a Trust, the spread of its dominion will continue.
CHAPTER IX
Four years ago I wrote the preceding chapters. I was assured by the wise
that Christian Science was a fleeting craze and would soon perish. This
prompt and all-competent stripe of prophet is always to be had in the
market at ground-floor rates. He does not stop to load, or consider, or
take aim, but lets fly just as he stands. Facts are nothing to him, he
has no use for such things; he works wholly by inspiration. And so, when
he is asked why he considers a new movement a passing fad and quickly
perishable, he finds himself unprepared with a reason and is more or less
embarrassed. For a moment. Only for a moment. Then he waylays the
first spectre of a reason that goes flitting through the desert places of
his mind, and is at once serene again and ready for conflict. Serene and
confident. Yet he should not be so, since he has had no chance to
examine his catch, and cannot know whether it is going to help his
contention or damage it.
The impromptu reason furnished by the early prophets of whom I have
spoken was this:
“There is nothing to Christian Science; there is nothing about it that
appeals to the intellect; its market will be restricted to the
unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not think.”
They called that a reason why the cult would not flourish and endure. It
seems the equivalent of saying:
“There is no money in tinware; there is nothing about it that appeals to
the rich; its market will be restricted to the poor.”
It is like bringing forward the best reason in the world why Christian
Science should flourish and live, and then blandly offering it as a
reason why it should sicken and die.
That reason was furnished me by the complacent and unfrightened prophets
four years ago, and it has been furnished me again to-day. If
conversions to new religions or to old ones were in any considerable
degree achieved through the intellect, the aforesaid reason would be
sound and sufficient, no doubt; the inquirer into Christian Science might
go away unconvinced and unconverted. But we all know that conversions
are seldom made in that way; that such a thing as a serious and
painstaking and fairly competent inquiry into the claims of a religion or
of a political dogma is a rare occurrence; and that the vast mass of men
and women are far from being capable of making such an examination. They
are not capable, for the reason that their minds, howsoever good they may
be, are not trained for such examinations. The mind not trained for that
work is no more competent to do it than are lawyers and farmers competent
to make successful clothes without learning the tailor’s trade. There
are seventy-five million men and women among us who do not know how to
cut out and make a dress-suit, and they would not think of trying; yet
they all think they can competently think out a political or religious
scheme without any apprenticeship to the business, and many of them
believe they have actually worked that miracle. But, indeed, the truth
is, almost all the men and women of our nation or of any other get their
religion and their politics where they get their astronomy–entirely at
second hand. Being untrained, they are no more able to intelligently
examine a dogma or a policy than they are to calculate an eclipse.
Men are usually competent thinkers along the lines of their specialized
training only. Within these limits alone are their opinions and
judgments valuable; outside of these limits they grope and are lost–
usually without knowing it. In a church assemblage of five hundred
persons, there will be a man or two whose trained minds can seize upon
each detail of a great manufacturing scheme and recognize its value or
its lack of value promptly; and can pass the details in intelligent
review, section by section, and finally as a whole, and then deliver a
verdict upon the scheme which cannot be flippantly set aside nor easily