embarrassing appeal to the intellect, has no occasion to do it, and can
get along quite well without it.
Provided. Provided what? That it can secure that thing which is worth
two or three hundred thousand times more than an “appeal to the
intellect”–an environment. Can it get that? Will it be a menace to
regular Christianity if it gets that? Is it time for regular
Christianity to get alarmed? Or shall regular Christianity smile a smile
and turn over and take another nap? Won’t it be wise and proper for
regular Christianity to do the old way, Me customary way, the historical
way–lock the stable-door after the horse is gone? Just as Protestantism
has smiled and nodded this long time (while the alert and diligent
Catholic was slipping in and capturing the public schools), and is now
beginning to hunt around for the key when it is too late?
Will Christian Science get a chance to show its wares? It has already
secured that chance. Will it flourish and spread and prosper if it shall
create for itself the one thing essential to those conditions–an
environment? It has already created an environment. There are families
of Christian Scientists in every community in America, and each family is
a factory; each family turns out a Christian Science product at the
customary intervals, and contributes it to the Cause in the only way in
which contributions of recruits to Churches are ever made on a large
scale–by the puissant forces of personal contact and association. Each
family is an agency for the Cause, and makes converts among the
neighbors, and starts some more factories.
Four years ago there were six Christian Scientists in a certain town that
I am acquainted with; a year ago there were two hundred and fifty there;
they have built a church, and its membership now numbers four hundred.
This has all been quietly done; done without frenzied revivals, without
uniforms, brass bands, street parades, corner oratory, or any of the
other customary persuasions to a godly life. Christian Science, like
Mohammedanism, is “restricted” to the “unintelligent, the people who do
not think.” There lies the danger. It makes Christian Science
formidable. It is “restricted” to ninety-nine one-hundredths of the
human race, and must be reckoned with by regular Christianity. And will
be, as soon as it is too late.
BOOK II
There were remarkable things about the stranger called the Man–Mystery-
things so very extraordinary that they monopolized attention and made all
of him seem extraordinary; but this was not so, the most of his qualities
being of the common, every-day size and like anybody else’s. It was
curious. He was of the ordinary stature, and had the ordinary aspects;
yet in him were hidden such strange contradictions and disproportions!
He was majestically fearless and heroic; he had the strength of thirty
men and the daring of thirty thousand; handling armies, organizing
states, administering governments–these were pastimes to him; he
publicly and ostentatiously accepted the human race at its own valuation-
-as demigods–and privately and successfully dealt with it at quite
another and juster valuation–as children and slaves; his ambitions were
stupendous, and his dreams had no commerce with the humble plain, but
moved with the cloud-rack among the snow-summits. These features of him
were, indeed, extraordinary, but the rest of him was ordinary and usual.
He was so mean-minded, in the matter of jealousy, that it was thought he
was descended from a god; he was vain in little ways, and had a pride in
trivialities; he doted on ballads about moonshine and bruised hearts; in
education he was deficient, he was indifferent to literature, and knew
nothing of art; he was dumb upon all subjects but one, indifferent to all
except that one–the Nebular Theory. Upon that one his flow of words was
full and free, he was a geyser. The official astronomers disputed his
facts and deeded his views, and said that he had invented both, they not
being findable in any of the books. But many of the laity, who wanted
their nebulosities fresh, admired his doctrine and adopted it, and it
attained to great prosperity in spite of the hostility of the experts.”–