Eddyism, Commonly Called “Christian Science” 163 difficult to give the figures. How many lepers have they cleansed? There are plenty of opportunities in the world to try their hand at this. Let some of them repair to Molokai, for example, and get to work. Or does Eddyism enable any of its most ardent devotees to handle serpents that have poison in their fangs? Or to drink carbolic acid, just by way of proof ? Or to speak with foreign tongues, without a course of study? How many languages did Mrs. Eddy speak? I t looks as if she could not speak one with any very great degree of accuracy. But then she told the world that her Divine revelations had purged her mind of all such trifles as Latin and Greek and Hebrew. She certainly should not have been so reckless with her “new tongues,” since, according to her own teaching, Jesus meant all His disciples to possess and use them. Take another example of dishonest treatment of the Word of God. In “Science and Health” (p. 75), after quoting the words of our Lord to His disciples, “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep,” Mrs. Eddy declares that “He restored Lazarus by the understanding that he had never died,” and this in spite of the fact that in the third verse below that in which Christ uses the figure of sleep—discovering that the disciples did not understand— He “said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.” Again, “the injunction, ‘Believe . . . and thou shalt be saved 1’ demands self-reliant trustworthiness.” Every student of the Bible knows that these are the words of Paul to the Philippian jailer, and that he says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” The Apostle is en joining the very opposite of “self-reliant trustworthiness.” He is showing to the trembling jailer that Jesus is the One upon whom he must rely! No doubt many of her disciples who were formerly mem bers of the evangelical churches think they still have the same Saviour as of old. But it was her boast that she had “taken
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