the Methodist, or the
Catholic, or the Mohammedan, or the Buddhist, or the Mormon; it is
environment. If religions were got by reasoning, we should have the
extraordinary spectacle of an American family with a Presbyterian in it,
and a Baptist, a Methodist, a Catholic, a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, and
a Mormon. A Presbyterian family does not produce Catholic families
or other religious brands, it produces its own kind; and not
by intellectual processes, but by association. And so also with
Mohammedanism, the cult which in our day is spreading with the sweep of
a world-conflagration through the Orient, that native home of profound
thought and of subtle intellectual fence, that fertile womb whence has
sprung every great religion that exists. Including our own; for with all
our brains we cannot invent a religion and market it.

The language of my quoted prophets recurs to us now, and we wonder to
think how small a space in the world the mighty Mohammedan Church would
be occupying now, if a successful trade in its line of goods had been
conditioned upon an exhibit that would "appeal to the intellect" instead
of to "the unintelligent, the mentally inferior, the people who do not
think."

The Christian Science Church, like the Mohammedan Church, makes no
embarrassing appeal to the intellect, has no occasion to do it, and can
get along quite well without it.

Provided. Provided what? That it can secure that thing which is
worth two or three hundred thousand times more than an "appeal to the
intellect"--an environment. Can it get that? Will it be a menace
to regular Christianity if it gets that? Is it time for regular
Christianity to get alarmed? Or shall regular Christianity smile a smile
and turn over and take another nap? Won't it be wise and proper for
regular Christianity to do the old way, Me customary way, the historical
way--lock the stable-door after the horse is gone? Just as Protestantism
has smiled and nodded this long time (while the alert and diligent
Catholic was slipping in and capturing the public schools), and is now
beginning to hunt around for the key when it is too late?

Will Christian Science get a chance to show its wares? It has already
secured that chance. Will it flourish and spread and prosper if it
shall create for itself the one thing essential to those conditions--an
environment? It has already created an environment. There are families
of Christian Scientists in every community in America, and