It is invariably true that every vital uncompromising statement of divine truth proves to be both an inspiration and an offense. Illuminating and corrective, it comes to confirm the intuitions, the spiritual visions of those who have loved the truth for its own sake, and who, have awakened to the deadening effect upon the higher life of unquestioning devotion to forms and creeds.
To the religiously contented, however, this same Word seems to endanger the things that are well established and worthy of all honor, and their outcry of opposition has always tested the courage and staying qualities of the herald of the new idea. To this test Mrs. Eddy was early subjected, and her bravery in expressing her understanding of the Christ teaching, quite regardless of consequences, has been one of the most distinctive features of her ministry.
This daring was peculiarly marked in her declaration of the allness of God, a teaching which has led very many Christian people to interpret as pantheistic. Those critics who have taken the time to glance over her writings, have been compelled to concede that her thought is entirely removed from the identification of God with the sum total of things, including the material universe; nevertheless, noting her repeated statement that God is All, they have persisted in saying that she is an "idealistic pantheist" and hence deserves to be stoned. The editor of a prominent religious periodical, who has been impelled recently to say not a few kindly things of Christian Science, closes with the insistence that despite the good it is accomplishing, and the probable permanence of its tenure, it is nevertheless "unchristian because pantheistic," and he commends a book which undertakes to show that Mrs. Eddy was indebted to Plotinus (not Quimby in this instance!) for the bulk of her ideas, and that her teaching is Neoplatonism pure and simple! In all this the critic quite overlooks the possibility that in their thought of the universe as emanating "from the absolute as light emanates from the sun," these Greek philosophers were much nearer the teaching of the Master than were the creed-making ecclesiasties of that day.
