For a student of history--not in its moments, but in its decades and centuries--it is easy to see that "Christian Science" has the reason of the fact and _the spread of it_, in its being a protest against the depressing materialism around it--a materialism which, though rationally decapitated by Kant, has shown marvelous activity, for a corpse, ever since the execution.
The medical profession, too, has partly, if indirectly, been responsible for Mrs. Eddy's crazy horse of "metaphysics," running away in the dark, and butting its own brains out. From Dr. Mesmer to Dr. Charcot, it took about a hundred and twenty years for "animal magnetism," under the softer names of "hypnotism" and "suggestion," to achieve full and final standing in the French Academy of Medicine; and the mental phenomena attending "mesmerism" have still but little "respectability" among "regular physicians." But, that curative agencies are not confined to drugs has long been settled in the public mind--such part of the public mind, at least, as permits itself any considerable reading and thinking.
Has the pulpit itself--orthodox and not so orthodox--contributed to the success of Eddy "Science"? We must say it has. The practise, among the sects, of twisting the Bible out of its straight, historical, natural significance, and fitting its texts to every sort of whim, folly, and malefaction--this general practise has at last culminated in Mrs. Eddy's _Key to the Scriptures_, with pretty nearly the dissolution of them in the abomination of interpretation.
But "Christian Science"--the Eddy misfit for a specious name--has had its rise, and it has probably risen about as high as it can reach, notwithstanding its rapid extension for the moment. Only its protrusion from insignificance and non-attention was needed to uncover its foundation on the sands of ignorance, its strength in the perennial weakness and credulity of mankind, and its business success in ordinary, or more than ordinary, business cupidity. Has it done no good in the world, then? Ah, that is another question. Whatever may have been the chief motive of its founder, and whatever may have been its "comedy of errors," it has forced the inception of a movement that, as a whole, may have vast results for the human mind and the human body. Whatever material medicines may be necessary to mankind while they themselves are in a material condition, psychic forces in the cure of disease can no longer be ignored. What is the extent, and what the limit, of these forces, is a problem that must be examined. As conditionally--here and now--man is _both spiritual and corporeal_--it would seem to be a self-evident conclusion that he must have both material and spiritual aids to health. That we can "jump" our condition, before we get out of it, is the most tremendous paradox ever presented to the human mind; but the sequences--even physical--of systematically opening the finite soul to the Infinite Spirit may be incalculable. The revival, or definite rediscovery, in modern times, of healing the sick by the soul and the laying-on of hands, came to pass some fifty years ago, in the United States, through the honest, single-minded, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. If the spirit of evil--of hypocrisy, selfishness and avarice--has entered into the movement of mental healing through another source, the frequent necessity of very human means to divine ends is once more illustrated.