Mrs. Eddy believed that her students not only depended upon her for their own moral and physical support, but that, when treating their patients, their minds naturally turned to her, in whom dwelt the healing principle, and unconsciously coupled her in thought with the ill of the patient, which was thus transferred to her.
Even after she had escaped into solitude, the book progressed but slowly, and she complained that whenever she had succeeded in concentrating herself upon her work, the beliefs (illnesses) of other people would seize her "as sensibly as a hand." From Boston, shortly after her departure, she wrote to a trusted student one of those incoherent letters which indicate the excitement under which Mrs. Eddy sometimes laboured.
April, 1877, Sunday.
Dear Student: I am in Boston to-day feeling very very little better for the five weeks that are gone. I cannot finish the Key[1] yet I will be getting myself and all of a sudden I am seized as sensibly by some others belief as the hand could lay hold of me my sufferings have made me utterly weaned from this plane and if my husband was only willing to give me up I would gladly yield up the ghost of this terrible earth plane and join those nearer my Life. . . . Cure Miss Brown[2] or I shall never finish my book. Truly yrs.
M.
A letter to Mr. Spofford, written a week after she left Lynn, and postmarked Fair Haven, Conn., shows that despite her sufferings she was eagerly planning for the second edition of her book and that, notwithstanding the cold reception of the first edition, her faith in its ultimate success was unshaken.
April 19, 1877.
My Dear Student, . . . I will consider the arrangement for embellishing the book. I had fixed on the picture of Jesus and a sick man—the hand of the former outstretched to him as in rebuke of the disease;
