answered. And there will be one or two other men there who can do the
same thing with a great and complicated educational project; and one or
two others who can do the like with a large scheme for applying
electricity in a new and unheard-of way; and one or two others who can do
it with a showy scheme for revolutionizing the scientific world’s
accepted notions regarding geology. And so on, and so on. But the
manufacturing experts will not be competent to examine the educational
scheme intelligently, and their opinion about it would not be valuable;
neither of these two groups will be able to understand and pass upon the
electrical scheme; none of these three batches of experts will be able to
understand and pass upon the geological revolution; and probably not one
man in the entire lot will be competent to examine, capably, the
intricacies of a political or religious scheme, new or old, and deliver a
judgment upon it which any one need regard as precious.
There you have the top crust. There will be four hundred and seventy-
five men and women present who can draw upon their training and deliver
incontrovertible judgments concerning cheese, and leather, and cattle,
and hardware, and soap, and tar, and candles, and patent medicines, and
dreams, and apparitions, and garden trucks, and cats, and baby food, and
warts, and hymns, and time-tables, and freight-rates, and summer resorts,
and whiskey, and law, and surgery, and dentistry, and blacksmithing, and
shoemaking, and dancing, and Huyler’s candy, and mathematics, and dog
fights, and obstetrics, and music, and sausages, and dry goods, and
molasses, and railroad stocks, and horses, and literature, and labor
unions, and vegetables, and morals, and lamb’s fries, and etiquette, and
agriculture. And not ten among the five hundred–let their minds be ever
so good and bright–will be competent, by grace of the requisite
specialized mental training, to take hold of a complex abstraction of any
kind and make head or tail of it.
The whole five hundred are thinkers, and they are all capable thinkers–
but only within the narrow limits of their specialized trainings. Four
hundred and ninety of them cannot competently examine either a religious
plan or a political one. A scattering few of them do examine both–that
is, they think they do. With results as precious as when I examine the
nebular theory and explain it to myself.
If the four hundred and ninety got their religion through their minds,
and by weighed and measured detail, Christian Science would not be a
scary apparition. But they don’t; they get a little of it through their
minds, more of it through their feelings, and the overwhelming bulk of it
through their environment.
Environment is the chief thing to be considered when one is proposing to
predict the future of Christian Science. It is not the ability to reason
that makes the Presbyterian, or the Baptist, or the Methodist, or the
Catholic, or the Mohammedan, or the Buddhist, or the Mormon; it is
environment. If religions were got by reasoning, we should have the
extraordinary spectacle of an American family with a Presbyterian in it,
and a Baptist, a Methodist, a Catholic, a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, and a
Mormon. A Presbyterian family does not produce Catholic families or
other religious brands, it produces its own kind; and not by intellectual
processes, but by association. And so also with Mohammedanism, the cult
which in our day is spreading with the sweep of a world-conflagration
through the Orient, that native home of profound thought and of subtle
intellectual fence, that fertile womb whence has sprung every great
religion that exists. Including our own; for with all our brains we
cannot invent a religion and market it.
The language of my quoted prophets recurs to us now, and we wonder to
think how small a space in the world the mighty Mohammedan Church would
be occupying now, if a successful trade in its line of goods had been
conditioned upon an exhibit that would “appeal to the intellect” instead
of to “the unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not
think.”
The Christian Science Church, like the Mohammedan Church, makes no