each family
is a factory; each family turns out a Christian Science product at the
customary intervals, and contributes it to the Cause in the only way
in which contributions of recruits to Churches are ever made on a large
scale--by the puissant forces of personal contact and association.
Each family is an agency for the Cause, and makes converts among the
neighbors, and starts some more factories.

Four years ago there were six Christian Scientists in a certain town
that I am acquainted with; a year ago there were two hundred and fifty
there; they have built a church, and its membership now numbers four
hundred. This has all been quietly done; done without frenzied revivals,
without uniforms, brass bands, street parades, corner oratory, or any of
the other customary persuasions to a godly life. Christian Science, like
Mohammedanism, is "restricted" to the "unintelligent, the people who
do not think." There lies the danger. It makes Christian Science
formidable. It is "restricted" to ninety-nine one-hundredths of the
human race, and must be reckoned with by regular Christianity. And will
be, as soon as it is too late.

BOOK II

"There were remarkable things about the stranger called the
Man--Mystery-things so very extraordinary that they monopolized
attention and made all of him seem extraordinary; but this was not so,
the most of his qualities being of the common, every-day size and like
anybody else's. It was curious. He was of the ordinary stature, and had
the ordinary aspects; yet in him were hidden such strange contradictions
and disproportions! He was majestically fearless and heroic; he had
the strength of thirty men and the daring of thirty thousand; handling
armies, organizing states, administering governments--these were
pastimes to him; he publicly and ostentatiously accepted the human race
at its own valuation--as demigods--and privately and successfully dealt
with it at quite another and juster valuation--as children and slaves;
his ambitions were stupendous, and his dreams had no commerce with the
humble plain, but moved with the cloud-rack among the snow-summits.
These features of him were, indeed, extraordinary, but the rest of
him was ordinary and usual. He was so mean-minded, in the matter of
jealousy, that it was thought he was descended from a god; he was vain
in little ways, and had a pride in trivialities; he doted on ballads
about moonshine and bruised hearts; in education he was def