CHAPTER I

JANUARY, 1903. When we do not know a public man personally, we guess him
out by the facts of his career. When it is Washington, we all arrive at
about one and the same result. We agree that his words and his acts
clearly interpret his character to us, and that they never leave us in
doubt as to the motives whence the words and acts proceeded. It is the
same with Joan of Arc, it is the same with two or three or five or six
others among the immortals. But in the matter of motives and of a few
details of character we agree to disagree upon Napoleon, Cromwell, and
all the rest; and to this list we must add Mrs. Eddy. I think we can
peacefully agree as to two or three extraordinary features of her
make-up, but not upon the other features of it. We cannot peacefully
agree as to her motives, therefore her character must remain crooked to
some of us and straight to the others.

No matter, she is interesting enough without an amicable agreement. In
several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the
most extraordinary. The same may be said of her career, and the same may
be said of its chief result. She started from nothing. Her enemies
charge that she surreptitiously took from Quimby a peculiar system of
healing which was mind-cure with a Biblical basis. She and her friends
deny that she took anything from him. This is a matter which we can
discuss by-and-by. Whether she took it or invented it, it was
--materially--a sawdust mine when she got it, and she has turned it into
a Klondike; its spiritual dock had next to no custom, if any at all: from
it she has launched a world-religion which has now six hundred and