The Religio-Medical Masquerade: A Complete Exposure of Christian Science. Frederick William Peabody

Baker G. Eddy and her impostures, be they called by the name of religion, or be they pretended cure-alls for the ills to which our human flesh is heir.

      I challenge Mrs. Eddy and the whole Christian Science combination to dare to prosecute me for libel, and I affirm and shall continue to affirm that their omission so to do is an acknowledgment of the truth of every statement I make. She knows I am telling nothing but the truth, and that the whole truth, to be brought out upon a judicial investigation, would be more damning than the truth as I have presented it. The whole truth cannot be told outside of a judicial tribunal.

      In presenting the substance of this book in the form of a lecture to the people of the country, from one ocean to the other, the only response has been slander and defamation of me, the last resort of the accused who can make no defense; but nobody has met my facts with anything like evidence, or undertaken in any serious manner to disprove the truth of my most damaging charges.

      I beg every one who reads this book not to be diverted from the facts by any personal abuse of me that may follow its publication. It is the only response that has been or can be made to my presentation, and I am accustomed to it from the paid spokesmen of a cult that, so far as its ruling spirits are concerned, more resembles an organization of outlaws banded together for plunder, than a religious establishment based upon the sublime teachings of the Man of Sorrows.

      The knowledge I possess I could not suppress without making myself a party to one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated against the human race; and I will not, by my silence, permit myself to become an ally with Mrs. Eddy and her associates in that crime.

      History is but repeated in Christian Science. “We have seen,” said Macaulay, “an old woman with no talents beyond the cunning of a fortune teller, and with the education of a scullion, exalted into a prophetess and surrounded by tens of thousands of devoted followers, many of whom were, in station and in knowledge, immeasurably her superiors, and all this in the nineteenth century, and all this in London.”

      Marveling as he thus did at the success of Joanna Southcott’s parody upon religion in the early part of the last century, what would Macaulay have thought of Mary Baker G. Eddy’s utterly unintelligible hodge-podge, which she falsely calls both a discovery and a revelation, a science and a religion, and what would he have thought of her following?

      Mrs. Eddy is in no respect superior to Miss Southcott in the matter of origin and education. One was as obscure and as unlearned as the other. In one respect at least the Southcott woman was superior to the Eddy woman. The former was at least honest; she believed in her mission. There is no evidence that she built up a pretended religion upon a foundation of lies. She was, at the worst, an unbalanced creature with a form of religious mania. She did not grow rich out of her followers. She did not use her supposed revelation as a business asset and sell it for what it would bring. She did not take out a copyright on her “religion,” and monopolize its sale for extraordinary profit. There was no taint of commercialism about her frenzies. She died poor.

      The founder of Christian Science, on the contrary, is everything that Joanna Southcott was not. She is mercenary, insincere, shameless, and bold to a degree surpassing that of all other persons who have duped mankind. Upon theft and falsehood she has laid the foundations of the “religion” by the sale of which she has accumulated a fortune.

      F. W. P.

      The Religio-Medical Masquerade

      Chapter I

The Sacrifice of Children

       Table of Contents

      At the very outset of a candid consideration of Christian Science, I feel the necessity, if not of an apology, at least of an explanation. I shall with entire freedom discuss a woman and a combined religio-medical-commercial system of which she is the founder. I shall handle the one and the other without the least regard for anything but the truth. Mary Baker G. Eddy is the woman, and Christian Science, so called, is the system; but they are inseparable, identical. They have arisen and they will go down together, and I predict that they will go down much more rapidly than they have ascended.

      I am going to hold up for the inspection of mankind the soul of a woman, of a woman eighty-eight years of age, and I am going to do it without regard to the fact that she is feminine and aged. There is no other way to present Christian Science in its true aspect. It rests exclusively upon Mrs. Eddy’s representations and Mrs. 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.

      While this is unmistakably true, it is, notwithstanding, most distasteful to a man, if he be half a man, publicly to assail the character of a woman, and nothing under heaven can justify it, if she be in private life and not putting forth nor seeking to put forth an influence upon the lives of others; but if she have constituted herself sponsor for a religion of lies and a medical system that is a fraud and a shame, if she profess God imparted knowledge of everything needful for human bodies and souls, if she reach out her influence to all parts of the land and seek to govern hundreds of thousands of people in every detail of their daily lives, and if her influence be harmful and only harmful, it is the duty of a man, who knows the facts, to make them public, regardless of sex or age or anything whatever but the public good. And so I ask my readers to believe that while for Mrs. Eddy, the feeble and palsied old woman tottering on the very verge of the grave, I have feelings only of compassion; for Mrs. Eddy, the charlatan and adventuress, for Mrs. Eddy, the impious pretender to equality with Jesus, the fraudulent claimant of exclusive and immediate revelation from God, for Mrs. Eddy, upon whose altar of greed have been sacrificed the harmony and happiness of marriage, the natural love and tenderness of parents and the sweet lives of God only knows how many children, for Mrs. Eddy, the heartless and avaricious despot of multitudes of despoiled and demented dupes, for that woman, as there is no sympathy in my heart, so there shall be no charity in my speech.

      Now, who is Mrs. Eddy, and what is this strange thing called Christian Science?

      As I understand her, Mrs. 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; it never relieved any one of any real evil​—​but his money.

      Mrs. Eddy, boldly professing to have received a revelation from God, and to be the equal of Jesus Christ, has made upwards of a million and a half dollars out of her enterprise that she calls Christian Science since she reached sixty years of age; and, if some be inclined to infer therefrom the possession by her of extraordinary genius, I cannot agree with them. Mrs. Eddy has succeeded, not because of her greatness, but because of the avidity with which unreasoning people swallow the most monstrous absurdities, the shamelessness with which men and women will intellectually prostrate themselves before the coarsest vulgarity and the most patent fraud.

      Let me illustrate this, if I can. It is no part of my undertaking to account for Mrs. Eddy’s following. The fact that she has some thousands of followers does not, of itself, prove the truth of any of her teachings or pretensions. There was never any religious pretender yet, who could not, with slight effort, obtain a hearing and a following. I recently observed, in one of our daily papers, an account of an amusing incident of this character in Oklahoma. A man, believing himself to be the incarnation of Almighty God, started out to convert the world to his belief, and considered it to be his mission, in the first instance, to persuade mankind to divest