My friends, do you know that since the world began Christian Science is the only system which has intelligently related religion to business?  Christian Science shows that since all ideas belong to Mind, God, therefore all real business belongs to Him.

As I said, these people have the new-old power of mental healing.  They blunder along with it blindly, absurdly, sometimes with tragic consequences; but meantime the rank and file of the pill-doctors know nothing about this power, and regard it with contempt mingled with fear; so of course the hosts of sufferers whom the pill-doctors cannot help flock to the healers of the “Church of Christ, Scientist”.  According to the custom of those who are healed by “faith”, they swallow line, hook, and sinker, creed, ritual, metaphysic and divinity.  So we see in twentieth-century America precisely what we saw in B.C. twentieth-century Assyria—­a host of worshippers; giving their worldly goods without stint, and a priesthood, made partly of fanatics and partly of charlatans, conducting a vast enterprise of graft, and harvesting that thing desired of all men, power over the lives and destinies of others.

And of course among themselves they quarrel; they murder one another’s Mortal Minds, they drive one another out, they snarl over the spoils like a pack of hungry animals.  Listen to the Mother, denouncing one of her students—­a perfectly amiable and harmless youth whose only offense was that he had gone his own way and was healing the sick for the benefit of his own pocket-book: 

Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the sunshine of earth, that would sever friends, destroy virtue, put out Truth, and murder in secret the innocent, befouling thy track with the trophies of thy guilt—­I say, Behold the “cloud” no bigger than a man’s hand already rising on the horizon of Truth, to pour down upon thy guilty head the hailstones of doom.

And again: 

The Nero of today, regaling himself through a mental method with the torture of individuals, is repeating history, and will fall upon his own sword, and it shall pierce him through.  Let him remember this when, in the dark recesses of thought, he is robbing, committing adultery and killing.  When he is attempting to turn friend away from friend, ruthlessly stabbing the quivering heart; when he is clipping the thread of life and giving to the grave youth and its rainbow hues; when he is turning back the reviving sufferer to his bed of pain, clouding his first morning after years of night; and the Nemesis of that hour shall point to the tyrant’s fate, who falls at length upon the sword of justice.

#New Nonsense#