IT has been a novel spectacle to the world to see a woman in a position of leadership in a great religious movement. Through the centuries now and again some man has risen who has led a religious reform or added to the sum of spiritual understanding by emphasizing a phase of truth that had hitherto been neglected. Such a teacher has usually been denied and decried by his own time, until the worth of his ideas has been proved; but it is safe to say that around none of these has quite the same quality of personal curiosity and criticism ever gathered as in the case of Mrs. Eddy. This is not at all remarkable, in view of the extreme rarity of woman's attempt as yet even to stand as a religious teacher in religious organizations already established. That a woman should establish a new church, with teachings of so marked a divergence in at least one point—the healing— from what has for centuries been understood to be Christian doctrine, was something that could not be passed by without a contribution of opinion even from those most indifferent to the subject of religion in general.
Indeed, one of the interesting phenomena of this movement has been the emphatic opinion on the subject of the character and work of its Leader which has been held by people who on close questioning admit that they have had actually no knowledge whatever of either the woman or her affairs. Today, however, the steady growth of the movement, together with the qualities of normal manhood and womanhood in its representatives, has given headlong opinion pause, and many who before spoke slightingly or condemningly of a noble and courageous woman, stop to ask themselves, What actual ground have I for holding a sense of criticism toward her?
Happily, however, these long years of adverse comment on Christian Science and its Discoverer are drawing to a close. It is no longer a shock to persons to be told that religious truth is scientific, not a matter of personal opinion; it no longer offends physicians to be told that the mental condition of their patients is reflected in the body; and best of all, the people are awakening to trust in God as their present deliverer from trouble of every sort. It was to the great mass of the people that Lincoln appealed. His wisdom saw that wherever the leaders might stand, for or against him, it was at the last on the great body of public judgment that he must rely to carry out and to be himself justified in his splendid service to the cause of unity and freedom.
