eds to
stand a good ways back from the book itself in order at all to get any
balanced view of its philosophy but, so seen, its fundamentals are
almost unexpectedly simple.

_Christian Science a Philosophy, a Theology, a Religion and a System of
Healing; General Conditions Which Have Lent it Power_

Christian Science is offered as a philosophy, a theology, a religion and
a method for the practical conduct of life and it needs to be considered
under each of these four heads. It demands also for any proper
understanding of it the backgrounds of Mrs. Eddy's peculiar temperament
and checkered history. It is a growth. For her fundamentals Mrs. Eddy
is, beyond reasonable debate, in debt to Quimby and in some ways
Quimby's original insights have suffered at her hands. None the less, in
its final form "Science and Health" is what Mrs. Eddy has made it and it
is what it is because she was what she was. She shared with her own
generation an absorbing interest in fundamental theological problems.
She inherited a religion which has reduced the whole of life to rigid
and on the whole too narrow theological formulae. She was not able to fit
her experience into the formula which her faith supplied and yet, on the
other hand, her faith exercised a controlling influence over her life.
She was in a small and pathetic way a kind of nineteenth century Job
grappling with the old, old question given sin and, above all, pain and
suffering to find God. She could not adjust either Divine love or a just
Divine sovereignty to what she herself had been called upon to bear. A
natural tendency toward the occult and the desperate willingness of the
hopelessly sick to try anything which promises a cure, led her in many
directions. So much her biography explains.

Quimby was the first teacher she found whose system seemed to offer any
key at all to the intellectual and spiritual puzzle in which she found
herself and when his system seemed to be proved for her by her recovery
from a chronic abnormal state, she thereafter followed and elaborated
what he suggested. Here a certain natural shrewdness and ingenuity of
mind stood her in good stead. She was helped by her own ignorances and
limitations. If she had been a trained thinker, familiar with a wide
range of philosophic speculation, she would never have dared write so
dogmatically; if she had been a great philosopher with the philosopher's
inclusive vision, she would never have dared build so much