The human mind is made up of passions. For this reason there is no virtue it finds it harder to assimilate than that of toleration. Nineteen centuries ago however, a strange thing happened. There came preaching in the Jordan valley a Syrian carpenter from the village of Nazareth, and as he preached it became clear that he was telling to his listeners a new story, expounding to them an unfamiliar philosophy, demonstrating to them a new Science. One day, as he was seated on the Mount of Olives, teaching his disciples, he made what must have seemed to them a strange prophecy. "Heaven and earth," he said, "shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." Yet the earth and the sky must have seemed very real to them as he said it, the Temple rock very immovable, and the ravine of Kidron a part of eternity. A statement of Truth is however, indestructible. The human mind, with its realm of material phenomena, has never seemed quite so actual as it appeared that day its passions have gone ever since, as it were, in fear of their own nothingness, and ever some little murmur of toleration has been heard in the streets.
Nevertheless, the world is still what Dr. Johnson would have termed a good hater. But the edge of its hatred has been turned. Evil, of course, continues to hate Truth; that is a necessity of the continuation of its own supposititious existence. But it has not the power it had before the star of the shepherds stood over Bethlehem. Mr. Froude tells a story, with a view to illustrating the lingering bitterness of sectarian controversy, of how, little more than half a century ago, two Anglican bishops presented, to Convocation, a volume in which Luther was described as a heretic fit to be ranked only with Joe Smith. Think of it, it is four centuries since Luther nailed the famous theses to the church door at Wittenberg, and these two Protestant prelates were still feeling like that about it. It is little to be wondered at, then, that when Mrs. Eddy discovered the lost Science of Christian healing, and named it Christian Science, she should have aroused some of the dormant thunders of the odium theologicum.
Mrs. Eddy's discovery came at a time when the angel of spiritual inquiry was troubling the waters of human thought. In the United States the civil war had just come to an end, and the country was stirred to its depths by Lincoln's wonderful appeals to its love for God and man. On the continent of Europe the revolt from the Treaty of Vienna and its materialism had found expression in the uprising of the Magyars, the barricades in Paris, and the preaching of Mazzini and Garibaldi; whilst Prussia and Austria, having combined to rob Denmark, were themselves quarreling over the spoils. England, characteristically, had avoided such violence: the leveling of half a mile of park railings and the trampling of some flower beds had been sufficient to carry a reform bill. So the world was spinning on that February evening when Mrs. Eddy, slipping on the ice of a Lynn sidewalk, sustained those injuries from which she was healed, when the doctor saw no hope, by reading her Bible: "And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. And, behold, certain of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth. And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts? For whether is easier, to say. Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house. And he arose, and departed to his house. But when the multitudes saw it, they marvelled, and glorified God, which had given such power unto men."
