kinship according to the flesh, it shall be regarded by the Church as an
indication of disrespect for their Pastor Emeritus, and unfitness to be a
member of the Mother-Church.”
She is the Pastor Emeritus.
While the quoted paragraph about the Procession seems to indicate that
Mrs. Eddy is expecting to occupy the First Place in it, that expectation
is not definitely avowed. In an earlier utterance of hers she is
clearer–clearer, and does not claim the first place all to herself, but
only the half of it. I quote from Mr. Peabody’s book again:
“In the Christian Science Journal for April, 1889, when it was her
property, and published by her, it was claimed for her, and with her
sanction, that she was equal with Jesus, and elaborate effort was made to
establish the claim.
“Mrs. Eddy has distinctly authorized the claim in her behalf that she
herself was the chosen successor to and equal of Jesus.”
In her Miscellaneous Writings (using her once favorite “We” for “I”) she
says that “While we entertain decided views . . . and shall express
them as duty demands, we shall claim no especial gift from our divine
origin,” etc.
Our divine origin. It suggests Equal again. It is inferable, then, that
in the near by-and-by the new Church will officially rank the Holy Family
in the following order:
1. Jesus of Nazareth. –1. Our Mother.
2. The Virgin Mary.
SUMMARY
I am not playing with Christian Science and its founder, I am examining
them; and I am doing it because of the interest I feel in the inquiry.
My results may seem inadequate to the reader, but they have for me
clarified a muddle and brought a sort of order out of a chaos, and so I
value them.
My readings of Mrs. Eddy’s uninspired miscellaneous literary efforts have
convinced me of several things:
1. That she did not write Science and Health.
2. That the Deity did (or did not) write it.
3. That She thinks She wrote it.
4. That She believes She wrote it under the Deity’s inspiration.
5. That She believes She is a Member of the Holy Family.
6. That She believes She is the equal of the Head of it.
Finally, I think She is now entitled to the capital S–on her own
evidence.
CHAPTER VI
Thus far we have a part of Mrs. Eddy’s portrait. Not made of fictions,
surmises, reports, rumors, innuendoes, dropped by her enemies; no, she
has furnished all of the materials herself, and laid them on the canvas,
under my general superintendence and direction. As far as she has gone
with it, it is the presentation of a complacent, commonplace, illiterate
New England woman who “forgot everything she knew” when she discovered
her discovery, then wrote a Bible in good English under the inspiration
of God, and climbed up it to the supremest summit of earthly grandeur
attainable by man–where she sits serene to-day, beloved and worshiped by
a multitude of human beings of as good average intelligence as is
possessed by those that march under the banner of any competing cult.
This is not intended to flatter the competing cults, it is merely a
statement of cold fact.
That a commonplace person should go climbing aloft and become a god or a
half-god or a quarter-god and be worshiped by men and women of average
intelligence, is nothing. It has happened a million times, it will
happen a hundred million more. It has been millions of years since the
first of these supernaturals appeared, and by the time the last one in
that inconceivably remote future shall have performed his solemn little
high-jinks on the stage and closed the business, there will be enough of
them accumulated in the museum on the Other Side to start a heaven of
their own-and jam it.
Each in his turn those little supernaturals of our by-gone ages and aeons
joined the monster procession of his predecessors and marched
horizonward, disappeared, and was forgotten. They changed nothing, they
built nothing, they left nothing behind them to remember them by, nothing
to hold their disciples together, nothing to solidify their work and
enable it to defy the assaults of time and the weather. They passed, and