mar; that she has but a rude and
dull sense of the values of words; that she so lacks in the matter of
literary precision that she can seldom put a thought into words that
express it lucidly to the reader and leave no doubts in his mind as to
whether he has rightly understood or not; that she cannot even draught a
Preface that a person can fully comprehend, nor one which can by any
art be translated into a fully understandable form; that she can
seldom inject into a Preface even single sentences whose meaning is
uncompromisingly clear--yet Prefaces are her specialty, if she has one.

Mrs. Eddy's known and undisputed writings are very limited in bulk;
they exhibit no depth, no analytical quality, no thought above school
composition size, and but juvenile ability in handling thoughts of even
that modest magnitude. She has a fine commercial ability, and could
govern a vast railway system in great style; she could draught a set
of rules that Satan himself would say could not be improved on--for
devilish effectiveness--by his staff; but we know, by our excursions
among the Mother-Church's By-laws, that their English would discredit
the deputy baggage-smasher. I am quite sure that Mrs. Eddy cannot write
well upon any subject, even a commercial one.

In the very first revision of Science and Health (1883), Mrs. Eddy wrote
a Preface which is an unimpeachable witness that the rest of the book
was written by somebody else. I have put it in the Appendix along with a
page or two taken from the body of the book, and will ask the reader to
compare the labored and lumbering and confused gropings of this Preface
with the easy and flowing and direct English of the other exhibit, and
see if he can believe that the one hand and brain produced both.

And let him take the Preface apart, sentence by sentence, and
searchingly examine each sentence word by word, and see if he can find
half a dozen sentences whose meanings he is so sure of that he can
rephrase them--in words of his own--and reproduce what he takes to be
those meanings. Money can be lost on this game. I know, for I am the one
that lost it.

Now let the reader turn to the excerpt which I have made from the
chapter on "Prayer" (last year's edition of Science and Health), and
compare that wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of
work with the aforesaid Preface, and with Mrs. Eddy's poetry concerning
the gymnastic trees, and Minerva's not yet effete sandals, and