Article January 6, 1906 Issue

"Mrs. Eddy ... in her insistence upon the constant...

Frederick Lawrence Knowles

Methodist Review

"Mrs. Eddy ... in her insistence upon the constant daily reading of the Bible and her own writings, ... has given to her disciples a means of spiritual development which ... will certainly build such truth as they do gain into the marrow of their characters. The scorn of the gross and sensual, and the subordination of merely material to spiritual values, together with the discouragement of care and worry, are all forces that make for righteousness. And they are burned indelibly upon the mind of the neophyte every day through its reading. The intellects of these people are not drugged by scandal, drowned in frivolity, or paralyzed by sentimental fiction.... They feed the higher nature through the mind, and I am bound as an observer of them to say, in all fairness, that the result is already manifest in their faces, their conversation, and their bearing, both in public and private. What wonder that when these smiling people say, 'Come thou with us, and we will do thee good,' the hitherto half-persuaded one is wholly drawn over, as by an irresistible attraction.

"The religious body which can direct and control, in no arbitrary sense, but through sane counsel, the reading of its membership, stands a great chance of sweeping the world within a generation. On the other hand, a religious body that neglects to give instruction on the necessity of systematic religious reading, especially the reading of Scripture, is doomed, unless it look promptly to its ways, to certain disintegration and death."

Extracts from an article by the late

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