Modern Religious Cults and Movements | Page 3

Investigation of Mesmerism--Mesmerism
in America; Phineas Quimby an Important Link in a Long
Chain--Quimby is Led to Define Sickness as Wrong Belief--Quimby
Develops His Theories--Mary Baker Eddy Comes Under His
Influence--Outstanding Events of Her Life: Her Early Girlhood--Her
Education: Shaping Influences--Her Unhappy Fortunes. She is Cured
by Quimby--An Unacknowledged Debt--She Develops Quimby's
Teachings--Begins to Teach and to Heal--Early Phases of Christian
Science--She Writes "Science and Health" and Completes the
Organization of Her Church.
V. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A PHILOSOPHY 136
Christian Science a Philosophy, a Theology, a Religion and a System
of Healing--The Philosophic Bases of Christian Science--It Undertakes
to Solve the Problem of Evil--Contrasted Solutions--The Divine Mind
and Mortal Mind--The Essential Limitations of Mrs. Eddy's

System--Experience and Life--Sense-Testimony--The Inescapable
Reality of Shadowed Experience.
VI. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A THEOLOGY 163
Science and Health Offered as a Key to the Scriptures--It Ignores All
Recognized Canons of Biblical Interpretation--Its Conception of
God--Mrs. Eddy's Interpretation of Jesus Christ--Christian Science His
Second Coming--Christian Science, the Incarnation and the
Atonement--Sin an Error of Mortal Mind--The Sacraments
Disappear--The Real Power of Christian Science.
VII. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A SYSTEM OF HEALING AND A
RELIGION 185
Christian Science the Application of Philosophy and Theology to
Bodily Healing--Looseness of Christian Science Diagnosis--The Power
of Mental Environment--Christian Science Definition of Disease--Has a
Rich Field to Work--A Strongly-Drawn System of Psycho-therapy--A
System of Suggestion--Affected by Our Growing Understanding of the
Range of Suggestion--Strongest in Teaching That God Has Meaning
for the Whole of Life--Exalts the Power of Mind; the Processes--Is Not
Big Enough for the Whole of Experience.
VIII. NEW THOUGHT 210
New Thought Difficult to Define--"The Rediscovery of the Inner
Life"--Spinoza's Quest--Kant Reaffirms the Creative Power of
Mind--Utilitarianism, Deism and Individualism--The Reactions Against
Them--New England Transcendentalism--New Thought Takes
Form--Its Creeds--The Range of the Movement--The Key-Words of
New Thought--Its Field of Real Usefulness--Its Gospel of Getting
On--The Limitations and Dangers of Its Positions--Tends to Become a
Universal and Loosely-Defined Religion.
IX. THE RETURN OF THE EAST UPON WEST. THEOSOPHY
AND KINDRED CULTS 245

Historic Forces Carried Early Christianity West and Not East--The
West Rediscovers the East; the East Returns Upon the
West--Chesterton's Two Saints--Why the West Questions the
East--Pantheism and Its Problems--How the One Becomes the
Many--Evolution and Involution--Theosophy Undertakes to Offer
Deliverance--But Becomes Deeply Entangled Itself--The West Looks
to Personal Immortality--The East Balances the Accounts of Life in a
Series of Reincarnations--Theosophy Produces a Distinct Type of
Character--A "Tour de Force" of the Imagination--A Bridge of
Clouds--The Difficulties of Reincarnation--Immortality Nobler, Juster
and Simpler--Pantheism at Its Best--and Its Worst.
X. SPIRITUALISM 284
The Genesis of Modern Spiritualism--It Crosses to Europe--The
Beginnings of Trance-Mediumship--The Society for Psychical
Research Begins Its Work--Confronts Difficulties--William James
Enters the Field--The Limitations of Psychical Investigation--The
Society for Psychical Research Gives Intellectual Standing to
Spiritism--The Very Small Number of Dependable Mediums--Spiritism
a Question of Testimony and Interpretation--Possible Explanations of
Spiritistic Phenomena--Myers' Theory of
Mediumship--Telepathy--Controls--The Dilemma of Spiritism--The
Influence of Spiritism--The Real Alternative to Spiritism--The
Investigations of Émile Boirac--Geley's Conclusions--The Meaning of
Spiritism for Faith.
XI. MINOR CULTS: THE MEANING OF THE CULTS FOR THE
CHURCH 326
Border-land Cults--Bahaism--The Bab and His Successors--The
Temple of Unity--General Conclusions--The Cults Are Aspects of the
Creative Religious Consciousness of the Age--Their Parallels in the
Past--The Healing Cults Likely to be Adversely Influenced by the
Scientific Organization of Psycho-therapy--New Thought Will Become
Old Thought--Possible Absorption of the Cults by a Widening Historic
Christianity--Christianity Influenced by the Cults--Medical Science and
the Healing Cults--A Neglected Force--Time and the Corrections of

Truth.

I
THE FORMS AND BACKGROUNDS OF INHERITED
CHRISTIANITY
Chronologically the point of departure for such a study as this is the
decade from 1880 to 1890. This is only an approximation but it will do.
It was a particularly decorous decade. There was no fighting save on
the outposts of colonial empires, the little wars of Soldiers Three and
Barrack Room Ballads--too far away for their guns to be heard in the
streets of capital cities, but lending a touch of colour to newspaper
head-lines and supplying new material for rising young writers. It was
the decade of triumphant Democracy and triumphant Science and
triumphant Industrialism and, among the more open-minded, of
triumphant Evolution. Western Civilization was sure of its forces, sure
of its formulæ, sure of its future; there were here and there clouds no
bigger than a man's hand against particularly luminous horizons, but
there was everywhere a general agreement that they would be dissolved
by the force of benign development. The world seemed particularly
well in hand.
The churches generally shared this confidence. Catholicism and
Protestantism had reached a tacit working agreement as to their spheres
of influence and were even beginning to fraternize a little. The divisive
force of Protestantism seemed to have spent itself. Since Alexander
Campbell--dead now for a decade and a half--no Protestant sect of any