The Church of St. Bunco Part 3

through which he established "the truth" in "the patient"--a truth which he opposed to the error of giving intelligence to matter, and placing pain where it never placed itself.

In Mrs. Eddy's magazine article of June, 1887, she went so far as to say of Dr. Quimby,

"His healing was never _considered_ or _called_ anything but Mesmerism."

Well, Mrs. Mary M. Patterson, from 1862 to 1866, both "considered" and "called" the Doctor's healing something wholly different from mesmerism; and, saying it was done "by the truth which Christ taught," she considered and called it something "in contradistinction to _all_ Isms."

Meanwhile, for more than three years of Mrs. Eddy's close acquaintance with Dr. Quimby, all his advertis.e.m.e.nts, even, told her, what she then fluently repeated, that he cured disease by implanting _truth_ in the human mind, in place of _error_--"the truth being the cure." In other words, everything around her proclaimed that Dr. Quimby's cures were performed wholly by Mind-healing.

Mrs. Eddy's reversal of herself has been so agile and exhaustive since her comparisons of Dr. Quimby with our Lord Jesus Christ, that she has latterly preferred to speak of the good old doctor, who taught and healed her, as "unlearned"--a "mesmerist" who cured a patient by "rubbing"

her--an "illiterate" man who said that he was only "John" while she was "Jesus," and whose "scribblings" she, to a considerable extent, wrote herself. From all this it must be adduced that Mrs. Eddy, in her Patterson days, went to Dr. Quimby to be cured of disease, but taught him to do it.

It is true, as we have noted, that Dr. Quimby was not an educated man, in the sense of the schools. It would have been impossible for him to write like Mrs. Eddy. When, for instance, she excogitated that first letter of Mrs. Patterson's to the Portland _Courier_, she opened it in this way:

"When our Shakespeare decided that there were more things in this world 'than were dreamed of in your philosophy,' I cannot say of a verity that he had a foreknowledge of P. P. Quimby. And when the school Platonic anatomized the soul and divided it into halves, to be united by elementary attractions, and heathen philosophers averred that old Chaos in sullen silence brooded o'er the earth until her inimitable form was hatched from the egg of night, I would not at present decide whether the fallacy was found in their premises or conclusions, never having dated my existence before the flood."

No: P. P. Quimby, even if aided by all the freshmen and soph.o.m.ores that ever lived, could never have risen into the state of gorgeous, ponderous culture evinced in the foregoing power-house and epitome of all learning.

Besides, when that incomparable paragraph was erected, Mrs. Eddy was young--not yet fifty years of age. At sixty, her literary _style_ had lost something of its dazzle; but, in _matter_, all her work, especially her world-renowned book, _Science and Health_, compares beautifully with her grand production of 1862.

P. P. Quimby was a plain man of great natural genius. When he wrote--generally in great haste--he paid little attention to capital letters, punctuation, or _form_ of any kind; but his ma.n.u.scripts were carefully revised, under his own direction, by his two faithful friends, the Ware sisters, or by his son, Mr. George A. Quimby. Mrs. Mary M.

Patterson borrowed and read some occasional jotting--that was all. In the possession of Mr. George A. Quimby are eight hundred pages of his father's writings, prepared before Dr. Quimby had the honor of knowing that Mrs.

Patterson (to be Eddy) was on the face of the earth. These writings contain the substance of all his thoughts.

The knowledge that such writings exist has much disturbed Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy. On the 21st of May, 1887, she published, through a Boston newspaper, an offer to print the Quimby ma.n.u.scripts, at her own expense, _provided_ she should "first _be allowed to examine said ma.n.u.scripts_," and to see that "they were his own compositions," not _hers_, which _she_ "had left with him many years ago."

Now Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, author of _Science and Health_, filled with "immortal mind" and the only "divine science" ever "demonstrated," is of course an honest woman. Many delightful innocents of all sizes would take her word for anything she promised. There is not a single member of her Church-Scientist who is not sure that her little hatchet is infinitely cleaner and brighter than George Was.h.i.+ngton's. Still, the possessors of the Quimby ma.n.u.scripts, not yet having teetered themselves above all "earthly wisdom," would rather not trust her with their property.

A few years ago, the eldest of Dr. Quimby's two devoted friends, the Ware sisters, pa.s.sed away. With the younger sister she left the following statement, in the form of an affidavit, which is here printed with permission:

"I, Emma G. Ware, of Portland, Maine, in the United States of America, do hereby declare that I knew personally the late Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and that I and my sister, Mrs. Mackay (formerly Sarah E. Ware), were his patients while he resided in Portland, between the years 1859 and 1865, and that we both owe our restored health to his treatment or mode of teaching. I have learned that attempts are being made to deprive him of the credit of being the first to introduce the method of healing through the mind (or, more correctly, of applying moral philosophy to the cure of diseases), and I make this declaration out of regard to him, in order that the credit to which he is ent.i.tled may not, without protest, be a.s.sumed by others. I know that while Mr. Quimby resided in Portland he wrote out his ideas on Mental Science: he was not a scholarly man, and on that account copies of his writings were made by my sister, myself, and by Mr.

Quimby's son, George A. Quimby. These copies were read over to Mr. Quimby, and such corrections made as he thought fit. They are now in the possession of Mr. George A. Quimby, who resides in Belfast, Maine, and my sister and I have also copies of a number of them. Beyond these, there are no other copies of his writings, if I except a few fugitive pieces which he gave away while he resided in Portland. The mode of reasoning pursued by Mr. Quimby is not new, but its application to disease as a remedy has not, so far as I am aware, been previously made in modern times. His teaching may be thus summarized: that all diseases, whether mental or physical, are caused by an error in reasoning, and that correcting the error will remove the cause, and restore the sufferer to health."

CHAPTER IV.

A GREAT "METAPHYSICAL" NOVEL.

As shown by our last chapter, Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Eddy, whatever divine attributes may have perched upon her, has been endowed with some very human qualities. But in one gift she has been strangely lacking--a good memory. For, in spite of her a.s.sociation with Dr. P. P. Quimby, his renovation of her broken system, and all the mellifluous prose and poetry she devoted to him in his day, the fruitful "mother," "discoverer," and "founder" of "Christian Science," when she came to set up her new religion, entirely forgot that her old friend, Quimby, was the real suggestion of her whole Shekinah. She not only failed to mention the fact, but she has been so miraculously forgetful, ever since, as to repudiate her own record of it, and to attempt the obliteration of it from sacred and profane history.

Mother Eddy's lack of memory, however, has had its plenary compensation.

Her imagination has more than made up for it. The surcharge of this illimitable faculty has enabled her to produce one of the greatest works of fiction ever conceived on earth, or possible to any other planet. This arch-angelic romance, dimly and very distantly founded on fact, bears the esoteric t.i.tle of _Retrospection and Introspection_. It is not in the usual form of a novel, but was evaporated by Mrs. Eddy as her corporal and spiritual biography, after she had dropped Dr. Quimby from her powers of research, and had built up her grand theological and financial industry, "Christian Science." From an attentive reading of this personally conducted and authorized volume, we know the light in which the hallowed lady wishes to appear, and we know a good deal more if we read between the lines.

At eight years of age--if we can only credit true piety hitched up with lost memory--a heaven-selected little girl, Mary Baker, "repeatedly heard a voice," calling her "distinctly by name, three times in an ascending scale." At first she thought it was a human voice; but in due season--for the call came many times--she, her mother and her cousin, Mehitable Huntoon, learned better. Then her mother read to her the Hebrew story of little Samuel, and advised her to respond to the voice, saying, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." Finally the chosen virgin took this advice, whereupon the voice "came no more" to her "_material_ senses." Its mission had been fulfilled.

Such is the opening legend told to the marines of the Church Scientist, in that juicy book, _Retrospection and Introspection_.[17]

Still, in these days of "Spiritual manifestations," the numerous believers in messages from "the summer land" would account, in a quite simple way, for the voices calling little Hebrew Samuel and little New-England Mary.

But not so Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy. "Am I a believer in Spiritualism?" she asks. "I believe in no ism.... As I understand it Spiritualism is the antipode of Christian Science."[18]

Ah, it was no voice of common, finite spirit, that came to the high and mighty founder of an "absolutely scientific religion." So there is but one conclusion she gives us to draw: _the voice was directly the voice of G.o.d_. The Infinite and Omniscient, the All-in-All, spake to the girl of nine years, as a miraculous call to her divine work. At that time, she tells us, her father thought her "brain" was "too large for her body."[19]

The old gentleman was doubtless right. It looks, too, as if the brain of his blessed daughter, with the entire head containing it, has been rapidly enlarging ever since.

From the metaphysical adventures of Saint Mary Baker, as told in her _Retrospection and Introspection_,[20] we find that when twelve years old she was admitted to the "Orthodox Church" of New England, though she declined to accept the doctrine of predestination--a doctrine which so troubled her that a doctor was called, who p.r.o.nounced her "stricken with fever." It is told of Martin Luther that when a theological student once came to him half-crazy over the same doctrine, the doughty reformer ordered him to go and get "well drunk." In the case of Robert Ingersoll, his soul could only find relief from the tenet by such hard swearing that it brought him peace. But we are a.s.sured by our divine lady of the "Church Scientist" that she took the better as well as the usual course prescribed for such trials. She "wrestled in prayer." For she felt sure that the Creator of the Universe, who had once descended in person and spoken to her by name, could not fail to possess the faculty of hearing and the usefulness of help. Behold it was so! Instantly the fever was gone and health was restored. "The physician marveled," she says, and John Calvin "lost his power."

In 1878 Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy was called to preach at the Baptist Tabernacle of Boston. The congregation increased beyond the capacity of the pews, and it was no uncommon occurrence for the sick to be healed by her sermons. Cancers were cured, and "many pale cripples went into the church, leaning on crutches, who went out carrying them on their shoulders." Mrs. Eddy says so.[21]

By the same authority--in her _Retrospection and Introspection_--it is stated that her "Science of Divine Metaphysical Healing," otherwise "Christian Science," was "discovered" by her in 1866. The day and date are not given. But it was some time after February 15th; for at that time one Mary M. Patterson was occupied in putting on poetic mourning for Dr. P. P.

Quimby, and in begging Mr. Julius A. Dresser to visit Lynn and heal an injury to her back from a fall on the ice.

It is not well to wear mourning too long. In the spring of 1866 it must have occurred to Mrs. Eddy that weeds of poetry would not pay, and she hustled them off. Dr. Quimby having gone "to heaven" and slipped out of a decayed memory, his obituary poetess just then realized that she had spent "twenty years" in tracing "physical effects to a mental cause." Then came the "scientific certainty" that "all causation" is "Mind," and that "every effect is a mental phenomenon."[22]

What "Christian Scientists" mean by "scientific certainty" is proof by "healing." Take the revered principle of cosmogony that "the moon is made of green cheese." If one who holds the doctrine, "heals" anybody, the proposition is "demonstrated." Mrs. Eddy's "scientific works" are all filled with this unanswerable logic. "Mortal Mind"--a thing which she utterly reprobates--may find difficulty in accepting the conclusion; but it is doubtless quite as well founded as most of the "healing" itself.

Mrs. Eddy's own case is an ill.u.s.tration in point. A bed-ridden invalid for years, she was s.n.a.t.c.hed from death, she has told us, by Dr. Quimby, and within a week of his first mental treatment she climbed to the top of a city hall. The writer has read a series of Mrs. Eddy's unpublished letters, which show that for some time she had varied nervous and spinal relapses. When not with Dr. Quimby, she wrote to him for "absent treatments," and sometimes _saw him appear to her_--or said she did--in response. Finally she was cured. Then she fell on an icy sidewalk, was nearly frightened to death, and wrote her letter beseeching Mr. Dresser to "undertake" for her. But, having been taught mind-healing by Dr. Quimby, she "demonstrated" over herself, and got up. The Doctor's original cure appears to have been so effective that her fall on the ice was mostly a jar of her imagination and a contusion on her veracity. For, in her _Retrospection and Introspection_, she solemnly affirms that her accident caused an injury far beyond the reach of "medicine" or "surgery," which she repaired by application of the Divine Spirit. This experience, says Mrs. Eddy ("scientist"), was a "falling apple of discovery" to her.

Thereupon she went out into the wilderness of Boston--"withdrew," that is, from society--for three years--that she might search the Scriptures and find "Science."[23] At the end of her retirement, she had learned that "Mind reconstructs the body," and that "nothing else can." How it is done, she adds, "the Spiritual Science of Mind must reveal." Her charge for a course of ten lessons in this "divine science" was soon fixed at "only three hundred dollars."[24]

Of the genuine original "Christian Science"--the sole and undivided "discovery" of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy--she says:

"I named it _Christian_ because it is compa.s.sionate, helpful, and spiritual. G.o.d I called _Immortal Mind_. That which sins, suffers, and dies, I named _mortal mind_. The physical senses, or sensuous nature, I called _error_ and _shadow_. Soul I denominated _Substance_, because Soul alone is truly substantial. G.o.d I characterized as individual ent.i.ty, but his corporeality I denied. The Real I claimed as eternal; and its antipodes, or the temporal, I described as unreal. Spirit I called the _reality_; and matter, the _unreality_."[25]

On the hash and rehash of theology, here announced, we need not dwell just now, but will consider, for the moment, how much of Mrs. Eddy's individually discovered and copyrighted creed was first expounded, though _not_ copyrighted, by one P. P. Quimby.

Dr. Quimby never thought of pus.h.i.+ng his thought and work under the special name of "Christian Science," though his writings show that he used the term.[26]

He was not in pursuit of money by truckling to current preconception or prejudice. We recollect, however--for our own memory has not been laid in the tomb of our piety--that after "his truth was discovered" he "found his new views all portrayed and ill.u.s.trated in Christ's teachings." We recollect that he said of his practise, "It belongs to a Wisdom that is above man as man. It was taught eighteen hundred years ago, and has never had a place in the heart of man since." He said, "There is a bread which, if a man eat, he is filled; and this bread is Christ or Science." In 1865 the Portland _Advertiser_ said of Dr. Quimby:

"By a method entirely novel and at first sight quite unintelligible, he has been slowly developing what he calls _the 'Science of Health'_; that is, as he defines it, a science founded on principles that can be taught and practised like that of mathematics, and not on opinion or experiments of any kind whatsoever."

Prior to the issue of Mrs. Eddy's _Retrospection and Introspection_ she had, of course, written her other great and better-known work of religious fiction, called _Science and Health_. Now the t.i.tle of that book--the term "Science and Health"--is quite different from Dr. Quimby's term, "The Science of Health." Still, the chief distinction between them, considering what Dr. Quimby taught, is that the latter came first and the former afterwards.

It does not appear that G.o.d--who in our day has been personally known by Mrs. Eddy only--and in an interview which _He_ took the trouble to seek--was ever technically defined by Dr. Quimby as "Immortal Mind," or "characterized as individual ent.i.ty," with "corporeality denied." It may have been so; for all the obligations derived by Mrs. Eddy from Dr. Quimby have not yet been published. By all competent theologians and metaphysicians, since the beginning at least of human records, G.o.d has been conceived and proclaimed as Infinite Spirit, one with "Immortal Mind," and above "corporeality," which has been accounted a temporary phase of finite things. Plato was pretty nearly made of this conception in philosophy, and St. John in religion. P. P. Quimby was neither a Plato nor a Saint John; but he "agreed" with them, in his literal, honest fas.h.i.+on, as he said he did with Bishop Berkeley.

If Mrs. Eddy had ever read a history of philosophy before she inst.i.tuted a religion, she would have found that Spinoza honored her advent, some two hundred years in advance of it, by postulating "Substance" as the "Soul"

of things. Incidentally, too, he postulated "matter" as an "unreality of sense," and thus, in a way, as "error" and "shadow"--the product of "mortal mind." Dr. Quimby said, with the utmost possible distinctness, "I believe matter to be nothing but an idea belonging to the senses"; and it will be found, when his writings get published, that he said the same thing in some hundreds of different ways. But all this was known to the thought of India, even before books were written, and the original authorities for it had then been lost.

But now: in one point of doctrine--and to her the most important one--Mother Mary Baker G. Eddy does stand completely "original," solitary and alone. She holds of "matter" that it is not only not what it seems, but is _nothing at all_ save "unreality." To recognize it as anything whatever, beyond "shadow" and "error," is to be buried in disease, sin, and death. Absolutely to deny the most palpable fact of daily existence is to Christian Science the one road to health and salvation.

To Dr. Quimby, matter was a state of things "reduced from mind," but the state and the things were _here_. They were perfectly _actual_ as _a condition_, though not as an unrelated fixture of all time and eternity.

Every "idealist," in every age, has taken this view, excepting only Mrs.

Eddy. Of her own view, no human being out of a refuge for imbeciles or the Church Scientist, could possibly begrudge her the sole copyright. In due order Mrs. Eddy's theological speculation will be further considered.

From the Arabian Nights tales of _Retrospection and Introspection_, we learn that, before setting up her new church, the revelator "wandered through the dim mazes of _Materia Medica_." She "found," in Jahr's two hundred and sixty-two remedies, the one pervading secret that the less matter and the more mind, the better the work. Homeopathy taught her that in the higher attenuations of its drugs, "matter is rarefied to its fatal essence, mortal mind." Her conclusion was that "mortal belief," instead of any "drug," governs the action of material medicine. "I claim," says she, "for healing scientifically," that "it does away with all material medicine, and recognizes the antidote for all sickness, as well as sin, in the Immortal Mind; and mortal mind as the source of all ills which befall mortals.... The mortal body being but the objective state of the mortal mind, this mind must be renovated to improve the body."[27]

Considering the high moral perch on which Mrs. Eddy has set herself, and contemplating the cerulean nest in which she has laid the eggs of "science," it is really painful here to study her case of fatty degeneration of the memory. For, apart from mere phraseology and acquaintance with Jahr, Dr. P. P. Quimby had reached the principle and practise of "healing scientifically," more than twenty years before she proclaimed it in _Science and Health_, and he had applied it to Mrs. Eddy herself, thirteen years prior to that publication, which descended from heaven in 1875. He did not mention "mortal mind"--by name, that is--for he called the fact of it "opinion of the natural man," in "the state of matter," and so far of "error." He did not use the term, "Immortal Mind"; for he designated it as "Wisdom," "Science," and the "Christ," as distinguished from "the man, Jesus." Adopting the Christ _principle_, Dr.

Quimby aimed to follow, persistently but humbly, in the footsteps of Jesus. Dr. Quimby, in fact, was covering, both theoretically and practically, the whole true and essential field of "Christian Science,"

while avoiding its nonsense and its humbugs, at a time when Mrs. Eddy, as "Mary B. Glover," was a writer of love stories for "Peterson's Magazine."[28]