The above is the title of a pamphlet by Ursula S. Gestefeld. Before entering my class, in 1884, she had been the student of a Spiritualist and mind-curer. Though a Christian Scientist in name, she is a member of the Theosophical Society in Chicago. Her attempted explanation of my book, Science and Health, is abortive; the altitude of her mind has neither reached the explanation nor inspiration of this work. She attempts to vilify my life and to criticize my works, in the face of twenty-two years of unstained labor in Christian Science Mind-healing, while she, a suckling, is drawing her nutriment from them. This is at least, silly.
When teaching her, I found that her mind presented a compilation of other minds, that it possessed, to a remarkable degree, these qualities,— vanity, intellectual dash, and courage without conviction. Her reasoning is intoned with Pagan philosophy, her humanity besprinkled with Buddhism, and her pride and purpose nerved with the spirit of a Judas.
The picture she draws of me, in the above-named pamphlet, is the subjective state of her own mind, and the minds of members expelled, from the Christian Scientist Association of Boston. The reader recognizes at once that it is no portraiture of the Author of Science and Health. The honest seeker after Christian Science asks, "Where shall the young child be born?" Where shall the human concept of the Divine idea be given birth? He queries, Is the mother of Science and Health a misnomer? Does the child look like its mother, act like her, and does it resemble in the least the hideous counterfeit that Mrs. Gestefeld has conjured up? My heart's desire is, that the mind of this woman be imbued with better thoughts, and her life uplifted.
