The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  Shall we forget the wisdom of its way?

  Then ask me not, amid this mortal strife,—

  This keenest pang of animated clay,—

  To mourn him less. To mourn him more, were just,

  If to his memory ’twere a tribute given,

  For every solemn, sacred, earnest trust

  Delivered to us ere he rose to heaven;

  Heaven but the happiness of that calm soul,

  Growing in stature to the throne of God

  Rest should reward him who hath made us whole,

  Seeking, though tremblers, where his footsteps trod

  —MARY M. PATTERSON.

  Lynn, January 22nd, 1866.

  When they accused her of being a charlatan, her disciples pointed to the record of the law courts and to the fact that their leader used little enough of the money she earned. And to the more serious charges against her, they might well claim that these were common form whenever a new religion began. Mark Twain, in 1907, devoted a book to a vicious attack on Christian Science on the very first page of which he wrote, “It is the first time since the dawn-days of creation that a Voice has gone crashing through space with such placid and complacent confidence and command.” This is not a literally accurate statement. Confidence and command have characterized a hundred prophets and a hundred charlatans in every age. They prove nothing of falsehood or truth. Origin in fact seldom does but, even if Mark Twain’s statement were true to the letter, it would only mean to the believer that no one before Mrs. Eddy had had such absolute command of the truth.

  Christian Science is a modern religion in the sense that it is connected with no shrine and has no sacred relics. It is a religion that accords with railroads and large editions of books and cheap postage. It is not incongruous that a rather fanatic group of Christian Scientists should have offered to broadcast, not only the doctrine, but the actual cures by radio. For the miracles of Christian Science, as compared with those of primitive Christianity, are performed by large-scale production. One almost expects interchangeable cures. And in keeping with this, the most vicious attack on Mrs. Eddy has had to do not with her religion, but with her financial success. Thus in America, which is supposed by foreigners to make a religion of Business, it was considered an impropriety to make a business out of religion. It was held against Mrs. Eddy that, in seven years, according to her own account, she had four thousand pupils each of whom paid $300—a total of $1,200,000, which ought to have assured her respect in financial circles. The price of three weeks’ tuition at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College was not lowered when the course was reduced to seven lessons and Mrs. Eddy is quoted as having said, “This amount greatly troubled me. I shrank from asking it, but was finally led by a strange providence to accept this fee. God has since shown me in multitudinous ways the wisdom of this decision.” She was accused of chicanery in regard to the mortgage covering the land on which the First Church stands and of ingratitude for not reimbursing those who lent her money to publish Science and Health, even after that book had sold a quarter of a million copies. On one occasion, the work of healing was suspended and it became obligatory for all good Scientists to buy a new edition of Science and Health, which is reported to have contained only one minor change in a single sentence. There was a traffic in spoons at $5 for gold plate and $3 for silver, both equally effective, as a token of grace, because there was a representation of Mrs. Eddy’s home in the bowl and of her alert and earnest face on the handle. In December, 1878, Mrs. Eddy’s husband was indicted for conspiracy to murder Daniel A. Spofford, who had been accused by a disciple of Mrs. Eddy of causing pain and illness by the exercise of “malicious animal magnetism.” It is always said that Mrs. Eddy managed to get rid of those healers who, by publishing explanations of Science and Health, threatened to cut into the revenues of the mother church, and of those who became so adept and influential as to threaten the position of the Mother herself. So runs the first group of charges and it is easy to see how much more they are based on interpretation of facts than on facts themselves. Even if they were all true, they would not belittle the truth of Christian Science any more than the love affairs of Goethe detract from the poetry of Faust.

  The second line of attack on Christian Science is that it is silly. Here Mark Twain, as was to be expected, found himself at home. He calls Mrs. Eddy the most erratic and contradictory and untrustworthy witness that has occupied the stand since the days of Ananias. He mentions the story of a fatally injured horse restored to health by the application of Christian Science and exclaims, “I can stand a good deal, but I recognize that the ice is getting thin here. That horse had as many as fifty claims; how could he demonstrate over them? Could he do the All-Good, Good-Gracious, Liver, Bones, Truth, All down but nine, Set them up in the Other Alley? Could he intone the Scientific Statement of Being? Now, could he? Wouldn’t it give him a relapse? Let us draw the line at horses. Horses and furniture.”

  He tells the story of “little Gordon who ‘came into the world without the assistance of surgery or anesthetics.’ He was a ‘demonstration.’ A painless one; therefore, his coming evoked ‘joy and thankfulness to God and the Discoverer of Christian Science.’ This is a noticeable feature of this literature—the so frequent linking together of the two Bibles. When little Gordon was two years old, ‘he was playing horse on the bed, where I had left my ‘little book.’ I noticed him stop in his play, take the book carefully in his little hands, kiss it softly, then look about for the highest place of safety his arms could reach and put it there.’ This pious act filled the mother ‘with such a train of thought as I had never experienced before. I thought of the sweet mother of long ago who kept things in her heart,’ etc. It is a bold comparison; however, unconscious profanations are about as common in the mouths of the lay membership of the new Church as are frank and open ones in the mouths of its consecrated chiefs.”

  He examines the four fundamentals of Christian Science:

  “1. God is all.

  “2. God is good.

  “3. God, Spirit being all, nothing is matter.

  “4. Life, God, omnipotent Good deny death, Evil, sin, disease. Disease, Sin, Evil, Death deny Good, Omnipotent God, Life.”

  And he almost shrieks with delight over Mrs. Eddy’s statement that these “will be found to agree in statement and proof even if read backwards.” Other critics mark the meaningless jumble of words which Mrs. Eddy used with such zeal and swing and assurance that they have a persuasive effect regardless of the meaning. Thus a Catholic critic notes that:

  “Issachar, Jacob’s son, is defined as corporeal belief; Jacob himself as a corporeal mortal embracing duplicity, repentance, sensualism, and yet—mirabile dictu—representing at the same time Inspiration and the Revelation of Science (Christian Science of course); Jerusalem becomes mortal belief and knowledge, obtained from the five corporeal senses; Jesus is the highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea; Joseph is, like Jacob, a corporeal mortal, but with a higher sense of Truth, rebuking mortal belief or error; Judah is, like Issachar, only more so a corporeal material belief progressing and disappearing, while at the same time it is the spiritual understanding of God and man appearing.”

  Critics also point to the fact that Mrs. Eddy swung herself out of the normal orbit of consequence and proof by the simple process of defining her own terms. Thus she says:

  “I named it Christian, because it is compassionate, helpful, and spiritual. God I called immortal Mind. That which sins, suffers, and dies I named mortal mind. The physical senses, or sensuous nature, I called error and shadow. Soul I denominated Substance, because soul alone is truly substantial. God I characterized as individual entity, but His corporeality I denied. The Real I claimed as eternal; and its antipodes, or the temporal, I described as unreal. Spirit I called the reality; and matter, the unreality.”

  One is reminded of some of the mad passages in Alice in Wonderland, but Mrs. Eddy herself recognized the difficulty and blamed it on the “ina
dequacy of material terms,” a strange echo of Jonathan Edwards’ complaint that words contradict themselves, and a strange forerunner of modernistic theories of literary expression. Mrs. Eddy reported that she had been a rather precocious pupil, making natural philosophy, logic, and moral science her favorite studies, and learning something of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but “after my discovery of Christian Science most of the knowledge I gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined that grammar was eclipsed. Etymology was divine history, voicing the idea of God in man’s origin and signification. Syntax was spiritual order and unity. Prosody the song of angels. . . .”

  This was no doubt convenient and parallels exactly the experience of teachers of Mesmerism who advised their pupils earnestly to forget all they knew of ordinary physics and chemistry. Hugo Münsterberg, wholly unsympathetic as he is, does not find Science and Health silly. He says that the system is by no means unskillfully constructed and implies that if Mrs. Eddy had had more aptitude in expression it might have been much more effective.

  Beyond these external objections, there are two more serious charges. The first is that Christian Science is not in any way original. Münsterberg says that “one who is familiar with the history of philosophy will find in it not one original thought.” The obligation to Quimby is insisted upon although Mrs. Eddy, confronted by articles in praise of Quimby “purporting” to be hers, said that she might have written them while she was under the influence of “mesmeric treatment” by the Portland doctor. It is also known that, when Quimby died, Mrs. Eddy wanted H. W. Dresser, a leader of New Thought, to take his place and would not then make any claims for herself. A more illuminating light on the sources of Christian Science is found in the religion of the Shakers whose great prophetess, Ann Lee, was considered as the female principle of God and identified as the woman of the Apocalypse. She was called Mother Ann and claimed the gift of healing, and the Shakers called their first establishment the Mother Church. In all of these points Milmine, an historian of Christian Science, has found sufficient parallels to justify his assertion that the Shaker colony near Mrs. Eddy’s childhood home strongly influenced the character of her own religion. These criticisms take us by marked stages closer to the heart of Christian Science. The next one is that Christian Science is blasphemous. (It may be said in advance that it is only blasphemous if it is not true.) Mrs. Eddy frequently wrote her name in the same line with that of the Virgin Mary and the Saviour, confusing Mark Twain by the arrangement since he could not tell whether she meant to place herself above one or both of them. In Christ and Christmas, by Mrs. Eddy, there was a picture of Christ holding the hand of a woman in whose other hand was a scroll marked Christian Science. Women disciples of the new church upon several occasions claimed to have been blessed with virgin births[1] and the height of blasphemy, to the orthodox, is in the Christian Science version of the Lord’s Prayer, especially in the invocation:

  “1. Our Father-Mother God, all harmonious.

  2. Admirable One.

  3. Thy kingdom is within us; Thou art ever present.

  4. Enable us to know—as in heaven, so on earth—God is supreme.

  5. Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections.

  6. And infinite Love is reflected in love.

  7. And Love leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth us from sin, disease and death.

  8. For God is now and forever all Life, Truth and Love.”

  This brings us to the heart of Christian Science where we may leave objections behind and examine only the intentions of the new cult and its relations with the other unorthodox movements of the time. The connection with spiritualism is obvious; it is precisely the same as the connection between spiritualism and Quimby, and it hardly needs the corroborating evidence of Mrs. Eddy’s brief term as a spiritualistic clairvoyant before she founded Christian Science. She indicated her relation to the characteristic thought of her day when she announced her purpose “to relieve the suffering of humanity, by a sanitary system that should include all moral and religious reform,” and her inclination to faddishness when she protested against giving babies their daily bath and said that “bathing and rubbing to alter secretions or remove unhealthy exhalation from the cuticle receive useful rebuke from Christian healing.” That nature is always good, always healthy, always informed by a moral order, which man must discover and conform to, is as implicit in Christian Science as in transcendentalism and New Thought. And Christian Science is essentially a religion of perfection, without the theology of Noyes, and with a strong tendency to identify moral and physical perfection with the ineffable purity and power of God.

  The methods of Christian Science are so subject to ridicule that they have obscured the essence of its teaching. To call pain an error, to deny the existence of evil, to proclaim that disease and deformity can be willed, thought, or wished away, significant as these things are in Christian Science, were not its philosophical essence. Ascetics and pagans have both attempted in their several ways to rid their lives of these same factors of unhappiness, just as there have been Puritans who attempted to kill all elements of joy and who rejoiced in the mortifications and indignities of common existence. Absent treatment and mental healing are the proofs which a pragmatic age demanded of the truth of Christian Science. It worked, it brought religion as an active force into daily life as a way of guaranteeing health and happiness. It infused warmth into the inert body of science and it gave scientific, even if pseudo-scientific, corroboration to the imperiled mysteries of Christianity. There were thousands who fell away from orthodox creeds because these failed adequately to reconcile the common facts of misery and failure, of disease and death, with the protecting benevolence of an almighty God. And when these thousands turned their minds, still habituated to the Christian mythology, to science, they found it incapable of satisfying their ultimate demands. It is quite possible that no combination of words in the thousands of names of sects has ever been more canny and more finely calculated in psychological appeal than the name of Christian Science. In the person of the healer, Christian Science retained all that was powerful in the doctrines which stem from mesmerism. In the cold, rigid solemnity of the church, it kept the advantage of ritual. Through Mrs. Eddy it afforded the longed-for human touch and, at the same time, a fore-taste of divinity.

  To what end? The closer one comes to the core of Christian Science the more one is impressed by a sense of its strangeness, the more one is compelled to retreat before it, in order to examine the essence of other religions, and find an adequate basis of comparison. Christian Science is confusing because, with all its novelty, it accepts the Christian idea of a redeemer. “No person,” says Mrs. Eddy, “can compass or fulfill the individual mission of Jesus of Nazareth.” His mission in all Christian theology is that of a Saviour, or Redeemer. But what can his mission be to a world in which sin is only error? The idea of redemption is found in many religions outside of Christianity. Persephone and Adonis are redeemers no less than Jesus and, in all theologies, the God who dies and lives again shares this function. Pagan and Christian alike have felt the bitter reality of evil, the misery of earthly existence and the terror of death. In one way or another, they have looked for an atonement of sin which brought these evils into the world. Or if they were less conscious of sin, they have hoped for some intercession and some mediation between them and their Gods. But the moment misery and evil are denied, the moment their acute and burdensome reality is declared an illusion, the function of the intercessor and the redeemer is logically at an end. One feels that Christ remains in the theology of Christian Science for another purpose. It is his thaumaturgy that makes him precious. As in the religion of business Christ has been called the first rotarian, and in the religion of altruism, the first socialist, so, in Christian Science, he is the first, the greatest, the supreme worker of miracles. Lazarus was raised from the dead—it is a familiar interpretation—so that there might be hope for all men; but only Lazarus
, so that no man would presume. But in Christian Science there is no body, and no body of this death.

  And there at last is the pivot and center of Christian Science. The organized religions and even the independent ways in which men face the plight of existence may be roughly divided into two classes. There are the religions which we too broadly call pagan and pantheistic, which exalt fertility and take joy in life, averting their eyes from a cold and rather insignificant existence after death. In some of these, the stress on the present is so marked that they become purely materialistic, exclaim that nothing exists but the world we see and touch and experience, and that death is the end. Other religions are essentially life-fearing. They seek death as the enviable culmination of a miserable existence. In them death is the return to the eternal Good. It is harps and halos, or an endless day without passions, disease, or gratifications. Buddha, “seeking relief from the tedious impermanence of personal experience,” and the gluttonous Epicurean, seeking endless gratifications through his experience, stand at opposite poles. And it is the mark of Christianity, in some of its forms, that it approves or permits a degree of earthly happiness while it robs death of its ultimate terrors. The joy of St. Francis impresses us as more genuine than the pleasures of an epicurean emperor. But the debased Christianity of modern times is, in dogma, a death-seeking religion.

  Not so Christian Science, which denies the reality of the body and is compelled to deny the reality of the body’s death. Here we arrive at a peculiar paradox. For, while Christian Science denies the reality of death, it also opposes itself to a great part of the reality of life. To a rhapsodist like Nietzsche, the very brutality and pain of life is part of its essence, adding dignity and magnificence. The tragic sense of life, and the feeling of life as a great tragedy, have been held precious by pagan and Protestant and Catholic. To deny these elements is, in a serious sense, to diminish and belittle human destiny.