history of submerged con- 
 tinents and their peoples self-destroyed through 
 the practice of infernal arts. Though all this 
 and more are professedly its province, Theos- 
 ophy undertakes, as its prime object, to prove 
 
 120 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 that brotherhood in its widest sense is a neces- 
 sary factor in the world's progress. 
 
 In these few pages the writer would make 
 obvious certain similarities in Eastern and 
 Western thought. Anything like justice to the 
 scope of Leibnitz, Hegel and modern Theoso- 
 phy would result in a sizable volume. It must 
 not be supposed that in our brief exposition 
 we have exhausted similarities ; others can be 
 shown, for example : Hegel says of gravitation, 
 that it is the desire of that which is the real of 
 matter to individualize itself. Already it would 
 find in a common center that intelligent one- 
 ness for which the Spirit first went forth. 
 Theosophy sees in gravitation the principle of 
 Desire urging every atom of the sentient uni- 
 verse to mutual contact in an instinctive attempt 
 to overcome the illusion of separateness. 
 
 This desire for oneness, manifest in the wheel- 
 ing of suns and planets, is, to Hegel, as also to 
 Theosophy, the ultimate cause of those mys- 
 terious affinities which the chemist has noted 
 but not explained. Belief in original and final 
 unity inspired the alchemists in their exoteric 
 search for what to Theosophy is the gold of 
 transmuted desire, even Divine Love. 
 
 In certain quarters, men of distinguished 
 attainment have overleaped the walls where- 
 with modern physical science has encompassed 
 itself. These investigators have turned to those 
 tabooed subjects, telepathy and spiritism, of 
 which Theosophy essays a detailed explana- 
 
 121 
 
MODERN THEOSOPHY 
 
 tion. Such investigation is a hopeful sign. 
 Evidently the wave of materialism is expending 
 itself even among the inheritors of the ques- 
 tionable legacy of John Locke. Less and less 
 contempt is now expressed for " German Tran- 
 scendentalism " and the so-called wild and 
 extravagant assumptions of Indian thinkers. 
 Though the gradual substantiation of the Dar- 
 winian theory is working adversely toward the 
 doctrine of Swedenborg, Theosophists claim 
 that when to wireless telegraphy, and the unique 
 behavior of Radium, and our latest knowledge 
 of the atom — said by Theosophy to be, like 
 man, a miniature of the solar system — Science 
 has added a few other important discoveries, 
 men will look with amazement at the half-reve- 
 lation of these in that semi-esoteric work "The 
 Secret Doctrine" of H. P. Blavatsky. 
 
 Although such thinkers as Hamilton and Mill 
 have deemed the knowledge of God no prov- 
 ince of philosophy, and though Kant himself 
 considered his Being a matter of faith, and 
 though Spencer relegates Deity to the regions 
 of the unknowable, Leibnitz made the Universal 
 Monad the indispensable primary of his sys- 
 tem, and Hegel, believed that he himself had 
 reasoned even to the Absolute One. Theoso- 
 phy, which, like Hegelianism, declares for the 
 perfectibility and unification of mankind, stands 
 also for "That," the Divine Parent, the All in 
 All when suns and systems, and time itself, shall 
 be no more. 
 

 Date Due 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 
 aV-H 
 
 3 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 f) 
 
 
 
 
BP955 .F23 
 
 The sophistries of Christian science 
 
 Princeton Theological Semmary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 00038 4596 
 
 
 ►! 
 
 !J::iiLf;>i)L)Io!?5i;^?j?>?>i>!3^!.>Jl>I.>L'I'i!i.^i!JS!>!>i>L'^I'I'