Mrs. Eddy take comfort in that their great teacher
had plenty of high precedent for believing that Adam was created by
fiat, and Eve was made from his rib, all the fiat being used; that
Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and it obeyed, even when the
order should have been given to the earth; that Lazarus was raised from
the dead after his body had become putrid; that witchcraft is a fact in
Nature; and that children can be born with the aid of one parent a
little better than in the old-fashioned way--parthenogenesis, I think
they call it.

These inconsistencies of absolute absurdity, existing side by side with
great competence and sanity, are to be found everywhere in history.

Mrs. Eddy excited the envy of the medical world in her demonstration
that good health and happiness are the sure results of getting rid of
the doctor habit; but they got even with her when she said that virgin
motherhood would yet become the rule, and tilling of the soil would
cease to be a necessity.

Saint Augustine thought, as did most of the early Churchmen, that to do
evil that good might follow was not only justifiable, but highly
meritorious. So they preached hagiology to scare people into the narrow
path of rectitude.

Chapman, Alexander, Torrey, Billy Sunday and most other professional
evangelists believe in and practise the same doctrine.

The literary conscience was a thing known in Greece, but only recently,
say within two hundred years, has it been again manifest, and as yet it
is rare. It consists in the scorn and absolute refusal to write a line
except that which stands for truth.

The artistic conscience that refuses to paint for hire or model on order
is the same. Wagner, Millet, Rembrandt, William Morris and Ruskin are
examples of men who were incapable of anything but their highest and
best creative work, and refused to truckle to the mercenary horde. Such
men may be without conscience in a business way. And a person may be
absolutely moral in all his acts of life, except in writing and talking,
and here he may be slipshod and uncertain.

Mrs. Eddy was beautifully lacking in the literary conscience, just as
much so as was Gladstone when he attempted to reply to Ingersoll in "The
North American Review," and resorted to sophistry and evasion in
lieu of logic. Absolute truth to Gladstone was a matter of
indifference--expediency was his shibboleth. Truth to Mrs. Eddy was also
a secondary matter; the only things that r