Peel titled chapter three “church militant” and there are
certainly signs of war in its pages. Three passages remain with me.
1. We are told that Mrs. Eddy’s response to an apparently “grumbling”
George Choate was the advice to “have more fight” in himself (p. 72).
2. In the 1880s, while researchers were discovering various disease-filled
microbes, and Louis Pasteur was devising his “immunization through vaccination”
theory, Eddy was responding with terms such as “mental molecules…germs of
truth, microbes of sin, the virus of hatred” (p. 76). Peel points out that as
her emphasis changed from warring against a person or persons, to warring with “evil
thoughts and aims” (see p. 77), so the medical folk moved away
from describing the microbe as the cause of disease, to observing its reception in the “terrain” of the “host organism”. Indeed, Peel quotes Pasteur: “…the microbe is
nothing, the terrain is everything.” (p. 77).
3. Eddy enlisted the help of two medical
men in her quest to make Christian Science “more respectable in the eyes of
society” (p. 81). Peel introduces his readers to an unconventional and independent
thinker, Rufus King Noyes, M.D., author of “The History of Medicine for the
Last 4000 Years”, and then to an almost shady character, one Charles J.
Eastman.
And so, the enlightened spiritual warrior soberly dons “the
breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation” (I
Thessalonians 5: 8).
Julie Swannell
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