As regards No. 3, Mrs. Eddy was brought up, from the cradle, an old-time, boiler-iron, Westminster-Catechism Christian, and knew her Bible as well as Captain Kydd knew his, “when he sailed, when he sailed,” and perhaps as sympathetically.  The Great Idea had struck a million Bible-readers before her as being possible of resurrection and application—­it must have struck as many as that, and been cogitated, indolently, doubtingly, then dropped and forgotten—­and it could have struck her, in due course.  But how it could interest her, how it could appeal to her—­with her make this a thing that is difficult to understand.

For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful:  the power, through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and pains and grief—­all—­with a word, with a touch of the hand!  This power was given by the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the converted.  All—­every one.  It was exercised for generations afterwards.  Any Christian who was in earnest and not a make-believe, not a policy —­Christian, not a Christian for revenue only, had that healing power, and could cure with it any disease or any hurt or damage possible to human flesh and bone.  These things are true, or they are not.  If they were true seventeen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago it would be difficult to satisfactorily explain why or how or by what argument that power should be nonexistent in Christians now.

To wish to exercise it could occur to Mrs. Eddy—­but would it?

Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees—­money, power, glory—­vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish—­

Of course the Great Idea could strike her, we have to grant that, but why it should interest her is a question which can easily overstrain the imagination and bring on nervous prostration, or something like that, and is better left alone by the judicious, it seems to me—­

Unless we call to our help the alleged other side of Mrs. Eddy’s make and character the side which her multitude of followers see, and sincerely believe in.  Fairness requires that their view be stated here.  It is the opposite of the one which I have drawn from Mrs. Eddy’s history and from her By-laws.  To her followers she is this: 

Patient, gentle, loving, compassionate, noble hearted, unselfish, sinless, widely cultured, splendidly equipped mentally, a profound thinker, an able writer, a divine personage, an inspired messenger whose acts are dictated from the Throne, and whose every utterance is the Voice of God.

She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with a break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into eternity as fancies of the waking day melt into the dreams of sleep.