Thomas Stafford

“ Notice simply that in the act of the soul in which one approaches the good and becomes identified with it he is as a spectator beholding so intently the object of his vision and becoming by so entranced that he forgets that he is something different from it. ”

“ Oh, you poor Christian, in bondage all your life-time to fear, do not be bothered about sin or blasphemy, all which is unreal. When Jesus used these words he was simply accommodating himself to the limited mentality of the unscientific countrymen of an obscure people of a materialistic age. What you need is to think, to think powerfully, that is metaphysically. And when you learn this art, before you even observe the process and as quick as thought you will find yourself on the same lofty summit of divine vision with us where all is mind. ”

“ Mankind will become perfect in proportion as this fact becomes apparent;” [60] “Mortality will cease when man beholds himself God's reflection, even as man sees his reflection in a glass;” [61] “Immortal man was and is God's image or idea, even the infinite expression of infinite Mind.” ”

“ Eddy and the Neoplatonists teach that there is one infinite mind; and that when they speak of creation they are not thinking of what has a beginning in time and an existence of limited duration but of what is eternal. If the student will lay hold of this thought he will easily understand and appreciate the parallel which, though traced with brevity here, is far reaching in importance. ”

“ Eddy, with the aid of the same philosophy, makes the same disposal of him. The refined and scholarly infidelity of our age owes more to Spinoza and to David Hume, the great English historian and empirical philosopher, than to all other persons combined. ”

“ There is in eternity no past nor future, that is, no succession. Notice that they are compelled to have this view as time or succession belongs to the world of matter and the sense of time arises from the body. Time has to do with unrealities. Therefore eternity which measures the existence of realities only has no relation to time. ”

“ Eddy's god has an affection, that is, if he were affected by anything he would be finite and no god at all. So her Dagon, Infinity, is loveless, and is incapable of affection, for it is lifeless. When she calls it “Love” and “Life” she is doing just what all idolaters do in putting into their gods human qualities, just what Mrs. Eddy says we should not do. A principle, even though we may call it love, does not love. It is a person only that can love and does love. ”

“ Eddy's psychological edifice are not only like those of the Neoplatonic temple but are these actual materials and qualities. There are really not two structures but one. An attempt has been made to render the old one modern by simply effacing from the walls the names of heathen gods and writing in their stead the names of Christian ideas. ”

“ As an orthodox Christian my blood is made to boil at such an accommodation of the sacred Scriptures. Its only reason for existence is that it ministers to human pride which the Biblical trinity causes to wither to the roots. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When sufficiently advanced in Science to be in harmony with the truth of being, men become seers and prophets involuntarily, controlled not by demons, spirits, or demigods, but by the one Spirit. It is the prerogative of the ever-present, divine Mind, and of thought which is in rapport with this Mind, to know the past, the present, and the future. ”

“ Eddy should say simply that she rejects prayer and substitutes for it meditation. Consider that the perfection she is thinking of is not the perfection of the divine character or of a personal God, but the perfection which she attributes to the universe. ”

“ And let it be stated without further delay that Christian Science is a system of ideas or philosophic principles. A philosophic system is a body of doctrines or a collection of conceptions that are logically related and interdependent. ”

“ In this conception two doctrines intimately related are involved, namely, that what God creates is eternal, that is, it is without beginning and without end, and that the act of creation also is eternal, that is, it is timeless. ”

“ Famous as a historian he undertakes by means of dialectics alone to say what was not a fact. We can easily conclude that an event which is defined as impossible has never happened. Some great men “make history” but David Hume proposed to unmake it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let that inform the sentiments and awaken the man's dormant sense of moral obligation, and by degrees he will learn the nothingness of the pleasures of human sense and the grandeur and bliss of a spiritual sense, which silences the material or corporeal. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ The parallel we have drawn between Mrs. Eddy's psychology and that of the Neoplatonists is a deadly one. The identities here alone are so damaging to Mrs. Eddy's claim to originality as to destroy it utterly. Her case is absolutely hopeless. She and her followers are in a pitiable plight. They have entangled themselves in meshes out of which it is impossible for one to extricate them. They can “save their face” only by keeping themselves ignorant of the psychological shamming involved in their system or by a bracing and brazen affront. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Eddy teaches that God is a being without will. In opposing and rejecting theism she says: “Reason and will are human, God is divine. In academics and religion, it is patent that will is capable of use and of abuse, of right and wrong action, while God is incapable of evil.” ”

“ She cannot think of God as we think of a great and good man whose very perfection and permanency of character and whose moral worth are revealed in his yielding to the cry of the weak and needy. Mrs. Eddy's divine perfection is nothing but the order and harmony of the universe which she imagines is, has been and ever will be perfect. So to ask for what is not or will not be is to pray for what is supposed to be discord or evil, and as these cannot possibly be, prayer is a waste of breath. Do not forget that Mrs. Eddy is a pantheist. Her god is something impersonal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So we may ask the proud mother “What do you call it?” and get into worse trouble. The mother feels that her babe is something infinitely more than an it. Her child is a human being, a person, and is not to be thought of as a thing either finite or infinite. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Very well, but she should reason the same way about swallowing any other piece of materiality. Mrs. Eddy should have continued the application of her logic and advised us thus: “My little children, bread is unreal and your body is unreal. It is not necessary for one unreality to chew up and swallow down another unreality or for one shadow to consume another shadow. The whole physical performance is a delusion of the flesh and the very thought of it jars us out of harmony with the universe of reality. So from henceforth eat nothing. The spirit should dominate the body, not the body the spirit.” ”

“ Spinoza follows suit gracefully and says: “Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd, or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole;” [27] and he considers that when we call anything bad, we are led astray by the imagination which always sees things imperfectly. ”

“ I believe myself to have sufficiently shown, that that which constitutes the reality of evil, error, crime, etc., does not consist in anything which expresses essence, and therefore we cannot say that God is its cause. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”