● ● ● question, into the hands of Mr. Albert S. Osborn and Mr. Elbridge Walter Stein of New York City, who are two of the best-known authorities on handwriting and questioned documents in the United States. These experts were consulted separately, and each of them tested the documents in question separately, but both of them reported the same conclusions, and each of them reported his conclusions and his reasons for them in detail, at length, and in positive words. The gist of their findings was that neither the purported notation by Mary Baker nor the purported signature was in the handwriting of Mary Baker Eddy, and that neither the purported letter nor the purported manuscript reproduced in the book nor the purported signature of Francis Lieber was in his handwriting.2
In 1955 a book entitled Ordeal by Concordance by Conrad Henry Moehlman was published by Longmans Green of New York and London. Dr. Moehlman, a church historian who was for many years James B. Colgate Professor of the History of Christianity at Colgate-Rochester Seminary, had been assigning the Lieber-Hegel document to one of his classes each year as a linguistic-historical problem, and each year the result was the same. The students came to the unanimous conclusion that it was a forgery plagiarized from Science and Health rather than the other way around. Dr. Moehlman’s book documented his own reasons for reaching such a conclusion.
A single small example must serve here. According to the Haushalter claim, Lieber is supposed to have written in 1866 in the document in question: “The treatment of evil by Hegel is on the lines of Baader and the Theodicy of Leibnitz. Evil is negation, the absence of Essence. The negation of evil is finite and not connected with God. . . .”3 But in Otto Pfleiderer’s The Philosophy of Religion on the Basis of its History, published in London in 1887, one reads these words: “Krause’s solution of the problem [of evil] is quite on the lines of Leibnitz’s theodicy. Evil . . . is negation, in part a simple want of essence. . . . Evil as non-essential has its sphere only in the finite and . . . is not to be connected with God. . . .”4
2 “Item of Interest,” Christian Science Sentinel, 3 April 1937, pp. 611–612.
3 [Haushalter, Mrs. Eddy Purloins from Hegel, p. 90.]
4 Otto Pfleiderer, The Philosophy of Religion on the Basis of Its History, vol. 2, Schelling to the Present Day (London: Williams and Norgate, 1887), pp. 61–62 [bracketed text Peel’s].