Obviously the learned Pfleiderer neither could nor needed to plagiarize from a highly inaccurate essay about Hegel which (a) either had been stowed away with an obscure New England shoemaker eleven years earlier, or (b) had not yet been composed. On the other hand, the difficulties disappear if a date between 1887 and 1930 is accepted for the composition of the essay—especially toward the latter end of the period, when a person engaged in such a fabrication might well feel he could borrow a few phrases from a forgotten 1887 history of philosophy without danger of detection.

The Lieber-Hegel charge collapses ignominiously under any sort of thorough examination. Since the first edition of this biography was published the coup de grace has been administered to the whole sorry fraud by a carefully documented study, “Historical Consensus and Christian Science: the Career of a Manuscript Controversy,” by Thomas C. Johnsen in The New England Quarterly, March 1980. One further implication of the fraud is not to be overlooked. The fabricator of the essay, now positively identified as Walter Haushalter, shrewdly judged that if one were going to produce a “father” for Christian Science, Quimby was wholly inadequate, though the paper-thin “Hegel” he produced served the purpose no better.⁵