I think Mrs. Eddy was born with a far-seeing business-eye, but did not know it; and with a great organizing and executive talent, and did not know it; and with a large appetite for power and distinction, and did not know it.  I think the reason that her make did not show up until middle life was that she had General Grant’s luck—­Circumstance and Opportunity did not come her way when she was younger.  The qualities that were born in her had to wait for circumstance and opportunity—­but they were there:  they were there to stay, whether they ever got a chance to fructify or not.  If they had come early, they would have found her ready and competent.  And they—­not she—­would have determined what they would set her at and what they would make of her.  If they had elected to commission her as second-assistant cook in a bankrupt boarding-house, I know the rest of it—­I know what would have happened.  She would have owned the boarding-house within six months; she would have had the late proprietor on salary and humping himself, as the worldly say; she would have had that boarding-house spewing money like a mint; she would have worked the servants and the late landlord up to the limit; she would have squeezed the boarders till they wailed, and by some mysterious quality born in her she would have kept the affections of certain of the lot whose love and esteem she valued, and flung the others down the back area; in two years she would own all the boarding-houses in the town, in five all the boarding-houses in the State, in twenty all the hotels in America, in forty all the hotels on the planet, and would sit at home with her finger on a button and govern the whole combination as easily as a bench-manager governs a dog-show.

It would be a grand thing to see, and I feel a kind of disappointment —­but never mind, a religion is better and larger; and there is more to it.  And I have not been steeping myself in Christian Science all these weeks without finding out that the one sensible thing to do with a disappointment is to put it out of your mind and think of something cheerfuler.

We outsiders cannot conceive of Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science Religion as being a sudden and miraculous birth, but only as a growth from a seed planted by circumstances, and developed stage by stage by command and compulsion of the same force.  What the stages were we cannot know, but are privileged to guess.  She may have gotten the mental-healing idea from Quimby—­it had been experimented with for ages, and was no one’s special property. [For the present, for convenience’ sake, let us proceed upon the hypothesis that that was all she got of him, and that she put up the rest of the assets herself.  This will strain us, but let us try it.] In each and all its forms and under all its many names, mental healing had had limits, always, and they were rather narrow ones —­Mrs. Eddy, let us imagine, removed the fence, abolished the frontiers.  Not by expanding mental-healing, but by absorbing its small bulk into the vaster bulk of Christian Science—­Divine Science, The Holy Ghost, the Comforter—­which was a quite different and sublimer force, and one which had long lain dormant and unemployed.