s a religion.

_The Philosophic Bases of Christian Science_

It is professedly an idealistic monism based on carefully selected facts
and depending for its proof upon certain results in the experience of
those who accept it. An idealism because there is for Mrs. Eddy no
reality save in mind, a monism because there is for Mrs. Eddy only one
reality and that is God. For a definition of God she offers only
synonyms and affirmations though here perhaps she follows only the usual
procedure of theology. God is divine Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul,
Spirit, Mind--and all these capitalized, for it makes a vast difference
in the philosophy of Christian Science whether such familiar words as
these are spelled with a capital letter or not. It would be possible
from Mrs. Eddy's own words to pretty effectually prove what has been
more than once claimed: that Christian Science does not offer a personal
God, but all our terminology in this region is necessarily somewhat
loose, though hers is excessively so. Some of her definitions of God are
as personal as the Westminster Catechism or the Thirty-nine Articles.
The writer believes, however, after such dispassionate consideration of
the philosophy of Christian Science as he is able to give, that it would
make absolutely no difference in its philosophic basis whether God were
conceived as a person or not. If the God of Christian Science be taken
merely as the exaltation of an abstract idealism or a philosophic
Absolute everything would be secured which is otherwise secured.

Up to a certain point Christian Science marches with other idealistic
systems. From Plato down we have had philosophers a plenty, who have
sought to build for us a universe whose only realities are mind and its
attributes, or perhaps more technically, consciousness and its content.
It is truly a difficult enough matter to relate the world without and
the world within, once we begin thinking about it (though happily and in
the practical conduct of life this is not so hard as the philosophers
make out, otherwise we should be in a hopeless state), and it is natural
enough for one type of mind to simplify the problem by making the world
within the only world. Nor have there been wanting those who have sought
to reduce everything to a single reality whether matter or mind, and
ever since we have had theology at all a perplexed humanity has been
seeking to reconcile the goodness and the power of God with the sin and