Will Christian Science get a chance to show its wares?
It has already secured that chance. Will it
flourish and spread and prosper if it shall create
for itself the one thing essential to those conditions—an
environment? It has already created an environment.
There are families of Christian Scientists in every
community in America, and each family is a factory;
each family turns out a Christian Science product at
the customary intervals, and contributes it to the
Cause in the only way in which contributions of recruits
to Churches are ever made on a large scale—by
the puissant forces of personal contact and association.
Each family is an agency for the Cause, and makes
converts among the neighbors, and starts some more
factories.
Four years ago there were six Christian Scientists
in a certain town that I am acquainted with; a year
ago there were two hundred and fifty there; they have
built a church, and its membership now numbers four
hundred. This has all been quietly done; done
without frenzied revivals, without uniforms, brass
bands, street parades, corner oratory, or any of the
other customary persuasions to a godly life.
Christian Science, like Mohammedanism, is “restricted”
to the “unintelligent, the people who do not
think.” There lies the danger. It
makes Christian Science formidable. It is “restricted”
to ninety-nine one-hundredths of the human race, and
must be reckoned with by regular Christianity.
And will be, as soon as it is too late.
BOOK II
“There were remarkable things about the stranger
called the Man —Mystery-things so very
extraordinary that they monopolized attention and
made all of him seem extraordinary; but this was not
so, the most of his qualities being of the common,
every-day size and like anybody else’s.
It was curious. He was of the ordinary stature,
and had the ordinary aspects; yet in him were hidden
such strange contradictions and disproportions!
He was majestically fearless and heroic; he had the
strength of thirty men and the daring of thirty thousand;
handling armies, organizing states, administering
governments—these were pastimes to him;
he publicly and ostentatiously accepted the human race
at its own valuation—as demigods—and
privately and successfully dealt with it at quite
another and juster valuation—as children
and slaves; his ambitions were stupendous, and his
dreams had no commerce with the humble plain, but
moved with the cloud-rack among the snow-summits.
These features of him were, indeed, extraordinary,
but the rest of him was ordinary and usual. He
was so mean-minded, in the matter of jealousy, that
it was thought he was descended from a god; he was
vain in little ways, and had a pride in trivialities;
he doted on ballads about moonshine and bruised hearts;
in education he was deficient, he was indifferent to
literature, and knew nothing of art; he was dumb upon
all subjects but one, indifferent to all except that
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