Article May 7, 1910 Issue

The reviewer of the "Life of Mrs. Eddy," referred...

Frederick Dixon—London, Eng.

Outlook,

The reviewer of the "Life of Mrs. Eddy," referred to in my letter printed in your issue of March 19, does not, it appears, approve of the form in which my answer was couched. He seems to think that the right way to approach the subject would have been to reply to the book, statement by statement, in a volume which in the nature of things would have been several times larger than the biography itself. I am afraid that would have been to invest the subject with an importance which no Christian Scientist would attach to it. The book in question is only one of a perfect library of volumes which are yearly being poured out on the subject. There is no reason for selecting it for special notice beyond the fact that it has been better advertised. The prospect held up to the Christian Science movement is therefore somewhat alarming. It is possible, as Lord Macaulay might have said, that Hilpa and Shalum would have considered the task a light one, but the ordinary Christian Scientist, engaged in the daily struggle to demonstrate the truth of the teaching he has accepted in the conquest of sickness and sin, might consider it a waste of time.

Then the reviewer objects to what he calls the suggestion that he only knows Christian Science through the book in question. I certainly understood that he had got the "facts" in his review from that book, but if I had been asked from whence he obtained his general knowledge of the subject I am afraid I should have been compelled to fall back on a somewhat hackneyed quotation from "Hamlet," as adapted in the phrase from his mind's eye, Horatio.

Again, the reviewer asks what is the difference between the evidence of nonagenarians and Mrs. Eddy's own statements about her youth. It is a mathematical one to begin with, which I will try to explain to him. Mrs. Eddy is not a nonagenarian, therefore there is a difference in the first instance. Secondly, Mrs. Eddy's reminiscences of her own youth were published years ago. I do not know in exactly which year her little autobiography was written, but I do know that it was copyrighted in 1891, which is twenty years ago, and that seems, when you come to think of it, to make a difference in the nonagenarian question. As a matter of fact Mrs. Eddy was never more mentally alert than today. She is the clearest thinker and hardest worker imaginable. Only a few weeks ago I had the happiness of talking to her in her house in Boston, and I should be extremely glad to feel that I possessed the same keenness of grasp which she displays of the complex questions which come to her in the course of her work. About a couple of years ago an attempt was made by certain people to prove her mentally deficient, but its futility was hopelessly exposed after the judges of the Concord court and some of the greatest of American doctors had spent an hour or so in her company. It was after these interviews that Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, one of the most brilliant medical men in America, wrote to her, "It is the lot of every one who is in earnest in this life to have rivals and sometimes calumniators, and you have certainly had your share. May 1908 be full of peace for you."

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