To have founded a faith which has its followers wherever...

Dallas (Tex.) News

To have founded a faith which has its followers wherever there is civilization, and counts them by the hundred thousand, is of itself title to such fame as few men, and fewer women, earn. At least this tribute to Mrs. Eddy men of all creeds, as well as the creedless, may unite in giving, for it involves no question as to their agreement with the tenets of the faith which she either revived or instituted. Indeed, it ought to be possible to pay her higher tribute than that without arousing sectarian controversy; for we think it is indisputable that the faith she taught has quickened with hope and joy the souls of multitudes in whom other creeds inspired only a perfunctory morality. Thus it has justified its existence, proved that there was room for it.

Christian Science has lived too long, the spread of its influence has been too persistent and rapid, to allow any one to imagine that it is merely a transitory phenomenon, a spiritual delusion destined to pass away. It has been subjected to the same test which every other faith has had to withstand, that of intolerant skepticism. Man is disposed to regard every new idea as somewhat intrusive, and when that new idea is one that unsettles religious formula he is disposed to resent it as a thing of malign inspiration. Primitive Christianity itself underwent the same combat with paganism, and every Christian sect since then has encountered the same opposition, proportioned to the angle of divergence from all other fashions of orthodoxy.

Though the Christian Science church, as a church, has met this opposition with serenity and smiled into the face of frowning hostility, some few of its members, with an impatience that ill comports with their creed, have complained of the bigotry that is wont to look at them askance. They have no grievance that is not common to the disciples of every new faith, and indeed they are more fortunate in that their faith was founded at a time when, if intolerance was quite as active, it was at least less sanguinary in its methods of repression. Mrs. Eddy and that little band first won by her teaching have suffered the sting of hostile gossip and have often been isolated by a social ostracism, but at least they have not felt the sword nor known the gibbet and the stake; moreover, they have pressed more rapidly than most new creeds did into the circle of toleration.

The world at large may still look at them askance, but only in the backwoods are they any longer objects of curiosity. Men are coming rapidly to see that with them at least their faith is real. They exemplify it in their daily conduct with a fidelity that compares favorably at least with the fidelity with which the followers of any other creed manifest their faith; and as men behold it thus exemplified, they have come to see that, instead of being incompatible with Christian morality, it imposes a standard of ethics in which other Christians can find no flaw and conceptions of life beyond the grave that imply the highest degree of religious optimism.

It is this optimism that contrasts so forcibly with some other phases of religious thought which would have us regard this earthly life a vale of tears. From it has sprung that confidence in the unlimited possibilities of the human soul which has literally transformed the physical as well as the spiritual life of thousands of its adherents.

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