Article August 24, 1929 Issue

As the readers who saw it may have suspected, the letter...

Judge Clifford P. Smith, Committee on Publication for The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, Massachusetts,—New Jersey

Englewood Press

As the readers who saw it may have suspected, the letter in your issue of July 19 from an adversary of the Christian Science Mother Church and defamer of Mary Baker Eddy was essentially fictitious. For his conduct, including such letters, the explanation is that he and certain other former members of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, are carrying on an aggressive war against this church. For a time, they did not directly attack Mrs. Eddy; now, they have turned against her. The letter in question, therefore, is discredited by its purpose. And I can add that all of its aspersions can be contradicted or explained to the satisfaction of disinterested persons.

For instance, kindly allow me to contradict particularly the assertion that Mrs. Eddy "purloined verbatim" from Thomas Carlyle "a foundational statement of Christian Science teaching." The only pretext for this cry of plagiarism is that a paragraph beginning at line 16 on page 254 of Mrs. Eddy's principal work, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," includes the words "and to work out the spiritual which determines the outward and actual;" which phrase resembles, but is not the same as a sentence previously written by Thomas Carlyle.

As is to be observed, the phrase just quoted consists of ordinary words such as could be used naturally by anybody who is familiar with good English. Furthermore, they do not constitute "a foundational statement" or any statement; they only make a phrase. Moreover, this phrase is not "foundational"; it is an incidental part of a paragraph which Mrs. Eddy added to the Christian Science textbook in 1902, in the two hundred and thirty-seventh edition thereof, twentyseven years after her original publication of this work.

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