CHAPTER IX

Four years ago I wrote the preceding chapters.  I was assured by the wise that Christian Science was a fleeting craze and would soon perish.  This prompt and all-competent stripe of prophet is always to be had in the market at ground-floor rates.  He does not stop to load, or consider, or take aim, but lets fly just as he stands.  Facts are nothing to him, he has no use for such things; he works wholly by inspiration.  And so, when he is asked why he considers a new movement a passing fad and quickly perishable, he finds himself unprepared with a reason and is more or less embarrassed.  For a moment.  Only for a moment.  Then he waylays the first spectre of a reason that goes flitting through the desert places of his mind, and is at once serene again and ready for conflict.  Serene and confident.  Yet he should not be so, since he has had no chance to examine his catch, and cannot know whether it is going to help his contention or damage it.

The impromptu reason furnished by the early prophets of whom I have spoken was this: 

“There is nothing to Christian Science; there is nothing about it that appeals to the intellect; its market will be restricted to the unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not think.”

They called that a reason why the cult would not flourish and endure.  It seems the equivalent of saying: 

“There is no money in tinware; there is nothing about it that appeals to the rich; its market will be restricted to the poor.”

It is like bringing forward the best reason in the world why Christian Science should flourish and live, and then blandly offering it as a reason why it should sicken and die.

That reason was furnished me by the complacent and unfrightened prophets four years ago, and it has been furnished me again to-day.  If conversions to new religions or to old ones were in any considerable degree achieved through the intellect, the aforesaid reason would be sound and sufficient, no doubt; the inquirer into Christian Science might go away unconvinced and unconverted.  But we all know that conversions are seldom made in that way; that such a thing as a serious and painstaking and fairly competent inquiry into the claims of a religion or of a political dogma is a rare occurrence; and that the vast mass of men and women are far from being capable of making such an examination.  They are not capable, for the reason that their minds, howsoever good they may be, are not trained for such examinations.  The mind not trained for that work is no more competent to do it than are lawyers and farmers competent to make successful clothes without learning the tailor’s trade.  There are seventy-five million men and women among us who do not know how to cut out and make a dress-suit, and they would not think of trying; yet they all think they can competently think out