Will Christian Science get a chance to show its wares?  It has already secured that chance.  Will it flourish and spread and prosper if it shall create for itself the one thing essential to those conditions—­an environment?  It has already created an environment.  There are families of Christian Scientists in every community in America, and each family is a factory; each family turns out a Christian Science product at the customary intervals, and contributes it to the Cause in the only way in which contributions of recruits to Churches are ever made on a large scale—­by the puissant forces of personal contact and association.  Each family is an agency for the Cause, and makes converts among the neighbors, and starts some more factories.

Four years ago there were six Christian Scientists in a certain town that I am acquainted with; a year ago there were two hundred and fifty there; they have built a church, and its membership now numbers four hundred.  This has all been quietly done; done without frenzied revivals, without uniforms, brass bands, street parades, corner oratory, or any of the other customary persuasions to a godly life.  Christian Science, like Mohammedanism, is “restricted” to the “unintelligent, the people who do not think.”  There lies the danger.  It makes Christian Science formidable.  It is “restricted” to ninety-nine one-hundredths of the human race, and must be reckoned with by regular Christianity.  And will be, as soon as it is too late.

BOOK II

“There were remarkable things about the stranger called the Man —­Mystery-things so very extraordinary that they monopolized attention and made all of him seem extraordinary; but this was not so, the most of his qualities being of the common, every-day size and like anybody else’s.  It was curious.  He was of the ordinary stature, and had the ordinary aspects; yet in him were hidden such strange contradictions and disproportions!  He was majestically fearless and heroic; he had the strength of thirty men and the daring of thirty thousand; handling armies, organizing states, administering governments—­these were pastimes to him; he publicly and ostentatiously accepted the human race at its own valuation—­as demigods—­and privately and successfully dealt with it at quite another and juster valuation—­as children and slaves; his ambitions were stupendous, and his dreams had no commerce with the humble plain, but moved with the cloud-rack among the snow-summits.  These features of him were, indeed, extraordinary, but the rest of him was ordinary and usual.  He was so mean-minded, in the matter of jealousy, that it was thought he was descended from a god; he was vain in little ways, and had a pride in trivialities; he doted on ballads about moonshine and bruised hearts; in education he was deficient, he was indifferent to literature, and knew nothing of art; he was dumb upon all subjects but one, indifferent to all except that