through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and
pains and grief –all–with a word, with a touch of the hand! This power
was given by the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the converted.
All–every one. It was exercised for generations afterwards. Any
Christian who was in earnest and not a make-believe, not a policy–
Christian, not a Christian for revenue only, had that healing power, and
could cure with it any disease or any hurt or damage possible to human
flesh and bone. These things are true, or they are not. If they were
true seventeen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago it would be
difficult to satisfactorily explain why or how or by what argument that
power should be nonexistent in Christians now.
To wish to exercise it could occur to Mrs. Eddy–but would it?
Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees–money,
power, glory– vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent,
pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate,
shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably
selfish–
Of course the Great Idea could strike her, we have to grant that, but why
it should interest her is a question which can easily overstrain the
imagination and bring on nervous prostration, or something like that, and
is better left alone by the judicious, it seems to me–
Unless we call to our help the alleged other side of Mrs. Eddy’s make and
character the side which her multitude of followers see, and sincerely
believe in. Fairness requires that their view be stated here. It is the
opposite of the one which I have drawn from Mrs. Eddy’s history and from
her By-laws. To her followers she is this:
Patient, gentle, loving, compassionate, noble hearted, unselfish,
sinless, widely cultured, splendidly equipped mentally, a profound
thinker, an able writer, a divine personage, an inspired messenger whose
acts are dictated from the Throne, and whose every utterance is the Voice
of God.
She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their
lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and
flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has
no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with a
break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into
eternity as fancies of the waking day melt into the dreams of sleep.
They believe it is a Christianity that is in the New Testament; that it
has always been there, that in the drift of ages it was lost through
disuse and neglect, and that this benefactor has found it and given it
back to men, turning the night of life into day, its terrors into myths,
its lamentations into songs of emancipation and rejoicing.
There we have Mrs. Eddy as her followers see her. She has lifted them
out of grief and care and doubt and fear, and made their lives beautiful;
she found them wandering forlorn in a wintry wilderness, and has led them
to a tropic paradise like that of which the poet sings:
“O, islands there are on the face of the deep
Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep.”
To ask them to examine with a microscope the character of such a
benefactor; to ask them to examine it at all; to ask them to look at a
blemish which another person believes he has found in it–well, in their
place could you do it? Would you do it? Wouldn’t you be ashamed to do
it? If a tramp had rescued your child from fire and death, and saved its
mother’s heart from breaking, could you see his rags? Could you smell
his breath? Mrs. Eddy has done more than that for these people.
They are prejudiced witnesses. To the credit of human nature it is not
possible that they should be otherwise. They sincerely believe that Mrs.
Eddy’s character is pure and perfect and beautiful, and her history
without stain or blot or blemish. But that does not settle it. They
sincerely believe she did not borrow the Great Idea from Quimby, but hit
upon it herself. It may be so, and it could be so. Let it go–there is