basis, and they must be examined in that light. Now there are
certain sound and universally recognized rules governing the scholarly
approach to the Old and New Testaments. Words must be taken in their
plain sense; they must be understood in their relation to their context.
A book is to be studied also in the light of its history; the time and
place and purpose of its composition, as far as these are known, must be
considered; no changes made in the text save through critical
emendation, nor any translations offered not supported by accepted
texts, nor any liberties be taken with grammatical constructions. By
such plain tests as these Mrs. Eddy's use of the Scriptures will not
bear examination. She violates all recognized canons of Biblical
interpretation on almost every page.[42]

[Footnote 42: This is a brief--and a Christian Scientist may protest--a
summary dismissal of the claim of "Science and Health" to be a "key to
the Scriptures." But nothing is gained--save of the unnecessary
lengthening of this chapter--in going into a detailed examination of her
method and conclusions. She has insight, imagination, boundless
allegorical resource, but the whole Bible beneath her touch becomes a
plastic material to be subdued to her peculiar purpose by omissions,
read-in meanings and the substantial and constant disregard of plain
meanings. To the student the whole matter is important only as revealing
the confusion of the popular mind which receives such a method as
authoritative.]

Her method is wholly allegorical and the results achieved are
conditioned only by the ingenuity of the commentator. It would require a
body of citation from the pages of "Science and Health," not possible
here, to follow through Mrs. Eddy's peculiar exegesis. One needs only to
open the book at random for outstanding illustrations. For example,
Genesis 1:6, "And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the
waters and let it divide the waters from the waters." The word
"firmament" has its own well established connotation gathered from a
careful study of all its uses. We can no more understand the earlier
chapters of Genesis without an understanding of Hebrew cosmogony than we
can understand Dante without a knowledge of medieval cosmogony. But,
given this knowledge which is the common possession of all sound
scholarship, we can at least understand what the passage means, even
though we have long left behind us the naive conception of the va