The negation in Christian Science goes deeper still. It is one of the many religions which is, in essence, opposed to life, to fertility and procreation, to the basic functions of sex. Logically, a religion which banishes death might well be either a cult of sensual indulgence or a cult of holy motherhood. Christian Science is neither. Sometimes explicitly, and sometimes in vague tendencies, it stands against the manifestation of sex. It does not stand alone. In German mysticism, and Yoga, in some cults of Perfectionism and the Shakers, we find versions of the same doctrine. The Rappites believed that Adam, before the creation of Eve, combined in himself both sexual elements. The Shakers, refraining like the Rappites from sexual intercourse, held that Ann Lee was the female principle of God, and prayed to “our Father and Mother who art in Heaven.” Of Ramakrashna, Jules Bois writes, “He adored the feminine principle in Divinity. The divine mother was for him the supreme God nameless and without form, in personal tenderness and inexhaustible love.” And the perfectionists, as we have noted, ran through every variety of dogma denouncing sexual intercourse and restraining procreation. In Christian Science we find this hostility to the sexual impulse erected into a divine principle. It is perhaps accounted for by Mrs. Eddy’s two unhappy marriages and by the recurrences after her son was born of the fits of hysteria with which she was afflicted as a child. But beyond the personal reasons, or possibly fortifying them, there was the common cult which insisted upon denying all differences between the sexes. To a certain type of mind, the idea of difference and of opposition is displeasing. There must be only harmony and oneness. Not procreative intercourse of male and female, nor the equilibrium between positive and negative, nor the duality of right and wrong and good and evil, but the destruction of these oppositions in the creation of the One. Mrs. Eddy applied this principle to sex. She did not forbid, but she discouraged marriage. She said that “Jesus was the offspring of Mary’s subconscious communion with God” and like Thomas Lake Harris made it clear that she expected virgin births to become quickly more common and eventually to be the rule. From some of the observations and discoveries of Professor Agassiz, Mrs. Eddy derived extraordinary proof of the truth of Christian Science:
“The propagation of their species without the male element, by butterfly, bee, and moth, is a discovery corroborative of the Science of Mind, because it shows that the origin and continuance of these insects rest on Principle, apart from material conditions. An egg never was the origin of a man, and no seed ever produced a plant. . . . The belief that life can be in matter, or soul in body, and that man springs from dust or from an egg, is the brief record of mortal error. . . . The plant grows not because of seed or soil.”
In this we have the pure originality of Christian Science— a conception of humanity almost without appetites, rejecting natural birth and absolved of natural death. Stated in these terms Christian Science is neither absurd nor unique. It answers a deep desire in some human souls. Whether that desire itself is desirable, and whether those souls are sick or well, is another question.[2]
[1] While this book was being prepared for the press, a series of astonishing advertisements appeared in the New York World. In the first of these Mrs. Augusta E. Stetson, most famous of Mrs. Eddy’s disciples and head of the chief dissenting sect of Christian Scientists, specifically declared that she herself is immortal and that Mrs. Eddy will presently manifest herself again on earth. This announcement, and others which followed, precipitated a controversy between orthodox and dissenting Christian Scientists. The leaders of the First Church repudiated Mrs. Stetson’s conception of immortality. The head of the Publication Committee for the state of New York, Edgar Grant Gyger, said, in the New York Times of August 2, 1927, that “Christian Scientists at the present time accept the inevitability of death.” Two days later a prophet, Carl Gluck, of Oakland, California, announced that Mrs. Eddy had already been born again, was, in fact, now twelve years old, living as a little girl, unaware of her future mission, “in the western part of the United States.” Mr. Gluck’s statement was based on an interpretation of the poem, Christ and Christmas. Mrs. Stetson, in a later announcement, said,
[2] “In June, 1890, Mrs. Woodbury gave birth to a son, whom she proclaimed, Mr. Woodbury not dissenting, to have been conceived by mental generation, in accordance with the doctrine of Christian Science.”—Frank Podmore, in Mesmerism and Christian Science.
“I, Augusta E. Stetson, C.S.D., by the spiritual authority which has been vested in me by my Teacher and Leader, Mary Baker Eddy, do now, once again, proclaim to the Christian Science field, and to universal mankind, that Mary Baker Eddy lives, and that she will reappear, for she is the ever-present Christ, the Son-Daughter of God, who is eternal Life and Love.”
She also quotes many passages from Mrs. Eddy’s writings, especially from volumes less known than Science and Health, to prove her statement that Mrs. Eddy denied the actuality of death. The thought of death, one gathers, is due to a false conception of creation. The “Adam-Eve” creation is false. The true creation is that of Adam created in the image of God, without the separation of the sexes. The true creation is spiritual:
“I have never held,” writes Mrs. Stetson, “that ‘flesh and blood’ will ‘return to earth,’ or, indeed, that Mary Baker Eddy ever lived in matter, flesh, and blood. I have always taught, as she taught me, that man is now, always has been, and forever will be, spiritual and immortal. . . .”
The fact that, to a great number of disciples, Mrs. Eddy seemed to teach literal immortality and to deny the corporeal existence of sexual man, is the chief issue of the controversy. A minor point is the complete identification of Mrs. Eddy with Christ— minor because it seems, so far, to be the idea of Mrs. Stetson alone. Some support is given to the idea, however, by interpretations of the pictures in Christ and Christmas, for one of which, at least, Mrs. Eddy herself posed. These interpretations also reveal the precise moment of the rebirth of Mrs. Eddy, according to Gluck, and are otherwise too involved for lay interpretation. The poem was withdrawn shortly after its original publication because the pictures in it were beginning to be used as talismans and to effect cures. Mrs. Eddy recorded the fact that a child, merely by looking at one of the illustrations, had been healed. Three of the illustrations which, according to Mrs. Eddy, were compared to Botticelli and perfect in art, were used as designs for stained glass windows in the Mother’s Room of the original Mother Church in Boston, a room now closed to the public.
Long after Mrs. Stetson’s announcement, the Christian Science Parent Church (the Church of the Transforming Covenant) with addresses in Washington and London, published in the World an appeal to “its beloved brethren of the outdated counterfeit Boston organization to return to Mrs. Eddy’s system of organization in time to avert further catastrophe.” The details of the catastrophe are interesting:
“According to statistics published by Mary Baker Eddy in 1896, Christian Science under legitimate organization had proved so effective within the circle of her five thousand students, nearly all of whom were middle aged, that only fourteen deaths occurred in a period of nearly thirty years.” Yet, of the four hundred and sixty-two persons holding the degrees of C.S.B. and C.S.D. [i.e., graduates of the Metaphysical College and presumable practitioners of Christian Science] sixty per cent, have died since the decease of Mrs. Eddy in 1910. This “appalling mortality” is ascribed to “illegitimate Christian Science”; briefly, the increase in the death rate of Christian Scientists, leaders and followers alike, is due to the fact that, since Mrs. Eddy passed away, Scientists have accepted false doctrine. Further:
“Mrs. Eddy taught that the mind of an individual affects his body for good and ill. She also taught that the individual mind is influenced by the convictions of the majority in any circle within which he is bound. Death is caused by a majority of human beliefs that man must die, and a change in general belief will cause a change in human experience.”
The advertisement ends with the statement that “Legitimate Christ
ian Science, under scientific government, maintains health and happiness and unfolds immortality.”
The numerical strength of the particular dissentients who inserted this announcement is not given. One gathers from it further evidence that Christian Scientists, outside the parent church, tend to believe that Mrs. Eddy taught immortality in the strictest and most literal terms. And also that the belief in the circle of emanations, the possibility of harm being done by projecting evil thoughts, which comes down from Mesmer to New Thought, is no stranger to Christian Science. The distinction between New Thought and Christian Science in this respect is that the latter, possessing a Church, stresses belief in immortality; the former, without a discipline, stresses the will.
In the later stages of the controversy started by Mrs. Stetson, it was claimed that Mrs. Eddy asserted her power over the forces of nature, had a special group of disciples to attend to the weather (particularly to avert snowstorms) and had restored life to a favorite disciple after he had been dead for some time. As all these revelations lack official authority, they cannot be used as the basis for criticism of Christian Science; but so far as they are in keeping with the essential principles of Christian Science they serve legitimately as signposts to the inevitable, though possibly unconscious, intentions of Mrs. Eddy’s teaching.
XXV. The Kingdom of God in Chicago.
IN what proportions the souls of Matthias, Moody, Quimby, and John Humphrey Noyes entered into the composition of John Alexander Dowie is too delicate a question for me to solve. He was an impostor, an extraordinary organizer, and an exceptional evangelist. In 1899, he declared himself a messenger of God’s covenant. In 1901, he added to that the affirmation that he was the reincarnation of Elijah. In 1904, he consecrated himself first apostle announcing that, in 1906, he would consecrate the other members of the Apostolic college. A somewhat terrified church, fearing that he would announce himself as Christ incarnate, deposed him before this last step could be taken. The divine healing which he practiced then came to an end and, in 1907, he died. The rapid audacity of his aggrandizement, as shown by these dates, is characteristic. For, to the business of being Christ’s messenger on earth, Dowie brought an unparalleled energy, a maniacal haste, and the business methods of a Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford. Since the time of Brigham Young, there had been no phenomenon like the growth of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. A cynical foreigner, observing the phenomenon, would say that, at last, the business methods of the United States had created the perfect American religion. John Alexander Dowie was, however, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and did not land in the United States until he was forty-one years old (in 1888). He had already labored for many years in Australia and New Zealand on his “worldwide work for God and for humanity.” His pretensions to divine inspiration equal those of Mrs. Eddy. The foulness of his language makes the speech of a Billy Sunday prim in comparison. His business acumen brought him the respect of Chicago bankers. The community and the Church he founded summed up and burlesqued the American sects and the communities of a century. But he was in no sense a product of the American revival system nor was he directly affected by the breakdown in religious authority which followed those revivals. His disciples, however, were. They flocked to him from all the collapsing cults. For thirteen years he made himself, by violence and chicanery, and by a degree of self-hypnotism almost without parallel, the outstanding prophet of the country, as preposterous a figure as Carry Nation, who hated him for the publicity he got.
Dowie first went into business in Adelaide, Australia, but returned to Edinburgh for four years’ study at the University and after that, in South Australia, was ordained as minister in the Congregational Church. He discovered his ability to heal the sick by the laying on of hands and, in 1882, went to Melbourne where he accomplished in a small way what he afterwards did on a large scale in Chicago. He established a Church, built a tabernacle, and founded the International Divine Healing Association under whose auspices he did mission work in the Antipodes and later on the Pacific coast. In 1893, he came to Chicago and, with characteristic appreciation of the opportunities of the site, built a tabernacle just outside the grounds of the World’s Fair.
He had already published a little book called American First Fruits in which the results of his early labors were set down. A union of pastors on the Pacific coast having condemned his doctrine of healing, he issued a violent reply, reinforced by a sufficient number of public testimonials from women who not only were cured, but were made to love Christ better, and from doctors and business men who were cured and were not therefore “inclined to scoff at religion.” In Chicago, the cures and the conquests came more rapidly and Dowie soon felt himself hampered by the International Association he had founded. He was going into business with a press, and a bank, and a college, and a hospice of healing. For a focus and center he needed a Church. As Matthias was commanded to find, Dowie received word from God to found and, in 1896, the Christian Catholic Church, to which the name Apostolic was later added, was founded in Chicago with Dowie as General Overseer. The Church, which was to prepare for the kingdom of God and held fast to the conventional idea of the present coming of Christ, had a three-fold gospel: salvation, healing, and holy living. Dowie was of such a pugnacious temperament that he spent most of his time in attacking the enemies of a holy life, from oysters to walking delegates. His art of healing, while he magnified it and undoubtedly lied about it, was generally used as a sort of advertisement for the Church. As for salvation it was conventionally sought.
The comparative specific gravity of these three principles in the theology of Dowie may be judged from a single tragic incident. A daughter, to whom he was devoted, lit a spirit lamp in order to heat some curling irons and her loose nightgown caught the flame. She was so horribly burned that she died, after twelve hours of mortal agony, without the attendance of a doctor, since doctors were forbidden in the holy living of the Church. Heartbroken, Dowie said over his daughter’s grave, “She was a good girl, but she disobeyed me. I forbade the use of alcohol in any form, she violated my command, and she has been punished for it.” The prohibition of alcohol to which he alluded was that of the ordinary opponent of liquor but, in his explanation, Dowie was specifically putting a holy life, that is, a life led in accordance with his commandments, above even his own power to heal.
The Church was, of course, primitive and restorationist. In 1902, Dowie organized the Theocratic Party as a political unit, including all the citizens of his city, and, in the platform, summed up the moral basis of the Church in the declaration “that the Holy Scriptures which contain the ten commandments, and the inspired Gospel of Jesus, the Christ the son of God, constitute the principles of all righteous government for the individual, for the nation, and for the whole world.” To Dowie, the Bible was not only literally true but universally binding. It was the source of every law governing every human activity. Thus, within sight of the abattoirs of Chicago, he preached a violent crusade against the eating of pork. He denied that the vision of St. Peter taught us to sweep away the distinction between animals clean and unclean; for him, the story of the Gadarene swine was the last recorded statement of our obligation. He proved that swine were possessed of the devil by the fact that “our Lord Jesus Christ . . . never healed a case of cancer,” adding that cancer was not known in Palestine at that time and “is unknown now in countries where swine’s flesh is not eaten.” He insisted that the pig eats rattlesnakes, “Yea, more, as I have said, it swallows the whole thing from snout to tail” and that, in eating pork, “you eat cholera, and trichinosis, and tuberculosis, and scrofula, and cancer, and all kinds of foul diseases.”
The idea that cancer is the devil was entirely in keeping with Dowie’s theory of disease. He did not, like Christian Science, refuse to recognize it; to him disease was real, present, and dangerous. It was evil, the devil, or the devil’s child. There was but one way to cure disease—by prayer, which casts out the devil and purifies us of sin, after which
it is impossible for disease to have hold upon us. The only condition is that one must have faith; and it was not in Dowie’s temperament to tolerate a divided allegiance, so that there were neither drugs nor doctors in the City of Zion. For a year the physicians of Chicago had been persecuting Dowie under a municipal ordinance regulating hospitals. Dowie faced over a hundred charges and, by carrying a test case to a higher court, had the ordinance declared invalid. When he founded his own city he took his revenge by banishing all physicians entirely. In the tabernacle he asked a thousand women, “If you knew you were going to die in your next confinement would you want a doctor?” and the Zion Banner reports that the answer was “no.” It would have availed them little if they had answered “yes,” for Zion City was ruled with an iron hand and lay under the terror of an intricate spy system. In A Voice from Zion, one of the many official publications, we find an attack on the miracles at Lourdes and doctors are dealt with under the heading of “You Dirty Boy”:
“ ‘The saved and healed shall walk in God’s way of Holiness, praise His name.’ (Amen)
“ ‘And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it.’
“You stink-pots! You’ll not get there. (Laughter)
“You whiskey-pots, what business have you on God’s Highway of Holiness?
“It is no place for you.
“You who are full of digitalis, nux vomica, arsenic, strychnine, cocaine, Mother Siegal’s Soothing Syrup, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Pink Pills for Pale People, and Pale Pills for Pink People. (Laughter.) It is no place for you.
“What are you going to do on that road, ye who are full of deadly drugs, disease and uncleanness? Get rid of your dirt and muck, of sin and of disease, and of the dirty, filthy drugs, and of the effect of the unclean hands of these unclean devils who get foolish legislators to pass laws which give them power over humanity from the cradle to the grave. We repudiate these illegal enactments.
The Stammering Century Page 48
