49. It is these "cross currents," we are told, which form the chief difficulty in the way of Christian Science practice. Mrs. Carrie Snider even reports in The Journal of Christian Science (McClure's Magazine, 1907, pp. 692-693) the case of her husband, who, being "under the treatment of two healers, whose minds were not in accord," was caught in this cross current and died, or, as Mrs. Eddy would express it, "showed the manifestation of the death symptoms" ("symptoms" themselves being "shadows of belief"). "The thought from the one," explains Miss Milmine, "confused thought from the other, leaving him to die in the cross- fire." The interested reader will find the precepts of Elwood Worcester on "Suggestion" (Religion and Medicine, p. 64) running very closely parallel to Mrs. Eddy's on all such matters: "It is necessary as far as possible to guard against counter-suggestions";
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"suggestions . . . contained in books are often of great curative value"; "in order to avoid the danger of opposition and counter- suggestion some practitioners prefer to treat the patient silently."
50. Medicine and the Church, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes, 1910,
P- 293-
51. Sin is, of course, in Mrs. Eddy's system, like disease, an illusion; there is no such thing. "The belief" of it is in the be- ginning "an unconscious error" (ed. 1899, p. 81), it "exists only so long as the material illusion remains" (p. 207), and what "must die" is "not the sinful soul" but "the sense of sin" (ibid.). It is amusing to observe as we read Science and Health, how often, in the preoccupation with sickness as the thing from which we look to Christian Science for relief, sin comes in as an afterthought. The book itself, it is to be noticed, is a treatise on " Science and Health"; and what the author professes to have discovered is " the adapta- tion of Truth to the treatment of disease" — to which is added, plainly as an afterthought, "as well as of sin." "The question of What is Truth," she adds in the next paragraph, "is answered by demon- stration— by healing disease" — "and sin" she adds again as an afterthought. Consequently she goes on to say, "This shows that Christian healing confers the most health," "and," she adds weakly, "makes the best men." This preoccupation with sickness rather than sin is grounded, no doubt, in part, in the historical genesis of the system and of the book in which it is presented. It was not as a religious leader but as a healer that Mrs. Eddy came forward, treading in the footsteps of Quimby, who was not a religious leader but a healer. Her theories were religious only because, pushing Quimby's suggestions into express declarations, she found his "all is mind" completing itself in "all mind is God." Her religion, in other words, existed for its healing value, and her interest in it was as a curative agent. Sickness and healing were the foci around which the ellipse of her thought was thrown. Christian Scientists, therefore, teach that there is no such thing as sin; and sin, like disease, is to be treated by denial. C. H. Lea, A Plea for . . . Christian Science,2 1915, p. 29, says that God, being perfect, all His creations must also be perfect; "consequently that He did not and could not create a sinful man, or even a man that could become sinful." We can never be separated from God; "the apparent separation of man from God is, according to Christian Science teaching, due to the false human consciousness or mortal's sense of sin" (p. 39).
52. One gains the impression that Mrs. Eddy was even excep- tionally troubled by sickness. In the Christian Science Journal for
322 NOTES TO LECTURE VI