CHAPTER XIX
MRS. EDDY RALLIES HER FORCES—GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE IN THE WEST—THE MAKING OF A HEALER—THE APOTHEOSIS OF MRS. EDDY
Mrs. Eddy, publicly, made little of the fact that she was losing support in Boston. "The late much ado about nothing," she writes in the Journal of September, 1888, "arose solely from mental malicious practice, and the audible falsehood designed to stir up strife between brethren, for the purpose of placing Christian Science in the hands of aspirants for place and power." In practice, however, she heeded the warning. She braced up the course in "Metaphysical Obstetrics" in her college by engaging the services of Ebenezer J. Foster,[1] who held a degree of Doctor of Medicine, and who had taken a course in Christian Science the previous autumn. Dr. Foster was to act as Mrs. Eddy's "assistant in obstetrics." The course was made longer and the tuition fee was doubled. "Doctor Foster," read Mrs. Eddy's announcement in the Journal, "will teach the anatomy and surgery of obstetrics, and I, its metaphysics. The combination of his knowledge of Christian Science with his anatomical skill, renders him a desirable teacher in this department of my college. In twenty years' practice he has not had a single case of mortality at childbirth. . . . Students will receive the combined instruction of Mrs. Eddy and Dr. Foster for $200 tuition." In every direction she strove to strengthen her position, to regain her lost ground, and to gather new followers. She reiterated her divine right of supremacy, she asserted with greater emphasis her command of the situation, and she declared with no uncertainty the duties of Christian Scientists toward her, giving the Bible as her authority. "Students will do well," says the Journal (October, 1888) under the head, "Who Hath Ears to Hear, let Him Hear," "to bear in mind the Master's warning: 'except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' This Scripture means practically to each individual to-day all that it implies in its relative bearing towards the Truth as Divine Science, and towards its rightful Discoverer."
Christian Scientists were held even more rigidly than before to the rule forbidding them to read any but Mrs. Eddy's writings on mental healing. This war against heresy was carried on too zealously at last, and when the Journal (October, 1890) admonished beginning students to lay aside the Bible for Science and Health,[2] it was felt even by Scientists that this was going too far. The Journal also instructed Mrs. Eddy's loyal students to burn all forbidden literature. "Burn every scrap of 'Christian Science literature,' so-called," it said, "except Science and Health, and the publications bearing the imprint of the Christian Science Publishing Society of Boston."
This red-hot exhortation was brought out by the fact that the dissenters of 1888 were now publishing periodicals, bringing out books, and carrying on their work of healing and teaching under the name of Christian Science, exactly as if Mrs. Eddy did not exist. Most of them had adopted the policy of non-resistance. They kept a neutral attitude toward Mrs. Eddy, refused to discuss her or her church, and in their work and public utterances they adhered to the rule of excluding personalities and keeping close to principle. They no longer recognised Mrs. Eddy's favourite doctrine of Malicious Animal Magnetism, but dwelt much upon the affirmative principle of Good. But they must have missed the inspiring presence and influence of their old leader, for after a few years their publications lagged and most of these "independents" either dropped Christian Science definitely or joined the New Thought movement.
But, whether Mrs. Eddy realised it or not, sedition among the Boston students no longer meant jeopardy to her or to her cause. If there was disloyalty in Boston, hundreds of converts in New England, the middle West, and the far West waited but the word to rally to her support. Christian Science was an established faith, and was no longer at the mercy of any group of people. It had been established by those indefatigable missionaries, the healers; with Mrs. Eddy always behind them, and their devotion to her holding them together, inspiring them with one purpose, and enabling them to work for one end.
After Mrs. Eddy herself, the most remarkable thing about Christian Science is its rapid growth. When the National Christian Science Association, formed at Mrs. Eddy's house in Boston, January 29, 1886, was little more than a year old, one hundred and eleven professional healers advertised in the pages of the Christian Science Journal and twenty-one academies and institutes taught Mrs. Eddy's doctrines.
In April, 1890, the Journal contained the professional cards of two hundred and fifty healers, men and women who were practising in all parts of the country, and nearly all of whom were depending entirely upon their practice for a livelihood. Thirty-three academies and institutes were then teaching Christian Science. These "academies" were very unpretentious—simply a room in which the teacher met her classes. In some institutes there were two teachers; usually there was but one. The "graduates" of these institutions sometimes went on to Boston to take a normal course under Mrs. Eddy, but oftener they went immediately into practice. By 1890 there were twenty incorporated Christian Science churches which announced their weekly services in the Journal and which met in public halls and schoolhouses, while ninety societies not yet organised into churches were holding their weekly meetings. The first Christian Science church building was dedicated at Oconto, Wis., in 1887.
When Mrs. Eddy established herself in Boston in 1882, there was but one Christian Science Church, a feeble society of less than fifty members, which had been already shattered by dissensions and quarrels. It is certainly very evident that such an astonishing growth in the space of eight years can be accounted for only by the fact that Mrs. Eddy's religion gave the people something they wanted, and that it was presented to them in a direct and effective way. "Demonstrate, demonstrate," was Mrs. Eddy's watchword. "Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons." Thus read the seal of Mrs. Eddy's college, and such were the instructions she gave her students when she sent them out into the field. She never took cases herself, but she made her students understand that they were to be proved by works, and by works alone, and that if they were children of the new birth at all, they must heal.
To appreciate the work of the healers, one must understand something about their preparation. Many of the students who left Mrs. Eddy's Metaphysical College and went out to practise knew much less about physiology, anatomy, and hygiene than the average grammar-school boy knows to-day. They had not been taught how to tie an artery or to set a broken bone, how to take a patient's temperature or how to administer the simple antidotes for poisons. Spinsters who had never even been present at a confinement went bravely out to attend women in childbirth. The healers' instruction had been after this manner:
Tumors, ulcers, tubercles, inflammation, pain, deformed joints, are all dream shadows, dark images of mortal thought which will flee before the light.[3]
Have no fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed. . . . Your body would suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the trunk of a tree which you gash, were it not for mortal mind.[4]
A child can have worms if you say so, or any other malady, timorously hidden in the beliefs, relative to his body, of those about him.[5]
The treatment of insanity is especially interesting. . . . The arguments to be used in curing insanity are the same as in other diseases: namely, the impossibility that matter, brain, can control or derange the mind, can suffer or cause suffering.[6]
If a crisis occurs in your treatment, you must treat the patient less for the disease and more for the mental fermentation.[7]
When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again. If the Science of Life were understood, it would be found that the senses of Mind are never lost, and that matter has no sensation. Then the human limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster's claw.[8]
The healers were recruited from every walk of life—schoolteachers, milliners, dressmakers, music-teachers; elocutionists, mothers of families, and young women who had been trained to no vocation at all. Among the male practitioners—they were greatly in the minority—there were even a few converts from the regular schools of medicine, but their contributions to the Journal are so disorderly and inexact, and in some cases so illiterate, as to indicate that their success in the practice of medicine was very questionable. In the first years of her college, Mrs. Eddy's consulting physician in instrumental surgery was, the reader will remember, Charles J. Eastman, afterward imprisoned for criminal practice. There were, however, among her early practitioners, honest and worthy men. One of the most successful of these was Captain Joseph S. Eastaman, for many years a leading Christian Science practitioner in Boston, and who is still practising in Cambridge.
When he went to Mrs. Eddy to lay before her the case of his sick wife, Mr. Eastaman had been a sea-captain for twenty-one years, having begun his apprenticeship to the sea when he was thirteen, as cabin-boy on board an English brig. If the old seaman soon became docile like the other men about Mrs. Eddy he had, at least, learned obedience in a hard and manly school. The story of his life at sea, which he contributed in several articles to the Christian Science Journal, is a vigorous and sturdy piece of narrative-writing, full of wrecks and typhoons and adventures with cannibal tribes, which make his subsequent career seem all the more remarkable. Concerning his first meeting with Mrs. Eddy in 1884, and his conversion to Christian Science, he writes at length. His last voyage, from Peru home to Boston, was made for the purpose of joining his invalid wife.
Upon my arrival [he says], I found her much lower than I had supposed, and the consultation of physicians immediately secured only made it evident that she could not live long. In anxiety and distress, I then added my own knowledge of medicine of necessity considerable to have enabled me for so many years to care properly for both passengers and crew. . . . One evening, as I was sitting hopeless at my wife's bedside, a friend called and asked, “Captain, why don't you get a Christian Scientist to treat your wife?”
The captain visited a healer, and learned for the first time of the existence of Mrs. Eddy. He thought, “If the healer can do so much, his teacher must heal instantly.” In his narrative the captain says:
So, like a drowning man grasping at a straw, with alternating hopes and fears besieging me on the way, I went to the college. In answer to my request for a personal interview, Mrs. Eddy kindly granted me an extended audience, though to my appeal for help she made the gentle announcement that she herself did not now take patients. At this my heart failed utterly, for I felt that none less than the founder was equal to the healing necessary in my case. As I was about to leave, she turned to me and said with much earnestness, “Captain, why don't you heal your wife yourself?” I stood spellbound. I did not know what to say or think. Finally I stammered out, “How can I heal my wife? Have I not procured the best medical aid? What more can I do?” Gently she said, “Learn how to heal.” Without hesitation I returned to the parlour for particulars. It seemed to me that it must require years of studying to learn Christian Science—and she whom I was trying to save would not long be here. But when I heard that the entire term required but three weeks, I gathered courage. In twenty minutes more I had arranged to enter a class.
The captain's wife was averse to his new plan. She was unwilling that he should add this tuition fee of several hundred dollars to the already heavy expenses of her long illness. Moreover, she was afraid that this Christian Science was some new kind of Spiritualism. But the captain never committed himself half-way. In that first interview Mrs. Eddy had won him completely. He had escaped typhoons and coral reefs and cannibal kings, only to arrive at an adventure of the mind which was vastly stranger. Into the class he went. He says:
The class included many highly cultured people, all more or less conversant with the rudiments of Christian Science; while I, a sailor, with only a seaman's knowledge of the world, and not the faintest inkling of the field to be opened up before me, felt very much out of place there. To that first and last and most important question "What is God?" the students replied variously. When the question came to me, I stammered out, "God is all, with all and in all. Everything that is good and pure." The teacher smiled encouragingly as my answers followed one another, and I was encouraged to go on. Every day during the term questions were asked and answers were made that puzzled me not a little. But to all my own simple earnest queries the patient teacher replied clearly and satisfactorily. The many laughs enjoyed by the class at my expense did not trouble me, therefore, for my teacher knew that I would not profess to understand when I did not. The simpler my questions, the more pains she took to explain clearly.
How much was due to my own changed thought I cannot tell, but after Christian Science was recognised in our home, even before I entered the college, my wife began to recover. As soon as I understood the rudiments, I began to treat her, and so quickly did she respond to the treatment that she was able to avail herself of the kind invitation of the teacher to accompany me to the final session.
The captain's conversion was a thorough one. He gave up his little bit of grog—to which he had never been much addicted—and his Havana cigars, of which he had been very fond. He began to practise a little among his old friends—shipowners and sailors. After his wife had fully recovered he began to look about for work, and decided to accept an offer which had been made him by the Panama Railway Company.
I accordingly engaged passage to Aspinwall, but on the last day I was reminded of a promise made my teacher. I at once wrote her of my plans, asking if they were wise, and received immediate counsel not to go. Packed and passage taken, here was a dilemma. Still, I was ready to be rightly guided, and wrote again asking what I should do. The reply came, "Take an office." This certainly was the last thing I should have thought of doing, for I could see no way to clear my personal expenses, much less meet the added rent of a central location. However, the time had come, and the birthright in Christian Science required obedience, even though it looked like throwing away time and means. I could not disobey, so I set about office-hunting. At first I wished to take a place on trial, but a voice kept telling me that I would do better to take a lease for at least a year. And it was well I did, for mortal mind soon tried to drive me away, and at times apparently only the obligation of the lease held me firm.
Whatever unfortunate examples of the professional healer one may have seen, one believes Captain Eastaman when he says that in his practice of twenty-two years he has worked harder than he ever did at stowing cargoes in the West India service. His account of his cures is as straightforward and convincing in its style as is his story of his life at sea. No one who reads it can doubt that the captain actually believes he cured a woman of five tumours on the neck, and a workingman of cataract of both eyes.
The businesslike methods which have always been so conspicuous in the operations of the Christian Science Church had their effect in its early proselyting.
The healer had no Board of Missions back of him; he was thrown entirely upon his own resources. His income and his usefulness to Christian Science alike depended upon the number of patients he could attract, interest, influence, and heal. While this condition must have had its temptation for the healer of not very rugged integrity, it was wonderfully advantageous to the cause as a whole. Never, since religions were propagated by the sword, was a new faith advertised and spread in such a systematic and effective manner. When the healer went to a new town, he had first to create a demand for Christian Science treatments, and, if he could demonstrate successfully enough to make that demand, not only was his career assured, but he had laid the foundation of a future Christian Science church. The files of the Journal abound in letters from healers which show exactly how this demand was created.
Take the case of Mrs. Ann M. Otis, a healer at Stanton, Mich. She was called to Marquette to treat a young man who was suffering from a heavy cold on his lungs. As his father and brother had both died from "quick" consumption, his mother and sisters were in frantic alarm and his friends had already consigned him to go the way of his family. Under Mrs. Otis' treatment he recovered. The cure was noised about the town by his grateful relatives, and so many patients poured in upon the healer that she had to remain there for weeks.
Wherever the new religion went, it had the advantage of novelty. It was much talked about, was discussed at social gatherings and in women's clubs. Josephine Tyter, a healer at Richmond, Ind., writes in the Journal, September, 1888:
"It is one year next month since I came to Richmond. I knew no one here, and no one knew me. Christian Science they knew nothing of. People thought they did not want it. I knew they did, but they could not see in darkness. The physicians paid but little attention to me at first, but now they are thoroughly aroused. At the regular meeting of the Tuesday Evening Literary Club, to which all the high order of minds of Richmond are supposed to belong, one of the physicians of this city read a paper on Christian Science." Miss Tyter then relates her own success, enumerating among her cures cases of the delusions of pregnancy, nervous prostration, lung and brain fever. She says, "Have had some fine cases of spinal curvature," and tells how she brought one man "out of a plaster cast into Truth."
Mrs. A. M. Rigby, a school-teacher at Bloomington, Ill., writes that her health, broken down by many years of service in the schoolroom, was restored by Christian Science, and that she then began to practise. When she had eighty cases, she resigned from her school, and for two years she has had from twenty-five to fifty new cases a month.
Emma A. Estes, a healer at Grandledge, Mich., writes exultantly of her trip to Newark: "My stay of three days lengthened into one of three weeks, and I was kept busy every day. Had forty-nine patients, and found my work greatly blessed. . . . Mother joins me in sending love, and adds, 'May God bless dear Mrs. Eddy for her kindness to my own little girl.' "
Mrs. Harriet N. Cordwell, Berlin Falls, N. H., writes that she has but recently become a healer, has healed one case of spinal trouble in sixteen absent treatments, a case of scrofula in thirteen treatments, case of lame back (fifteen years' standing), one treatment, etc.
L. W. P. writes from Piqua, Ohio, that over three hundred cases were treated within five months by an incoming healer, that four classes were organised for the study of Science and Health, and a Christian Science Sunday-school organised (July, 1890).
Ella B. Fluno, a healer then in Lexington, Ky., writes that she was painlessly delivered of a child, got up the next day and did her housework, carried water from the well and walked on the icy sidewalk in low slippers. She did not have the blinds in her bedroom lowered, and the sun shone daily in the baby's eyes, with no ill effects.
Some of these communications from healers are extremely entertaining, attesting to the efficacy of Christian Science in increasing the patient's worldly prosperity, and giving examples of how "demonstration" may be made useful in despatching housework. One woman writes:
My husband came from the stable one morning with word that a valued four-year-old colt had got into the oats-bin, had been eating all night, and was as "tight as a drum." I met the error's claim with an emphatic mental denial. . . . As soon as possible, though not immediately, I went to the barn-yard, laid my hand on the horse's head, and said in an audible voice: "You are God's horse; for all that is He made and pronounced perfect. You cannot overeat, have colic, or be foundered, for there is no power in material food to obstruct or interfere with the perfect health, activity, and freedom of all that is real and spiritual." . . . Previous to my treatment he stood with head down and short, rapid breathing. At noon he was all right, and I am delighted to know how to realise for the good of animals.
In the healer's effort to arouse interest and get business in a new field there can be no doubt that he was sometimes overzealous and disregarded those uninspiring facts of which mortal mind must still take account. The more conservative and honest workers felt the bad effects of these extreme methods, and in the Journal of June, 1892, one healer writes:
All healers have some instantaneous cures, but if we mention only these, does it not imply that we have no lingering cases? I call to mind a lady Scientist who wanted to make an impression in a new field where she hoped to get business. After talking of the many wonderful cures which she had effected, she added that she herself was cured in three treatments of a lifelong malady. Now, while that was substantially correct, the shadows of her belief [symptoms of her illness] were not wholly effaced for over two years, and this was known to others in Science. Would it not have been better had the Scientist qualified her statement as to the time required?
Do not Scientists make a mistake in conveying the impression, or, what is the same thing, letting an impression go uncorrected, that those in Science are never sick, that they never have any ailments or troubles to contend with? There is no Scientist who at all times is wholly exempt from aches and pains or from trials of some kind. Neither pride of knowledge nor practice nor the good of the cause require that Scientists disguise or withhold these facts.
The question of the compensation which it was proper for the healer and teacher to receive was, from time to time, discussed in the Journal. At the various institutes and academies where Christian Science was taught, the charge for a term of lessons was from one to two hundred dollars. The healer's usual charge was a dollar a treatment, or daily treatments at five dollars a week.
One healer writes, May, 1890: "To allow the patient to decide the price would certainly be unselfish on the part of the healer. But such laxity might allow selfishness with the patient."
Another practitioner protests that the customary fee is too little: "It is a low plane of thought," he says, "that goes through the community and itself erects a barrier against generosity or even fair compensation. The Science is lowered in the public estimation, the healer humiliated, if not weakened, and the chances of success in doing good greatly lessened. Selfishness still remains to imprison the patient unless his thought, in this, as in other directions, be changed."
Mrs. Buswell, a healer at Beatrice, Neb., was once summoned before the court under charge of practising medicine unlawfully. She objected that her treatments were in the nature of a religious exercise and did not come under the jurisdiction of the medical laws of the state. When, upon question, she admitted that she accepted money for these treatments, the judge cited to her the reply of Peter to Simon the sorcerer: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." But the Christian Scientist's God is not at all the God of Christian theology. He is, as Mrs. Eddy ceaselessly reiterates, Principle. There was really no more irreverence in Mrs. Buswell's realising the Allness of God for money than there would have been in her realising the truth of a proposition of Euclid.
Every patient healed was practically a new Christian Scientist made. If he were to keep well he must do so by studying Science and Health. The new converts always became immediately estranged from their old church associates, and very often from their oldest friends. They met together at one another's houses to discuss Christian Science and to hold services. These circles were, indeed, very much like that first one which used to meet in Mrs. Damon's parlour in Lynn. As soon as such groups of believers were able to do so, they formed a society and held regular Sunday services in a schoolhouse or public hall. If this society grew and prospered, which it was almost sure to do, it became an incorporated church. A Christian Science reading-room was often established, where Mrs. Eddy's works and copies of the Journal might be obtained. If a community happened to be slow in taking up the new faith, the missionaries sometimes attributed public disasters to the prevalence of Error over Truth. One worker in an untoward field writes in the Journal of November, 1890:
The result of their closed eyes and ears has been demonstrated in a startling railroad accident and sudden deaths in our midst. On the night of the fourteenth a cloudburst caused a deluge of destruction of property in the lower streets of this village and imperilled many lives. Just now is a favourable time for work.
While the growth of Christian Science must be attributed primarily to its stimulating influence upon the sick and discontented, the low vitality of the orthodox churches undoubtedly facilitated its advance. Mrs. Eddy's teachings brought the promise of material benefits to a practical people, and the appeal of seeming newness to a people whose mental recreation was a feverish pursuit of novelty. In the West, especially, where every one was absorbed in a new and hard-won material prosperity, the healer and teacher met with an immediate response. This religion had a message of cheer for the rugged materialist as well as for the morbid invalid. It exalted health and self-satisfaction and material prosperity high among the moral virtues—indeed, they were the evidences of right living, the manifestations of a man's "at-oneness" with God. Christian Science had no rebuke for riches; it bade man think always of life, of his own worthiness and security, just as the old religions had bidden him remember death and be mindful of his unworthiness and insecurity. It contributed to the general sense of self-satisfaction and well-being which already characterised a new and thrifty society.
Probably Mrs. Eddy herself was not aware of the headway which her sect had made until she attended the third annual convention of the National Christian Scientists' Association, held at Chicago in June, 1888. Mrs. Eddy went on from Boston, personally attended by Mr. Frye and Ebenezer J. Foster, who was soon to become her son by adoption. Croud, of Mrs. Eddy's Western followers here for the first time beheld her, as they put it, "face to face," and she achieved a most gratifying personal triumph.
This was the first and last annual convention Mrs. Eddy ever attended, and a coup de théâtre could scarcely have been better planned. On the morning of June 13, Mrs. Eddy delivered an address to an audience of more than three thousand people, eight hundred of whom were Christian Science delegates. When she stepped upon the platform the entire audience rose and cheered her.
Her address, which is said to have thrilled every listener and which was termed "pentecostal," seems, at this distance, rather below Mrs. Eddy's average. She closed with the following tribute to her church militant:
Christian Science and Christian Scientists will, must, have a history; and if I could write the history in poor parody on Tennyson's grand verse, it would read thus:
| " | Traitors to right of them, |
| M.D.'s to left of them, | |
| Priestcraft in front of them, | |
| Volleyed and thundered: | |
| Into the jaws of hate, | |
| Out through the door of love, | |
| On—to the blest above— | |
| Marched the one hundred." |
Such sentiments as these wrought her audience to a feverish pitch of excitement. A letter to the Boston Traveller, afterward reprinted in the Christian Science Journal, thus described the outburst of feeling which followed Mrs. Eddy's address:
The scenes that followed when she had ceased speaking will long be remembered by those who witnessed them. The people were in the presence of the woman whose book had healed them, and they knew it. Up they came in crowds to her side, begging one hand-clasp, one look, one memorial from her whose name was a power and a sacred thing in their homes. Those whom she had never seen before—invalids raised up by her book, "Science and Health"—attempted to hurriedly tell the wonderful story.
A mother who failed to get near her held high her babe to look on their helper. Others touched the dress of their benefactor, not so much as asking for more. An aged woman, trembling with palsy, lifted her shaking hands at Mrs. Eddy's feet, crying, "Help, help!" and the cry was answered. Many such people were known to go away healed. Strong men turned aside to hide tears, as the people thronged to Mrs. Eddy with blessings and thanks.
Meekly and almost silently, she received all this homage from the multitude, until she was led away from the place, the throng blocking her passage from the door to the carriage.
What wonder if the thoughts of those present went back to eighteen hundred years ago, when the healing power was manifested through the personal Jesus?
Can the cold critic, harsh opposer, or disbeliever in Christian Science call up any other like picture through all these centuries?
What was the Pentecostal hour but this same dawning of God's allness and oneness, and His supremacy manifested in gifts of healing and speaking, "with tongues"? Let history declare of Mary Eddy what were the blessings and power which she brought.
It was while Mrs. Eddy was thus making material for legend in Chicago that "conspiracy" was afoot in Boston, and the enthusiastic writer just quoted was forced to take this into account, and to add: “Is there no similarity between the past and present records of Christ, Truth, entering into Jerusalem, and the betrayal? Is the bloodthirsty tyranny of animal magnetism the Veil of the Temple, which is to be rent from top to bottom?”
- ↑ Who later became her adopted son. See Chapter XX.
- ↑ "A student," says the Journal, "—in the tongue of the world called a patient who says to a Scientist, 'I take so much comfort in reading my Bible,' if guided wisely, will be answered, 'Let your Bible alone for three months or more. Don't open it even, nor think of it, but dig night and day at Science and Health.' "
In response to public criticism concerning these utterances, the Christian Science publication committee met and unanimously voted that this sentiment was "unauthorised, unwise, and not the thought of our committee."
- ↑ Science and Health (1906), p. 418.
- ↑ Science and Health (1906), p. 393.
- ↑ Science and Health (1906), p. 413.
- ↑ Science and Health (1906), p. 414.
- ↑ Science and Health (1906), p. 421.
- ↑ Science and Health (1906), p. 489.