on
foundations so narrow.

Mrs. Eddy was, unconsciously to herself, a type. She thought and felt
for multitudes of perplexed people unable to reconcile the more trying
experiences of life with what faith they had in the love and goodness of
God, unable on the other side to find the love and goodness of God in
the wide sweep of law and the orderly sequence of cause and effect, and
incapable under any circumstances of the patient analysis needed to
trace to all their sources the threads of their strangely mingled webs
of life; impressionable folk under the spell of words; speculative; at
once credulous and skeptical; intellectually alert enough to want to do
their own thinking and not intellectually disciplined enough to do it
well; persuaded that the Bible has both a message and authority and
unable to find in their traditional interpretation of it either a
satisfying message or an adequately directing authority; impatient of
discipline and pathetically eager for some short cut to happiness and
well-being. In a very signal way Mrs. Eddy has spoken and written for
this type particularly in American life. Her very style a liability as
it is, when tested by either logic or the accepted standards of good
writing, has, nevertheless, been an asset with those who have made her
their prophetess.

The secret of Mrs. Eddy's power and the power of her system after her is
most largely in her essential intellectual and spiritual kinship with
such a temper and intellectual status as this, but she possessed also a
real measure of creative capacity, a marked reach of speculative power,
rare shrewdness and a masterful temper. Mrs. Eddy believed herself to
have found her system in the Old and New Testaments--but she did not.
She gradually built it up out of the suggestions which had been given
her to begin with; she gave it colour and direction from her own
experiences; she proved it to her own satisfaction in the healings which
seemed to result from it, then fitted it all as best she could into the
framework of her inherited Christian faith and read its meanings back
into the Scriptures. It is a pseudo-philosophy pseudo-Christianized (if
one may use the word) by a curious combination of ingenuity, devotion,
main strength and even awkwardness. And though Christian Science is
carrying on to-day as a religion rather than as either a philosophy or a
system of healing, it will stand or fall on the intellectual side as a
philosophy and not a