th her finger on a button and govern the whole combination as easily
as a bench-manager governs a dog-show.

It would be a grand thing to see, and I feel a kind of
disappointment--but never mind, a religion is better and larger; and
there is more to it. And I have not been steeping myself in Christian
Science all these weeks without finding out that the one sensible thing
to do with a disappointment is to put it out of your mind and think of
something cheerfuler.

We outsiders cannot conceive of Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science Religion
as being a sudden and miraculous birth, but only as a growth from a seed
planted by circumstances, and developed stage by stage by command and
compulsion of the same force. What the stages were we cannot know, but
are privileged to guess. She may have gotten the mental-healing idea
from Quimby--it had been experimented with for ages, and was no one's
special property. [For the present, for convenience' sake, let us
proceed upon the hypothesis that that was all she got of him, and that
she put up the rest of the assets herself. This will strain us, but
let us try it.] In each and all its forms and under all its many names,
mental healing had had limits, always, and they were rather narrow
ones--Mrs. Eddy, let us imagine, removed the fence, abolished the
frontiers. Not by expanding mental-healing, but by absorbing its small
bulk into the vaster bulk of Christian Science--Divine Science, The Holy
Ghost, the Comforter--which was a quite different and sublimer force,
and one which had long lain dormant and unemployed.

The Christian Scientist believes that the Spirit of God (life and love)
pervades the universe like an atmosphere; that whoso will study Science
and Health can get from it the secret of how to inhale that transforming
air; that to breathe it is to be made new; that from the new man all
sorrow, all care, all miseries of the mind vanish away, for that only
peace, contentment and measureless joy can live in that divine fluid;
that it purifies the body from disease, which is a vicious creation of
the gross human mind, and cannot continue to exist in the presence of
the Immortal Mind, the renewing Spirit of God.

The Scientist finds this reasonable, natural, and not harder to believe
than that the disease germ, a creature of darkness, perishes when
exposed to the light of the great sun--a new revelation of profane
science which no one doubts. He reminds us that the actinic ray, shini