A clear head for business, and a phenomenally long
one;
Clear understanding of business situations;
Accuracy in estimating the opportunities they offer;
Intelligence in planning a business move;
Firmness in sticking to it after it has been decided
upon;
Extraordinary daring;
Indestructible persistency;
Devouring ambition;
Limitless selfishness;
A knowledge of the weaknesses and poverties and docilities
of human
nature and how to turn them to account which has never
been surpassed, if
ever equalled;
And—necessarily—the foundation-stone
of Mrs. Eddy’s character is a never-wavering
confidence in herself.
It is a granite character. And—quite
naturally—a measure of the talc of smallnesses
common to human nature is mixed up in it and distributed
through it. When Mrs. Eddy is not dictating servilities
from her throne in the clouds to her official domestics
in Boston or to her far-spread subjects round about
the planet, but is down on the ground, she is kin to
us and one of us: sentimental as a girl, garrulous,
ungrammatical, incomprehensible, affected, vain of
her little human ancestry, unstable, inconsistent,
unreliable in statement, and naively and everlastingly
self-contradictory-oh, trivial and common and commonplace
as the commonest of us! just a Napoleon as Madame
de Remusat saw him, a brass god with clay legs.
In drawing Mrs. Eddy’s portrait it has been
my purpose to restrict myself to materials furnished
by herself, and I believe I have done that. If
I have misinterpreted any of her acts, it was not
done intentionally.
It will be noticed that in skeletonizing a list of
the qualities which have carried her to the dizzy
summit which she occupies, I have not mentioned the
power which was the commanding force employed in achieving
that lofty flight. It did not belong in that
list; it was a force that was not a detail of her
character, but was an outside one. It was the
power which proceeded from her people’s recognition
of her as a supernatural personage, conveyer of the
Latest Word, and divinely commissioned to deliver
it to the world. The form which such a recognition
takes, consciously or unconsciously, is worship; and
worship does not question nor criticize, it obeys.
The object of it does not need to coddle it, bribe
it, beguile it, reason with it, convince it—it
commands it; that is sufficient; the obedience rendered
is not reluctant, but prompt and whole-hearted.
Admiration for a Napoleon, confidence in him, pride
in him, affection for him, can lift him high and carry
him far; and these are forms of worship, and are strong
forces, but they are worship of a mere human being,
after all, and are infinitely feeble, as compared
with those that are generated by that other worship,
the worship of a divine personage. Mrs. Eddy
has this efficient worship, this massed and centralized
force, this force which is indifferent to opposition,
untroubled by fear, and goes to battle singing, like
Cromwell’s soldiers; and while she has it she
can command and it will obey, and maintain her on
her throne, and extend her empire.
