t was the idea, but we cannot be sure.
She has a perfectly astonishing talent for putting words together
in such a way as to make successful inquiry into their intention
impossible.

She generally makes us uneasy when she begins to tune up on her
fine-writing timbrel. It carries me back to her Plague-Spot and Poetry
days, and I just dread those:

"Into mortal mind's material obliquity I gazed and stood abashed.
Blanched was the cheek of pride. My heart bent low before the
omnipotence of Spirit, and a tint of humility soft as the heart of
a moonbeam mantled the earth. Bethlehem and Bethany, Gethsemane and
Calvary, spoke to my chastened sense as by the tearful lips of a babe."
Page 48.

The heart of a moonbeam is a pretty enough Friendship's-Album
expression--let it pass, though I do think the figure a little strained;
but humility has no tint, humility has no complexion, and if it had it
could not mantle the earth. A moonbeam might--I do not know--but she
did not say it was the moonbeam. But let it go, I cannot decide it, she
mixes me up so. A babe hasn't "tearful lips," it's its eyes. You find
none of Mrs. Eddy's kind of English in Science and Health--not a line of
it.

CHAPTER III

Setting aside title-page, index, etc., the little Autobiography begins
on page 7 and ends on page 130. My quotations are from the first forty
pages. They seem to me to prove the presence of the 'prentice hand. The
style of the forty pages is loose and feeble and 'prentice-like. The
movement of the narrative is not orderly and sequential, but rambles
around, and skips forward and back and here and there and yonder,
'prentice-fashion. Many a journeyman has broken up his narrative and
skipped about and rambled around, but he did it for a purpose, for
an advantage; there was art in it, and points to be scored by it; the
observant reader perceived the game, and enjoyed it and respected it, if
it was well played. But Mrs. Eddy's performance was without intention,
and destitute of art. She could score no points by it on those terms,
and almost any reader can see that her work was the uncalculated
puttering of a novice.

In the above paragraph I have described the first third of the booklet.
That third being completed, Mrs. Eddy leaves the rabbit-range,
crosses the frontier, and steps out upon her far-spreading big-game
territory--Christian Science and there is an instant change! The style
smartly improves; and the clumsy little techn