There is plenty of other testimonies in the magazine, but these quoted samples will answer.  They show the kind of trade the Science is driving.  Now we come back to the question, Does the Science kill a patient here and there and now and then?  We must concede it.  Does it compensate for this?  I am persuaded that it can make a plausible showing in that direction.  For instance:  when it lays its hand upon a soldier who has suffered thirty years of helpless torture and makes him whole in body and mind, what is the actual sum of that achievement?  This, I think:  that it has restored to life a subject who had essentially died ten deaths a year for thirty years, and each of them a long and painful one.  But for its interference that man in the three years which have since elapsed, would have essentially died thirty times more.  There are thousands of young people in the land who are now ready to enter upon a life-long death similar to that man’s.  Every time the Science captures one of these and secures to him life-long immunity from imagination-manufactured disease, it may plausibly claim that in his person it has saved three hundred lives.  Meantime, it will kill a man every now and then.  But no matter, it will still be ahead on the credit side.

[Note.—­I have received several letters (two from educated and ostensibly intelligent persons), which contained, in substance, this protest:  “I don’t object to men and women chancing their lives with these people, but it is a burning shame that the law should allow them to trust their helpless little children in their deadly hands.”  Isn’t it touching?  Isn’t it deep?  Isn’t it modest?  It is as if the person said:  “I know that to a parent his child is the core of his heart, the apple of his eye, a possession so dear, so precious that he will trust its life in no hands but those which he believes, with all his soul, to be the very best and the very safest, but it is a burning shame that the law does not require him to come to me to ask what kind of healer I will allow him to call.”  The public is merely a multiplied “me.”—­M.T.]

CHAPTER VII

“We consciously declare that Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, was foretold, as well as its author, Mary Baker Eddy, in Revelation x.  She is the ‘mighty angel,’ or God’s highest thought to this age (verse 1), giving us the spiritual interpretation of the Bible in the ‘little book open’ (verse 2).  Thus we prove that Christian Science is the second coming of Christ-Truth-Spirit.”—­Lecture by Dr. George Tomkins, D.D.  C.S.

There you have it in plain speech.  She is the mighty angel; she is the divinely and officially sent bearer of God’s highest thought.  For the present, she brings the Second Advent.  We must expect that before she has been in her grave fifty years she will be regarded by her following as having been herself the Second Advent.  She is already worshiped, and we must expect this feeling to spread, territorially, and also to deepen in intensity.