If we survey the system of Christian Science as a whole, with an active desire to discover in it elements of value, it is quite possible to fix upon characteristics which, viewed in the abstract, may seem admirable. There is its un- compromising idealism, for example ; the emphasis which it places on spirit as distinguished from matter. There is the high value it attaches to Truth, as over against other forms — emotional or volitional — of human activity. And there is its constant inculcation of contentment and seren- ity, the quiet optimism of its outlook on life, which must tend, one would think, to the production of a demeanor, at least, if not a character, full of attractiveness. These things occur in the actual system, however, not in the ab- stract but in very concrete forms; and the concrete forms
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in which they occur in the system do not seem, upon being frankly looked in the face, very beautiful.
It is easy immediately on perceiving the idealistic pre- suppositions of Christian Science to go off into laudations of idealism in general, in contrast with the sordid material- ism of our age. But it is our own idealism we are lauding, not Mrs. Eddy's. Her idealism is a sheer pantheism, in- volving a complete acosmism, which sinks, not the material universe only, but the world of individual spirits as well, in the ocean of undifferentiated Being. If it be said that Mrs. Eddy does not work her pantheistic assumption out consistently, that is true in one sense and quite untrue in another and much more important sense. It is true that she is constantly making assertions quite inconsistent with it; that in her attempts to expound it, she cannot main- tain her consistency three sentences at a time, but every- where presents us, as Miss Sturge puts it,50 "with such a tangle of incoherent, inconsistent, confused statements, contradictory to each other, as has, perhaps, never been seriously given to the world before." But with all her in- ability in expounding the details of her thought to keep in view its fundamental pantheistic postulate, Mrs. Eddy does not fail to make this pantheistic postulate consis- tently fundamental to her system, or to press it explicitly to its extremest implications. Her system is precisely acosmic pantheism, that, all that, and nothing but that.
From another point of view also it is absurd to speak in terms of praise of Mrs. Eddy's idealism. It is but a sorry idealism at the best. It does not take its starting-point from the vision of the spiritual, from an enlarged mental outlook and a soaring sense of the value of spiritual things — but from a cringing fear of the evils of life, as life is and must be lived by creatures of sense. It makes all the dif- ference whether we begin by affirming spirit and draw the inference thence to the relative nothingness of the material; or begin by shirking the material and inferring only thence
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that spirit is all. The centre of gravity of the two atti- tudes, though they be described in identical language, is antipodal; their reactions on life — expressed in thought, feeling and doing — are so completely contrasting as to be in point of fact directly contradictory. Mrs. Eddy's be- ginning lay in the denial of matter, that the suffering and trials of life might be, if they could not be escaped, yet as far as possible circumvented. Her attitude is that of flight, flight from the evils of life. There is nothing heroic about it; nothing elevated or elevating. We fear that we must say that it looks from without rather sordid. Her idealism is a sham idealism; merely a mechanical device for the eluding of life, a life which must be lived in a world of suffering (of which Mrs. Eddy has the keenest sense) and sin (of which she appears to have no sense at all).51 Of course the device is as vain as it is mechanical. To deny the evils of life, however stoutly, unfortunately does not abolish them. Mrs. Eddy herself suffered from dis- ease and weakness; she too grew old and died.52 Her idealism is as false to all the facts of experience as it is mean in its origin. And we must add that it is as cruel as it is false and mean. We see it in its full enormity only when we see it at work on helpless sufferers — on those too ill to speak for themselves, on tortured infancy. The an- nals of the practice of Christian Science on sick and suffer- ing babies belongs to the history of atrocities.53