Eddyistn, Commonly Called “Christian Science” 115 prayer, “God be merciful to me a sinner”—a prayer which, our Lord Himself tells us, sent the publican down from the temple forgiven and justified. There is no place for it be cause we are distinctly told that “principle does not pardon.” She is against “audible prayer”, as she calls it. And having endlessly revised and expurgated, without sense and without conscience, her so-called Divine Revelation, she in sists that we, who are not her disciples, worship a “corporeal Jehovah.” She found it impossible to keep her hands off even the Lord’s Prayer. Every Sabbath in every one of her congre gations her version of the Lord’s Prayer is read aloud, sen-, tence by sentence alternately, with that version which we owe to Jesus Christ. The audience, led by one of the read ers, recites the Christian version; and the other reader re cites Mrs. Eddy’s lingo, in which she addresses God as “Our Father-Mother God, all harmonious” (p. 16, “Science and Health”). As another has said, the alternating sentences pro duce a well-marked, almost physical nausea, as if one had suddenly been plunged into foul air. “The difficulty is to sit still; to resist the longing to get away, out into the street— anywhere to cleanse the mind of these sacrilegious puerili ties.” I can corroborate this from experience. As Eddyism is distinctly un-Christian in its views of God, so is it un-Christian in its views of prayer. Then there is the great fact of sin. Concerning this sub ject, too, Mrs. Eddy’s teaching is pantheistic. It mistakes the whole purpose of Christ’s coming into the world. “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” “Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins.” We very well “ s i n a n d a t o n e m e n t ”
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