Thomas Polhill Stafford

“ I cannot refrain from pointing out again the hopeless inconsistency that we have here in the metaphysics of Christian Science. “Human reason” is inferior knowledge and is therefore not a quality of “immortal Mind.” It belongs then to “mortal mind.” But how can “mortal mind” be spoken of as having a faculty that is “most active” or that awakens “man's dormant sense of moral obligation” or that teaches him by degrees “the grandeur and bliss of a spiritual sense?” How can unreality lead to reality? How can darkness bring us to light?
The same inconsistency exists in her doctrine of faith. ”

“ Eddy is a philosophic plagiarist; to trace her to her hiding place which is in the dark and to bring her out into the light, together with the plunder she has been keeping secret and to convict her before the bar of human judgment of the worst crime known to God and men, but for which there is neither prison nor exile nor death, the crime of soul-stealing. One who deceives his fellowmen in religious matters steals and sells their souls and is worse than a slave trader. A more successful literary and religious grafter than Mary Baker G. Eddy has never appeared. ”

“ Christian Science tells us that we are looking into the big end of a funnel full of many apparently different realities but which are really illusions, and that by means of its minimizing glass we may see all of these illusions sink down and vanish at the little end, where there is room for only the one reality, mind. Everything has to be run through this funnel. What will not go through has no existence. Man is simply idea. He is intellectuality, he is thought and nothing more. He has, or rather he is, understanding, intuition or consciousness but nothing more. ”

“ The world has not yet freed itself from his moulding mind. If one imagines that Christian Science is a jumble of wild fancies or wonders that it has won to itself so many followers of varying degrees of intelligence, it will be of benefit to him to know that Plato, from whom so many philosophic systems good, bad, and indifferent, have sprung, is in the background of this system also. Yes, no less a person than Plato stands there, at first in dim outline, but growing more distinct the longer we look, though Mrs. Eddy is unwilling that anyone should see him there. ”

“ Eddy says: “Life is God, or Spirit, the supersensible, eternal;” [17] “Life is divine Principle, Mind, Spirit. Life is without beginning and without end. Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of Life, and time is no part of eternity;” [18] “Life is eternal;” [19] “Life is, like Christ, ‘the same yesterday, and today and forever’. Organization and time have nothing to do with Life;” [20] “One moment of divine consciousness or the spiritual understanding of Life and Love is a foretaste of eternity. ”

“ There is no place in the real and true man for passion. Such turbulent feelings arise from ignorance, as all imperfections do. It is not blasphemy at all. It is sublime understanding. It is divine metaphysics. When you free yourself from the illusions and delusions of the flesh, or learn the little trick that all is mind, then you also by the aid of Christ the way-shower, and of me the discoverer of Christian Science or the Holy Ghost, may take a seat along with us two, the male originator and the female finisher of real Christianity. ”

“ When we are cognizant of limitations of time and sense, of physical conditions, of anything finite or even of ourselves as something other than deity or mind or universal reality or as some finite limitation of it we are in an imperfect state of mind or of character. Therefore, freeing ourselves from these notions or delusion and understanding the unity, infinity and identity of reality, ourselves included, is the highest blessedness, the greatest good, the end of existence. ”

“ In the first edition of Science and Health, in which she was not so shrewd in hiding this deadly defect of non-personality, both with reference to God and to man, as she was in the late editions of the work, though it is not at all eliminated from these, she says: “Personality will be swallowed up in the boundless Love that shadows forth man; and beauty, immortality, and blessedness, be the glorious proof of existence you recognize. ”

“ It is not something positive and contrary to the will or wish of God, for God has neither will nor wish. Nor is it something contrary to his knowledge, for his knowledge constitutes all reality. As error is not knowing something contrary to divine knowledge but failing to have divine knowledge; as, for example, to split fine hairs still finer, error is not thinking that two and three make four but failing to see that they make five; so is it in regard to evil. As all virtue is simply a participation of the divine mind so all vice is simply a privation of the divine mind. ”

“ The mysteries of human life are so deep and so little known that many people are helpless in the hands of those who would lead them. Witness those who resort to spiritism, mind-reading, fortune-telling and what not. Dr. Stafford has laid bare the very abstruse subjects involved in Platonic philosophy and Christian Science in such a way as to make them clear to all who seek to know the truth. He has shown by irrefutable evidence that Christian Science is a key which locks God out of his word and locks Jesus Christ out of his blood-bought kingdom. ”

“ It is natural to ask, how could Spinoza, who identifies man with God, that is eternal man, corresponding to Mrs. Eddy's immortal man, affirm that God is wholly unlike man? It is, I repeat, on account of the system. God is infinite and must not be thought of in any sense as finite. Mrs. Eddy has his standpoint exactly. Both are pantheists. Both identify man with God. Both teach that God is unlike man in every respect, though man is the image and likeness of God, and do so for the same reason, namely, to make secure their idol. Infinity, and both follow the Neoplatonists. ”

“ But the simplicity is secured at the sacrifice of the principal elements of human nature. When we eliminate from life and character all qualities and faculties except mathematical thinking by simply calling them non-entities, then it is a very easy matter to treat of moral relations and all relations. But the process is similar to that of an anatomist who says, “the flesh, the nerves and the blood are of no importance in the human system. They are non-entities; they do not really exist. We are concerned with what has reality, namely, the bones and nothing more.” ”

“ If I show that she was influenced by others fundamentally, so much as to do little more than to reproduce their system, then I disprove the third proposition and show that the first and main element of her claim, namely, that she is the discoverer and founder of Christian Science, has no truth in it. If I show that the principles of Christian Science are in a system that is not only non-Christian and pagan but anti-Christian, a system that was inspired by those who wanted to resist the spreading tide of Christianity, then I disprove the second point of her claim. ”

“ She calls it metaphysical healing, which means curing and preventing disease by the realizing of truth or true principles. And since she denies the existence of disease in the body, the healing she offers is not after all for the body but for the mind. But if the application of the unreality of matter to healing be anything new, the credit for it belongs to P. P. Quimby, not to Mrs. Eddy. [22]
So this one new thing that might possibly be claimed for her vanishes also. Christian Science is a theory, not a practice. It is a system of principles, of metaphysics as she is proud to call it. ”

“ Plotinus in designating the nous as the creator's son had prepared the way most excellently for Synesius. Plotinus says: “As he who diligently surveys the heavens, and contemplates the splendor of the stars, should immediately think upon and search after their artificer, so it is requisite that he who beholds and admires the intelligible world, should diligently inquire after its author, investigating who he is, where he resides, and how he produces such an offspring as intellect, a son beautiful and pure, and full of his ineffable fire.” ”

“ For my understanding is too small to determine all the means, whereby God leads men to the love of Himself, that is, to salvation. So far is my opinion from being hurtful, that it offers to those, who are not taken up with prejudices and childish superstitions, the only means for arriving at the highest stage blessedness.” [105] Spinoza, like Mrs. Eddy, identifies our love of God with understanding God or truth, as I will show later. I will also show that to Proclus and Spinoza salvation or the highest blessedness is nothing else than intellectual knowledge or perfect understanding. ”

“ When necessity is the mother of invention the offspring may be something quite unnatural. She cannot say that God is a person because she does not believe this, and because such a statement would tear out the keystone of her metaphysical system and cause the whole massive structure to fall in a pile. On the other hand it would not be wise for Mrs. Eddy to tell us plainly that she is going to rob us of our beautiful conception of God as a being of will, forethought, design, moral qualities and moral relations. ”

“ And to say that God is any one or all of these is to reduce him to limits much narrower than to say that he is a person. That God may be thought of as in some way limited is a cause of great concern to Mrs. Eddy, and to her infinity, or unlimitedness, is simply the sum total of all reality. She says: “Allness is the measure of the infinite, and nothing less can express God.” [49] It is clear that in such a system of pantheism, “Principle” is the best name for God, and God is not to be thought of as a person. ”

“ With the passing of one's finiteness or otherness than God must pass his personality. It is the wave of the sea sinking back again into the water of the sea and thereby ceasing to be. The individual in order to reach eternal blessedness must, like everything else of value, be pressed through the Christian Science funnel and made to come out as principle; his personality must be squeezed out of him in order to get him to heaven. The heaven of Christian Science is about the same as the Nirvana of Buddhism. ”

“ It is mind realizing its emancipation, sitting serenely upon its throne and, regnant with power, smiting the darkness with the scepter of light.
Again I exhort you, excited Christian, not to be controlled by passion but to think, to think calmly and imperially until all things are understood and you have peace in the consciousness of universal harmony. Yes, be at peace, troubled Christian and do not fear blasphemy. Do not fear anything, neither the devil for he does not exist; nor God, for he cannot become angry ”

“ There is no parallel between Christian Science and Neoplatonism more striking and more fundamental than the theory that evil is a negation, the mere absence of reality. We have naturally touched upon this subject before, as it was unavoidable, but here we are to scrutinize it very carefully.
Let us recall that Neoplatonism and Christian Science are rigid monistic systems. They hold that there is harmony in the universe considered in its entirety. Sin or evil must be either discord in the universe or be no part of it. ”

“ Christian Science compels its devotees so to reason, for its mission is to “make man God-like” and God cannot sympathize with those that suffer, for he cannot even recognize the existence of pain. So Mrs. Eddy says: “He could not destroy our woes totally if He possessed any knowledge of them. His sympathy is divine, not human.” [93]
A sympathy that arises without the recognition even of the pain of the sufferer is no sympathy at all. A sympathy that has in it no element of suffering is not sympathy. ”

“ The one seemingly good thing that may be said about this ethical theory is that it simplifies wonderfully the moral problems of life. All we have to do is to think, to think profoundly or metaphysically, until we see that truth is all and error is nothing. And when we have done that we have reached the goal of existence, and need to do nothing more except to keep on so thinking. Yes, this is a very simple analysis of life. It enables us to consider questions of character as we would numbers in arithmetic and figures in geometry, as Spinoza ambitiously attempted to do. ”

“ A very common synonym for Christ is truth, which she uses not figuratively of Christ but as describing literally his nature. Her conception is that Christ, the ideal and true man, is not a person. He is simply an idea which she contends any and every real man is. So then in Jesus Christ we have the example of one who possessed, or attained finally to, perfect understanding, in whom intuitive consciousness reigned, who exhibited the kingly power of mind, who knew only reality and eternity and who had no sense of time, limitation, suffering, sin, sickness, or death. ”

“ Intellectual conceptions or ideas constitute all those things that eternally exist. So then the infinite mind is the cause of all ideas or thoughts. Plotinus had already taught the same doctrine. He says: “Intellect * * * contains all real existences in itself * * * as though they were its own self, and it were one with them.” [27] Real existences are ideas, all ideas, and these are so in the one infinite mind as to be one with it. All ideas, whether considered as belonging to and originating in an individual mind or not, are in reality the progeny and effects of this one infinite mind. ”