Christian Science (1907)

by Twain, Mark; Wills, Garry; Hill, Hamlin; Fishkin, Shelley Fisher

• ISBN13: 9780195101553
• ISBN10: 0195101553
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-12-05
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Christian Science begins, as Garry Wills notes in his introduction, with Twain's description of a man who "falls off a cliff and finds his bones projecting from him like the arms of a hat rack. After a course of treatment from a Christian Science practitioner, he calls in a veterinarian and pays the Christian Scientist with an imaginary check for an imaginary cure." Although Twain recognized that everyone was born with "the power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal it or make it sick," he was deeply suspicious of the empire-building, power-mongering, delusions, and evasions of the founder of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy. Wills notes that " Christian Science can be read at several levels, all rewarding--first, as a satire on Christian Science's wilder pretensions and its founder's deceptions; then, as an example of Twain's regard for language as the indicator of mental and moral conditions; and finally as part of a biographical descent into the nihilism of his last days. On all these counts the book gets us very close to the heart of American culture."

Table of Contents

Editor's Note	x
Foreword	xi
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Introduction	xxxi
Garry Wills
Christian Science, with Notes Containing Corrections to Date, follows	xxxviii
Afterword	1	(11)
Hamlin Hill
For Further Reading	12	(1)
Hamlin Hill
A Note on the Text	13	(2)
Robert H. Hirst
Contributors	15	(1)
Acknowledgments	16