ible, perhaps I ought to say. Plainly the book was
written under the mental desolations of the Third Degree, and I feel
sure that none but the membership of that Degree can discover meanings
in it. When you read it you seem to be listening to a lively and
aggressive and oracular speech delivered in an unknown tongue, a speech
whose spirit you get but not the particulars; or, to change the figure,
you seem to be listening to a vigorous instrument which is making a
noise it thinks is a tune, but which to persons not members of the band
is only the martial tooting of a trombone, and merely stirs the soul
through the noise but does not convey a meaning.

The book's serenities of self-satisfaction do almost seem to smack of
a heavenly origin--they have no blood-kin in the earth. It is more than
human to be so placidly certain about things, and so finely superior,
and so airily content with one's performance. Without ever presenting
anything which may rightfully be called by the strong name of Evidence,
and sometimes without even mentioning a reason for a deduction at all,
it thunders out the startling words, 'I have Proved' so and so! It takes
the Pope and all the great guns of his church in battery assembled to
authoritatively settle and establish the meaning of a sole and single
unclarified passage of Scripture, and this at vast cost of time and
study and reflection, but the author of this work is superior to all
that: she finds the whole Bible in an unclarified condition, and at
small expense of time and no expense of mental effort she clarifies
it from lid to lid, reorganises and improves the meanings, then
authoritatively settles and establishes them with formulae which you
cannot tell from 'Let there be light!' and 'Here you have it!' It is
the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that a Voice has gone
crashing through space with such placid and complacent confidence and
command.

IV

A word upon a question of authorship. Not that quite; but, rather, a
question of emendation and revision. We know that the Bible-Annex was
not written by Mrs. Eddy, but was handed down to her eighteen hundred
years ago by the Angel of the Apocalypse; but did she translate it
alone, or did she have help? There seems to be evidence that she had
help. For there are four several copyrights on it--1875, 1885, 1890,
1894. It did not come down in English, for in that language it could not
have acquired copyright--there were no copyrig