Article February 21, 1931 Issue

A certain religious writer attempted to record a brief...

Hugh Stuart Campbell, Committee on Publication for the State of Illinois,—Chicago

Scandia

A certain religious writer attempted to record a brief history of the Christian Science movement in you issue of September 11. The attempt openly reveals the fact that your contributor approached his subject with bias and lack of adequate preparation and appreciation. He has furnished your readers with nothing more or less than fiction born of intolerance. It is in order to supply you with facts that I submit this letter for publication.

The author of the article in question has spoken of Mary Baker Eddy as "an irrational woman" who "obtained most of her ideas from Dr. Quimby." To refute such an unwarranted opinion of the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, I submit the following appreciation of Mrs. Eddy by Dr. Lyman Pierson Powell, an Episcopal clergyman of New York City, when, in an article furnished to the Cambridge History of American Literature, he said: "Christian Science as it is to-day is really its founder's creation. Where she got this idea, or where that, little matters. As a whole the system described in Science and Health is hers, and nothing that can ever happen will make it less than hers."

Mrs. Eddy was not at any time in her progressive life a spiritualistic medium. This absurd claim she herself denied in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" when she wrote (p. 71), "I never could believe in spiritualism." Nor did Mrs. Eddy need the assistance of literary folks to improve her literary efforts, our critic's opinion to the contrary. Brilliant as a child, Mrs. Eddy later developed the unique and forceful diction which pervades her writings, giving them a mode of expression which has been acknowledged by eminent English scholars as examples of classic literature.

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