Her presumption is appalling! Her audacity as great as that of Isaiah's Lucifer, when in rebellion against God, he said, "I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will be like the Most High."

But even more pointedly and positively is the claim made by her. In 1894 she published and copyrighted a book called "Christ and Christmas." In this illustrated book appears a picture to which she has given the name of "Christian Unity." This picture represents Jesus seated upon a rock and holding the right hand of a woman standing by his side. In the left hand of this woman a scroll is held, and upon the scroll appear the words, "Christian Science." And now the amazing and blasphemous audacity of the woman becomes manifest, for hovering over the head of each, Jesus and the woman, sharing and sharing alike, is a shining halo, fallen man's brandmark of divinity. And she not alone suffers it to be so, but is actually the unblushing and unblushable promoter of the idea. If the young woman, in the terrible times of the French Revolution, was enthroned as the Goddess of Reason, surely this old woman of a later day earned her throne and crown as the Goddess of Unreason or Folly, for with the picture described above, she illustrated the following lines, appearing as they do on the opposite page:

"As in blessed Palestine's hour, so in our age

'Tis the same hand unfolds His power and writes the page."

In which she out-Herods Herod, for when "Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration to them, and the people gave a shout,

saying it is the voice of a god, and not of a man! And because he gave not God the glory, immediately the angel of the Lord smote him; and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost." Now mark you, divinity, however, willing Barkis might be, was not thrust upon this modern Mary, but she became of her own free will and vain and foolish choice, the selfelected centre of a new and wicked Mariolatry. Instinctively, and with a shudder, we turn to see if the Angel of the Lord will not smite, and the worms will not devour!

And what shall I say more? For time would fail me to tell of all the bombastic claims she has made, and from which she has retreated, under the stress and strain of most embarrassing impotency, and under the protecting cover of shameless and grossly immoral equivocation. Shame on the woman that she ever dared to look woman, or man, or even little child, in the face and claim that she was inspired of God! That she should have the audacity to affirm, with or without an oath, that God, the omnipotent One, gave her that mass and mess of unscientific and anti-Christian matter contained in "Science and Health," that he gave it to her by special revelation for the world! That she was sent to complete the unfinished work of Jesus Christ, although he said just before he died, "It is finished!" That she was the feminine principle, while Jesus Christ was the masculine, thereby making herself to be equal with him! Affirming his divinity, while denying his deity, she put herself in the same class with him! That Christian Science was the Holy Ghost come again, and that she herself was the woman of the 12th chapter of the book of Revelation!

She was an artist in her line even as Blind Tom was in his, and, in some respects, as simple as he, for confessing herself to having been a quack in homeopathic medicine, her life and writings furnish a superabundance of evidence for all those that have eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to reason that she was, beyond all question or controversy, a most prodigious spiritual quack! I charge her, and the records justify the charge, with being dishonest and untruthful, wholly selfish and consistently and unceasingly mercenary. I charge her with a vanity and a thirst for power most amazing. That she was a fakir of the first water, a charlatan raised to the highest degree, an accomplished pretender, a monstrous mountebank in matters of religion, dealing in fiction until fact was outlawed, telling the lie so long, that, at last, even she believed it to be the truth, "deceiving and being deceived," and under the power of a strong delusion, believing and teaching a lie!

Or, as Mark Twain, in his book on Christian Science, page 285, tersely and powerfully puts it, “Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees-money, power, glory-vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish-," and he might have said much more, had time and space and adequate language not failed him!

And this woman, without a single Christly characteristic, the successor of Jesus Christ! The very thought is satanic and reeks with blasphemy.

But with her the play is over. The comedy has be

come tragedy, and the tragedy as dreadfully real as everything real and substantial has always appeared shadowy and fantastic in her vain philosophy. Would to God that that vain, soul-destroying and foolish philosophy, "science falsely so-called," had died with her when she died! But it did not, and is destined, it seems, in the mysterious providence of God, to live on and grow, in these last days, as a conspicuous part of the Great Apostasy even now developing.