--Mrs. Eddy promises her followers _health_,
relief from bodily pain and sickness, and thus addresses herself to a
universally and urgently felt want. A merely spiritual message may fail
to obtain listeners; but--to state the truth baldly--a person need not be
particularly spiritually-minded in order to be drawn towards Christian
Science. The natural man would much rather {123} be made well than made
good, and a creed which professes to be able to do the former will touch
him in his most sensitive part. Certainly, this was one of the
difficulties of Christ's public ministry, _viz._, that the people flocked
to Him to be cured rather than to be taught. But while He declined to
place the emphasis on His works of healing--while He left Capernaum by
Himself before sunrise in order to escape the importunities of the mob,
and refused Peter's request that He should return thither with the words,
"Let us go elsewhere into the next towns that I may preach there also;
for to _this_ end came I forth"--Christian Science addresses its sure
appeal to man's material nature. The contrast is significant.

And yet the true essence of Christian Science is not "faith-healing" in
the ordinary sense. It does not say, _e.g._, "Here is a case of genuine,
unmistakeable rheumatism or consumption, but faith is able to dispel it";
on the contrary, it says, "This alleged rheumatism or consumption is a
mere illusion, a phantasm of the imagination; and the way to be cured is
for the 'patient' to discover his mistake. There are no maladies--there
are only _malades imaginaires_." Mrs. Eddy states in plain words that
"Mortal ills are but errors of thought" [2]; it is from this point of
view that Christian Science as a system has to be approached and
understood.

{124}

With the fantastic exegesis of Scripture on which this creed professes to
be based, we are not directly concerned; else something might be said of
the method of interpretation which is to be found in the official
text-book of the movement--a method which sees in the serpent the symbol
of malicious animal magnetism, which identifies the Holy Ghost and the
New Jerusalem with Christian Science, and the little book brought down
from heaven by the mighty angel with Mrs. Eddy's own _magnum opus_,
_Science and Health_. As Mr. Podmore drily remarks, "In these holy games
each player is at liberty to make words mean what he wants them to mean";
at the same time, these grotesque and arbitr