"A social curse, possessing neither intelligence nor power, its basis being a belief, and this belief an error. Spiritualism destroys the supremacy of spirit; clairvoyance influences mortal thought only; and the Faith Cure is belief without understanding-mental blindness. . . Christian Science never gives medicine, never recommends hygiene, never manipulates, never consults spirits, or requires a history of the patient, or trespasses on the rights of mind through animal magnetism."

Yet if the following sentence means anything, it is a squinting toward hypnotism :

"The soul has eyes to see, and ears to hear. There is an inner door through which the soul can look. The senses can be made to slumber, while the door of the soul is ajar to catch the vibrations which are borne in on the atmosphere."

Christian Science heals by working on the consciousness, and "a mental cure is the discovery made by a sick person that he is well." The patient is told to "cast aside all thought of sickness and pain, and know that God is the only panacea, divine love the only medicine." This divine love is to be got by seeking "the help of a Christian healer," who says to the patient mentally, "You have no disease; what you call your disease is a fixed mode of thought arising from the absence of positive belief in absolute good." A sufferer from gout is told that it has no real existence, but that it is "a shadow of doubt reflected in the feet a mere negation. Look down yourself, and see that it

is gone the place where you located it now shows for itself as sound as the rest of your body." Another writer gives us a compact and lucid exposition of the modus medelae: "It consists in a vigorous holding of the patient to his right of soul growth, unobstructed and unretarded by physical defects."

A form of prayer is sometimes given to the sick; not "prayer with the old interpretation," which "begs the Father to change the unchangeable," but "prayer with the new interpretation," which "lifts the beggar to the comprehension that he himself has omitted to take the gifts already prepared for him." The Rev. Dr. J. M. Buckley, in an entertaining and thorough article on Christian Science, gives a "Prayer for a Dyspeptic," from a text-book on Mind Cure. It concludes thus:

"Lord, help us to believe that all evil is utterly unreal; that it is silly to be

sick, absurd to be ailing, wicked to be wailing, atheism and denial of God to say 'I am sick.' Help us stoutly to affirm, with our hand in thy hand, with our eyes fixed on thee, that we have no dyspepsia, that we never had dyspepsia, that we will never have dyspepsia, that there is no such thing, that there never was any such thing, that there never will be any such thing."

Should a patient appear to grow worse, it only shows that the crisis is approaching; this is called "chemilcalization," and is "the upheaval, when mental truth is destroying erroneous and mortal belief. It brings sin and sickness to the surface, as in a fermenting fluid, allowing impurities to pass away."

There being "no space or time to mind," distance offers no hinderance to the Christian healer, and he is quite as potent if he be in New York or Boston, and the patient in San Francisco or Brooklyn. "Every thought that you think will be transferred to the person thought of, if you only think long enough and strong enough." "The living image and inner personality seem to stand before us, and what we say to it we say to him." Though faith is not held to be essential to success, it is acknowledged to be a good helper.

This is a fair presentment of the principles and practice of Christian Science in the words of its founder and its chief teachers. It is a strange compound of theology, cosmology, ontology, and healing, and full of impossibilities, contradictions, and inconsistencies. There is little heed given to the apostle's caution: "Unless ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken?" and a good deal of speaking in the air, so that it is not easy to get at the meaning of the voice. The theology of this "science" cannot be tortured into any known system of Christianity, primitive, mediæval, or present. One of its leading professors, on being asked why they called themselves "Christian Scientists, while they refused all the chief dogmas accepted by all Christian sects," replied that "though rejecting doctrinal Christianity, they regarded Jesus of Nazareth as the most perfect exemplification of the triumph of mind over matter."

Its ontology is a crazy-quilt patched with every crotchet of philosophers, from Plato to brain-fagging Hegel. Dr. Armstrong styled metaphysics "talking grave nonsense on sub

jects beyond the reach of human understanding;" and Michelet, "Tart de s'égarer avec méthode." Here we have the nonsense in abundance, and the bewilderment without the method. In spite, however, of its being just now somewhat out of favor and fashion, there always has been in metaphysics, as Goethe observes, "much wisdom of thought." The ontology of Christian Science is borrowed from the Greek philosophers and Bishop Berkeley, and looks upon the phenomenal world as a mere mirage, an illusion of the thinking self. It regards the cosmos as God, and man as a manifestation of the Divine Essence which pervades the universe, and in whom he is contained. Real space is the Eternal. The universe is a thought, a beat, a pulse of the Absolute Mind. There is no corporeal or material existence, only an incorporeal active essence or spirit. The cosmos is a mind-constituted universe, in which all external things exist only as clusters of dependent and powerless phenomena, perceived and affected by active mind. In plain words, the existence of an external world is denied, the representation which we have of it corresponding to no objective reality. The one and only thing is mind.

The problem of mind and body has occupied the best thought for many ages, and the extent and nature of their connection has been the subject of active and even acrid dispute between the most prominent philosophers. That much progress in the study of the nervous system has been made, particularly during the latter half of this century, is true; but it is also true that to a great degree it is still what D'Alembert said of the space between geometry and metaphysics, "l'abîme des incertitudes et le théâtre des découvertes." If we have a better knowledge of the intimate structure of the brain, we are still struggling with a full understanding of its offices.

Psychology to-day is either monistic or dualistic. The monists insist, as a fundamental fact, that there can be no manifestation of consciousness, no psychical activity, without correlative molecular change of nerve-element, and that this is all-sufficient. The dualists, on the other hand, contend that the nerve vibrations or impulses are set agoing by a special entity, and are its phenomenal expression, the physical series and the

psychical series keeping abreast. Both schools concede, therefore, the necessity of a physical basis for the manifestation of the facts of consciousness. Mind for the one is a force of matter; for the other, an entity dwelling in the organism, and using it as an instrument for the purpose of expression. Without an environment to act upon the organism, and without an organism to perceive, feel, and react, there can be no mind. Our knowledge, our beliefs, are derived from the impressions of an external world, which stream into our senses, "are combined within the mind by laws of association, and are grouped, analyzed, recollected, till they form our facts, cognitions, principles, propositions, and generalizations." All states of mind are states of body. If the mind rules the body, the body rules the mind. The mental and bodily functions are bound indissolubly together, and there is essential interdependence. Perfectness of service is adjusted to integrity of substance, any defect of the latter marring the proper expression of the force. "The influence," says Huxley, "of diet upon dreams; of stimulants upon the fullness and velocity of thought; the delirious phantasms generated by disease, by hasheesh, or by alcohol, will occur to every one as examples of the marvelous sensitiveness of the apparatus of ideation to purely physical influences."*

After spiriting away the body, and saying, with Master Doctor Caius, "dere be no bodies," or with the Berkeleyites, that the body exists only as a phase or quality of mind, the Christian Scientists, with rare contradiction and inconsequence, “materialize" it out of "mortal mind" for the purpose of contumely and contempt. The body has long had its "bites and blows" from heathen philosophers and Christian theologians. Now, if we know anything, we know our own bodies. Almost the first acts of consciousness of the infant are the attempts to get acquainted with its body. "We know," says Lewes, "that we exist as objects perceptible to our senses, and to the senses of others; and as subjects percipient of objects, and conscious of feelings. We live, feel, and move. The solidity, form, color, weight, and motions of the body constitute the objective, visible self. The sensations, ideas, and volitions constitute the

"Life of Hume."

subjective, intelligible self." "In man there are other things great besides mind," writes Dr. Maudsley, though Sir William Hamilton had hung in his lecture-room the legend, "In man there is nothing great but mind;" forgetting how barren is the study of mind without the study of the body. Is no account to be taken of the wondrous organization of the great primary apparatuses by which the life of the individual is maintained and the species preserved, and of the nervous and muscular systems by which man is put in relation with his fellow-men and an external world? To those who believe that man was created in the likeness of his Maker, who "breathed into him the breath of life, and made him a living soul," such vilification, whether from pagan, philosopher, or priest, can only rouse a feeling of disgust. Whether we look on man as a dismissed angel or an improved ape, he is still the same wonderful piece of work, "the paragon of animals."

As may easily have been guessed, we find in the following quotation from one of the "professors" of Christian Science the keynote of their treatment, and its true explanation: "To modify the patient's views with regard to himself, we apply the principle of Suggestion in positive affirmation." The foreign and the native-born "cures," if not one in theory, are one in practice.

The dogmas of Christian Science are a faith strained into a void. They ask a surrender of ordinary and well-grounded beliefs, by resolving the phenomena of nature into subjective affections, and making the external universe a mere shadow and echo. They contradict our senses,

"As if these organs had deceptious functions."

They disallow what we are most certain of, the existence of our own bodies. Christian Science denies disease, as we understand and know it, calling sickness a figment of imagination, our ofttime maladies mere beliefs, and affirms that "mortal mind" alone suffers. It disowns all knowledge of the building and doings of the wondrous tenement we dwell in, and rejects inquiry into the causes and nature of the disorders of the organism, as if any of its followers would trust a crippled watch