The Profits of Religion, Fifth EditionSinclair, Upton
Religion
The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition
Sinclair, Upton
Christianity -- Controversial literature
While working in the yard one morning and gratefully
communing with God, the only power, I suddenly felt that I
should stop working and prepare for visitors on their way to
look at the property. I obeyed this very distinct command,
and in about an hour I greeted two people who had searched
almost the entire city for just what we had to offer. They
had been directed to our place by what to material sense
would seem an accident, but we know it was the divine law of
harmony in its universal operation.
After this no one will wonder that John M. Tutt, in a Christian
Science lecture at Kansas City, Mo., should proclaim:
My friends, do you know that since the world began Christian
Science is the only system which has intelligently related
religion to business? Christian Science shows that since all
ideas belong to Mind, God, therefore all real business
belongs to Him.
As I said, these people have the new-old power of mental healing. They
blunder along with it blindly, absurdly, sometimes with tragic
consequences; but meantime the rank and file of the pill-doctors know
nothing about this power, and regard it with contempt mingled with
fear; so of course the hosts of sufferers whom the pill-doctors cannot
help flock to the healers of the "Church of Christ, Scientist".
According to the custom of those who are healed by "faith", they
swallow line, hook, and sinker, creed, ritual, metaphysic and
divinity. So we see in twentieth-century America precisely what we saw
in B.C. twentieth-century Assyria--a host of worshippers; giving their
worldly goods without stint, and a priesthood, made partly of fanatics
and partly of charlatans, conducting a vast enterprise of graft, and
harvesting that thing desired of all men, power over the lives and
destinies of others.
And of course among themselves they quarrel; they murder one another's
Mortal Minds, they drive one another out, they snarl over the spoils
like a pack of hungry animals. Listen to the Mother, denouncing one of
her students--a perfectly amiable and harmless youth whose only
offense was that he had gone his own way and was healing the sick for
the benefit of his own pocket-book:
Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out
the sunshine of earth, that would sever friends, destroy
virtue, put out Truth, and murder in secret the innocent,
befouling thy track with the trophies of thy guilt--I say,
Behold the "cloud" no bigger than a man's hand already
rising on the horizon of Truth, to pour down upon thy guilty
head the hailstones of doom.
And again:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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