The Newest Religion.

Auckland Star, Volume XXVI, Issue 193, 22 August 1885, Page 5

The Newest Religion .

The United States are tho chosen homo of novelties not less in tho speculative than in tho practical field, and the soil is as fertile of new beliefs as it is of new machines. The speculative and tho practical faculty sometimes combine with curious results, as when a now policy and almost a new State are founded on the monstrous caricature of Christianity which forms the creed of the Latter Day Saints. For a practical people tho Americans havo a wonderful lovo of crazos, and tho latest and not least remarkablo oxamplo is supplied by sober and superior Boston. It is called the mindcure, and partakes of tho nature partly of a religiaus, partly of a pseudo scientific, movement. Its founder is stated to be a Mrs Mary B. G. Eddy, and its principal votaries consist, it appears, almost entirely of women. Mrs Eddy was in the year 1866 tho subject at once of a euro and of a revelation. She was, or was Euppoaed to bo, dying from paralysis, brought on from spinal injury caused by a fall. Her pastor had called to adminiaterthe last conaolations of religion, and she btgged him to call again in tho afternoon. But in the intorval something occurred. Mrs Eddy was not co near aa had been supposed to the end of her resources. It occurred to hor that illness was after all only a mistake in preeence of the divine determination for good, and " she realised that hor hurt wae but an error which when supplanted by iho truth would disappear." Fortified by this now knowledge, she rose from her bod, and when the clergyman came expecting to be called upon to comfort i\ bereaved family she met him at the door. What she had done for hersolf sho felt she could do for others. It was only necessary (o got them to look at things rightly in order that they should bo righted. Sho has bocomo tho apostle of a now sect called tho " Christian Scientists," and of a new medicino which dispensos with tho doctors. Sho has a church which is crowded every Sunday an hour before the service begins, and she has drawn away co many persons from other creeds and places of worship that a serious commotion has been oxcited among tho orthodox clergy of all denominations. One of these has after a careful study, pronounced Mrs Eddy's reliction to be ''a mixture of Pantheism and Buddhism," and describes tho whole system as " a port of witch's cauldron, in which every concoivablo heathon and Christian heresy is seething and simmering." Another reverend gentleman devotes himself every Monday to a lecture in denunciation of the new religion, and conferences of tho clergy are , held almost weekly in order to consider what shall be done. In epito, however, of all this clerical hubbub, the thing goes on and increases portentously, and the original heresy of Mrs Eddy has givon rise to a whole crop of subordinate heresies, differing in the moans employed and some of them having no connection whatever with religion, but nil of them apparently producing equally good results in tho shape of "mind-curing." It would almost seem that there must be a large number of hysterical persons in Boston,