Rev. Wiggins letter to a friend, dated December 14, 1889

Re-printed from “The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy & The History of Christian Science”

pages 337-339

Christian Science, on its theological side, is an ignorant revival of one form of ancient gnosticism, that Jesus is to be distinguished from the Christ, and that his earthly appearance was phantasmal, not real and fleshly.

On its moral side, it involves what must follow from the doctrine that reality is a dream, and that if a thing is right in thought, why right it is, and that sin is non-existent, because God can behold no evil. Not that Christian Science believers generally see this, or practice evil, but the virus is within.

Religiously, Christian Science is a revolt from orthodoxy, but unphilosophically conducted, endeavouring to ride two horses.

Physically, it leads people to trust all to nature, the great healer, and so does some good. Great virtue in imagination . . . Where there is disease which time will not reach, Christian Science is useless.

As far as the High Priestess of it, . . . she is – well I could tell you, but not write. An awfully (I use the word advisedly) smart woman, acute, shrewd, but not well read, nor in any way learned. What she has, as documents well show, she got from P.P. Quimby, of Portland, Maine, whom she eulogised after death as the great leader and her special teacher, . . . she tried to answer the charge of the adoption of Quimby’s ideas, and called me in to counsel her about it, but her only answer (in print!) was that if she said such things twenty years ago, she must have been under the influence of animal magnetism, which is her devil. No church can long get on without a devil, you know. Much more I could say if you were here.

People beset with this delusion are thoroughly irrational. Take an instance. Dr. R—- of Roxbury is not a believer. His wife is. One evening I met her at a friendly house. Knowing her belief, I ventured only a mild and wary dissent, saying that I saw too much of it to feel satisfied, etc. In fact, the Doctor said the same and told me more in private. Yet, later, I learned that this slight discussion made her ill, nervous, and had a bad effect.

One of Mrs. Eddy’s followers went so far as to say that if she saw Mrs. Eddy commit a crime she should believe her own sight at fault, not Mrs. Eddy’s conduct. An intelligent man told me in reference to lies he knew about, that the wrong was in us. “Was not Jesus accused of wrong-doing, yet guiltless?”

Only experience can teach these fanatics, ie, the real believers, not the charlatans who go into it for the money, … As for the book, if you have any edition since December, 1885, it is my supervision. Though now she is getting out an entirely new edition, with which I had nothing to do, and occasionally she has made changes whereof I did not know. The chapter B—– told you of is rather fanciful, though, to use Mrs. Eddy’s language in her last note, her “friends think it a gem.” It is the one called “Wayside Hints,” and was added after the work was not only in type, but cast, because she wished to take out some twenty pages of diatribe on her dissenters. . . . I do not think it will greatly edify you, the chapter. As for clearness, many Christian Science people thought her early editions much better, because they sounded more like Mrs. Eddy. The truth is, she does not care to have her paragraphs clear, and delights in so expressing herself that her words may have various readings and meanings. Really, that is one of the tricks of the trade. You know sibyls have always been thus oracular, to “keep the word of promise to the ear, and break it to the hope.”

There is nothing really to understand in “Science and Health” except that God is all, and yet there is no God in matter! What they fail to explain is, the origin of the idea of matter, or sin. They say it comes from mortal mind, and that mortal mind is not divinely created, in fact, has no existence; in fact, that nothing comes from nothing, and that matter and disease are like dreams, having no existence. Quimby had definite ideas, but Mrs. Eddy has not understood them.

When I first knew Christian Science, I wrote a defensive pamphlet called “Christian Science and the Bible” (though I did not believe the doctrine). . . . I found fair game in the assaults of orthodoxy upon Mrs. Eddy, and support in the supernaturalism of the Bible; but I did not pretend to give an exposition of Christian Science, and I did not know the old lady as well as I do now.

No, Swedenborg, and all other such writers, are sealed books to her. She cannot understand such utterances, and never could, but dollars and cents she understands thoroughly.

Her influence is wonderful. Mrs. R—-‘s husband is anxious not to have her undeceived, though her tenth cancer is forming, lest she sink under the change of faith, and I can quite see that the loss of such a faith, like loss of faith in a physician, might be injurious. . . . In the summer of 1888, some thirty of her best people left Mrs. Eddy, including her leading people, too, her association and church officers. . . They still believe nominally in Christian Science, yet several of them . . . are studying medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Boston; and she gave consent for at least one of them to study at this allopathic school. These students I often see, and they say the professors are coming over to their way of belief, which means simply that they hear the trust-worthiness of the laws of nature proclaimed. As in her book, and in her class (which I went through), she says, “Call me a surgeon in surgical cases.”

“What if I find a breech presentation in childbirth?” asked a pupil.

“You will not, if you are in Christian Science,” replied Mrs. Eddy.

“But if I do?”

“Then you are to send for the nearest regular practitioner!”

You see, Mrs. Eddy is nobody’s fool.

Re-printed from “The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy & The History of Christian Science” pages 337-339