As Mrs. Eddy has been a manufacturer and vender of "Christian Science" for a comparatively short time--only a quarter of a century--many good people who knew her at the inception of that successful industry are still on earth, in an active condition of "mortal mind." They have volunteered to furnish for this brief book a variety of plain and ornamental information that is not essential to it. But, in justice to history and biography, one point must not be omitted. They all agree that "Mother Eddy," like Cæsar, the Standard Oil Company, and the Sugar Trust, has more organizing capacity than "the sons and daughters of God," to use her own phrase, generally possess. With this capacity, it is also agreed that never a Bonaparte, never a Jay Gould, never a Pierpont Morgan, could be more handy in surmounting all over-nice impediments to practical success. Thus by her rare combination of terrestrial and celestial genius, "Mother Eddy" has been able to hold her copyrighted religion, "Christian Science," strictly under her personal regnancy, and direct it to the highest financial, doctrinal, and healing ends. She permits no tinge of private judgment, no stain of unauthorized opinion, and no mere finite criticism, so far as she can silence it. She is the Church, and membership is obedience. Hence she bitterly antagonizes all independent agencies of scientific salvation, though with eyes rolled up, and with fervent proclamations of unbounded "love." In her _Science and Health_, she advises her readers not to read other "scientific works," as they are full of "materialism," and are not "Scientifically Christian." Directly or indirectly, too, there is always the point that money can be much better invested in Mrs. Eddy's own "sacred" and "positively demonstrated" writings. It would almost seem that, in her universal motherhood, Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy must have borne Mohammed's great soldier who burned the Alexandrian library in devotion to the _Koran_. To a great organizer, a wholesale business is always more attractive than retail trade. It is handled quite as easily, with less detail, and thousands of small merchants contribute to the proceeds. The able founder of "Christian Science" early realized this fact--in her case drawn from on high, but sometimes reached through commercial experience. Having retired into the wilderness of her mind, far from all monitions of "sense"; having trained her memory to forget the existence of "matter," "error," and Mary M. Patterson; having taken a three-years' vacation with her only peers, "the ancient worthies" and "the Scriptures"; Mrs. Eddy came back at last, among the human species, with the metaphysics and curative formulas of "Christian Science." Then came practical transactions in "revelations" and "mental medicine," which soon rivaled the sales of Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup and Lydia Pinkham's celebrated compound.