And not ten among the five hundred--let their minds be ever so good and bright--will be competent, by grace of the requisite specialized mental training, to take hold of a complex abstraction of any kind and make head or tail of it.
The whole five hundred are thinkers, and they are all capable thinkers--but only within the narrow limits of their specialized trainings.

Four hundred and ninety of them cannot competently examine either a religious plan or a political one.

A scattering few of them do examine both--that is, they think they do.

With results as precious as when I examine the nebular theory and explain it to myself.
If the four hundred and ninety got their religion through their minds, and by weighed and measured detail, Christian Science would not be a scary apparition.

But they don't; they get a little of it through their minds, more of it through their feelings, and the overwhelming bulk of it through their environment.
Environment is the chief thing to be considered when one is proposing to predict the future of Christian Science.