Марк Твен
Christian Science
There probably came a time, in due course, when her students began to think there was something deeper in her teachings than they had been suspecting – a mystery beyond mental-healing, and higher. It is conceivable that by consequence their manner towards her changed little by little, and from respectful became reverent. It is conceivable that this would have an influence upon her; that it would incline her to wonder if their secret thought – that she was inspired – might not be a well-grounded guess. It is conceivable that as time went on the thought in their minds and its reflection in hers might solidify into conviction.
She would remember, then, that as a child she had been called, more than once, by a mysterious voice – just as had happened to little Samuel. (Mentioned in her Autobiography.) She would be impressed by that ancient reminiscence, now, and it could have a prophetic meaning for her.
It is conceivable that the persuasive influences around her and within her would give a new and powerful impulse to her philosophizings, and that from this, in time, would result that great birth, the healing of body and mind by the inpouring of the Spirit of God – the central and dominant idea of Christian Science – and that when this idea came she would not doubt that it was an inspiration direct from Heaven.
CHAPTER XI
[I must rest a little, now. To sit here and painstakingly spin out a scheme which imagines Mrs. Eddy, of all people, working her mind on a plane above commercialism; imagines her thinking, philosophizing, discovering majestic things; and even imagines her dealing in sincerities – to be frank, I find it a large contract But I have begun it, and I will go through with it.]
CHAPTER XII
It is evident that she made disciples fast, and that their belief in her and in the authenticity of her heavenly ambassadorship was not of the lukewarm and half-way sort, but was profoundly earnest and sincere. Her book was issued from the press in 1875, it began its work of convert-making, and within six years she had successfully launched a new Religion and a new system of healing, and was teaching them to crowds of eager students in a College of her own, at prices so extraordinary that we are almost compelled to accept her statement (no, her guarded intimation) that the rates were arranged on high, since a mere human being unacquainted with commerce and accustomed to think in pennies could hardly put up such a hand as that without supernatural help.
From this stage onward – Mrs. Eddy being what she was – the rest of the development – stages would follow naturally and inevitably.
But if she had been anybody else, there would have been a different arrangement of them, with different results. Being the extraordinary person she was, she realized her position and its possibilities; realized the possibilities, and had the daring to use them for all they were worth.
We have seen what her methods were after she passed the stage where her divine ambassadorship was granted its executer in the hearts and minds of her followers; we have seen how steady and fearless and calculated and orderly was her march thenceforth from conquest to conquest; we have seen her strike dead, without hesitancy, any hostile or questionable force that rose in her path: first, the horde of pretenders that sprang up and tried to take her Science and its market away from her – she crushed them, she obliterated them; when her own National Christian Science Association became great in numbers and influence, and loosely and dangerously garrulous, and began to expound the doctrines according to its own uninspired notions, she took up her sponge without a tremor of fear and wiped that Association out; when she perceived that the preachers in her pulpits were becoming afflicted with doctrine-tinkering, she recognized the danger of it, and did not hesitate nor temporize, but promptly dismissed the whole of them in a day, and abolished their office permanently; we have seen that, as fast as her power grew, she was competent to take the measure of it, and that as fast as its expansion suggested to her gradually awakening native ambition a higher step she took it; and so, by this evolutionary process, we have seen the gross money-lust relegated to second place, and the lust of empire and glory rise above it. A splendid dream; and by force of the qualities born in her she is making it come true.
These qualities – and the capacities growing out of them by the nurturing influences of training, observation, and experience seem to be clearly indicated by the character of her career and its achievements. They seem to be:
A clear head for business, and a phenomenally long one; Clear understanding of business situations; Accuracy in estimating the opportunities they offer; Intelligence in planning a business move; Firmness in sticking to it after it has been decided upon; Extraordinary daring; Indestructible persistency; Devouring ambition; Limitless selfishness; A knowledge of the weaknesses and poverties and docilities of human nature and how to turn them to account which has never been surpassed, if ever equalled.
And – necessarily – the foundation-stone of Mrs. Eddy’s character is a never-wavering confidence in herself.
It is a granite character. And – quite naturally – a measure of the talc of smallnesses common to human nature is mixed up in it and distributed through it. When Mrs. Eddy is not dictating servilities from her throne in the clouds to her official domestics in Boston or to her far-spread subjects round about the planet, but is down on the ground, she is kin to us and one of us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical, incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable, inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass god with clay legs.
CHAPTER XIII
In drawing Mrs. Eddy’s portrait it has been my purpose to restrict myself to materials furnished by herself, and I believe I have done that. If I have misinterpreted any of her acts, it was not done intentionally.
It will be noticed that in skeletonizing a list of the qualities which have carried her to the dizzy summit which she occupies, I have not mentioned the power which was the commanding force employed in achieving that lofty flight. It did not belong in that list; it was a force that was not a detail of her character, but was an outside one. It was the power which proceeded from her people’s recognition of her as a supernatural personage, conveyer of the Latest Word, and divinely commissioned to deliver it to the world. The form which such a recognition takes, consciously or unconsciously, is worship; and worship does not question nor criticize, it obeys. The object of it does not need to coddle it, bribe it, beguile it, reason with it, convince it – it commands it; that is sufficient; the obedience rendered is not reluctant, but prompt and whole-hearted. Admiration for a Napoleon, confidence in him, pride in him, affection for him, can lift him high and carry him far; and these are forms of worship, and are strong forces, but they are worship of a mere human being, after all, and are infinitely feeble, as compared with those that are generated by that other worship, the worship of a divine personage. Mrs. Eddy has this efficient worship, this massed and centralized force, this force which is indifferent to opposition, untroubled by fear, and goes to battle singing, like Cromwell’s soldiers; and while she has it she can command and it will obey, and maintain her on her throne, and extend her empire.
She will have it until she dies; and then we shall see a curious and interesting further development of her revolutionary work begin.
CHAPTER XIV
The President and Board of Directors will succeed her, and the government will go on without a hitch. The By-laws will bear that interpretation. All the Mother-Church’s vast powers are concentrated in that Board. Mrs. Eddy’s unlimited personal reservations make the Board’s ostensible supremacy, during her life, a sham, and the Board itself a shadow. But Mrs. Eddy has not made those reservations for any one but herself – they are distinctly personal, they bear her name, they are not usable by another individual. When she dies her reservations die, and the Board’s shadow-powers become real powers, without the change of any important By-law, and the Board sits in her place as absolute and irresponsible a sovereign as she was.
It consists of but five persons, a much more manageable Cardinalate than the Roman Pope’s. I think it will elect its Pope from its own body, and that it will fill its own vacancies. An elective Papacy is a safe and wise system, and a long-liver.
CHAPTER XV
We may take that up now
It is not a single if, but a several-jointed one; not an oyster, but a vertebrate.
1. Did Mrs. Eddy borrow from Quimby the Great Idea, or only the little one, the old-timer, the ordinary mental-healing-healing by “mortal” mind?
2. If she borrowed the Great Idea, did she carry it away in her head, or in manuscript?
3. Did she hit upon the Great Idea herself? By the Great Idea I mean, of course, the conviction that the Force involved was still existent, and could be applied now just as it was applied by Christ’s Disciples and their converts, and as successfully.
4. Did she philosophize it, systematize it, and write it down in a book?
5. Was it she, and not another, that built a new Religion upon the book and organized it?
I think No. 5 can be answered with a Yes, and dismissed from the controversy. And I think that the Great Idea, great as it was, would have enjoyed but a brief activity, and would then have gone to sleep again for some more centuries, but for the perpetuating impulse it got from that organized and tremendous force.
As for Nos. 1, 2, and 4, the hostiles contend that Mrs. Eddy got the Great Idea from Quimby and carried it off in manuscript. But their testimony, while of consequence, lacks the most important detail; so far as my information goes, the Quimby manuscript has not been produced. I think we cannot discuss No. 1 and No. 2 profitably. Let them go.
For me, No. 3 has a mild interest, and No. 4 a violent one.
As regards No. 3, Mrs. Eddy was brought up, from the cradle, an old-time, boiler-iron, Westminster-Catechism Christian, and knew her Bible as well as Captain Kydd knew his, “when he sailed, when he sailed,” and perhaps as sympathetically. The Great Idea had struck a million Bible-readers before her as being possible of resurrection and application – it must have struck as many as that, and been cogitated, indolently, doubtingly, then dropped and forgotten – and it could have struck her, in due course. But how it could interest her, how it could appeal to her – with her make this a thing that is difficult to understand.
For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful: the power, 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 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 cannot believe, and do not believe that she ever wrote any part of that book.
I think that if anything in the world stands proven, and well and solidly proven, by unimpeachable testimony – the treacherous testimony of her own pen in her known and undisputed literary productions – it is that Mrs. Eddy is not capable of thinking upon high planes, nor of reasoning clearly nor writing intelligently upon low ones.
Inasmuch as – in my belief – the very first editions of the book Science and Health were far above the reach of Mrs. Eddy’s mental and literary abilities, I think she has from the very beginning been claiming as her own another person’s book, and wearing as her own property laurels rightfully belonging to that person – the real author of Science and Health. And I think the reason – and the only reason – that he has not protested is because his work was not exposed to print until after he was safely dead.
That with an eye to business, and by grace of her business talent, she has restored to the world neglected and abandoned features of the Christian religion which her thousands of followers find gracious and blessed and contenting, I recognize and confess; but I am convinced that every single detail of the work except just that one – the delivery of the Product to the world – was conceived and performed by another.
