The Religio-Medical Masquerade: A Complete Exposure of Christian Science. Frederick William Peabody

      Introduction

       Table of Contents

      Christian Science is the most shallow and sordid and wicked imposture of the ages. Upon a substratum of lies a foundation of false pretense has been laid, upon which has been built a superstructure of outward beauty in which multitudes of credulous people gather to glorify the founder as God’s chief anointed.

      Never before has the world witnessed a masquerade like that of Christian Science. Being everything that Christianity is not, it puts on the garb of Christianity and seizes the name of Christ the better to attract and the more strongly to hold people of shallow mind, but sincere heart. Having nothing in it remotely worthy of the name of science, it meaninglessly appropriates scientific terms and phrases in order to parade before the world with an air of learning.

      The founder of this pretended religion, this bogus healing system, audaciously and irreligiously professing equality of character and of power with Jesus, has, throughout her whole long life, been in every particular precisely antithetical to Christ. Sordid, mercenary, unprincipled, the consuming passion of her life has been the accumulation of money, and she has stopped at no falsehood, no fraud and no greater wickedness that seemed to put her in the way of adding to her accumulations, or overcoming her supposed enemies.

      Jesus condemned nothing so forcefully as the mercenary spirit. With a whip he scourged the money changers from the Temple, and in language that burned as flaming fire he denounced the hypocrites and liars of his time as “like unto whited sepulchers that are indeed beautiful outward, but within are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

      If the language of this book seem severe, if its denunciations are emphatic, if things are called by their right names and facts handled without the least equivocation, if contrasts are drawn between the founder of Christianity and the founder of Christian Science that seem to border upon the irreverent, let it not be assumed that there is in the heart of the author the slightest particle of personal animosity, or in his attitude toward real Christianity and Christ anything but the most complete reverence.

      It is time the plain facts should be stated in plain terms, that the hand of truth should ruthlessly tear away the mask of falsehood from the face of hypocrisy and expose to the horrified gaze of mankind the hideous lineaments upon which are indelibly and unmistakably written the craft and insincerity of utter selfishness and monstrous greed, and the hardness of a cruelty almost unbelievable.

      Without egotism, I may say that no other man knows, as I know, the true inwardness of Christian Science, because no other man has come face to face with it again and again on so many occasions as I have, and no other has been in the position I have to force from the lips of reluctant witnesses, under the sanction of an oath, unwilling and discrediting testimony.

      Ten years ago I knew nothing and cared less about Christian Science, assuming it to be a sincere, but deluded, manifestation of the childish credulity to which the human race is prone. But ten years of investigations and repeated professional employments, in which it became my duty as a lawyer to get at the actual facts with the aid of legal process, have qualified me, as no other not having had my experience can be qualified, to set forth the amazing story in utter nakedness. In order that it may appear that I am talking from a basis of knowledge, and not of rumor or gossip or speculation, let me briefly narrate the professional experiences above referred to.

      My first encounter with Christian Science came about through an employment by the Arena Company, publishers of the Arena magazine, in 1899. In the May number of the magazine for that year an article by Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury, that was in the nature of an exposé of Christian Science, was published, and instead of bringing suit against Mrs. Woodbury or the magazine for the statements contained in the article, an endeavor was made, in Mrs. Eddy’s interest, to suppress the magazine by a suit in equity to restrain its publication based upon the incorporation in the article of a photograph of Mrs. Eddy said to have been copyrighted. The Arena Company retained me to represent its interests in the litigation, and during that employment I was brought in contact with the author of the article, and from her got my first inkling of the real character of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, and her religio-medical-commercial system.

      Mrs. Woodbury had been a Christian Scientist for many years, during a long portion of which time she enjoyed Mrs. Eddy’s confidence as one of her leading lieutenants. She had accumulated many letters from Mrs. Eddy, and all her published utterances, whether in book or pamphlet form, from the beginning of the movement down to that time. Mrs. Woodbury was a woman of forceful, dominating personality, of much greater culture than Mrs. Eddy and the rank and file of her following, and in course of time she attracted to herself a personal popularity and influence that so threatened Mrs. Eddy’s, that it became important, if her ascendency was to be maintained unimpaired, that Mrs. Woodbury be cast into outer darkness and her influence wholly destroyed. Occasion was readily found for this and, in due time, without warning, without a notice of the charges made against her, and without an opportunity to be heard, Mrs. Woodbury was excommunicated from the Boston Christian Science Church and cut off from fellowship with the faithful. This placed her in a position where rational reflection was forced upon her, and she speedily came to the necessary conclusion that she had been duped.

      Arriving at this conclusion, with a courage much to be admired Mrs. Woodbury wrote and published in the Arena magazine the article to which I have referred, and in unmeasured terms laid open the sinister and sordid quality of the whole movement, and exposed the consummate selfishness and greed in the heart