blacksmithing, and shoemaking, and dancing, and Huyler's candy, and
mathematics, and dog fights, and obstetrics, and music, and sausages, and
dry goods, and molasses, and railroad stocks, and horses, and literature,
and labor unions, and vegetables, and morals, and lamb's fries, and
etiquette, and agriculture. And not ten among the five hundred--let
their minds be ever so good and bright--will be competent, by grace of
the requisite specialized mental training, to take hold of a complex
abstraction of any kind and make head or tail of it.

The whole five hundred are thinkers, and they are all capable thinkers
--but only within the narrow limits of their specialized trainings. Four
hundred and ninety of them cannot competently examine either a religious
plan or a political one. A scattering few of them do examine both--that
is, they think they do. With results as precious as when I examine the
nebular theory and explain it to myself.

If the four hundred and ninety got their religion through their minds,
and by weighed and measured detail, Christian Science would not be a
scary apparition. But they don't; they get a little of it through their
minds, more of it through their feelings, and the overwhelming bulk of it
through their environment.

Environment is the chief thing to be considered when one is proposing to
predict the future of Christian Science. It is not the ability to reason
that makes the Presbyterian, or the Baptist, or the Methodist, or the
Catholic, or the Mohammedan, or the Buddhist, or the Mormon; it is
environment. If religions were got by reasoning, we should have the
extraordinary spectacle of an American family with a Presbyterian in it,
and a Baptist, a Methodist, a Catholic, a Mohammedan, a Buddhist, and a
Mormon. A Presbyterian family does not produce Catholic families or