The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-10-14

glory 1t declares. Mrs. Eddy must explain away the evident meaning of this testimony to normal human ex- perience; but to a woman who can deny the, reality of the world which she is constantly treating as real-to dispose of the plain statement of a passage of Scripture is a very simple thing,
 She does it by the categorical" method of exegesis, by which she claims to give the spiritual" or Sci entifc" interpretation. This simply means that as often as she comes implication does not suit her, she turns them into metaphors" that do suit her. For example when one reads in Gen. 6, And God said Let there be a Armament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the wa ters from the waters, one natural ly supposes that he is reading about land and water; but Mrs Eddy's "key" Is as follows. Understanding is the spiritual Armament, whereby human conception distinguishes be- tween Truth and error" Tn met aphor, theAdry land Illustrates the sol i'd formations instituted by Mind, while water symbolizes It's solutions or elements" And so the Tights in the Armament of the Heaven" are Truth and Love enlightening the understanding, the mist that went up from the earth and watered the face of the ground" Is ''the mist of obscurity evolved by error because of it's material basis; that Is to say: ''The creation of matter arises from a mist, or false claim--or from mysti- fcation, (sici) and not from the firm ament, or understanding, which God erects between the true and the tfalse.' And so persists the wearying reiteEation of her stock phrases ia substitution for the real meaning of whatever passage of Scripture she Is protesting to expound. Once in a while the monotony is relieved by an Interpretation so extraordinarily ridi7 l culous as to refresh us with smile, as when she writes, The word Adam is from the Hebrew adamah, signify ing the red color of the ground, dust, nothingness. Divide the name Adam into two syllables, and it reads, dam or obstructlon This suggests the thought of something fluid, of mortal mind In solution" etc Such is the | childish treatment of Scripture of which woman is capable whom l thousands venerate in this dawn of the twentieth century as the only true i interpreter of Gods revelation to the human race, whose book containing such travesties of Truth is read in the Ireligious gatherings of these thous- | ands alternately with the words of Jesus and of Paul If Mrs. Eddy knew anything Of the history of Scriptural exegesis she would know that allegor- ical interpretation has proven in the I past a mere will-o-the- -wisp leading fanatical minds anywhere and nos where in the bogs of subjective fancy, but never along the highway of patl- ent and certified truth. The Jewish philosopher Philo having adopted an oriental error similar to Mrs. Eddy's namely that matter and hence the human body, is essentially evil, un- dertook to harmonize the Old Testa. ment with this and other Manichear teachings by this very method of al
 legorizing. Here are some of his re-
 suits: God did not rain upon tn, earth" This implies that God die Inot shed the perceptions of things upon the senses!" Again Jacob says With my staff I passed over this Jor
 dan," that seems plain enough, bu
 for Philo, Jordan means 'baseness'
 the staff means temperance' ant
 Jacob intends to say that by discipline he has risen above baseness. Ont hundred other interpreters of thi
 method might give one hundred diff
 ferent meanings to Jordan and Jac
 obs staff and anyone would be jus
 as near the truth as the fancy O
 Philo or of Mary Baker G. Eddy II
 Dean Farrar's The Bible, Its Mean
 ing and Supremacy" you may flnt
 numerous specimens of this fantasti
 and valueless interpretation as it ha
 appeared from century to century
 Listen to Origen as he explains Johl
 the Baptists saying Whose shoe
 latchet I am not worthy to unloose.
 "I think" he says that one of tn
 shoes is the Incarnation othe "the descent into Hades." And fin ally Swedenborg holds forth in Ian
 guage and spirit quite Eddy-ese: An
 Rebecca arose'-hereby is signified al
 elevation of the affection of truth and her damsels' hereby are signifle,
 subservient infections the
 rode upon camels'-hereby is signiflet the intellectual principles elevatet
 above natural scientifics." But al
 this edifeth not, Mrs. Eddy's exegesi
 her vaunted Key to the Scriptures {, is absolutely worthless as an interpre !, tation of the Book of books. The Bi
 ble must be understood first literall
 and historically, and when the spirit ] ual meaning of book of the Bible
 understood in its application to it : own time, we are in position to in terpret it's spiritual meaning for ou time and for all time. But thi
 means linguistic and historical re } search, close patient, laborious scien
 tiflc study and of this Mrs! Eddy is in l capable. It is much easier to shir the slow masteries of genuine schol arship and to float into the dreamlan of allegory where as by magic any