declares their prompt abolishment, and gives Mrs. Eddy’s Discovery the
praise. Milk-leg is cured; nervous prostration is cured; consumption is
cured; and St. Vitus’s dance is made a pastime. Even without a fiddle.
And now and then an interesting new addition to the Science slang appears
on the page. We have “demonstrations over chilblains” and such things.
It seems to be a curtailed way of saying “demonstrations of the power of
Christian-Science Truth over the fiction which masquerades under the name
of Chilblains.” The children, as well as the adults, share in the
blessings of the Science. “Through the study of the ‘little book’ they
are learning how to be healthful, peaceful, and wise.” Sometimes they
are cured of their little claims by the professional healer, and
sometimes more advanced children say over the formula and cure
themselves.
A little Far-Western girl of nine, equipped with an adult vocabulary,
states her age and says, “I thought I would write a demonstration to
you.” She had a claim, derived from getting flung over a pony’s head and
landed on a rockpile. She saved herself from disaster by remembering to
say “God is All” while she was in the air. I couldn’t have done it. I
shouldn’t even have thought of it. I should have been too excited.
Nothing but Christian Science could have enabled that child to do that
calm and thoughtful and judicious thing in those circumstances. She came
down on her head, and by all the rules she should have broken it; but the
intervention of the formula prevented that, so the only claim resulting
was a blackened eye. Monday morning it was still swollen and shut. At
school “it hurt pretty badly–that is, it seemed to.” So “I was excused,
and went down to the basement and said, ‘Now I am depending on mamma
instead of God, and I will depend on God instead of mamma.'” No doubt
this would have answered; but, to make sure, she added Mrs. Eddy to the
team and recited “the Scientific Statement of Being,” which is one of the
principal incantations, I judge. Then “I felt my eye opening.” Why,
dear, it would have opened an oyster. I think it is one of the
touchingest things in child-history, that pious little rat down cellar
pumping away at the Scientific Statement of Being.
There is a page about another good child–little Gordon. Little Gordon
“came into the world without the assistance of surgery or anaesthetics.”
He was a “demonstration.” A painless one; therefore, his coming evoked
“joy and thankfulness to God and the Discoverer of Christian Science.”
It is a noticeable feature of this literature–the so frequent linking
together of the Two Beings in an equal bond; also of Their 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
member ship of the new Church as are frank and open ones in the mouths of
its consecrated chiefs.
Some days later, the family library–Christian-Science books–was lying
in a deep-seated window. This was another chance for the holy child to
show off. He left his play and went there and pushed all the books to
one side, except the Annex “It he took in both hands, slowly raised it to
his lips, then removed it carefully, and seated himself in the window.”
It had seemed to the mother too wonderful to be true, that first time;
but now she was convinced that “neither imagination nor accident had
anything to do with it.” Later, little Gordon let the author of his
being see him do it. After that he did it frequently; probably every
time anybody was looking. I would rather have that child than a chromo.