he good mother.

But "He" caught the run of the talk and came to the rescue: "Oh, Mother,
Spencer is nobody you are interested in--just a writer of infidelic
books!"

The next day Bigelow called on Spencer and saw upon his table a copy of
"Science and Health," which some one had sent him. He smiled when the
American referred to the book, and in answer to a question said: "It is
surely interesting, and I find many pleasing maxims scattered through
it. But we can hardly call it scientific, any more than we can call
Swedenborg's 'Conjugal Love' scientific." And the author of "First
Principles" showed he had read Mrs. Eddy's book, for he turned to the
chapter on "Marriage," calling attention to the statement that marriage
in its present status is a permitted condition--a matter of
expediency--and children will yet be begotten by telepathic
correspondence. "The unintelligibility of the book recommends it to many
and accounts for its vogue. Swedenborg's immortality is largely owing to
the same reason," and the man who once loved George Eliot smiled not
unkindly, and the conversation drifted to other themes.

This comparison of Swedenborg with Mary Baker Eddy is not straining a
point. No one can read "Science and Health" intelligently unless his
mind is first prepared for it by some one whose mind has been prepared
for it by some one else. It requires a deal of explanation; and like the
Plan of Salvation, no one would ever know anything about it if it wasn't
elucidated by an educated person.

Books strong in abstraction are a convenient rag-bag for your mental
odds and ends. Swedenborg's philosophy is "Science and Health"
multiplied by forty. He lays down propositions and proves them in a
thousand pages.

Yet this must be confessed: The Swedenborgians and the Christian
Scientists as sects rank above most other denominations in point of
intellectual worth. In speaking of the artist Thompson, Nathaniel
Hawthorne once wrote: "This artist is a man of thought, and with no mean
idea of art, a Swedenborgian, or, as he prefers to call it, a member of
the New Church. I have generally found something marked in men who
adopt that faith. He seems to me to possess truth in himself, and to aim
at it is his artistic endeavor."

Swedenborg's essay on "Conjugal Love" contains four hundred thousand
words and divides the theme into forty parts, each of these being
subdivided into forty more. The delights of paradise are pictured in the
p