It is with respect to marriage, however, that the asceti- cism intrinsic to Mrs. Eddy's philosophy pushes nearest to the surface. She discourages marriage and prefers celibacy. "Is marriage more right than celibacy?" she asks, and answers,70 "Human knowledge indicates that it is, but Science indicates that it is not." And so far from marriage involving children, childless marriages are the best and are to be sought after.71 To the objection that, if every one followed this advice, the human race would soon perish, she has a ready answer. The propagation of the species, she intimates, does not depend on marriage; sex is an error of the mortal mind. "The butterfly, bee and moth," she says,72 — we are afraid that Mrs. Eddy's knowledge of natural history was defective— even now are reproduced in an asexual manner, and this may — nay, will — be true of man when he attains more nearly to his true being. Meanwhile, these are times of ignorance; and dur- ing these times of ignorance, she counsels, let marriages continue.73 Thus Christian Science makes its concession to "mortal mind." 74
We observe that Mrs. Eddy has an eschatology. She is looking forward to a better time to come, when all that Christian Science dreams should be shall be. Why her dreams of the future should take the form of this golden age we do not quite understand. If all is mind and mind
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is God, we should think Mrs. Eddy's eschatology would point forward to a time when all the wavelets which fret the surface of the infinite deep should have sunk to rest in its depths. But no, the paradise she looks forward to is, apparently, a material paradise.75 There are men in it, and they increase and multiply and replenish the earth — though after an asexual manner. They are in it but not of it. They tread the adder under foot; and though they drink deadly things, they will suffer no harm — for there will be no "mortal mind" then to make it harm them. They will walk on the water, it seems, and turn water into wine, and multiply loaves and fishes, as Jesus once did, but men cannot do now. At least Herman S. Hering, first reader of the church at Concord, seems to promise this to us, "eventually." "It is claimed by some opponents," he writes,76 "that because Christian Scientists do not walk on the water, turn water into wine, multiply loaves and fishes, as did Jesus, and because they still have to do with matter at every turn, the doctrines of Christian Science, especially that of the unreality of matter, must be fallacious. Such an argument is like that which declares that, because a school-boy, who is just learning to add and subtract, can- not work out a problem in cube-root, therefore the claims of greater possibilities in the science of mathematics are fallacious, and the school-boy is badly deceived by the promise of being able eventually to solve such higher problems."
There is a good time coming, then, and we may con- fidently look forward to it. It contains for us, no doubt, nothing beyond what we ought to have here and now, and would have here and now were it not for the interference of "mortal mind." In enumerating the benefits which Christian Science confers on us, Frances Lord includes in the list such items as these:77 "6. We do not need to fear any climate. ... 7. We do not need to travel or go away for a change of air. ... 8. We know that we do
A GOOD TIME COMING 227