They believe it is a Christianity that is in the New Testament; that it has always been there, that in the drift of ages it was lost through disuse and neglect, and that this benefactor has found it and given it back to men, turning the night of life into day, its terrors into myths, its lamentations into songs of emancipation and rejoicing.

There we have Mrs. Eddy as her followers see her.  She has lifted them out of grief and care and doubt and fear, and made their lives beautiful; she found them wandering forlorn in a wintry wilderness, and has led them to a tropic paradise like that of which the poet sings: 

     “O, islands there are on the face of the deep
     Where the leaves never fade and the skies never weep.”

To ask them to examine with a microscope the character of such a benefactor; to ask them to examine it at all; to ask them to look at a blemish which another person believes he has found in it—­well, in their place could you do it?  Would you do it?  Wouldn’t you be ashamed to do it?  If a tramp had rescued your child from fire and death, and saved its mother’s heart from breaking, could you see his rags?  Could you smell his breath?  Mrs. Eddy has done more than that for these people.

They are prejudiced witnesses.  To the credit of human nature it is not possible that they should be otherwise.  They sincerely believe that Mrs. Eddy’s character is pure and perfect and beautiful, and her history without stain or blot or blemish.  But that does not settle it.  They sincerely believe she did not borrow the Great Idea from Quimby, but hit upon it herself.  It may be so, and it could be so.  Let it go—­there is no way to settle it.  They believe she carried away no Quimby manuscripts.  Let that go, too—­there is no way to settle it.  They believe that she, and not another, built the Religion upon the book, and organized it.  I believe it, too.

Finally, they believe that she philosophized Christian Science, explained it, systematized it, and wrote it all out with her own hand in the book Science and Health.

I am not able to believe that.  Let us draw the line there.  The known and undisputed products of her pen are a formidable witness against her.  They do seem to me to prove, quite clearly and conclusively, that writing, upon even simple subjects, is a difficult labor for her:  that she has never been able to write anything above third-rate English; that she is weak in the matter of grammar; that she has but a rude and dull sense of the values of words; that she so lacks in the matter of literary precision that she can seldom put a thought into words that express it lucidly to the reader and leave no doubts in his mind as to whether he has rightly understood or not; that she cannot even draught a Preface that a person can fully comprehend, nor one which can by any art be translated into a fully understandable form; that she can seldom inject into a Preface even single sentences whose meaning is uncompromisingly clear—­yet Prefaces are her specialty, if she has one.