r-off land. It is not
likely that Mrs. Eddy ever heard of Mani or Manicheeism, or knew to what
a travail of soul St. Augustine was reduced when he fought his way
through just a kindred line of teaching which, to save God from any
contact with or responsibility for evil, affirmed our dual genesis and
made us on one side children of darkness and on the other the children
of light, without ever really trying to achieve in a single personality
any reconciliation of two natures drawn from two entirely different
sources. Nor does Mrs. Eddy know that one Eusebius, finding much
evidence of this faith in the Christianity of the fourth century,
dismissed it briefly enough as "an insane heresy." Heresy it certainly
was for all those who were fighting their way out of their paganism into
an ordered Christian faith and whether it be insane or no, it is of all
the explanations which have been offered for the presence of evil in a
world supposedly ruled by the love and goodness of God, the one which
will least bear examination. It has been dead and buried these thousand
years.

We may deny, if we are so minded, any freedom of the will at all, so
involving ourselves in an inevitable sequence of cause and effect as to
make us also simply weather-vanes driven east or west by winds of
inheritance and environment which we have no power to deflect and to
which we can only choose to respond. But to deny us the freedom to sin
and so to shut us up to a determinism of goodness is no more in accord
with the facts than to deny us the power to be good and shut us up to a
determinism of sin. If we are free at all we are free in all directions.

_The Sacraments Disappear. Mrs. Eddy's Theology a Reaction from the
Rigid Evangelicism of Her Youth_

"Science and Health" deals in the same radical way with the sacraments.
Nothing at all, apparently, is made of baptism save that Mrs. Eddy says
our baptism is a purification from all error. In her account of the Last
Supper the cup is mostly dwelt upon and that only as showing forth the
bitter experience of Jesus. The bread "is the great truth of spiritual
being, healing the sick" and the breaking of it the "explaining" it to
others. More is made of what is called the last spiritual breakfast with
the Disciples by Lake Galilee than of the Last Supper in the upper room.
"This spiritual meeting with our Lord in the dawn of a new light is the
morning meal which Christian Scientists commemorate" (page 35). "