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.
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:
