boy's youth, agreeable manner, and even his fresh colour conducive to a sinister effect. Given such a blithe and genial figure, and suppose in him a power over the health and emotions of other people, and a morbid passion for using it to the most atrocious ends, and you have indeed the young Nero, which title Mrs. Eddy so often applied to Kennedy.
Mrs. Eddy feared this imaginary Kennedy as only things born of the imagination can be feared, and dilated upon his corrupt nature and terrible power until her new students, when they met the actual, unconscious Kennedy upon the street, shuddered and hurried away. During the sleepless nights which sometimes followed an outburst of her hatred, Mrs. Eddy would pace the floor, exclaiming to her sympathetic students: "Oh, why does not some one kill him? Why does he not die?"
She afterward wrote of him:
Among our very first students was the mesmerist aforesaid, who has followed the cause of metaphysical healing as a hound follows his prey, to hunt down every promising student if he cannot place them in his track and on his pursuit. Never but one of our students was a voluntary malpractitioner; he has made many others. . . . This malpractitioner tried his best to break down our health before we learned the cause of our sufferings. It was difficult for us to credit the facts of his malice or to admit they lie within the pale of mortal thought.[1]
To Richard Kennedy and his mesmeric power Mrs. Eddy began to attribute, not only her illnesses, but all her vexations and misfortunes; any lack of success in her ventures, any difficulties with her students.
In the famous chapter on Demonology she enumerates a long list of friends whose warm regard for her was destroyed by Kennedy's mesmeric power. "Our lives," she writes, "have
- ↑ Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 34.
