Mrs. Eddy’s known and undisputed writings are very limited in bulk; they exhibit no depth, no analytical quality, no thought above school composition size, and but juvenile ability in handling thoughts of even that modest magnitude.  She has a fine commercial ability, and could govern a vast railway system in great style; she could draught a set of rules that Satan himself would say could not be improved on—­for devilish effectiveness—­by his staff; but we know, by our excursions among the Mother-Church’s By-laws, that their English would discredit the deputy baggage-smasher.  I am quite sure that Mrs. Eddy cannot write well upon any subject, even a commercial one.

In the very first revision of Science and Health (1883), Mrs. Eddy wrote a Preface which is an unimpeachable witness that the rest of the book was written by somebody else.  I have put it in the Appendix along with a page or two taken from the body of the book, and will ask the reader to compare the labored and lumbering and confused gropings of this Preface with the easy and flowing and direct English of the other exhibit, and see if he can believe that the one hand and brain produced both.

And let him take the Preface apart, sentence by sentence, and searchingly examine each sentence word by word, and see if he can find half a dozen sentences whose meanings he is so sure of that he can rephrase them—­in words of his own—­and reproduce what he takes to be those meanings.  Money can be lost on this game.  I know, for I am the one that lost it.

Now let the reader turn to the excerpt which I have made from the chapter on “Prayer” (last year’s edition of Science and Health), and compare that wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of work with the aforesaid Preface, and with Mrs. Eddy’s poetry concerning the gymnastic trees, and Minerva’s not yet effete sandals, and the wreaths imported from Erudition’s bower for the decoration of Plymouth Rock, and the Plague-spot and Bacilli, and my other exhibits (turn back to my Chapters I. and II.) from the Autobiography, and finally with the late Communication concerning me, and see if he thinks anybody’s affirmation, or anybody’s sworn testimony, or any other testimony of any imaginable kind would ever be likely to convince him that Mrs. Eddy wrote that chapter on Prayer.

I do not wish to impose my opinion on any one who will not permit it, but such as it is I offer it here for what it is worth.  I cannot believe, and I do not believe, that Mrs. Eddy originated any of the thoughts and reasonings out of which the book Science and Health is constructed; and I cannot believe, and do not believe that she ever wrote any part of that book.

I think that if anything in the world stands proven, and well and solidly proven, by unimpeachable testimony—­the treacherous testimony of her own pen in her known and undisputed literary productions—­it is that Mrs. Eddy is not capable of thinking upon high planes, nor of reasoning clearly nor writing intelligently upon low ones.