It is to be feared that the new Crusaders are deficient in the qualities essential to their undertaking. They need backbone, they are deplorably indifferent to the teaching of history, and they are devoid of any sense of humor. It is impossible to dive, within the limits of a letter, into the category of misconceptions, stated without proof and maintained without evidence, which their latest recruit, your contributor "Churchwoman," offers to your readers as a serious criticism of Christian Science. The long quotation she gives from Mrs. Eddy's "Miscellaneous Writings" will, however, serve as an excellent test, as it is proof positive that she has never understood in the least the distinction drawn in Christian Science between the real and the unreal, the absolute and the relative, the spiritual and the material; yet on that distinction depends the understanding of the passage she has so completely misapprehended.

In teaching Christian Science Mrs. Eddy has pointed out, with the utmost care, the difference between the spiritual man, the image and likeness of God, and the sinning race of Adam. The first is the real man, reflecting the qualities of the divine Mind; the second is the human counterfeit, reflecting the passions of mortal mind, itself the negation of divine Mind. Now, whether the world at large recognizes this or not, it is made clear in the Bible. The 1st chapter of Genesis, known sometimes as the priestly and sometimes as the Elohistic document, contains an account of creation which differs completely from that, known sometimes as the primitive and sometimes as the Jehovistic, contained in the 2d chapter. Mrs. Eddy has been insisting on this for upward of forty years, and insisting on it from the standpoint, not merely of historical criticism, but of practical Christianity. The two accounts, she has explained in Science and Health, lie side by side for those who will read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.

The common-sense critic has been peculiarly humorous on this subject and quite as peculiarly ill-informed. To make this plain, it is only necessary to refer to the writings of a great scholar, himself a champion of the accuracy of the Bible, Professor Sayce. The reverence of the Israelites for the primitive document in Genesis did not, he writes, prevent them from accepting another symbolic narrative which embodied more advanced truth, nor did the acceptance of the later narrative cause them to cast away the elder Scripture,—"the two were placed side by side." The elder narrative, he explains, was frankly anthropomorphic, the later narrative contained "a wonderful spiritual discrimination and insight." The earlier narrative, he maintains, had all the elements of polytheistic superstition; the later narrative, on the other hand, is "a noble and simple declaration of the making of all things by God, who is One, holy and benevolent." The later document, he concludes, was intended to supersede the elder document and to suppress the anthropomorphic narratives. Prejudice, however, was too strong, and the compilers of the complete Pentateuch had to rest content with placing the spiritual narrative beside the anthropomorphic, with the intention that the anthropomorphism of the one should be corrected and interpreted according to the more enlightened views of the latter. If Professor Sayce is not, from the point of view of Christian Science, a Daniel come to judgment, it would be difficult to say what all this means.

It is a confusion of these two views which has led to the theory of what is known as mental suggestion, itself only the latest development of the earlier occult systems. The anthropomorphism of the human mind, as expressed in the Jehovistic story of creation, has impressed itself in all ages in the belief that one human mind has power over another human mind through magic or witchcraft, through willpower, mesmerism, or hypnotism, themselves all aliases of suggestion. The story of Israel is the story of a people waking out of the primitive belief of anthropomorphism into an understanding, more or less chaotic, of spiritual being. The history of the Bible is the story of the battle of these two elements in Israelitish history, the battle of Jehovah against Elohim, of God in the image and likeness of man against God who is Spirit. The anthropomorphic tendency manifested itself in graven images, in houses of Baal, and in the incantations of the magicians, by whatever name they were known; the unquenchable spiritual perception of the Elohists manifested itself in the rejection of human sacrifice by Abraham, in the rejection of the sacrifice of animals by Isaiah, in the proclamation of the gospel of purity by the Baptist, and in the final declaration of Jesus the Christ, "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

To attempt to trace this struggle in anything but a few words would, of course, be impossible within the limits of a letter. It must suffice to say that the two theories came in actual collision on the day when the Pharisees strove to brush aside the healing of Jesus as healing through Beelzebub; that is, by the occult art of the exorcist. It was then that Jesus silenced them with the declaration that a house divided against a house could not stand. That is to say, that a mind believing in matter and Spirit, in good and evil, was believing in contraries, and was ipso facto, condemned to decay; but, going farther than this, he declared once and for all that if he cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God was come. This was the final statement in the struggle between anthropomorphism and Spirit, between all that was contained in the theory of God as Jehovah, and of God as Elohim, of a God who created or permitted, and who was consequently conscious of good and evil, and God who was Spirit, absolute good, and consequently of too pure eyes to behold iniquity.

Now, when Mrs. Eddy speaks of the man conscious of absolute harmony, she is speaking of the spiritual man, the image and likeness of God; and in the exact proportion in which the human being gains the perception that man is spiritual and not material, does he begin to repent. The Greek word translated repent means literally to perceive or come to a conclusion afterward, and so a change of mind to the opposite standpoint. The man who gains the perception of God as Elohim rather than Jehovah, changes his belief in the image and likeness of God from a material to a Spiritual basis, and, in thus repenting, finds, as Jesus said, that the kingdom of God is at hand. "That," in the words of Mrs. Eddy, on page 312 of Science and Health, "which material sense calls intangible, is found to be substance. What to material sense seems substance, becomes nothingness, as the sense-dream vanishes and reality appears." This is something about as far from the misconception of Christian Science which "Churchwoman" has so woefully conceived as anything well could be, for in it there is not a trace of healing by mental suggestion; there is nothing but healing by the realization of the Christ.

The fact is that mental suggestion cannot heal. The utmost it can do is to effect a temporary change of human thought, liable at any moment to relapse. It is a house divided against itself, a belief in relative good and relative evil, and as such it gives power and reality to evil. Evil, however, Jesus declared, was a lie, and the only power and the only reality a lie can ever even seem to possess is a supposititious power and the supposititious reality which adheres to it so long as it is believed in. The lie of anthropomorphism and materiality bound the believers in the Jehovistic theory of creation, and they fashioned their golden calves and they built their temples of Baal till Moses came down from the mountain and shattered the one and led the people into the land of promise, and until Elijah caused the priests of the other to call upon their gods in vain. These were the heralds of Truth, which, when it rose full-orbed, was to heal the sick by the thousand in the land of promise and teach men the truth which was to make them free.