The reviewer of the "Life of Mrs. Eddy," referred to in my letter printed in your issue of March 19, does not, it appears, approve of the form in which my answer was couched. He seems to think that the right way to approach the subject would have been to reply to the book, statement by statement, in a volume which in the nature of things would have been several times larger than the biography itself. I am afraid that would have been to invest the subject with an importance which no Christian Scientist would attach to it. The book in question is only one of a perfect library of volumes which are yearly being poured out on the subject. There is no reason for selecting it for special notice beyond the fact that it has been better advertised. The prospect held up to the Christian Science movement is therefore somewhat alarming. It is possible, as Lord Macaulay might have said, that Hilpa and Shalum would have considered the task a light one, but the ordinary Christian Scientist, engaged in the daily struggle to demonstrate the truth of the teaching he has accepted in the conquest of sickness and sin, might consider it a waste of time.

Then the reviewer objects to what he calls the suggestion that he only knows Christian Science through the book in question. I certainly understood that he had got the "facts" in his review from that book, but if I had been asked from whence he obtained his general knowledge of the subject I am afraid I should have been compelled to fall back on a somewhat hackneyed quotation from "Hamlet," as adapted in the phrase from his mind's eye, Horatio.

Again, the reviewer asks what is the difference between the evidence of nonagenarians and Mrs. Eddy's own statements about her youth. It is a mathematical one to begin with, which I will try to explain to him. Mrs. Eddy is not a nonagenarian, therefore there is a difference in the first instance. Secondly, Mrs. Eddy's reminiscences of her own youth were published years ago. I do not know in exactly which year her little autobiography was written, but I do know that it was copyrighted in 1891, which is twenty years ago, and that seems, when you come to think of it, to make a difference in the nonagenarian question. As a matter of fact Mrs. Eddy was never more mentally alert than today. She is the clearest thinker and hardest worker imaginable. Only a few weeks ago I had the happiness of talking to her in her house in Boston, and I should be extremely glad to feel that I possessed the same keenness of grasp which she displays of the complex questions which come to her in the course of her work. About a couple of years ago an attempt was made by certain people to prove her mentally deficient, but its futility was hopelessly exposed after the judges of the Concord court and some of the greatest of American doctors had spent an hour or so in her company. It was after these interviews that Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, one of the most brilliant medical men in America, wrote to her, "It is the lot of every one who is in earnest in this life to have rivals and sometimes calumniators, and you have certainly had your share. May 1908 be full of peace for you."

How I was to guess that when the reviewer referred to literature he confined literature to books, I am sure I do not know. There is a good deal of literature not contained in books, just as there are a great number of books which are not literature. As, however, he explains that when he says literature he means books, may I point out that no Christian Scientist sees any necessity for writing a new book upon a subject none of them understand nearly as well as Mrs. Eddy. It would be of great benefit to the world if their example was more generally followed.

Finally, may I refer to the reviewer's remark that I cannot understand anybody having convictions strong enough to express them rudely and violently. With the whole history of religion before me, it would be curious if I doubted the facts he dwells on. For centuries the holders of the dominant religious belief of the moment have been persecuting in the most hideous way those who have had the hardihood to differ from them. The religious history of the world is the history of the persecuted turned persecutors. That, however, has never proved that the argument of the rack was a sound one, or that controversial rudeness was a sign of controversial strength. I am not surprised at the reviewer considering the violence of his language a sign of virtue; what I am surprised at is his imagining that such a virtue has any connection, however remote, with Christianity.

The letter in your last issue of "An Outsider," a very unwisely chosen nom de guerre, by the way, puts it beyond any question that the reviewer has already gained one disciple. The qualification of much strong language and less than no argument is, however, such an easy one, that it is surprising there have not been more. Perhaps there were more. Some time ago the editor of a well-known London paper confided to me that he could not print a large part of the letters sent to him during a certain controversy on the subject of Christian Science, because they were so abusive. I had not then learned from your reviewer that this was a tribute to the depth of the religious feeling of the writers. In my innocence, I thought it a sign that they were getting the worst of the argument.

Nobody who has read "An Outsider's" letter by the light of your reviewer's commentary could possibly have any doubt of the depth of the writer's religious fervor. Genial expressions such as pitiable, hag-ridden, gross, immoral, unprogressive, evaders, shirkers, emotional, occupy the interstices between the most opprobrious charges put forward without any attempt at substantiation. It is, in short, a perfect mosaic of intemperance, which makes one feel, as one reads it, how immensely it must add to the self-esteem of a critic to feel himself so much better than thousands upon thousands of his fellow-creatures as to be able to write of them like this—anonymously.

Now does any human being, not in a passion, imagine that this sort of stuff is going to convince any one of anything except that the writer has lost his self-control? For upward of forty years the teaching of Christian Science has been traveling round the globe, gathering momentum every day, because men and women are beginning to find that in the understanding of it they can bid good-by to theoretical dogmas in the secure possession of a demonstrable religion. Jesus never demanded from his followers anything less than a demonstration of the power of Truth, the knowledge of which he declared would set them free. The key-note of his teaching was that those who understood his words would be able to prove their knowledge in their works. In this way he made the power to heal the sick the test of every man's Christianity. Alone of the churches of the day, Christian Science has made the healing of sorrow and sickness and sin the test of its own spirituality. It casts no stones at its neighbors, though when attacked it claims the right to defend itself. It devotes its entire energies not to proving some one else wrong, but to proving itself right. The consequence is that all over the world the numbers are daily increasing of those who owe their own lives and happiness, or the lives and happiness of those who are dear to them, to its ministrations. It is the strongest argument in the long run, for it is the argument by which Christ Jesus drew to him the sick and the sinner, the weary and the heavy laden, and gave to them "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding."