Article April 16, 1938 Issue

From Letters, Substantially as Published

An article in your paper written by a national contributor...

John M. Dean, Committee on Publication for the State of Tennessee,

Press-Scimitar, Memphis

An article in your paper written by a national contributor rightly asserts that fear is at the bottom of our financial troubles, and incidentally refers to some humorous statements of Mark Twain's, which were directed, not at Christian Science, but at his misconception of it. When Mark Twain wrote his facetious opinion of Mrs. Eddy's teachings, Christian Scientists smiled along with others, and they smiled because Mr. Clemens' shafts never reached their mark. Attention is quite frequently called to these critical statements, but comparatively few people know that in later years Mark Twain sharply reversed his estimate both of Mrs. Eddy and of her discovery. Witness the following words uttered by him and taken from his biography, written by his literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine (Vol. III, p. 1271): "Christian Science is humanity's boon. ... She [Mrs. Eddy] has organized and made available a healing principle that for two thousand years has never been employed except as the merest kind of guesswork. She is the benefactor of the age."

It seems only fair that the world should know of this changed attitude, which evidently came with the afterglow of matured thought and close observation.

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