There is a plenty of other testimonies in the magazine, but these quoted samples will answer.  They show the kind of trade the Science is driving.  Now we come back to the question; Does it kill a patient here and there and now and then?  We must concede it.  Does it compensate for this?  I am persuaded that it can make a plausible showing in that direction.  For instance:  when it lays its hands upon a soldier who has suffered thirty years of helpless torture and makes him whole in body and mind, what is the actual sum of that achievement?  This, I think:  that it has restored to life a subject who had essentially died ten deaths a year for thirty years, and each of them a long and painful one.  But for its interference that man would have essentially died thirty times more, in the three years which have since elapsed.  There are thousand of young people in the land who are now ready to enter upon a life-long death similar to that man’s.  Every time the Science captures one of these and secures to him life-long immunity from imagination-manufactured disease, it may plausibly claim that in his person it has saved 300 lives.  Meantime it will kill a man every now and then; but no matter, it will still be ahead on the credit side.

VIII

’We consciously declare that “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” was foretold as well as its author, Mary Baker Eddy, in Revelation x.  She is the “mighty angel,” or God’s highest thought to this age (verse 1), giving us the spiritual interpretation of the Bible in the “little book open” (verse 2).  Thus we prove that Christian Science is the second coming of Christ—­Truth—­Spirit.’  —­Lecture by Dr. George Tomkins, D.D., C.S.

There you have it in plain speech.  She is the mighty angel; she is the divinely and officially sent bearer of God’s highest thought.  For the present, she brings the Second Advent.  We must expect that before she has been in her grave fifty years she will be regarded by her following as having been herself the Second Advent.  She is already worshipped, and we must expect this feeling to spread territorially, and also to deepen in intensity [1].

Particularly after her death; for then, as anyone can foresee, Eddy-worship will be taught in the Sunday-schools and pulpits of the cult.  Already whatever she puts her trade-mark on, thought it be only a memorial spoon, is holy and is eagerly and passionately and gratefully bought by the disciple, and becomes a fetish in his house.  I say bought, for the Boston Christian-Science Trust gives nothing away; everything it has for sale.  And the terms are cash; and not cash only but cash in advance.  Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar.  Not a spiritual Dollar, but a real one.  From end to end of the Christian-Science literature not a single (material) thing in the world is conceded to be real, except the Dollar.  But