those progressive little natural changes in stature, dress, complexion,
mood, and carriage that mark–exteriorly–the march of the years and
record the accumulations of experience, while –interiorly–through all
this steady drift of evolution the one essential detail, the commanding
detail, the master detail of the make-up remains as it was in the
beginning, suffers no change and can suffer none; the basis of the
character; the temperament, the disposition, that indestructible iron
framework upon which the character is built, and whose shape it must
take, and keep, throughout life. We call it a person’s nature.
The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally–with his
hands; but not with his heart. The man born kind and compassionate can
have that disposition crushed down out of sight by embittering
experience; but if it were an organ the post-mortem would find it still
in his corpse. The man born ambitious of power and glory may live long
without finding it out, but when the opportunity comes he will know, will
strike for the largest thing within the limit of his chances at the time-
constable, perhaps–and will be glad and proud when he gets it, and will
write home about it. But he will not stop with that start; his appetite
will come again; and by-and-by again, and yet again; and when he has
climbed to police commissioner it will at last begin to dawn upon him
that what his Napoleon soul wants and was born for is something away
higher up–he does not quite know what, but Circumstance and Opportunity
will indicate the direction and he will cut a road through and find out.
I think Mrs. Eddy was born with a far-seeing business-eye, but did not
know it; and with a great organizing and executive talent, and did not
know it; and with a large appetite for power and distinction, and did not
know it. I think the reason that her make did not show up until middle
life was that she had General Grant’s luck –Circumstance and Opportunity
did not come her way when she was younger. The qualities that were born
in her had to wait for circumstance and opportunity–but they were there:
they were there to stay, whether they ever got a chance to fructify or
not. If they had come early, they would have found her ready and
competent. And they–not she–would have determined what they would set
her at and what they would make of her. If they had elected to
commission her as second-assistant cook in a bankrupt boarding-house,
I know the rest of it–I know what would have happened. She would have
owned the boarding-house within six months; she would have had the late
proprietor on salary and humping himself, as the worldly say; she would
have had that boarding-house spewing money like a mint; she would have
worked the servants and the late landlord up to the limit; she would have
squeezed the boarders till they wailed, and by some mysterious quality
born in her she would have kept the affections of certain of the lot
whose love and esteem she valued, and flung the others down the back
area; in two years she would own all the boarding-houses in the town, in
five all the boarding-houses in the State, in twenty all the hotels in
America, in forty all the hotels on the planet, and would sit at home
with her finger on a button and govern the whole combination as easily as
a bench-manager governs a dog-show.
It would be a grand thing to see, and I feel a kind of disappointment–
but never mind, a religion is better and larger; and there is more to it.
And I have not been steeping myself in Christian Science all these weeks
without finding out that the one sensible thing to do with a
disappointment is to put it out of your mind and think of something
cheerfuler.
We outsiders cannot conceive of Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science Religion as
being a sudden and miraculous birth, but only as a growth from a seed
planted by circumstances, and developed stage by stage by command and
compulsion of the same force. What the stages were we cannot know, but