out and know what it is I want to say before I begin.  An inspirer cannot inspire for Mrs. Eddy and keep his reputation.  I have never seen such slipshod work, bar the ten that interpreted for the home market the “sell all thou hast.”  I have quoted one “spiritual” rendering of the Lord’s Prayer, I have seen one other one, and am told there are five more.  Yet the inspirer of Mrs. Eddy the new Infallible casts a complacent critical stone at the other Infallible for being unable to make up its mind about such things.  Science and Health, edition 1899, page 33: 

“The decisions, by vote of Church Councils, as to what should and should not be considered Holy Writ, the manifest mistakes in the ancient versions:  the thirty thousand different readings in the Old Testament and the three hundred thousand in the New—­these facts show how a mortal and material sense stole into the divine record, darkening, to some extent, the inspired pages with its own hue.”

To some extent, yes—­speaking cautiously.  But it is nothing, really nothing; Mrs. Eddy is only a little way behind, and if her inspirer lives to get her Annex to suit him that Catholic record will have to “go ’way back and set down,” as the ballad says.  Listen to the boastful song of Mrs. Eddy’s organ, the Christian Science Journal for March, 1902, about that year’s revamping and half-soling of Science and Health, whose official name is the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, and who is now the Official Pastor and Infallible and Unerring Guide of every Christian Science church in the two hemispheres, hear Simple Simon that met the pieman brag of the Infallible’s fallibility: 

“Throughout the entire book the verbal changes are so numerous as to indicate the vast amount of time and labor Mrs. Eddy has devoted to this revision.  The time and labor thus bestowed is relatively as great as that of—­the committee who revised the Bible....  Thus we have additional evidence of the herculean efforts our beloved Leader has made and is constantly making for the promulgation of Truth and the furtherance of her divinely bestowed mission,” etc.

It is a steady job.  I could help inspire if desired; I am not doing much now, and would work for half-price, and should not object to the country.

PRICE OF THE PASTOR-UNIVERSAL

The price of the Pastor-Universal, Science and Health, called in Science literature the Comforter—­and by that other sacred Name—­is three dollars in cloth, as heretofore, six when it is finely bound, and shaped to imitate the Testament, and is broken into verses.  Margin of profit above cost of manufacture, from five hundred to seven hundred per cent., as already noted In the profane subscription-trade, it costs the publisher heavily to canvass a three-dollar book; he must pay the general agent sixty per cent. commission—­that is to say, one dollar and eighty-cents.  Mrs. Eddy escapes this blistering tax, because she owns the Christian Science canvasser, and can compel him to work for nothing.  Read the following command—­not request—­fulminated by Mrs. Eddy, over her signature, in the Christian Science Journal for March, 1897, and quoted by Mr. Peabody in his book.  The book referred to is Science and Health: