no way to settle it. They believe she carried away no Quimby
manuscripts. Let that go, too–there is no way to settle it. They
believe that she, and not another, built the Religion upon the book, and
organized it. I believe it, too.
Finally, they believe that she philosophized Christian Science, explained
it, systematized it, and wrote it all out with her own hand in the book
Science and Health.
I am not able to believe that. Let us draw the line there. The known
and undisputed products of her pen are a formidable witness against her.
They do seem to me to prove, quite clearly and conclusively, that
writing, upon even simple subjects, is a difficult labor for her: that
she has never been able to write anything above third-rate English; that
she is weak in the matter of grammar; that she has but a rude and dull
sense of the values of words; that she so lacks in the matter of literary
precision that she can seldom put a thought into words that express it
lucidly to the reader and leave no doubts in his mind as to whether he
has rightly understood or not; that she cannot even draught a Preface
that a person can fully comprehend, nor one which can by any art be
translated into a fully understandable form; that she can seldom inject
into a Preface even single sentences whose meaning is uncompromisingly
clear–yet Prefaces are her specialty, if she has one.
Mrs. Eddy’s known and undisputed writings are very limited in bulk; they
exhibit no depth, no analytical quality, no thought above school
composition size, and but juvenile ability in handling thoughts of even
that modest magnitude. She has a fine commercial ability, and could
govern a vast railway system in great style; she could draught a set of
rules that Satan himself would say could not be improved on– for
devilish effectiveness–by his staff; but we know, by our excursions
among the Mother-Church’s By-laws, that their English would discredit the
deputy baggage-smasher. I am quite sure that Mrs. Eddy cannot write well
upon any subject, even a commercial one.
In the very first revision of Science and Health (1883), Mrs. Eddy wrote
a Preface which is an unimpeachable witness that the rest of the book was
written by somebody else. I have put it in the Appendix along with a
page or two taken from the body of the book, and will ask the reader to
compare the labored and lumbering and confused gropings of this Preface
with the easy and flowing and direct English of the other exhibit, and
see if he can believe that the one hand and brain produced both.
And let him take the Preface apart, sentence by sentence, and searchingly
examine each sentence word by word, and see if he can find half a dozen
sentences whose meanings he is so sure of that he can rephrase them–in
words of his own–and reproduce what he takes to be those meanings.
Money can be lost on this game. I know, for I am the one that lost it.
Now let the reader turn to the excerpt which I have made from the chapter
on “Prayer” (last year’s edition of Science and Health), and compare that
wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of work with the
aforesaid Preface, and with Mrs. Eddy’s poetry concerning the gymnastic
trees, and Minerva’s not yet effete sandals, and the wreaths imported
from Erudition’s bower for the decoration of Plymouth Rock, and the
Plague-spot and Bacilli, and my other exhibits (turn back to my Chapters
I. and II.) from the Autobiography, and finally with the late
Communication concerning me, and see if he thinks anybody’s affirmation,
or anybody’s sworn testimony, or any other testimony of any imaginable
kind would ever be likely to convince him that Mrs. Eddy wrote that
chapter on Prayer.
I do not wish to impose my opinion on any one who will not permit it, but
such as it is I offer it here for what it is worth. I cannot believe,
and I do not believe, that Mrs. Eddy originated any of the thoughts and
reasonings out of which the book Science and Health is constructed; and I