



Produced by Paul Flo Williams, from images provided by the
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                 The Religio-Medical Masquerade



            A Complete Exposure of Christian Science

                               By
                  FREDERICK W. PEABODY, LL.B.
                       OF THE BOSTON BAR

                       THE HANCOCK PRESS
                         BOSTON, MASS.

                        Copyright, 1910
                               BY
                      Frederick W. Peabody

The price of this book is $1.00.

Mailed to any address upon receipt of price and eight cents in
stamps for postage.

The Hancock-Press, Post-Office Box 2789, Boston, Mass.




                            CONTENTS


          Introduction

       I. The Sacrifice of Children

      II. The Detached Heart

     III. Pretended Equality with Jesus

      IV. The Faked "Revelation"

       V. The Fiction of God's Authorship

      VI. A Sham "Religion"

     VII. A Bogus Healing System

    VIII. Immeasurable Greed

      IX. The Eddy Autocracy

       X. The "String" on the Gifts

      XI. The Eddy Ban on Marriage

     XII. Christian Science Witchcraft




                          Introduction



Christian Science is the most shallow and sordid and wicked
imposture of the ages. Upon a substratum of lies a foundation of
false pretense has been laid, upon which has been built a
superstructure of outward beauty in which multitudes of credulous
people gather to glorify the founder as God's chief anointed.

Never before has the world witnessed a masquerade like that of
Christian Science. Being everything that Christianity is not, it
puts on the garb of Christianity and seizes the name of Christ
the better to attract and the more strongly to hold people of
shallow mind, but sincere heart. Having nothing in it remotely
worthy of the name of science, it meaninglessly appropriates
scientific terms and phrases in order to parade before the world
with an air of learning.

The founder of this pretended religion, this bogus healing
system, audaciously and irreligiously professing equality of
character and of power with Jesus, has, throughout her whole long
life, been in every particular precisely antithetical to Christ.
Sordid, mercenary, unprincipled, the consuming passion of her
life has been the accumulation of money, and she has stopped at
no falsehood, no fraud and no greater wickedness that seemed to
put her in the way of adding to her accumulations, or overcoming
her supposed enemies.

Jesus condemned nothing so forcefully as the mercenary spirit.
With a whip he scourged the money changers from the Temple, and
in language that burned as flaming fire he denounced the
hypocrites and liars of his time as "like unto whited sepulchers
that are indeed beautiful outward, but within are full of dead
men's bones and all uncleanness."

If the language of this book seem severe, if its denunciations
are emphatic, if things are called by their right names and facts
handled without the least equivocation, if contrasts are drawn
between the founder of Christianity and the founder of Christian
Science that seem to border upon the irreverent, let it not be
assumed that there is in the heart of the author the slightest
particle of personal animosity, or in his attitude toward real
Christianity and Christ anything but the most complete reverence.

It is time the plain facts should be stated in plain terms, that
the hand of truth should ruthlessly tear away the mask of
falsehood from the face of hypocrisy and expose to the horrified
gaze of mankind the hideous lineaments upon which are indelibly
and unmistakably written the craft and insincerity of utter
selfishness and monstrous greed, and the hardness of a cruelty
almost unbelievable.

Without egotism, I may say that no other man knows, as I know,
the true inwardness of Christian Science, because no other man
has come face to face with it again and again on so many
occasions as I have, and no other has been in the position I have
to force from the lips of reluctant witnesses, under the sanction
of an oath, unwilling and discrediting testimony.

Ten years ago I knew nothing and cared less about Christian
Science, assuming it to be a sincere, but deluded, manifestation
of the childish credulity to which the human race is prone. But
ten years of investigations and repeated professional
employments, in which it became my duty as a lawyer to get at the
actual facts with the aid of legal process, have qualified me, as
no other not having had my experience can be qualified, to set
forth the amazing story in utter nakedness. In order that it may
appear that I am talking from a basis of knowledge, and not of
rumor or gossip or speculation, let me briefly narrate the
professional experiences above referred to.

My first encounter with Christian Science came about through an
employment by the Arena Company, publishers of the _Arena_
magazine, in 1899. In the May number of the magazine for that
year an article by Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury, that was in the
nature of an _expose_ of Christian Science, was published, and
instead of bringing suit against Mrs. Woodbury or the magazine
for the statements contained in the article, an endeavor was
made, in Mrs. Eddy's interest, to suppress the magazine by a suit
in equity to restrain its publication based upon the
incorporation in the article of a photograph of Mrs. Eddy said to
have been copyrighted. The Arena Company retained me to represent
its interests in the litigation, and during that employment I was
brought in contact with the author of the article, and from her
got my first inkling of the real character of Mrs. Mary Baker G.
Eddy, and her religio-medical-commercial system.

Mrs. Woodbury had been a Christian Scientist for many years,
during a long portion of which time she enjoyed Mrs. Eddy's
confidence as one of her leading lieutenants. She had accumulated
many letters from Mrs. Eddy, and all her published utterances,
whether in book or pamphlet form, from the beginning of the
movement down to that time. Mrs. Woodbury was a woman of
forceful, dominating personality, of much greater culture than
Mrs. Eddy and the rank and file of her following, and in course
of time she attracted to herself a personal popularity and
influence that so threatened Mrs. Eddy's, that it became
important, if her ascendency was to be maintained unimpaired,
that Mrs. Woodbury be cast into outer darkness and her influence
wholly destroyed. Occasion was readily found for this and, in due
time, without warning, without a notice of the charges made
against her, and without an opportunity to be heard, Mrs.
Woodbury was excommunicated from the Boston Christian Science
Church and cut off from fellowship with the faithful. This placed
her in a position where rational reflection was forced upon her,
and she speedily came to the necessary conclusion that she had
been duped.

Arriving at this conclusion, with a courage much to be admired
Mrs. Woodbury wrote and published in the _Arena_ magazine the
article to which I have referred, and in unmeasured terms laid
open the sinister and sordid quality of the whole movement, and
exposed the consummate selfishness and greed in the heart of its
"founder." The article went forth in the _Arena_, and
Christian-Sciencedom was up in arms. Mr. Septimus J. Hanna, then
editor of the _Christian Science Journal_, Mrs. Eddy's organ,
hastened to Concord, New Hampshire, to confer with Mrs. Eddy
regarding ways and means of meeting it, and the method of
squaring the account with Mrs. Woodbury was considered and
determined.

Let it be remembered that the article in the _Arena_ was
published in the May, 1899, number. Almost immediately after the
appearance of the article, Mrs. Woodbury's husband, to whom she
had been much devoted, died and paeans of rejoicing went up from
the Christian Scientists that the Judge of all the world had thus
righteously punished one who had dared to assail the sanctified
personality of "God's voice to this age."

Mrs. Eddy's personal opportunity came