Mrs. Eddy is a prophetess; and she unfolds, like a seer, her mental visions. What she says is always striking, as inspired utterances always inspire. But her figures should not be made to go on all fours, and her disciples should be careful not to press her statements beyond what is demanded by the general spirit and tenor of her deliverances. Her writings are like the Bible for the emphasis they give to different ideas in different connections. This is the true way to write a book of power and permanence.
But such a book is sure to be misunderstood and perverted by the superficial, the injudicious, the dishonest, and the hasty and conceited theorist. This has been the constant fate of the Bible. Men have taken isolated passages and infused into them a meaning their authors never conceived, or pressed their meaning beyond their original purpose; and then by putting these together in connections to suit the theorist, an indefinite variety of opposing systems of religion and theology, and perhaps all absurd, are drawn from the same book.
Some philosophical writers have been treated in the same way. Of this, John Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding is a conspicuous example. The emphasis which in one part Locke gives to the senses as a source of knowledge, led some to conceive him as affirming that they are the only source of knowledge, whence they inferred that all intelligence and all mind comes from matter, and is only a mode of matter, the result of a peculiar collocation of its atoms and molecules. This legitimately resulted in the awful and wide-spread atheism, most terribly conspicuous in France, which marked and darkened the last half of the eighteenth century.
