Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/117

Science and Health 529 in this book, Science and Health; and neither tongue nor pen can overthrow it." {Science and Health, p. no.) This post-war world is not the world of 1906 and 1907 when Christians of many folds seemed suddenly to discover that there was a new cult knocking loudly at the door of public interest, winning men and women from the various denomina- tions, giving no reason which the average man outside Chris- tian Science could understand for the faith it taught, using a vocabulary strange and even queer to many, making worthy doctors trained in the best schools seem to be of none efifect, giving them for rivals ambitious healers of scant training and that not in institutions recognized, and only under public compulsion abandoning its claim to supplant surgery and to deal with contagious diseases which might sweep a whole com- munity unless subject to conditions imposed by Boards of Health. Little wonder then that for the first time what seemed to many a menace to conventional Christianity and to scientific medicine was placed along with its founder under the microscope of ruthless scrutiny, and that on both sides where fifteen years ago light alone was needed, heat was often generated. Critics studied Science and Health with varying results. Some saw nothing good in book or author. That was in- evitable, but it must also be admitted that under criticism many Christian Scientists have kept a silence usually as wise as it is Christian. Others, in a purely scientific spirit, dis- sected the book without bias, and the author's career with no more bitterness than the trained historian brings to the consid- eration of Mahomet or Queen Elizabeth. Others approached the task from the practical point of view, discussed the author only as far as seemed necessary to understand her teaching, analyzed the book in sincerity, tried to find where it reached back to Quimbyism, and where to an idealism as old as De- mocritus of Abdera, and discovered a curious theology often quaintly expressed in such words as "Principle," "Father- Mother God," and " Demonstrate, " a sacramental system they believed evacuated Baptism and the Lord's Supper of their historic meaning and a tendency to dualism through an em- phasis on Animal Magnetism so like the Devil of orthodoxy