d is
the only author of man. The virgin mother conceived this idea of God and
gave to her ideal the name of Jesus."[50] "The illumination of Mary's
spiritual sense put to silence material law and its order of generation,
and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth. The Holy Ghost,
or divine Spirit, overshadowed the pure sense of the Virgin-mother with
the full recognition that being is Spirit."[51] "Jesus was the offspring
of Mary's self-conscious communion with God."[52] Now all this is
neither honest supernaturalism nor the honest acceptance of the normal
methods of birth. It is certainly not the equivalent of the Gospel
account whether the Gospel account be accepted or rejected. To use a
phrase which has come into use since "Science and Health" was written,
this is a "smoke screen" under cover of which Mrs. Eddy escapes the
necessity of either accepting or denying the testimony of the Gospels.

[Footnote 50: Page 29.]

[Footnote 51: Page 29.]

[Footnote 52: Page 30.]

Something of this, one must confess, one may find in not a little
religious teaching old and new, but it is doubtful if there is anywhere
so outstanding an instance of what one may call the smoke screen method
in the consideration of the Incarnation, as in the passages just quoted.
As a matter of fact all this is simply the attempt to fit the idealistic
dualism, which is the real philosophic basis of Christian Science and
which, in so far as it is capable of explanation at all, can be as
easily explained in two pages as two hundred, into the theology in which
Mrs. Eddy was nurtured and which was a background common to both herself
and her disciples. Christian Science would carry far less weight in the
race it is running if it frankly cut itself clear of a theology with
which it has fundamentally no affinity. This indoctrination of an
idealistic dualism with a content of Christian theology probably
heightens the appeal of the system to those who are most at home in a
new faith as they discover there the familiar phrases of their older
faith, but it weakens the fundamental Christian Science apologetic. I
think, however, we ought justly to recognize this as simply an
inevitable aspect in the transition of Christian Science from the
orthodox faith and experience of historic Christianity to a faith and
experience of its own.

Seen as a curious half-truth development made possible by a whole group
of forces in action at the end of the ninetee