etent to examine the educational
scheme intelligently, and their opinion about it would not be valuable;
neither of these two groups will be able to understand and pass upon the
electrical scheme; none of these three batches of experts will be able
to understand and pass upon the geological revolution; and probably not
one man in the entire lot will be competent to examine, capably, the
intricacies of a political or religious scheme, new or old, and deliver
a judgment upon it which any one need regard as precious.

There you have the top crust. There will be four hundred and
seventy-five men and women present who can draw upon their training and
deliver incontrovertible judgments concerning cheese, and leather,
and cattle, and hardware, and soap, and tar, and candles, and patent
medicines, and dreams, and apparitions, and garden trucks, and cats, and
baby food, and warts, and hymns, and time-tables, and freight-rates, and
summer resorts, and whiskey, and law, and surgery, and dentistry, and
blacksmithing, and shoemaking, and dancing, and Huyler's candy, and
mathematics, and dog fights, and obstetrics, and music, and sausages,
and dry goods, and molasses, and railroad stocks, and horses, and
literature, and labor unions, and vegetables, and morals, and lamb's
fries, and etiquette, and agriculture. And not ten among the five
hundred--let their minds be ever so good and bright--will be competent,
by grace of the requisite specialized mental training, to take hold of a
complex abstraction of any kind and make head or tail of it.

The whole five hundred are thinkers, and they are all capable
thinkers--but only within the narrow limits of their specialized
trainings. Four hundred and ninety of them cannot competently examine
either a religious plan or a political one. A scattering few of them do
examine both--that is, they think they do. With results as precious as
when I examine the nebular theory and explain it to myself.

If the four hundred and ninety got their religion through their minds,
and by weighed and measured detail, Christian Science would not be a
scary apparition. But they don't; they get a little of it through their
minds, more of it through their feelings, and the overwhelming bulk of
it through their environment.

Environment is the chief thing to be considered when one is proposing to
predict the future of Christian Science. It is not the ability to reason
that makes the Presbyterian, or the Baptist, or