New
England of the sixties contributed strongly, through their limitations,
to the growth of bizarre systems which had in them elements of truth. We
shall need to come back to this again in any evaluation of Christian
Science as a whole, but we cannot understand the rapid development of
the movement of which Christian Science was just one aspect without
taking all this into consideration.

Medicine itself has been greatly revolutionized within the last fifty
years. While Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy was finding her unhappy
way through border-land regions into a cloudy light, Louis Pasteur,
sitting, in the phrase of Huxley, "as humbly as a little child before
the facts of life," was making those investigations in bacteriology
which were to be, in some ways, the greatest contribution of the
nineteenth century to the well-being of humanity. He was following
patiently the action of microscopic organisms, especially in their
relation to health, discovering the secret of contagion and infection,
outlining methods of defense against the attacks of these invisible
armies, finding the true basis for inoculation, extending its operation,
robbing hospitals of their terrors and surrounding surgery with
safeguards heretofore undreamt of, literally performing miracles (in his
control of swine plague and the like), and for the want of another
subject preparing to experiment upon himself for the prevention of
hydrophobia, and in doing it all in the most simple and humble way,
naively unconscious of his own fame and living from first to last in a
noble and comparative poverty which contrasts dramatically with the
material well-being for which Mrs. Eddy was so eager. Nothing of this
had ever come into Mrs. Eddy's field or those whom she addressed. With
all the aid which the modern physician has at his control, diagnosis is
still a difficult matter, physicians confess it themselves. There is
still, with all the resource of modern medical science, a residuum of
hopeless and obscure cases which baffle the physician. That residuum was
very much larger fifty years ago than it is now.

_She Begins to Teach and to Heal_

The typical Protestant religious experience, as we have seen, was not
great enough to contain all the facts of life. The molten passion of an
earlier Calvinism had hardened down into rigidities which exalted the
power of God at the cost of human helplessness. There was no adequate
recognition among the devout of the sw