


Produced by David Widger





CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

by Mark Twain




PREFACE

Book I of this volume occupies a quarter or a third of the volume,
and consists of matter written about four years ago, but not hitherto
published in book form. It contained errors of judgment and of fact. I
have now corrected these to the best of my ability and later knowledge.


Book II was written at the beginning of 1903, and has not until
now appeared in any form. In it my purpose has been to present a
character-portrait of Mrs. Eddy, drawn from her own acts and words
solely, not from hearsay and rumor; and to explain the nature and scope
of her Monarchy, as revealed in the Laws by which she governs it, and
which she wrote herself.

MARK TWAIN

NEW YORK. January, 1907.





BOOK I CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

     "It is the first time since the dawn-days of Creation that
     a Voice has gone crashing through space with such
     placid and complacent confidence and command."



CHAPTER I

VIENNA 1899.

This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the
Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and
broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was
found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the
nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed
farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning
little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright 
flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room,
separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the
front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the
manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring
that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables
a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.

There was a village a mile away, and a horse doctor lived there, but
there was no surgeon. It seemed a bad outlook; mine was distinctly
a surgery case. Then it was remembered that a lady from Boston was
summering in that village, and she was a Christian Science doctor and
could cure anything. So she was sent for. It was night by this time, and
she could not conveniently come, but sent word that it was no matter,
there was no hurry, she would give me "absent treatment" now, and come
in the morning; meantime she begged me to make myself tranquil and
comfortable and remember that there was nothing the matter with me. I
thought there must be some mistake.

"Did you tell her I walked off a cliff seventy-five feet high?"

"Yes."

"And struck a boulder at the bottom and bounced?"

"Yes."

"And struck another one and bounced again?"

"Yes."

"And struck another one and bounced yet again?"

"Yes."

"And broke the boulders?"

"Yes."

"That accounts for it; she is thinking of the boulders. Why didn't you
tell her I got hurt, too?"

"I did. I told her what you told me to tell her: that you were now
but an incoherent series of compound fractures extending from your
scalp-lock to your heels, and that the comminuted projections caused you
to look like a hat-rack."

"And it was after this that she wished me to remember that there was
nothing the matter with me?"

"Those were her words."

"I do not understand it. I believe she has not diagnosed the case with
sufficient care. Did she look like a person who was theorizing, or did
she look like one who has fallen off precipices herself and brings to
the aid of abstract science the confirmations of personal experience?"

"Bitte?"

It was too large a contract for the Stubenmadchen's vocabulary; she
couldn't call the hand. I allowed the subject to rest there, and asked
for something to eat and smoke, and something hot to drink, and a basket
to pile my legs in; but I could not have any of these things.

"Why?"

"She said you would need nothing at all."

"But I am hungry and thirsty, and in desperate pain."

"She said you would have these delusions, but must pay no attention
to them. She wants you to particularly remember that there are no such
things as hunger and thirst and pain.''

"She does does she?"

"It is what she said."

"Does she seem to be in full and functionable possession of her
intellectual plant, such as it is?"

"Bitte?"

"Do they let her run at large, or do they tie her up?"

"Tie her up?"

"There, good-night, run along, you are a good girl, but your mental
Geschirr is not arranged for light and airy conversation. Leave me to my
delusions."




CHAPTER II

It was a night of anguish, of course--at least, I supposed it was, for
it had all the symptoms of it--but it passed at last, and the Christian
Scientist came, and I was glad She was middle-aged, and large and bony,
and erect, and had an austere face and a resolute jaw and a Roman beak
and was a widow in the third degree, and her name was Fuller. I was
eager to get to business and find relief, but she was distressingly
deliberate. She unpinned and unhooked and uncoupled her upholsteries one
by one, abolished the wrinkles with a flirt of her hand, and hung the
articles up; peeled off her gloves and disposed of them, got a book out
of her hand-bag, then drew a chair to the bedside, descended into it
without hurry, and I hung out my tongue. She said, with pity but without
passion:

"Return it to its receptacle. We deal with the mind only, not with its
dumb servants."

I could not offer my pulse, because the connection was broken; but she
detected the apology before I could word it, and indicated by a negative
tilt of her head that the pulse was another dumb servant that she had no
use for. Then I thought I would tell her my symptoms and how I felt, so
that she would understand the case; but that was another inconsequence,
she did not need to know those things; moreover, my remark about how I
felt was an abuse of language, a misapplication of terms.

"One does not feel," she explained; "there is no such thing as
feeling: therefore, to speak of a non-existent thing as existent is a
contradiction. Matter has no existence; nothing exists but mind; the
mind cannot feel pain, it can only imagine it."

"But if it hurts, just the same--"

"It doesn't. A thing which is unreal cannot exercise the functions of
reality. Pain is unreal; hence, pain cannot hurt."

In making a sweeping gesture to indicate the act of shooing the illusion
of pain out of the mind, she raked her hand on a pin in her dress, said
"Ouch!" and went tranquilly on with her talk. "You should never allow
yourself to speak of how you feel, nor permit others to ask you how
you are feeling; you should never concede that you are ill, nor permit
others to talk about disease or pain or death or similar nonexistences
in your presence. Such talk only encourages the mind to continue its
empty imaginings." Just at that point the Stuben-madchen trod on the
cat's tail, and the cat let fly a frenzy of cat-profanity. I asked, with
caution:

"Is a cat's opinion about pain valuable?"

"A cat has no opinion; opinions proceed from mind only; the lower
animals, being eternally perishable, have not been granted mind; without
mind, opinion is impossible."

"She merely imagined she felt a pain--the cat?"

"She cannot imagine a pain, for imagining is an effect of mind; without
mind, there is no imagination. A cat has no imagination."

"Then she had a real pain?"

"I have already told you there is no such thing as real pain."

"It is strange and interesting. I do wonder what was the matter with
the cat. Because, there being no such thing as a real pain, and she not
being able to imagine an imaginary one, it would seem that God in His
pity has compensated the cat with some kind of a mysterious emotion
usable when her tail is trodden on which, for the moment, joins cat and
Christian in one common brotherhood of--"

She broke in with an irritated--

"Peace! The cat feels nothing, the Christian feels nothing. Your empty
and foolish imaginings are profanation and blasphemy, and can do you an
injury. It is wiser and better and holier to recognize and confess that
there is no such thing as disease or pain or death."

"I am full of imaginary tortures," I said, "but I do not think I could
be any more uncomfortable if they were real ones. What must I do to get
rid of them?"

"There is no occasion to get rid of them since they do not exist. They
are illusions propagated by matter, and matter has no existence; there
is no such thing as matter."

"It sounds right and clear, but yet it seems in a degree elusive; it
seems to slip through, just when you think you are getting a grip on
it."

"Explain."

"Well, for instance: if there is no such thing as matter, how can matter
propagate things?"

In her compassion she almost smiled. She would have smiled if there were
any such thing as a smile.

"It is quite simple," she said; "the fundamental propositions of
Christian Science explain it, and they are summarized in the four
following self-evident propositions: 1. God is All in all. 2. God is
good. Good is Mind 3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter 4. Life,
God, omnipotent Good, deny death, evil, sin, disease.

"There--now you see."

It seemed nebulous; it did not seem to say anything about the difficulty
in hand--how non-existent matter can propagate illusions I said, with
some hesitancy:

"Does--does it explain?"

"Doesn't it? Even if read backward it will do it."

With a budding hope, I asked her to do it backwards.

"Very well. Disease sin evil death deny Good omnipotent God life matter
is nothing all being Spirit God Mind is Good good is God all in All is
God. There do you understand now?

"It--it--well, it is plainer than it was before; still--"

"Well?"

"Could you try it some more ways?"

"As many as you like; it always means the same. Interchanged in any way
you please it cannot be made to mean anything different from what it
means when put in any other way. Because it is perfect. You can jumble
it all up, and it makes no difference: it always comes out the way it
was before. It was a marvelous mind that produced it. As a mental tour
de force it is without a mate, it defies alike the simple, the concrete,
and the occult."

"It seems to be a