Although Mrs. Eddy's book has been enlarged and greatly improved as to its order and grammar, the first edition contains all the essential elements of her philosophy, if such it may be called. Mr. Wiggin did good work in translating the book into comparatively conventional English, and gave a kind of unity to paragraphs and sentences, and later revisers have greatly improved upon his work; but the first edition gave a fairly complete and, on the whole, a comprehensible statement of Mrs. Eddy's platform. Mrs. Eddy's religion claims to be a system of metaphysics, a system of therapeutics, and an improved form of Christianity. As the founder of a system of idealistic philosophy, Mrs. Eddy does indeed, as Mr. Alfred Farlow says, "begin where the sages of the world left off." Other philosophers have reached the conclusion that we can have no absolute knowledge of matter, since our evidence regarding it consists of sense impressions, and that we can absolutely assert of matter only that it exists in human consciousness; but Mrs. Eddy begins boldly with, "There is no such thing as matter." She reaches her conclusion by steps which she deems complete and logical: 1. God is All in all. 2. God is good. Good is Mind. 3. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is matter. Mrs. Eddy calls attention to the fact that even if read backward, these propositions mean identically the same as when read in the usual order, and she seems to regard this as conclusive proof of their logical truth. She says, "The metaphysics of Christian Science, like the rules of mathematics, prove the rule by inversion. For example: there is no pain in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no mind in nerve; no matter in Mind, and no mind in matter," etc. In his article upon Christian Science, published in _The Atlantic Monthly_, April, 1904, Dr. John Churchman says: The uncompromising idealism, however, which Mrs. Eddy offers us not only has these defects, but is guilty of a far more serious charge. It poses as an explanation, and is in reality a total evasion. To deny that matter exists, and assert that it is an illusion, is only another way of asserting its existence; you are freed by your suggestion from explaining the fact, but forced by it to explain the illusion. It is the old mistake of imagining that an escape from a problem is a solution. You are out of the frying-pan, it is true, but you are in the fire instead.[4] Having thus disposed of matter, Mrs. Eddy seems to think that her definition has actually changed the nature of the case, and that though we live in houses, eat food, and endure the changes of the seasons, our relation to the material universe is changed because she has defined matter as an illusion.