Recall the picture of the haloed Mrs. Eddy standing by His side and holding the Saviour’s hand, as illustrative of equality and “Christian Unity”; and imagine, if imagination be equal to the task, Jesus availing Himself of His communion and kinship with the Father to accumulate money. Fancy His Sermon on the Mount being imparted, after the payment to Him by each disciple of a financial equivalent of the proportions of the Eddy exaction. See Him crowding into the courts those poor unfortunates who were unable to pay, and by the employment of legal process seeking to wrest it from them. Imagine His requiring all His disciples to sign a contract to pay so much in advance, such a percentage of their annual income from healing, and one thousand dollars forfeit if they were indisposed to heal after having been taught. Hear Him instructing His disciples to go into all the world, teach the gospel to every creature for cash strictly in advance, to lay hands upon the sick and assure them that they would be more likely to be healed after having paid whatever they were able to pay for the service. Again, may we hear the burst of divine indignation at the impious and infamous pretensions of this sordid creature! Again the words, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers! How can ye escape the damnation of hell”! But teaching was not Mrs. Eddy’s only bonanza, and her income from teaching was only a fraction of her total income. In 1875, or thereabouts, Mrs. Eddy had a book on her hands that she had most laboriously written, and for which she must create a market. The book was the veriest rubbish and, with only her name to back it, was utterly without value to any one. In course of time, it not selling readily, the idea seems to have dawned upon her that, if she could make people believe that this book, this crude, incoherent jumbling together of meaningless terms, was in very deed the Word of God, the Infallible, the All-wise, and that its mere perusal would cure disease, a market would be created for it and her fortune would be made. Acting upon this theory, little by little she advanced the idea that the contents of the book came to her by revelation, and she soon reached a point where she did not hesitate to declare that it is, in its details and in its completeness, the “Word of God” in precisely the same sense and to precisely the same extent that the Christian believes the Scriptures to be the word of God. She would blush, she says, to speak of “Science and Health” as she does, “were it of human origin” and she “apart from God its author,” and “No human pen or tongue taught me the Science contained in this book and neither tongue nor pen can overthrow it;” and she boldly affirms it to have been expressly “authorized by Christ” as an interpreter of the Bible. Referring to its curative properties, she said, “The perusal of the author’s publications heals sickness.”