SOURCE: "Conclusion: Christian Science and the American Pragmatic Orientation," in The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life, University of California Press, 1973, pp. 275-93.

[In the following essay, Gottschalk examines the continuing influence of Christian Science.]

Christian Science can be best understood as a pragmatic interpretation of Christian revelation. It is the pragmatic character of Christian Science which most adequately conveys its distinctiveness as a religious teaching, most clearly illumines its relations with the patterns of American culture, and most fully explains the source of its appeal. To have used the term pragmatic in connection with Christian Science before this point would have been ahistorical, since the term never occurs in Mrs. Eddy's writings and, to my knowledge, was not used by Christian Scientists nor by others in reference to her teaching during the period with which we are concerned. Despite William James' passing interest in Christian Science, there were no direct links between Christian Science and the pragmatic movement in American philosophy.

Yet the emergence of both within roughly the same period is far from fortuitous. Certainly it was not just a co-incidence that the development of an indigenous American philosophy should have taken place in the decades following the Civil War when the United States was emerging into modern industrial nationhood and world power. Nor should it be surprising that the pragmatic direction of American culture and thought should have been given expression in the only major religious movement to have originated in the United States after the Civil War—Christian Science. Indeed, since Christian Science was formulated a decade or more before the emergence of pragmatism, Mrs. Eddy's teaching may be said in a limited sense to have anticipated its development.

Pragmatism is a term susceptible to many definitions, and it is important at this point to indicate the range of meanings with which it will be employed here. It can, of course, be used as a term for expediency and uncritical adaptability to conditions; but pragmatism in this sense is a distortion and vulgarization of its genuine philosophic content. In its basic philosophical sense, pragmatism is an attitude which insists that coherent theory must be related to practice, that the meaning of a concept is to be found in its bearing upon experience, and that the truth of an idea is to be tested by the actual consequences of believing in it. Whatever their differences in other respects, the major American pragmatic philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, were united in their emphasis upon these points. In its larger aspects, pragmatism can be understood as the philosophic expression of a much broader orientation toward experience than is embraced in traditional philosophic categories. John Dewey pointed out that philosophy is "the conversion of such culture as exists into consciousness"; and it is no original observation to say that pragmatism converted the open, fluid patterns of the American experience into philosophic consciousness.

Yet to understand pragmatism in its ultimate meaning, we must relate it to a tradition in American thought that can only be defined in religious terms. This tradition centers in New England, reaches back to American Puritanism, through Jonathan Edwards to Transcendentalism, and from Transcendentalism to pragmatism. It is unified by the tendency to define the content of religion in terms of the immediate possibilities of experience rather than with reference to a future realm of experience. In the broadest sense, this tradition can be called a religious naturalism, if that term is carefully understood. In this context, it refers to the disposition to think in terms of one order of experience, rather than in terms of two opposing orders of experience. In this sense it constitutes a rejection of the dualism of the secular and the sacred, earthly and heavenly, natural and supernatural and approaches the understanding of that which is ultimate in terms of that which is immediate—experienceable in man's present life-situation.

This naturalistic tendency becomes more and more conspicuous with each phase of the development of this tradition. Its first manifestation is in the eschatology of New England Puritanism, which was dominated by the concept of the Kingdom of God. Puritanism held as man's central duty, not the vision or contemplation of God, which is the basic ideal of Medieval Catholicism, but the actual living under the sovereignty or Kingdom of God, in obedience to Him in this present experience. Whatever the super-natural elements in Puritanism, the dominance of this tendency gave a distinctly ethical, this-worldly caste to American religious thought. Jonathan Edwards' powerful restatement of Calvinism in the American context in the mid-eighteenth century, though rejecting the Puritan scheme of the covenant, intensified the naturalistic tendency implicit in Puritanism. For Edwards saw the process of regeneration in radically experiential and nonlegalistic terms as involving the new sense of God and nature entertained by the newly born. It remained for Transcendentalism to entirely discard the theological framework of both Puritanism and Edwardsian theology, and to identify the religious experience with the illumined perception of nature. John Dewey made this line of development explicit when he rejected the concept of religious experience as such, and understood the term religious to apply to the ideal potentials of experience itself.

Christian Science is congruent with this tradition as briefly sketched, and is to a certain extent explicable in terms of it. Mrs. Eddy's background lay in New England Puritanism. She was schooled in the New England Theology that stemmed from Edwards, and adopted the term spiritual sense, so fundamental to Edwardsian theology, as one of the rubrics of her teaching. The immediate religious background of Christian Science, moreover, lay in New England Transcendentalism, and the development of American pragmatism was contemporaneous with the emergence of Christian Science. It is not difficult, of course, to see profound differences between Mrs. Eddy's teaching and all these other forms of thought. But the continuities are real and are essential to an understanding of the meaning of Christian Science in American religious life. For Christian Science reflects—indeed, in a radically intensified form—this disposition to see religious experience in terms of immediate possibilities.

Relating Christian Science to the pragmatic strain in American culture generally and to the pragmatic movement in philosophy specifically may run counter to the convictions of both scholars and Christian Scientists, though for very different reasons. In general, academic scholars have not taken Christian Science seriously enough to warrant relating it to so prestigious an intellectual movement as pragmatism, while Christian Scientists, holding that their faith is not culture-derived but issues from revelation, often dismiss any effort to relate Christian Science to its cultural context on religious grounds. Still, the relationship developed here is not imposed upon the materials of this study but emerges naturally from them, and tracing it can scarcely be avoided by the intellectual historian who wants to assess the meaning of the emergence of Christian Science when and where it emerged.

My conclusions, then, are as follows: (1) that Christian Science as a religious teaching is best understood as a pragmatic interpretation of Christian revelation; (2) that as such it is Christian, but definitely not Protestant; (3) and that in the pragmatic character of Christian Science one can most clearly see the source of its appeal as well as the greatest potential danger to its correct practice.

In characterizing Christian Science as pragmatic, it is necessary to emphasize at the outset that it is a pragmatic grasp of Christian revelation. Mrs. Eddy never claimed to have discovered a truth that had not been objectified before her time. She claimed, rather, that through her discovery die full practical implications of Biblical revelation, most particularly the Gospel narratives, had been made clear. Underlying everything Mrs. Eddy said was the fact that she accepted Biblical revelation as given. Her interpretation of its meaning, of course, is widely at variance with that of traditional Christianity; but she never claimed to have set forth any truth that had not been experimentally lived by Biblical figures, most particularly Christ Jesus.

Moreover, Mrs. Eddy held that the discovery through which she understood the full meaning of the Scriptures was in itself a spiritually empowered revelatory event. Perhaps her most succinct statement of the spiritual fact which she claimed to have envisioned in the discovery of Christian Science was her declaration that she then gained the sense of "Life in and of Spirit, this Life being the sole reality of existence." Mrs. Eddy did say that the healing work she pursued in the years prior to her discovery confirmed the truth of what she envisioned. But her conviction of the reality of this spiritual fact was not, for her, just a warranted conclusion drawn from experimental inquiry, and it obviously could not be substantiated on the basis of human rationality resting on material sense testimony. However great the emphasis upon the practical demonstration of Christian Science in her teaching, demonstration does not make truth true. Mrs. Eddy taught, rather, that basic truth is apprehended only through spiritual sense receptive to revelation. Demonstration confirms only that revealed truth has been understood.

To say that Mrs. Eddy predicates her teaching upon revelation, however, is not to say that she takes the revelation in its ordinary theological sense. She does so only in the sense that spiritual truth must come to human thought from a source absolutely outside itself. But the character and significance of revelation is for her a wholly practical affair. She interprets the revelatory event of the life of Jesus as a demonstration of divine manhood which when correctly understood discloses man's present possibilities. And she sees Christian Science as providing the understanding through which these possibilities can be realized in practice. There is, then, no split in Mrs. Eddy's teaching between that which is revealed to be true and that which can be demonstrated as truth. And if demonstration must be based on revelation, it remains true that for her revelation without demonstration is incomplete. Indeed, in Science and Health she cites the proof by demonstration of the truth of her discovery as one aspect of the revelation of Christian Science itself.

Christian Science is, therefore, understood by its adherents as a revelation, not of a dogma, but of demonstrable religious truth. In this sense it may be said to be a spiritually scientific discovery, and Mrs. Eddy's role as a revelator may be defined as essentially that of a discoverer. She claimed to have discovered a truth objective to herself, and sought to focus her followers' attention on her discovery and not on her person. Her active role as the founder of the movement made her its leader, a position which is permanently hers in the Christian Science church. But even in the extensive prerogatives which Mrs. Eddy claimed as leader of the movement, her main interest was in the promulgation in pure form of teachings which she held to be objectively and demonstrably true. Mrs. Eddy did claim that she could not ultimately be separated from her discovery, and that a correct understanding of her mission was crucial to an understanding of her teaching. But ultimately her personality, complex and controversial as it was, cannot be the main issue in any assessment of Christian Science. For granting the radical character of what Mrs. Eddy claimed to have discovered, her claims were in one respect similar to those of any scientific discoverer: to have set forth objective truths the validity of which is entirely independent of the personality of the discoverer, and which are demonstrable by anyone who understands them.

The scientific character that Mrs. Eddy claimed for her teaching might easily be dismissed as rhetoric used with the intent to gain prestige for a religious teaching in an age that to a large extent took material science as its standard for knowledge. But considered as a manifestation of an insistence upon rigor of method, the claim that Christian Science is scientific takes on real and illuminating meaning. Pragmatic thought is, after all, an expression of a scientific world view in the sense that though it upholds the view that experience is an open-ended affair, it is committed to rigorous subjection of claims of experience to the test of provability. Much of Mrs. Eddy's much vaunted rigidity in insisting that Christian Science be practiced without admixture just as she taught it can be understood as an expression of a devotion to scientific rigor rather than religious dogmatism. It is this insistence in part that accounts for her disdain for the free-roving mysticism and eclectic spirituality of the mind-cure movement. Mrs. Eddy's writings are permeated by an insistence upon the right use of method in healing and practice generally. For in the largest sense, the scientific character of Christian Science is its claim to be method—the method for the demonstration of the spiritual fact in practice. It is this pragmatic-scientific aspect of Christian Science which—whatever one thinks of the truth or un-truth of the possibilities it claims are present to man—most decisively separates it from the mystical mood and temper.

Christian Science, therefore, is best understood, not as an abstract metaphysical or theological system, but with reference to what it claims to make possible. Mrs. Eddy's most metaphysical statements are intended to be under-stood as pointing to demonstrable conditions of experience. Actually, she never intended to construct a meta-physical system as such. Rather, metaphysics for her was a mode of communication by which the practical significance of Christian revelation could be pointed out. In her own way, Mrs. Eddy voiced a very pragmatic concept of meaning when she spoke of her metaphysics as meaningful only when put into practice. And in one of her most frequently quoted characterizations of Christian Science she speaks of it in pragmatic terms as making something possible, for she refers to it as "that through which can be discerned the spiritual fact of whatever the material senses behold."

At the heart of Christian Science, therefore, is the claim that it is possible for man now to inwardly and subjectively know the spiritual fact of being even before it is objectified in the human situation. For Mrs. Eddy, this process of inner knowing is not just "taking thought" but is truly prayer. And throughout her writings she uses such terms as know, realize, apprehend, discern, behold, affirm, become conscious, understand, etc., to indicate the active nature of this process through which alone spiritual healing can be wrought. Prayer in this sense, is, for her, communion with God, in that it is spiritual receptivity to divine Truth. But it is a comprehensible process which, though not humanly visible, makes a difference in actual experience. Mrs. Eddy speaks of it as an act which is spiritually substantive, and to which rules and laws (though not formulas) do apply. To be sure, this act is in the first instance inward and subjective. But Mrs. Eddy claims that through the discernment of the spiritual fact the energies of Truth are released into the individual consciousness of the one being treated and act as healing power in the specific situation at hand. The healing power in Christian Science, it should be emphasized, is the power of Truth itself, not of the individual thought that beholds it. But the act of discerning the spiritual fact in Science is central as far as the practitioner of Christian Science is concerned.

Spiritual reality in Christian Science, of course, wholly transcends common sense testimony. But Mrs. Eddy does not conceive of the term reality as appertaining to a transcendental realm wholly uncognizable by human consciousness. For the implicit claim of Christian Science is that men can achieve some grasp of basic reality in their present situation, and that the understanding of true being releases spiritual power into their present experience. In this sense, the meaning of reality in Christian Science is far different from its ordinary meaning in traditional metaphysics in the Platonic tradition. It is to this more traditional concept that John Dewey refers when he writes of reality as "the most obnoxious of all metaphysical words in the most obnoxious sense of metaphysics; for it purports to speak of that which underlies all but which is incapable of being known in fact and as fact." Mrs. Eddy, of course, claims that reality is capable of being known and demonstrated "in fact and as fact"; that what the human mind calls reality is not the fact of being, but merely a limited percept treated as fact; and that the percept will change as more of the fact is understood.

Christian Science stands, therefore, for the idea of an experienceable absolute. The Godhead—Life, Truth, and Love—is to the degree of one's spiritual apprehension knowable as the actual condition of being. Since Mrs. Eddy understands God ontologically as the "source and condition of all existence," her assertions about His nature are in the final analysis claims about the nature of experience. And since she understands man as the expression of God's being, these theistic assertions are like-wise claims for what is divinely and demonstrably true about man. Thus when Mrs. Eddy states that God is Life, she is asserting as the spiritual fact that man is in no sense dependent upon material organization for life. In the same sense, when she declares that God is Mind, she is proclaiming the possibility that one can demonstrate the infinite intelligence of which truly understood He is the expression. And when she claims that God is All, she is affirming that the true understanding of Him dispels belief in an opposite power and demonstrates His supremacy.

Correlatively, her assertion of the nothingness of evil amounts pragmatically to the claim that the conditions of experience make it possible to actually reduce evil to nothingness in specific situations. Mrs. Eddy's definition of matter is also wholly pragmatic in character, for she treats it, not as an actual substance which is in some metaphysical sense unreal, but as a name for limitation. When Mrs. Eddy declares that there is no matter, she is claiming that limitation is not in any sense inherent in being and in man. The problem of the origin of evil or of the belief in matter is not a question which Mrs. Eddy even tries to answer satisfactorily at an intellectual level. Her basic concern is with what can be experienced, not with answering questions which contain, from her view-point, false premises to begin with; and her ontological claims regarding the non-existence of evil and matter must be understood entirely in this light.

Since Mrs. Eddy's claims concern the actual conditions of experience and therefore are oriented to what can be experienced, she is obviously not offering a philosophical interpretation of the nature of reality. The only real continuity between Christian Science and philosophic idealism lies in the fact that Mrs. Eddy at points found it helpful to use an idealistic vocabulary to communicate her concept of the potentials of experience. Her denial of the reality of matter is in abstract terms reminiscent of philosophic idealism. But in Mrs. Eddy's teaching this claim is made on a theological rather than a philosophical basis. And Mrs. Eddy holds, moreover, that it is a claim which can be progressively validated in practice. The so-called idealistic element in Christian Science, therefore, is actually the engine of its pragmatic thrust. And the locus of Mrs. Eddy's efforts lay not in offering a philosophic conception of the nature of existence, but a practical understanding of regeneration and its requirements.

The process of regeneration in Christian Science is the demonstration, or pragmatic living out, of what Mrs. Eddy declares as the spiritual fact of being. For her, it is not something to be sought and accomplished in another realm of being, since there is but one actual realm of experience. The basic reference point in her thinking is not a future life for which this is a preparation but one order of experience correctly or incorrectly discerned. Nor is Mrs. Eddy's teaching really oriented to any antecedent order of experience or realm of being in which all spiritual facts are presumed to be wholly demonstrated in final form. Mrs. Eddy does not posit some other worldly Platonic realm in which man's perfection is already wrought out, but claims that perfection as the basis for demonstrating in practice. She always insists that the reality of Life obtains now and that man's perfection is structurally and essentially his. Were this not the case demonstration would be impossible. But without demonstration, the assertion of the reality of perfect God and perfect man points only to what can and must be tangibly manifest in life-practice, not to a condition which is already objectified in experience. Mrs. Eddy's eschatology, therefore, does not point so much to the disruption of a material order (though to mortals that will appear to occur), as the consummate demonstration of the divine order, already established as the reality of being.

Christian Science, it has been claimed, can be best seen as a pragmatic grasp of Christianity. But in view of its radical departure from orthodoxy, its connection with traditional Christianity becomes problematic. Mrs. Eddy claimed to have cut behind historical Christianity to grasp the full significance of Biblical revelation. And the elements which define Christian Science as a distinctive religious teaching definitely do mark a departure from the theology of historical Christianity. But at the same time, Mrs. Eddy always claimed that her teaching was thoroughly Christian. And most of the elements of traditional Christian teaching are present in Christian Science, even though the radicalism of Mrs. Eddy's vision drastically alters their customary meaning.

Perhaps the clearest way of establishing this point is through a contrast between Christian Science and New Thought with respect to the basic Christianity of each. For it is in Mrs. Eddy's differences with New Thought and the variant forms of mind-cure which antedated it that one sees most clearly the essentially Christian nature of her teaching. The New Thought and mind-cure movements (with the exception of Unity) did not claim to be specifically Christian and drew inspiration from a variety of religious sources, among which the Bible was far from the most important. Mrs. Eddy, on the other hand, claimed most emphatically that her teaching was Christian, that it was founded squarely upon the Scriptures, and that it was in fact continuous with Biblical revelation. It was not because of personal rivalry that she so vehemently opposed these movements, which were so often confused with hers in the public mind and which recruited much of their membership from the Christian Science movement. It was, rather, because they negated those very elements in her teaching which most clearly identify it as Christian.

More specifically, the contrast between Christian Science and New Thought highlights those elements in Mrs. Eddy's teaching which link it with her Calvinist background. Unlike New Thought, Christian Science claims to be a redemptive religion. It holds that men need to be radically saved from the flesh, that "mortal mind" has within itself no resources on the basis of which to work out this salvation, and that men are thus wholly reliant upon divine revelation for an understanding of the way that leads to salvation. Mrs. Eddy speaks of mortal mind in very much the same way as did Paul when he referred to the carnal mind. To her mortal mind was not the subject of the healing wrought by Christian Science, but rather the object of this healing. Mind-cure, on the other hand, sought, as its name suggests, not the regeneration of mortals but the amelioration of human ills through the exercise of the benevolent powers of thought. In almost all of its forms, it rejected the radical distinction made by Mrs. Eddy between mortal mind and the divine Mind, and elevated the human mentality to virtually deific status. Thus it held that revelation is unnecessary, since the mind is capable of discerning religious truth through its own enlightened intuitions, and that man requires, therefore, not radical regeneration, but moral and physical improvement through the beneficent exercise of his latent powers.

A more pointed contrast lies in the fact that mind-cure, unlike Christian Science, has no doctrine of radical evil. Mrs. Eddy, of course, did maintain that evil was unreal to God and has no foundation in true being. But she insisted also that evil was completely real to mortals and had to be recognized and dealt with as a mortal belief. Indeed, she claimed that Christian Science revealed as had no other religious teaching the nature and operations of evil. The term animal magnetism in her teaching indicates the operation of the radical evil of the belief in a mind apart from God. The most conspicuous manifestation of animal magnetism Mrs. Eddy termed mental malpractice, the injurious effect of one human mind upon another. It is important that where mind-curers had no room for this concept in their teachings and for the most part dismissed it as nonsense, Mrs. Eddy identified their very practice as in large part a form of malpractice and the rise of the mind-cure movement itself as the effect of animal magnetism.

Similarly, it is the Christian character of Christian Science which most decisively differentiates it from Oriental religion. The limited congruence between Christian Science on the one hand and Buddhism and Hinduism on the other, lies in their rejection of the belief in the objective reality of a physical universe. But the differences between the two are of much greater ultimate consequence than the similarities, and even the limited area of congruence that they share leads to different attitudes in practice. For if the material picture of man and the universe in Christian Science is false, it is a false sense of a spiritual reality which Mrs. Eddy insists must be demonstrated as the fact of being. Christian Science, therefore, can be said to be a redemptive religion in a way that is uncharacteristic of either Buddhism or Hinduism, for it insists upon the thorough-going practical regeneration of mortals from all phases of the flesh through the demonstration of the spiritual fact. It insists, moreover, that this regeneration is wrought through the Christ, the objective healing power of divine Truth acting on mortal thought. Mrs. Eddy, then, rejects the strongly subjective, mystical quality characteristic of Indian religious thought. For her, God in no sense indwells mortal consciousness, but rather, His power acts upon it to dissolve human error and elevate men to the demonstration of divine manhood. Where Buddhism and Hinduism, particularly as popularized in America, tend to negate man's individuality through absorption into the divine, Mrs. Eddy always maintains that God and man are distinct as Principle and idea.

These defining features, then, constitute the Christian core of Mrs. Eddy's teaching: reliance upon Biblical revelation, specifically the life and work of Christ Jesus; belief in a God absolutely transcendent to mortal thought and wholly distinct from man; and the insistence upon the requirement of the radical regeneration of mortals from the flesh. Certainly some of the critics of Christian Science both in the period of our study and since would have been loathe to identify Christian Science as Christian. And whether one chooses to so designate it remains, of course, a matter of individual definition. But die presence of these distinctively Christian elements as essential aspects of Mrs. Eddy's teaching is good warrant theologically for so doing.

The crucial point here, however, is that Christian Science, while Christian, is definitely not Protestant. It is possible to speak of Christian Science as Protestant, in the sense that the religious and social background of Mrs. Eddy and most of her followers was Protestant. Further, in a sermon Mrs. Eddy once counseled them to display a Protestant spirit in these words, "Intrepid, self-oblivious Protestants in a higher sense than ever before, let us meet and defeat the claims of sense and sin, regardless of the bans or clans pouring in their fire upon us …" Yet she also wrote that Christian Scientists "have no quarrel with Protestants, Catholics, or any other sect," implying a clear distinction between her teaching and other religious positions. There are, of course, some important continuities between Christian Science and various forms of Protestantism, particularly the New England Puritanism in which Mrs. Eddy was raised. Yet when one identifies the distinguishing elements of Christian Science as a religious teaching, it is difficult to see how it can be classed as Protestant. For Mrs. Eddy asserted that man and creation understood in Science are the expression of God, hence that the belief in a God-created material universe and man are the products of a radical misconception of true being. Salvation in Christian Science, therefore, means the full demonstration of the spiritual fact and is predicated upon the understanding of the truth of being in Science as differentiated from the mortal picture of being as presented to the physical senses. Protestantism, however, accepts as true that very picture of man and the universe which Mrs. Eddy declares is a misconception of being, understands man's materiality as natural to him in his creaturely estate, and conceives of salvation as the moral transformation of a fallen man rather than the demonstration of man's inherent perfection as the son of God. Underlying the specific attacks of Mrs. Eddy's theological opponents upon Christian Science was this basic area of radical disagreement; and whatever the shades of theological difference among them, they agreed with each other in these basic points in which they all disagreed with her. The continuities that do exist between Christian Science and Protestantism are real and important. But they indicate only that both partake of a Christian base. The teaching of Christian Science, however, cannot be located on the spectrum of Protestant theology and should not really be referred to as Protestant at all.

Of course, Protestantism in the late nineteenth century was not untouched by the pragmatic, anti-formalist strain of thought that was also objectified in Christian Science. Though the liberalism of the New Theology and the Social Gospel have analogues in European movements, their character as they emerged in America was decisively influenced by indigenous cultural tendencies.

These movements, however, are best understood as pragmatic reinterpretations of Protestantism rather than radically new appraisals of Christian revelation. They were in essentials modifications of orthodox Protestantism intended to reconcile it with modernity in an age where the traditional symbols of orthodoxy were undergoing collapse.

The difference between liberal Protestantism and Christian Science can be seen particularly in their Christology. The Christology of liberal Protestantism is in some respect on the surface at least quite similar to that of Christian Science. Jesus is regarded more as an exemplar than as a supernatural mediator, the older Protestant concept of the vicarious atonement is rejected, and the Christly nature of Jesus is understood as embodying an ideal manhood to which all men should aspire and which they are capable of achieving. But here die resemblance ends. For Christian Science emphasizes the works of Jesus over his ethical example, which is generally stressed in Protestant liberalism to the detriment of concern for the miracles and the resurrection. In Christian Science, the miracle is understood as a natural demonstration of divine power, this view being predicated on the fact that the true condition of being is spiritual—wholly unfettered by material limitation. The significance of Jesus' life-work lies in the fact that he demonstrated that the ideal man is not subject to material limitation in any form. He is, therefore, an exemplar of a far more radical truth in Christian Science man in liberal Protestantism, though he is an exemplar in both. Liberalism, then, modified the Protestant tradition by emphasizing the moral aspects of Jesus' teaching, but maintained its continuity with the Protestant tradition. Mrs. Eddy claimed to offer an understanding of Jesus' life and works on a basis which departed radically from the Protestant ontology.

An even more telling contrast can be drawn between Christian Science and the Social Gospel. The two movements, the developments of which ran almost parallel, have certain pragmatic elements in common but point in completely different directions. Both did express a certain anti-formalism and offered alternatives to orthodoxy. But the Social Gospel, theologically reliant upon liberalism, stressed the ethical component of Protestantism in conjunction with a rejection of laissez-faire, thus giving rise to the idea that the Christian's ultimate commitment is to the amelioration of the social order. In this sense, traditional Protestant beliefs were radically immanentized and the supernaturalistic elements of orthodoxy were slighted or rejected outright. But the Social Gospel operated well within the world view or cosmology of Protestantism generally. It challenged traditional social ethics and doctrinal interpretations, but it did not in any sense challenge the basic ontology of Protestantism, as did Christian Science. Indeed, on the basis of the belief that social problems like all others flowed from a radical misconception of the nature of being, Mrs. Eddy developed a wholly different approach to the resolution of social problems than that of the Social Gospel. And whatever congruence there might be in the anti-formalism that both represent, they are wholly irreconcilable as religious orientations.

A final point here is that the institutional character of the Christian Science movement puts it well outside the framework of American denominational life. For The Mother Church cannot be understood along the lines of the ordinary sacramental or liturgical idea of church as an institution. In its ultimate spiritual signification, Mrs. Eddy defined church in such a way that it is inseparable from the structure of reality itself. As a human institution, church for her had an entirely instrumental character: it was designed to carry out certain essential purposes necessary to the growth of the Christian Science movement and the dissemination and protection of its teachings. Overall, the Christian Science church may be said to have an educational function. Its mission, as Mrs. Eddy defined it, is to bless the race through the promulgation of demonstrable truth. The end of the church, therefore, is not to exist as a church—indeed, Mrs. Eddy in the first years after her discovery of Christian Science did not want to found a church, and when she did so it was only as a concession to necessity. Thus the character of The Mother Church, as it took shape in the 1890s was as streamlined as possible to fulfill its intended function. Similarly, its services are designed to inspire through the communication of truth rather than through participation in symbolic rites. And its governing law, the Manual, is a skeletal system of providing the bare necessities of church government while allowing a good deal of flexibility in the day-to-day administration of church affairs.

How then are we to account for the emergence of Christian Science in American religious life? What made it a religious movement of significant proportions rather than just a minor sect? We have to account for this phenomenon in the first instance in terms of the religious situation into which Christian Science was projected. For the emergence of Christian Science coincided with a particularly crucial stage in American religious development. All the major mutations in American religious life before the late nineteenth century had transpired within the framework of Protestant supernaturalism. In the late nineteenth century, however, the very structure of Protestant supernaturalism itself began to give way, not just for a few intellectuals but for the laity in general. To a large extent, the dilemmas of present day Christianity can be traced back to the profound religious reorientation that began to assume major proportions in the period in which Christian Science first emerged on the American scene. Of course, Mrs. Eddy's teaching had been formulated just after the Civil War, a decade or more before this reorientation began to become apparent. Yet the significant fact here is that Christian Science gained a following and came to prominence in the midst of a period of profound spiritual turmoil.

The character of this orientation was marked by a rejection of the dualistic supernaturalism of orthodoxy and a longing, expressed in different ways, for religious experience which was vital, immediate, and comprehensible in practical terms. By the late nineteenth century, it was becoming increasingly impossible for the modern mind to accept a religious orientation which divided man's experience into the natural and supernatural, the here and the hereafter, the sacred and the secular. Progress, industrialization, the impact of science—indeed, almost all the elements characteristic of modern life—conspired to render increasingly meaningless the symbols, doctrines, and promises of orthodoxy. If religion were couched in terms of an apposition of the life to come to this life, then men were increasingly willing to let go any concern with the life to come and live in terms of the present alone. Cor-relatively, their institutionalized professions of faith tended to devolve into a meaningless conventionalism that masked the increasing secularism of the culture. This process had reached such a point in Europe by this period that Friedrich Nietzsche could declare the death of God, not as a theological pronouncement, but as a cultural diagnosis of the decline of the whole scheme of super-natural transcendence in the modern mind. The significant point for our purpose was that this decline in America was just becoming apparent in the period when Christian Science emerged in American religious life, though it was not to become generally characteristic of the culture until nearly a century later.

In the light of these points it should not be surprising that the main direction of religious innovation in this period was toward a more pragmatic conception of what religion includes. Whether we are speaking of the advent of the New Theology, the development of the Social Gospel, or even the popularity of variant forms of mysticism, the tendency was the same: toward a conception of religious experience in more pragmatic—more immediate, experienceable, and vital—terms. The New Theology verbalized this tendency in terms of an identification of God's kingdom with the progress of human culture. The Social Gospel expressed it by urging upon Christians the uplifting work of living the Gospel through aiding in the efforts at social amelioration. The Pentecostal movement reflected this trend through emphasizing speaking in different tongues and other manifestations of religious immediacy. William James spoke for a generalized mood among many of the religiously concerned of his day when he attempted, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, to adduce the meaning of religion in terms of concrete experiences rather than abstract formulations of theology. James approached religion through the analysis of mystical experience, but in mysticism he saw a strongly pragmatic element: for it was what seemed to him and to others as well most immediate and vital in religious life. This same concern for immediacy and vitality was voiced in a variety of ways in religious thought at that time and since in a renewed interest in the idea of Holy Spirit, God's operative and sustaining power. And it was, of course, the Holy Spirit that Christian Science claimed to reduce to human understanding and demonstration.

Those who embraced Christian Science as a religious teaching had in almost all cases in some way experienced the devitalization of orthodoxy that was so much a part of the inner history of Protestantism in their age. For in a variety of ways they had come to feel that orthodox doctrines and symbols, together with the institutions which perpetuated them, had lost whatever meaning and comprehensibility and vitality they once might have had. Some could no longer accept belief in a God who, as the Creator of a universe in which suffering and death seemed constant, appeared to be morally inferior to His worshipers. Others had lost faith in the doctrines of orthodoxy through the influence of scientific materialism or the higher criticism. For still others, the experiential immediacy of religion simply seemed to evaporate and its symbols became hollow shells. And many of those who turned to Christian Science found welcome surcease from the prevalent Protestant belief that in the face of suffering one must resign oneself to the will of a God who in some sense decreed it as a necessity. In any case, the doctrines, institutions, and symbols of orthodoxy seemed to converts to Christian Science quite remote from the felt realities of experience. Hence they were receptive to a religion which claimed that Christian promises were to be realized in the present; which offered demonstration instead of doctrine; and which taught that symbols of religious truth could be replaced by die discernment and demonstration of the spiritual fact of being.

To Christian Scientists, Mrs. Eddy's teaching constituted a revelation of spiritual power far beyond what they found in either liberal or orthodox Protestantism. To them, its glory lay in its promise that now men could begin the demonstration of eternal life. It lay in the conviction that men could be fully delivered from sickness, sin, and death, and that these forms of evil were neither necessary to being nor spiritually legitimate. Glowingly, Christian Scientists spoke of the release they had found through the study of Mrs. Eddy's teachings from physical suffering, the fear of death, the bondage to sin, and the dreariness of meaningless lives. And often they contrasted the spiritual power which they felt Christian Science had brought into their experience with the ineffectiveness of the orthodoxies they had left behind.

For such people, Christian Science healing was indeed a crucial religious experience, but not because of the material change it effected in their physical well-being. For healing validated the claim that spiritual power was presently effective in experience—that religion, therefore, was a matter of immediate experience and not just of ultimate assurance. The experience of healing was, therefore, not so much a matter of a physical change as a religious awakening. And in Christian Scientists' testimonies of healing, particularly those which involved a conversion experience, the really crucial factor is the religious awakening which accompanied and gave ultimate significance to the healing experience. Mrs. Eddy's claims for the efficacy of spiritual healing power were indeed radical, for they extended to the healing of virtually every disease on record. But the ultimate radicalism of her claims was for the immediacy and experience-ability of spiritual power through which these diseases were healed. And to her followers, die practice of Christian Science in individual instances seemed to make good these claims in an overwhelming way.

It was, therefore, the pragmatic quality of Christian Science that accounted for its religious appeal. But it must be carefully understood here that this defining element in the character of Christian Science made it if anything more demanding as a religious teaching than the orthodoxies which it claimed to supersede. Though Mrs. Eddy did define the meaning of salvation in radically experiential terms, salvation is in the final analysis the only thing she claims to offer. And mere is no denying the fact mat her demands on those who would practice Christian Science according to her standards were rigorous in the extreme. Christian Scientists often testified that the practical requirements of being a follower of Mrs. Eddy were difficult indeed. They found that they were required to put off old ways of tiiinking, to commit themselves to reliance upon spiritual power for healing, and in many cases to endure the bitter reproaches of those who could only see her teaching as dangerous heresy or quackery. But to devoted Christian Scientists, the effort expended in the study of Mrs. Eddy's teaching and the personal sacrifices entailed in its practice seemed well worthwhile.

To the degree that Christian Science was secularized in practice—and there is some evidence that it was—its character as a pragmatic grasp of Christian revelation was vitiated. The point can be stated in terms of two ways in which die term pragmatic may be used. In its larger and more philosophic sense, pragmatic signifies a quality of being experientially meaningful. But in its lesser and more popular usage, it connotes convenience and mere expediency. The secularized practice of Christian Science amounts to the reduction of a pragmatic religious teaching in the larger sense to a pragmatic problem-solver in the lesser sense. The teachings that inspire any movement that gains some widespread popularity are, of course, subject to being distorted in practice. But the particular character of this distortion in the case of Christian Science can only be understood as an inversion of its basic strength.

The process by which the pragmatic character of Christian Science was inverted into a narrow utilitarianism should be familiar to students of American religion. For it is essentially die same process that was at work in the secularization of Puritanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Puritanism was characterized especially by a strongly activist thrust which bade men obey the divine will in all phases of their lives. Through a subtle, long-term process, this activist tendency in Puritanism was channeled into the secularism of the "gospel of wealth" and cult of success. Obedience to the divine Word was subverted into moralism, the establishment of God's Kingdom on earth was identified with the attainment of the good life in purely human terms, and the religious impetus of original Puritanism was cooled into a form of rationalism. Christian Science shares with Puritanism the activist tendency which commits its adherents to seek to extend their religion into all phases of daily activity. Indeed, the pragmatic character of Christian Science, and in part the origins of pragmatism itself, are to some degree traceable to the activist thrust of New England Puritanism. Little wonder, then, that the practice of Christian Science should have been subject to the same distortions which plagued the development of Puritanism and impels the misinterpretation of Pragmatism as a philosophy of mere expediency. The secularized practice of Christian Science bears very much the same relationship to Mrs. Eddy's teaching as does the cult of success to original Puritanism and the ethic of expediency to Jamesian or Deweyan Pragmatism. Christian Science, in its more secularized form, becomes a kind of rationalistic neo-Protestantism which must be distinguished from Mrs. Eddy's basic vision.…