Frederick William Peabody

“ There is a great deal of delusive sickness, which is easily cured by a putting away of the delusion, and there was never yet any, but a delusive, cure by Christian Science of an organic disease​—​not one. Will Mrs. Eddy and all her healers and followers throughout the world be able to add one moment, one breath, to the life of Mrs. Eddy herself, when the hour of her death has arrived? No, deny the reality of disease and death as they may, it comes to them one and all, just as to others, when the angel of death approaches and beckons from the darkness that closes upon their drooping eyes. ”

“ Eddy furnishes no specifications, it is impossible, of course, to meet her allegations in the ordinary way; but I purpose, nevertheless, to satisfy every intelligent mind that there is not an atom of truth in her professed miracles.
If you have the power over life and death here claimed by Mrs. Eddy, when do you employ it? You employ it, do you not, when some one you greatly love is suffering, when some one dear to you is approaching the grave? If you have the power to save human life, you save the life, first of all, of those whom you most love ”

“ Eddy, no axe to grind, no interest to serve, I simply feel that it is due the thousands of good people, who have made Christian Science the anchorage of their souls and its founder the infallible guide of their daily life, to keep this no longer to myself. I desire only that people who take themselves and their helpless children into Christian Science shall do so with a full knowledge that this is not a divine revelation, but simply the idea of an old-time Maine healer. ”

“ Is it possible for any decent person, man or woman, to peruse this book and then acknowledge himself or herself a disciple of Mary Baker G. Eddy? Is it conceivable that any sane man or woman, with full knowledge of the facts of her life, can honestly profess belief in her disgusting imposture? Can any one who feels, as I do, that Jesus is the common glory of all who bear a human heart, without resentment and without anger witness the endeavor of this vulgar creature to place herself by His side? ”

“ Why has she turned a deaf ear to the prayers that have been addressed to her by broken-hearted parents who have so often journeyed to her home to beg her to exert her God-like power to save from the grave their dying child? Why has she for thirty years and more refused to even try to heal any one, to attempt to allay any pain however fearful, or save any human life however beautiful and however precious? ”

“ When the most corrupt tree in the orchard brings forth the sweetest and most beautiful fruit of all, it will be believed that Mary Baker G. Eddy can be the channel through which God has revealed Himself to mankind, and it will not be believed until then.
I am of those who believe that there can be no religion but a religion based upon revelation. Either God reveals himself to us, or He remains unknown and unknowable. “No man by searching can find out God.” Reason alone cannot attain unto Him. ”

“ Eddy was toward her only child when it was little more than a baby, cannot be expected to give herself great concern over the sacrifice of the children of strangers that is incidental to the accumulation of her fortune.
If the adult prefer foolishness to wisdom, if he prefer suicide to life, by the Christian Science or any other method, he may enjoy his preference. It is no business of mine to come between him and the grave; but no man and no woman has any right, whatever be the motive or the relation, to stand silently by and permit a child needlessly to suffer and needlessly to die. ”

“ Eddy’s character. If everything she has claimed regarding herself and Christian Science as a religion and healing system be absolutely false, then there is no justification for the existence of Christian Science as a religion, or a healing system, every church erected in its honor is but a monument to the “Queen of frauds and hypocrites,” and every worshiper at its shrines the dupe of a designing old woman who has laughed in her sleeves at the ease with which she has gulled them. ”

“ Ten years ago I knew nothing and cared less about Christian Science, assuming it to be a sincere, but deluded, manifestation of the childish credulity to which the human race is prone. But ten years of investigations and repeated professional employments, in which it became my duty as a lawyer to get at the actual facts with the aid of legal process, have qualified me, as no other not having had my experience can be qualified, to set forth the amazing story in utter nakedness. ”

“ I have sat in a Christian Science church repeatedly and have seen some thousands of people with open mouths and ecstatic expressions listening to material from the platform wholly unintelligible to those who read it and wholly unintelligible to every person in the building who heard it; and I have come slowly, very slowly and regretfully, to the conviction that it is true, that amongst large masses of people there are times when the brain has absolutely nothing to do with life. ”

“ How sweet, how charming, is the wifely devotion, that, kissing the lips of death, speedily and forever loses track of the sacred ashes of the beloved first husband, rushes into the divorce court for freedom from the truant second, and, having twice restored the adored third to life, when a third time he thus eludes her refuses, positively and coldly refuses, to bring him back and looks with calm and critical eyes upon the formerly attached, but now, alas, detached heart! ”

“ Never before has the world witnessed a masquerade like that of Christian Science. Being everything that Christianity is not, it puts on the garb of Christianity and seizes the name of Christ the better to attract and the more strongly to hold people of shallow mind, but sincere heart. ”

“ Eddy’s standpoint, the less mind, the better; the less mind, the more Christian Scientists; the more Christian Scientists, the more revenue; the more revenue, the greater glory for impostors and charlatans. And, oh, wonder of wonders! God here informs us, if Mrs. Eddy speak the truth, that the loss of a human leg will be but a temporary inconvenience when man has advanced to the high stage attained by the wholly mindless lobster! ”

“ Then it was I learned that Christian Science was a deliberate fraud foisted upon mankind by Mrs. Eddy in the name of religion for the mere purpose of extorting money from credulous people. Since that time I have been intensely interested in following the matter up and adding to my store of facts, until now I am confident that no man can read this book, no man and no woman who has not parted with every scrap of sanity and who retains elemental decency in his or her heart, and not be in entire accord with my conclusions. ”

“ How is it possible for a husband who loves and respects his wife, or a wife who loves and respects her husband, or parents who adore their children, to have anything but contempt for this woman and her odious teachings?
If Mrs. Eddy’s God were, in fact, the true God, and if Christian Science were a revelation from Him, and if all the miracles they pretend to have performed had been performed, I should still not bow down to their God nor worship him ”

“ If I have made good, if I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish, I ask every man and every woman who reads this book to lose no opportunity to show this hateful thing, miscalled Christian Science, in its true light to those with whom they come in contact. Let it have no quarter. Hit it every time you have a chance and hit it as hard as you can. It is not entitled to respectful treatment. Nothing is more impossible than to love Jesus, even a little, and to have the slightest, the very slightest, tolerance for Mrs. Eddy and her frauds. ”

“ The founder of this pretended religion, this bogus healing system, audaciously and irreligiously professing equality of character and of power with Jesus, has, throughout her whole long life, been in every particular precisely antithetical to Christ. Sordid, mercenary, unprincipled, the consuming passion of her life has been the accumulation of money, and she has stopped at no falsehood, no fraud and no greater wickedness that seemed to put her in the way of adding to her accumulations, or overcoming her supposed enemies. ”

“ Meantime the sickness of the child is real, the suffering terribly real, and after protracted suffering it dies without the turning of a hand to relieve its pain or to save its life. Those sane parents who have endured the anguish of seeing their child suffer, say from abscess in the ear, or from any one of the other forms of torture with which nature stretches our little ones upon beds of pain, will appreciate the enormity of this crime. ”

“ Eddy teaches that there is no reality in matter. When she sits down at her table three times a day and puts into her immaterial and nonexistent stomach unrealities in the shape of bread and butter and beef steak and tea and coffee, and so on, life is sustained by the belief that the food sustains life, and not by the food itself. It would be interesting to have Mrs. Eddy demonstrate in her own daily life that the partaking of what we grosser persons regard as food indispensable to the survival of the physical organism could be wholly dispensed with and life, notwithstanding, continue. ”

“ And so it is everywhere in Christian Science families throughout the length and breadth of this land. Nothing but the employment of a fool-man or a fool-woman, called a Christian Science healer, to administer a Christian Science treatment, which consists only of the inaudible repetition of Mrs. Eddy’s meaningless jargon, can be done by a Christian Science parent to save the life of his child without repudiating Mrs. Eddy’s fundamental teaching that sickness is unreal and giving the lie to her “inspired” insanity that there are no such things as pain and death. ”

“ I shall have shown that every beautiful temple erected for the worship of the Christian Science God is a monument to Mrs. Eddy’s success in imposing upon mankind, and that all of the thousands upon thousands of pure and simple-minded people, who acclaim her God’s messenger, are the victims of a mercenary old schemer who has amazed herself at the gullibility of her worshipers. ”

“ Just because the author of all of this fraud, falsehood, hypocrisy, blasphemy and attempted crime is a woman, now an aged woman, should I therefore stand silently by and permit her longer to masquerade before mankind as like unto the pure and holy Jesus? ”

“ A mind liberated from the beliefs of sense, to do good, by perverting its power becomes warped into the lines of evil without let or hindrance. A mind taught its power to touch other minds by the transference of thought, for the ends of restoration from sickness, or, grandest of all, the reformation and almost transformation into the living image and likeness of God​—​this mind, by misusing its freedom, reaches the degree of total moral depravity. ”

“ Eddy is the inventor and sole proprietor of the greatest get-rich-quick concern ever conceived. Her business​—​there is no religion about it, and her writings may be searched from end to end without finding a line about the worship of God​—​her business converts into cash the very highest emotions of the human soul by an appeal to religious feeling and extorts huge sums of money from multitudes of credulous people for healing them of nothing but the delusion that there is something the matter with them. Christian Science never cured any one of anything but imaginary illness ”

“ Eddy were evidently upon the same intellectual plane, both uneducated and crude. He was a good and sincere and unselfish and trustful man, and she appropriated his ideas. They knew nothing of philosophy nor of science, and whether Christian Science be his or hers is of slight importance, except as the establishment of his authorship proves her to be the author of a fraud whose large proportions and successful workings challenge the kind of admiration one feels for the criminal whose great crime proves him to be a man of immense mental fertility and of profound understanding of human weakness. ”

“ This Christian Science witchcraft has reached the proportion amongst the faithful almost of panic, and of it more hereafter. But of all of the harmful influences of this alleged medical science, which is an unmitigated nonsense or deviltry, and of this alleged religion which, so far as its founder is concerned, is the very quintessence of irreverence and hypocrisy, of all of the evil consequences of the life and work of this monumental imposture, the unrelieved suffering of helpless children is the worst. ”