The Religio-Medical Masquerade: A Complete Exposure of Christian Science. Frederick William Peabody
neighbor’s wife, and they were easily persuaded of the man’s divine mission, and that it was God’s wish that they should revert to primitive nakedness. So the three doffed the attire of civilization and perambulated into the adjoining town, naked as they came into the world. A police officer, who encountered them upon the street, with averted eyes hustled them into a van and carted them off to the nearest police station, where they were compelled to assume at least the outward garb of decency and sanity. This only shows how true it is that the religious impostor has no difficulty in making converts, and that the first person he converts is usually the first he encounters.
I am continually met with the inquiry, “If Christian Science is an absolute fraud, how do you account for the fact that so many intelligent people are Christian Scientists?”
In the first place, many people may be intelligent enough about the ordinary affairs of life, and utterly imbecile upon religious matters. History has again and again shown that in no respect are people so easily credulous and so readily victimized as in respect to religious things. Doubtless there are intelligent people in Christian Science; but the whole cult is not numerous, and the intelligent minority is a negligible quantity.
In the latest bulletin of religious statistics, published by the Federal Government in 1909, the total number of Christian Scientists is given as 85,717; but it is stated that a large portion, at least half, of the membership of the “Mother Church” in Boston is counted twice in this estimate; for the 41,634 membership of this Boston church is largely composed of non-residents, who are also members of other churches. So at least 20,000 must be deducted from the total of 85,717 in order to get at anything like an accurate estimate, which cannot be far from 65,000. These are the government’s figures for 1906, although Mrs. Eddy definitely stated that there were a million Christian Scientists as long ago as 1883.
Now, admitting that amongst this 65,000 people there are intelligent persons, I make the affirmation boldly that not one of them ever went into Christian Science because of his intelligence but notwithstanding and in spite of it. Let me make plain this non-intelligent attitude of its devotees toward Christian Science.
The religious service in a Christian Science church contains no original utterance from the pulpit. There is no preacher connected with any Christian Science church, and the individuals officiating from the platform are called readers, the first reader being a man, who reads from Mrs. Eddy’s book, and the second reader being a woman, who reads from the Bible. The sermon consists exclusively of the alternate reading, by the second reader of passages from the Bible, and by the first reader of alleged interpretative passages from Mrs. Eddy’s book, “Science and Health,” which is called by her, “The Key to the Scriptures.”
Mr. Arthur G. Frisbie of Cleveland, Ohio, an absolutely sincere and honest man, was for many years the first reader of the leading Christian Science church in that city. He became, however, convinced, as every sincere and honest person, who retains any remnant of analytical power sooner or later must, that the thing was a monstrous fraud, and he now denounces it in no less unmeasured terms than my own. Mr. Frisbie tells me that during all the time he was officiating as first reader in the church and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book, try as hard as he might he could discover no slightest relation between the Bible passages read by the second reader and the “Science and Health” interpretative passages read by himself. Any one who cares to make the experiment may demonstrate this for himself if he will get a copy of the Christian Science Quarterly in which the so-called Sermon Lessons are outlined. Such a test will show that there is no more connection between the Biblical passages and those selected and read from Mrs. Eddy’s book than there would be if “Mother Goose” or “Robinson Crusoe” were used as interpreters of the Scriptures. And yet I have sat in a Christian Science church and seen thousands of the faithful, with nothing less than ecstatic expressions upon their countenances, listening to readings that were absolutely unintelligible to both readers and hearers. So I say that the only possible way to be a Christian Scientist is to completely subordinate intelligence to feeling and approximate as nearly as possible the ideal condition pictured by Mrs. Eddy when she says, “The less mind there is manifested in matter, the better.”
Before passing from this point, I can’t refrain from incorporating here, for the benefit of mankind, the sage summary of a man whom I regard as the very wisest of living estimators of human qualities. I refer, of course, to Mark Twain. His opinion of why Mrs. Eddy has so many followers is most informing. In a letter to me some few years ago, Mr. Clemens said:
“Have I given you the impression that I was combating Xn Science? or that I am caring how the Xn Scientists ‘hail’ my articles? Relieve yourself of those errors. I wrote the articles to please MYSELF; and it had not occurred to me to care what the ‘Scientists’ might think of them. I am not combating Xn Science—I haven’t a thing in the world against it. Making fun of that shameless old swindler, Mother Eddy, is the only thing about it I take any interest in. At bottom I suppose I take a private delight in seeing the human race making an ass of itself again—which it has always done whenever it had a chance. That’s its affair—it has the right—and it will sweat blood for it a century hence, and for many centuries thereafter.
“It distresses me a little to hear you talk about ‘sanity in the affairs of men.’ So far as I know, men have never shown any noticeable degree of sanity in their affairs, and to me it seems rather large flattery to intimate that they are capable of it.
“See them get down and worship that old creature. A century hence, they’ll all be at it. Sanity—in the human race! This is really fulsome.”
There is no other possible explanation than this of Mrs. Eddy’s success. It is based, as Mark Twain says, upon the irresistible propensity of the human race to make an ass of itself every time it gets a chance. It is astounding, but it is a fact, that by many thousands of people in the United States in the year of grace 1910 this aged, illiterate, unprincipled, vulgar woman is regarded as the agent and representative of the Almighty God. I do not know how many times I have been told that because I have endeavored to make the people of the country understand that Christian Science is based wholly upon Mrs. Eddy’s falsehoods, I am therefore irreverently assailing the Almighty upon His throne. I confess I am not much disturbed by this particular criticism, because I feel that, if it be a fact, the Almighty will deal with me indulgently, knowing the integrity of my motives, and that, however aggressive I may become, the Almighty is in no danger.
The more I have studied and learned of the life of this strange creature and the more closely I have observed her effect upon the lives of those who come under her sway, the more strongly I am convinced of the harmfulness of her influence. It is literally derationalizing thousands of people, it is turning multitudes from the pursuit of knowledge and steeping them in a superstition worse than that of the Middle Ages. It is remorselessly separating husband and wife, parent and child. It is the mother and promoter of a new-old witchcraft which has so taken possession of the minds and lives of people that they live in constant terror of its supposed baneful work. This Christian Science witchcraft has reached the proportion amongst the faithful almost of panic, and of it more hereafter. But of all of the harmful influences of this alleged medical science, which is an unmitigated nonsense or deviltry, and of this alleged religion which, so far as its founder is concerned, is the very quintessence of irreverence and hypocrisy, of all of the evil consequences of the life and work of this monumental imposture, the unrelieved suffering of helpless children is the worst.
Mrs. Eddy teaches and her followers believe that God has revealed to her, as absolute truth, that sickness, pain and suffering do not in reality exist, and many are the deluded mothers upon whom this belief has taken so fast a hold that they permit their helpless children to suffer and to die without the slightest effort to alleviate the suffering, and with the continued iteration and reiteration of the insane notion that the child cannot be sick and cannot suffer, because sickness and suffering are unreal. Meantime the sickness of the child is real, the suffering terribly real, and after protracted suffering it dies without the turning of a hand to relieve its pain or to save its life. Those sane parents who have endured the anguish of seeing their child suffer, say from abscess in the ear, or from any one of the other forms of torture with which nature stretches our