Chapter V The Fiction of God’s Authorship God, we are told, is without variableness or shadow of turning, and yet, if He were the author of Mrs. Eddy’s book, He would be as changeable as a weathercock, for the book, throughout its numerous editions, has in the past thirty-five years undergone continuous change and revision at the hands of the literary expert, and the final product is so unlike the original as to be almost unrecognizable. Chapters have been dropped, chapters have been added and chapters have been shifted about from one place to another, and the book has been as coherent at the end as at the beginning of the process. Early editions, with compromising contents, have been suppressed at great expense, and the book, as now published, is Mrs. Eddy’s work only in part. She says herself that read backward it has, in part, as much meaning as read forward; and those of you, who have attempted to read it forward, have discovered that, so read, it has precisely as little meaning as if read backward. James Henry Wiggin, an ex-Unitarian minister, recently deceased, was for years Mrs. Eddy’s literary expert, putting all her productions, including her book, into good English, and into as coherent a form as she would permit. He wrote a sermon for Mrs. Eddy to preach, which she preached as her own, and subsequently incorporated, with some easily perceptible additions that conspicuously marred Mr. Wiggin’s work, in her God-inspired book, as a chapter entitled “Wayside Hints.” This chapter is left out of the latest editions, but it was given to the world with the rest in the “thirty-sixth” edition, as of God’s authorship. Mr. Wiggin’s story of the manner in which a sermon of his became a part of her inspired volume is not a little amusing. While acting as Mrs. Eddy’s literary friend and guide and helper, an edition of “Science and Health” was prepared for publication, completely written and completely set up in type and electrotyped; but as it contained a chapter that Mr. Wiggin regarded as in the nature of a libel upon several living persons, who were referred to and attacked by name, he endeavored to prevent the publication until that chapter had been eliminated. As the whole book had been electrotyped, the fifteen pages composing this chapter could not be taken out, unless fifteen others were inserted in their place, without involving new plates of all the succeeding pages, and a large consequent expense. So the publication was withheld, until in some manner fifteen pages could be furnished in substitution for the objectionable chapter.