Mark Twain - Christian Science

These qualities—and the capacities growing out of them by the nurturing influences of training, observation, and experience seem to be clearly indicated by the character of her career and its achievements. They seem to be:

A clear head for business, and a phenomenally long one; Clear understanding of business situations; Accuracy in estimating the opportunities they offer; Intelligence in planning a business move; Firmness in sticking to it after it has been decided upon; Extraordinary daring; Indestructible persistency; Devouring ambition; Limitless selfishness; A knowledge of the weaknesses and poverties and docilities of human nature and how to turn them to account which has never been surpassed, if ever equalled.

And—necessarily—the foundation-stone of Mrs. Eddy's character is a never-wavering confidence in herself.

It is a granite character. And—quite naturally—a measure of the talc of smallnesses common to human nature is mixed up in it and distributed through it. When Mrs. Eddy is not dictating servilities from her throne in the clouds to her official domestics in Boston or to her far-spread subjects round about the planet, but is down on the ground, she is kin to us and one of us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous, ungrammatical, incomprehensible, affected, vain of her little human ancestry, unstable, inconsistent, unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace as the commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame de Remusat saw him, a brass god with clay legs.

In drawing Mrs. Eddy's portrait it has been my purpose to restrict myself to materials furnished by herself, and I believe I have done that. If I have misinterpreted any of her acts, it was not done intentionally.

It will be noticed that in skeletonizing a list of the qualities which have carried her to the dizzy summit which she occupies, I have not mentioned the power which was the commanding force employed in achieving that lofty flight. It did not belong in that list; it was a force that was not a detail of her character, but was an outside one. It was the power which proceeded from her people's recognition of her as a supernatural personage, conveyer of the Latest Word, and divinely commissioned to deliver it to the world. The form which such a recognition takes, consciously or unconsciously, is worship; and worship does not question nor criticize, it obeys. The object of it does not need to coddle it, bribe it, beguile it, reason with it, convince it—it commands it; that is sufficient; the obedience rendered is not reluctant, but prompt and whole-hearted. Admiration for a Napoleon, confidence in him, pride in him, affection for him, can lift him high and carry him far; and these are forms of worship, and are strong forces, but they are worship of a mere human being, after all, and are infinitely feeble, as compared with those that are generated by that other worship, the worship of a divine personage. Mrs. Eddy has this efficient worship, this massed and centralized force, this force which is indifferent to opposition, untroubled by fear, and goes to battle singing, like Cromwell's soldiers; and while she has it she can command and it will obey, and maintain her on her throne, and extend her empire.

She will have it until she dies; and then we shall see a curious and interesting further development of her revolutionary work begin.

The President and Board of Directors will succeed her, and the government will go on without a hitch. The By-laws will bear that interpretation. All the Mother-Church's vast powers are concentrated in that Board. Mrs. Eddy's unlimited personal reservations make the Board's ostensible supremacy, during her life, a sham, and the Board itself a shadow. But Mrs. Eddy has not made those reservations for any one but herself—they are distinctly personal, they bear her name, they are not usable by another individual. When she dies her reservations die, and the Board's shadow-powers become real powers, without the change of any important By-law, and the Board sits in her place as absolute and irresponsible a sovereign as she was.

It consists of but five persons, a much more manageable Cardinalate than the Roman Pope's. I think it will elect its Pope from its own body, and that it will fill its own vacancies. An elective Papacy is a safe and wise system, and a long-liver.

It is not a single if, but a several-jointed one; not an oyster, but a vertebrate.

1. Did Mrs. Eddy borrow from Quimby the Great Idea, or only the little one, the old-timer, the ordinary mental-healing-healing by "mortal" mind?

2. If she borrowed the Great Idea, did she carry it away in her head, or in manuscript?

3. Did she hit upon the Great Idea herself? By the Great Idea I mean, of course, the conviction that the Force involved was still existent, and could be applied now just as it was applied by Christ's Disciples and their converts, and as successfully.

4. Did she philosophize it, systematize it, and write it down in a book?

5. Was it she, and not another, that built a new Religion upon the book and organized it?

I think No. 5 can be answered with a Yes, and dismissed from the controversy. And I think that the Great Idea, great as it was, would have enjoyed but a brief activity, and would then have gone to sleep again for some more centuries, but for the perpetuating impulse it got from that organized and tremendous force.

As for Nos. 1, 2, and 4, the hostiles contend that Mrs. Eddy got the Great Idea from Quimby and carried it off in manuscript. But their testimony, while of consequence, lacks the most important detail; so far as my information goes, the Quimby manuscript has not been produced. I think we cannot discuss No. 1 and No. 2 profitably. Let them go.

For me, No. 3 has a mild interest, and No. 4 a violent one.

As regards No. 3, Mrs. Eddy was brought up, from the cradle, an old-time, boiler-iron, Westminster-Catechism Christian, and knew her Bible as well as Captain Kydd knew his, "when he sailed, when he sailed," and perhaps as sympathetically. The Great Idea had struck a million Bible-readers before her as being possible of resurrection and application—it must have struck as many as that, and been cogitated, indolently, doubtingly, then dropped and forgotten—and it could have struck her, in due course. But how it could interest her, how it could appeal to her—with her make this a thing that is difficult to understand.

For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful: the power, through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and pains and grief—all—with a word, with a touch of the hand! This power was given by the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the converted. All—every one. It was exercised for generations afterwards. Any Christian who was in earnest and not a make-believe, not a policy—Christian, not a Christian for revenue only, had that healing power, and could cure with it any disease or any hurt or damage possible to human flesh and bone. These things are true, or they are not. If they were true seventeen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago it would be difficult to satisfactorily explain why or how or by what argument that power should be nonexistent in Christians now.

To wish to exercise it could occur to Mrs. Eddy—but would it?

Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees—money, power, glory—vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish—