The Christian Scientist has organised the business.  Now that was certainly a gigantic idea.  There is more intellect in it than would be needed in the invention of a couple of millions of Eddy Science-and-Health Bible Annexes.  Electricity, in limitless volume, has existed in the air and the rocks and the earth and everywhere since time began—­and was going to waste all the while.  In our time we have organised that scattered and wandering force and set it to work, and backed the business with capital, and concentrated it in few and competent hands, and the results are as we see.

The Christian Scientist has taken a force which has been lying idle in every member of the human race since time began, and has organised it, and backed the business with capital, and concentrated it at Boston headquarters in the hands of a small and very competent Trust, and there are results.

Therein lies the promise that this monopoly is going to extend its commerce wide in the earth.  I think that if the business were conducted in the loose and disconnected fashion customary with such things, it would achieve but little more than the modest prosperity usually secured by unorganised great moral and commercial ventures; but I believe that so long as this one remains compactly organised and closely concentrated in a Trust, the spread of its dominion will continue.

Vienna:  May 1, 1899.

[1] After raising a dead child to life, the disciple who did it writes an account of her performance, to Mrs. Eddy, and closes it thus:  ’My prayer daily is to be more spiritual, that I may do more as you would have me do... and may we all love you more and so live it that the world may know that the Christ is come.’—­Printed in the Concord, N.H., Independent Statesman, March 9, 1899.  If this is no worship, it is a good imitation of it.

[2] In the past two years the membership of the Established Church of England have given voluntary contributions amounting to $73,000,000 to the Church’s benevolent enterprises.  Churches that give have nothing to hide.

[3] I may be introducing the capital S a little early—­still it is on its way.

IS HE LIVING OR IS HE DEAD?

I was spending the month of March 1892 at Mentone, in the Riviera.  At this retired spot one has all the advantages, privately, which are to be had publicly at Monte Carlo and Nice, a few miles farther along.  That is to say, one has the flooding sunshine, the balmy air and the brilliant blue sea, without the marring additions of human pow-wow and fuss and feathers and display.  Mentone is quiet, simple, restful, unpretentious; the rich and the gaudy do not come there.  As a rule, I mean, the rich do not come there.  Now and then a rich man comes, and I presently got acquainted with one of these.  Partially to disguise him I will call him Smith.  One day, in the Hotel des Anglais, at the second breakfast, he exclaimed: