As I understand her, Mrs. Eddy is the inventor and sole proprietor of the greatest get-rich-quick concern ever conceived. Her business—there is no religion about it, and her writings may be searched from end to end without finding a line about the worship of God—her business converts into cash the very highest emotions of the human soul by an appeal to religious feeling and extorts huge sums of money from multitudes of credulous people for healing them of nothing but the delusion that there is something the matter with them. Christian Science never cured any one of anything but imaginary illness; it never relieved any one of any real evil—but his money. Mrs. Eddy, boldly professing to have received a revelation from God, and to be the equal of Jesus Christ, has made upwards of a million and a half dollars out of her enterprise that she calls Christian Science since she reached sixty years of age; and, if some be inclined to infer therefrom the possession by her of extraordinary genius, I cannot agree with them. Mrs. Eddy has succeeded, not because of her greatness, but because of the avidity with which unreasoning people swallow the most monstrous absurdities, the shamelessness with which men and women will intellectually prostrate themselves before the coarsest vulgarity and the most patent fraud. Let me illustrate this, if I can. It is no part of my undertaking to account for Mrs. Eddy’s following. The fact that she has some thousands of followers does not, of itself, prove the truth of any of her teachings or pretensions. There was never any religious pretender yet, who could not, with slight effort, obtain a hearing and a following. I recently observed, in one of our daily papers, an account of an amusing incident of this character in Oklahoma. A man, believing himself to be the incarnation of Almighty God, started out to convert the world to his belief, and considered it to be his mission, in the first instance, to persuade mankind to divest themselves of clothes. The first man he encountered was his next-door neighbor and the first woman his next-door neighbor’s wife, and they were easily persuaded of the man’s divine mission, and that it was God’s wish that they should revert to primitive nakedness. So the three doffed the attire of civilization and perambulated into the adjoining town, naked as they came into the world. A police officer, who encountered them upon the street, with averted eyes hustled them into a van and carted them off to the nearest police station, where they were compelled to assume at least the outward garb of decency and sanity. This only shows how true it is that the religious impostor has no difficulty in making converts, and that the first person he converts is usually the first he encounters. I am continually met with the inquiry, “If Christian Science is an absolute fraud, how do you account for the fact that so many intelligent people are Christian Scientists?”