leave, saying I was free to eat and drink anything I pleased and in any
quantity I liked. But I was not hungry any more, and did not care for
food.
I took up the Christian Science book and read half of it, then took a
dipperful of drench and read the other half. The resulting experiences
were full of interest and adventure. All through the rumblings and
grindings and quakings and effervescings accompanying the evolution of
the ache into the botts and the cold into the blind staggers I could note
the generous struggle for mastery going on between the mash and the
drench and the literature; and often I could tell which was ahead, and
could easily distinguish the literature from the others when the others
were separate, though not when they were mixed; for when a bran-mash and
an eclectic drench are mixed together they look just like the Apodictical
Principle out on a lark, and no one can tell it from that. The finish
was reached at last, the evolutions were complete, and a fine success,
but I think that this result could have been achieved with fewer
materials. I believe the mash was necessary to the conversion of the
stomach-ache into the botts, but I think one could develop the blind
staggers out of the literature by itself; also, that blind staggers
produced in this way would be of a better quality and more lasting than
any produced by the artificial processes of the horse-doctor.
For of all the strange and frantic and incomprehensible and
uninterpretable books which the imagination of man has created, surely
this one is the prize sample. It is written with a limitless confidence
and complacency, and with a dash and stir and earnestness which often
compel the effects of eloquence, even when the words do not seem to have
any traceable meaning. There are plenty of people who imagine they
understand the book; I know this, for I have talked with them; but in all
cases they were people who also imagined that there were no such things
as pain, sickness, and death, and no realities in the world; nothing
actually existent but Mind. It seems to me to modify the value of their
testimony. When these people talk about Christian Science they do as
Mrs. Fuller did: they do not use their own language, but the book’s; they
pour out the book’s showy incoherences, and leave you to find out later
that they were not originating, but merely quoting; they seem to know the
volume by heart, and to revere it as they would a Bible– another Bible,
perhaps I ought to say. Plainly the book was written under the mental
desolations of the Third Degree, and I feel sure that none but the
membership of that Degree can discover meanings in it. When you read it
you seem to be listening to a lively and aggressive and oracular speech
delivered in an unknown tongue, a speech whose spirit you get but not the
particulars; or, to change the figure, you seem to be listening to a
vigorous instrument which is making a noise which it thinks is a tune,
but which, to persons not members of the band, is only the martial
tooting of a trombone, and merrily stirs the soul through the noise, but
does not convey a meaning.
The book’s serenities of self-satisfaction do almost seem to smack of a
heavenly origin– they have no blood-kin in the earth. It is more than
human to be so placidly certain about things, and so finely superior, and
so airily content with one’s performance. Without ever presenting
anything which may rightfully be called by the strong name of Evidence,
and sometimes without even mentioning a reason for a deduction at all, it
thunders out the startling words, “I have Proved” so and so. It takes
the Pope and all the great guns of his Church in battery assembled to
authoritatively settle and establish the meaning of a sole and single
unclarified passage of Scripture, and this at vast cost of time and study
and reflection, but the author of this work is superior to all that: she
finds the whole Bible in an unclarified audition, and at small expense of