Science and Health has since been so inflated by later inspirations that
the 1902 edition contains one hundred and eighty thousand words–not
counting the thirty thousand at the back, devoted by Mrs. Eddy to
advertising the book’s healing abilities–and the inspiring continues
right along.
If you have a book whose market is so sure and so great that you can give
a printer an everlasting order for thirty or forty or fifty thousand
copies a year he will furnish them at a cheap rate, because whenever
there is a slack time in his press-room and bindery he can fill the idle
intervals on your book and be making something instead of losing. That
is the kind of contract that can be let on Science and Health every year.
I am obliged to doubt that the three-dollar Science and Health costs Mrs.
Eddy above fifteen cents, or that the six dollar copy costs her above
eighty cents. I feel quite sure that the average profit to her on these
books, above cost of manufacture, is all of seven hundred per cent.
Every proper Christian Scientist has to buy and own (and canvass for)
Science and Health (one hundred and eighty thousand words), and he must
also own a Bible (one million words). He can buy the one for from three
to six dollars, and the other for fifteen cents. Or, if three dollars is
all the money he has, he can get his Bible for nothing. When the Supreme
Being disseminates a saving Message through uninspired agents–the New
Testament, for instance –it can be done for five cents a copy, but when
He sends one containing only two-thirds as many words through the shop of
a Divine Personage, it costs sixty times as much. I think that in
matters of such importance it is bad economy to employ a wild-cat agency.
Here are some figures which are perfectly authentic, and which seem to
justify my opinion.
“These [Bible] societies, inspired only by a sense of religious duty, are
issuing the Bible at a price so small that they have made it the cheapest
book printed. For example, the American Bible Society offers an edition
of the whole Bible as low as fifteen cents and the New Testament at five
cents, and the British Society at sixpence and one penny, respectively.
These low prices, made possible by their policy of selling the books at
cost or below cost,” etc.–New York Sun, February 25, 1903.
CHAPTER IX
We may now make a final footing-up of Mrs. Eddy, and see what she is, in
the fulness of her powers. She is
The Massachusetts Metaphysical College
Pastor Emeritus;
President;
Board of Directors;
Board of Education;
Board of Lectureships;
Future Board of Trustees,
Proprietor of the Publishing-House and Periodicals;
Treasurer;
Clerk;
Proprietor of the Teachers;
Proprietor of the Lecturers;
Proprietor of the Missionaries;
Proprietor of the Readers;
Dictator of the Services; sole Voice of the Pulpit;
Proprietor of the Sanhedrin;
Sole Proprietor of the Creed. (Copyrighted.);
Indisputable Autocrat of the Branch Churches, with their life and death
in her hands;
Sole Thinker for The First Church (and the others);
Sole and Infallible Expounder of Doctrine, in life and in death;
Sole permissible Discoverer, Denouncer, Judge, and Executioner of
Ostensible Hypnotists;
Fifty-handed God of Excommunication–with a thunderbolt in every hand;
Appointer and Installer of the Pastor of all the Churches–the Perpetual
Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, “the Comforter.”
CHAPTER X
There she stands-painted by herself. No witness but herself has been
allowed to testify. She stands there painted by her acts, and decorated
by her words. When she talks, she has only a decorative value as a
witness, either for or against herself, for she deals mainly in
unsupported assertion; and in the rare cases where she puts forward a
verifiable fact she gets out of it a meaning which it refuses to furnish
to anybody else. Also, when she talks, she is unstable, she wanders, she
is incurably inconsistent; what she says to-day she contradicts tomorrow.
But her acts are consistent. They are always faithful to her, they never
misinterpret her, they are a mirror which always reflects her exactly,
precisely, minutely, unerringly, and always the same, to date, with only