killing; when he is attempting to turn friend away from friend, ruthlessly stabbing the quivering heart; when he is clipping the thread of life, and giving to the grave youth and its rainbow hues; when he is turning back the reviving sufferer to her bed of pain, clouding her first morning after years of night; and the Nemesis of that hour shall point to the tyrant's fate, who falls at length upon the sword of justice.[1]
In the beginning, then, Malicious Mesmerism was advanced merely as a personal attribute of Richard Kennedy, and was a means by which Mrs. Eddy sought to justify her hatred. In the first edition of Science and Health, though she usually links it with some reference to Kennedy, Mrs. Eddy occasionally refers to mesmerism as an abstract thing, apart from any personality.
In coming years the person or mind that hates his neighbour, will have no need to traverse his fields, to destroy his flocks and herds, and spoil his vines; or to enter his house to demoralise his household; for the evil mind will do this through mesmerism; and not in propria personæ be seen committing the deed. Unless this terrible hour be met and restrained by Science, mesmerism, that scourge of man, will leave nothing sacred when mind begins to act under direction of conscious power.
The sign of the mesmerist, however, the plague spot which he could not conceal, was "Manipulation"—the method which she had taught Kennedy and afterward repudiated. "Sooner suffer a doctor infected with smallpox to be about you," she cries, "than come under the treatment of one who manipulates his patients' heads." And again, "the malpractitioner can depend only on manipulation." From 1872 to 1877 Mrs. Eddy counted many victims of Kennedy's mesmeric power, but charged no other student with consciously and maliciously practising mesmerism. In 1877, however, an open rupture occurred between Mrs. Eddy and Daniel Spofford. Now, Mr. Spofford
- ↑ Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 38.
