In attempting to criticise the Metaphysics of Christian Science, as put forth in the book which claims to be the authority for its doctrine, ‘Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures,’ one is tempted to quote the famous chapter on ‘Snakes in Iceland,’ which runs ‘There are no snakes in Iceland,’ and to say at the outset that Christian Science has no Metaphysics. Since, however, it claims to explain the Universe, and to give a theory of such metaphysical subjects as Matter and Spirit, as well as of Unity and Reality, it may be well to examine its statements on these abstruse matters to see if they can justly claim to have value as Metaphysics, to search the island, as it were, before pronouncing that there are no snakes in it. Undoubtedly Christian Science owes a good deal of its attractiveness to its teaching of a sort of popular Idealism. It was put forth at a time when a great wave of Materialism had overspread the Christian world, not owing only to discoveries in Natural Science, which seemed in the first flush of their triumph, before they had been adjusted with other fields of thought, to destroy all belief in Spirit, but owing also to the fact that Religion had been for so long established and, apparently, firmly seated upon a secure spiritual foundation, that it had been loosely taught as to its fundamental basis. So little had its relation with physical things been explained that the spiritual and physical aspects of the Universe had become, as it were, separated in thought and shut up respectively in watertight compartments. The result was that in the popular mind the two worlds, the spiritual and the physical, stood in a merely artificial relation with each other, connected, as it were, by unmeaning hooks, instead of standing in an intimate organic relation, so close that no true statement regarding the one could possibly stand in collision with the truth of the other. In consequence of this merely artificial relation of the two in the popular mind, at the first breath of the new scientific announcements the two worlds in the minds of only too many fell apart, and the spiritual world floated away, if one may say so, to nowhere, whilst the physical, with all its limitations, its ruthless laws, its indifference to the individual, its total disregard of pain, and its insurmountable barriers, reigned alone. Materialism had triumphed with its apparently hard-and-fast solidity; whilst the ideals of Poetry, the truths hinted at by Art, the revelations of the prophet, the dreams of the young and the visions of the old, and our intuitions of unseen realities which cannot be uttered, were consigned by many, supposed to be wise, to the region of illusions, the realm of nothingness, and Man seemed indeed to be nothing more than a creature helplessly subject to circumstance, the sport of every wind, and entirely beyond the region of hope wherever physical aid failed.