There were at this time about fifty Christian Science academies in operation, and hundreds of Mrs. Eddy's followers made their living by teaching Christian Science. They were, without warning, directed to give up their means of support for one year in order to increase the sale of Mrs. Eddy's new book, and to sell the book, without commission, under penalty of expulsion from the church. It is scarcely necessary to say that they obeyed without a murmur.
Loyal Christian Scientists made an endeavour to buy not only a copy of every new edition of Science and Health, but of every book that Mrs. Eddy wrote. Mrs. Eddy discourages general reading, and particularly the perusal of fiction.[1] She has no tolerance for low-priced books. They "lower the intellectual standard to accommodate the purse" and "meet a frivolous demand for amusement instead of instruction."[2] For her own books Mrs. Eddy has always demanded very high prices. With her own audience she was, of course, without a rival. Many of her followers read no books at all but hers.
In 1893 Mrs. Eddy published Christ and Christmas, an illustrated poem which she afterward temporarily suppressed because the pictures were displeasing to many people. One picture represents Jesus Christ standing beside a big, black, upholstered coffin, raising to life an emaciated woman. An other represents a woman, strangely like Mrs. Eddy's authorised photographs in appearance, standing at a bedside and raising a prostrate form, while a great star burns above her
- ↑ It is the tangled barbarisms of learning which we deplore,—the mere dogma, the speculative theory, the nauseous fiction. Novels, remarkable only for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity, fill our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments, etc.—Science and Health (1898), p. 91.
- ↑ Ibid.
