The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy/Chapter 12

by Georgine Milmine

CHAPTER XII

MRS. EDDY'S BELIEF THAT SHE SUFFERED FOR THE SINS OF OTHERS—LETTERS TO STUDENTS—THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MALICIOUS ANIMAL MAGNETISM—A REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT

Indeed, one of the most primitive and fundamental shapes which the relation of cause and effect takes in the savage mind, is the assumed connection between disease or death and some malevolent personal agency. . . . The minds of civilised people have become familiar with the conception of natural law, and that conception has simply stifled the old superstition as clover chokes out weeds. . . . The disposition to believe was one of the oldest inheritances of the human mind, while the capacity for estimating evidence in cases of physical causation is one of its very latest and most laborious acquisitions.—John Fiske.

At the beginning of 1877, her seventh year as a teacher in Lynn, Mrs. Eddy and her Science were little known outside of Essex County, though the first edition of Science and Health had been published more than a year before, and the author was busy preparing a second edition. Her loyal students, however, believed that she was on the way to obtain wider recognition. Miss Dorcas Rawson, Mrs. Miranda Rice, and Daniel Spofford laboured unceasingly for her interests. Mr. Eddy, immediately upon his marriage, withdrew from practice, dropping the patients he had taken over from Mr. Spofford, and devoted himself entirely to his wife's service. Three days after her marriage Mrs. Eddy wrote to one of her students concerning Mr. Eddy: "I feel sure that I can teach my husband up to a higher usefulness, to purity, and the higher development of all his latent noble qualities of head and heart."

In spite of the frequent jars and occasional lawsuits between Mrs. Eddy and her students, new candidates for instruction were constantly attracted by the Science taught at Number 8 Broad Street, where the large sign, "Mary B. Glover's Christian Scientists' Home" still aroused the curiosity of the stranger.

The Christian Science faith has, from the beginning, owed its growth to its radical principle that sickness of soul and body are delusions which can be dispelled at will, and that the natural state of the human creature is characterised by health, happiness, and goodness. The message which Mrs. Eddy brought to Lynn was substantially that God is not only all-good, all-powerful, and all-present, but that there is nothing but God in all the Universe; that evil is a non-existent thing, a sinister legend which has been handed down from generation to generation until it has become a fixed belief. Mrs. Eddy's mission was to uproot this implanted belief and to emancipate the race from the terrors which had imprisoned it for so many thousands of years. "Ye shall know the Truth," she said, "and the Truth shall make you free."

Yet Mrs. Eddy herself was not always well, was not always happy. She used at first to account for this seeming inconsistency by explaining that she bore in her own person the ills from which she released others. When sick or distraught, Mrs. Eddy frequently reminded her students that Jesus Christ was bruised for our transgressions and bore upon His shoulders the sin and weakness of the world He came to save. She apparently did not realise that Christ, by the very act of His atonement, admitted the reality of sin, while she, having denied its existence, had forfeited any logical right to suffer because of it. The missionary who frees the savage from the fear of demons and witchcraft, and the nurse who assures the child that there is no evil thing lurking for him in the dark, do not suffer from the enlightenment they bring, and they do not assume the fear which the child casts off. Mrs. Eddy, on the contrary, for many years believed that she herself suffered from the torturing belief she had taken away from others. The reader will remember that in 1863 Mrs. Eddy wrote to Dr. Quimby that while treating her nephew, Albert Tilton, to rid him of the habit of smoking, she herself felt a desire to smoke. By 1877 Mrs. Eddy not only believed that she suffered from the physical ills from which her students were released, but declared that her students followed her in thought and selfishly took from her to feed their own weakness. The work upon the second edition of her book could not go on because they nourished themselves upon her and sapped her powers.

By the 1st of April, three months after her marriage to Mr. Eddy, she was almost in despair, and on April 7th she wrote one of her students: "I sometimes think I can not hold on till the next edition is out. Will you not help me so far as is in your power, in this way? Take Miss Norman, she is an interesting girl and help her through. She will work for the cause but she will swamp me if you do not take hold. I am at present such a tired swimmer, unless you do this I have more than I can carry at present. Direct your thoughts and everybody's else that you can away from me, don't talk of me."

A week later she fulfilled an old threat, and, attended by her husband, went away for some weeks, leaving no address; "driven," as she said, "into the wilderness." She felt that if her students did not know her whereabouts, their minds could not so persistently prey upon hers. The following letter to Daniel Spofford is postmarked Boston, April 14th, but seems to have been written upon the eve of Mrs. Eddy's flight from Lynn.

Dear Student—This hour of my departure I pick up from the carpet a piece of paper write you a line to say I am at length driven into the wilderness. Everything needs me in science, my doors are thronged, the book lies waiting, but those who call on me mentally in suffering are in belief killing me! Stopping my work that none but me can do in their supreme selfishness; how unlike the example I have left them! Tell this to Miss Brown, Mr. McLauthlen, Mrs. Atkinson, and Miss Norman^[1] but do not let them know they can call on me thus if they are doing this ignorantly and if they do it consciously tell McLauthlen and them all it would be no greater crime for them to come directly and thrust a dagger into my heart they are just as surely in belief killing me and committing murder.

The sin lies at their door and for them to meet its penalty sometime. You can teach them better, see you do this.

O! Harry,^[2] the book must stop. I can do no more now if ever. They lay on me suffering inconceivable.

Mary. 

If the students will continue to think of me and call on me, I shall at last defend myself and this will be to cut them off from me utterly in a spiritual sense by a bridge they cannot pass over and the effect of this on them they will then learn.

I will let you hear from me as soon as I can bear this on account of my health; and will return to prosecute my work on the Book as soon as I can safely. I am going far away and shall remain until you will do your part and give me some better prospect.

Ever truly,

Mary. 

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^[3] 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^[4] 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; or waves and an ark. The last will cost less I conclude and do as well. No rainbow can be made to look right except in colours and that cannot be conveniently arranged in gilt. Now for the printing—would 480 pages include the Key to Scriptures and the entire work as it now is? The book entitled Science and Health is to embrace the chapter on Physiology all the same as if this chapter was not compiled in a separate volume; perhaps you so understand it. If the cost is what you stated, I advise you to accept the terms for I am confident in the sale of two editions more there can be a net income over and above it all. If I get my health again I can make a large demand for the book for I shall lecture and this will sell one edition of a thousand copies (if I can stand it). I am better, some. One circumstance I will name. The night before I left, and before I wrote you those fragments, Miss Brown went into convulsions from a chemical, was not expected to live, but came out of it saying she felt perfectly well and as well as before the injury supposed to have been received. I thought at that time if she was not "born again" the Mother would die in her labours. O, how little my students can know what it all costs me. Now, I thank you for relieving me a little in the other case, please see her twice a week; in healing you are benefitting yourself, in teaching you are benefitting others. I would not advise you to change business at present the rolling stone gathers no moss; persevere in one line and you can do much more than to continually scatter your fire. Try to get students into the field as practitioners and thus healing will sell the book and introduce the science more than aught but my lecturing can do. Send the name of any you can get to study for the purpose of practising and in six months or thereabouts we will have them in the field helping you. If you have ears to hear you will understand. Send all letters to Boston. T. O. Gilbert will forward them to me at present.

Now for the writings you named. I will make an agreement with you to publish the book the three years from the time you took it and have twenty-five per cent royalty paid me; at the end of this period we will make other arrangements or agreements or continue those we have made just as the Spirit shall direct me. I feel this is the best thing for the present to decide upon. During these years we shall have a treasurer such as we shall agree upon and the funds deposited in his or her hands and drawn for specified purposes, at the end of these three years if we dissolve partnership the surplus amount shall be equally divided between us; and this is the best I can do. All the years I have expended on that book, the labour I am still performing, and all I have done for students and the cause gratuitously, entitle me to some income now that I am unable to work. But as it is I have none and instead am sued for $2,700^[5] for what? for just this, I have allowed my students to think I have no rights, and they can not wrong me!

May God open their eyes at length.

If you conclude not to carry the work forward on the terms named, it will have to go out of edition as I can do no more for it, and I believe this hour is to try my students who think they have the cause at heart and see if it be so. My husband is giving all his time and means to help me up from the depths in which these students plunge me and this is all he can do at present. Please write soon.

As ever,

Mary. 

Send me the two books that are corrected and just as soon as you can, and I with Gilbert will read them.^[6]

Please tell me if you are going to have the chapter on Physiology in a book by itself that I may get the preface ready as soon as I am able.

I do nothing else when I have a day I can work. Will send you the final corrections soon.

Think of me when you feel strong and well only, and think only of me as well

Ever yrs. in

Truth

Mary. 

It is an interesting fact that, however incoherent Mrs. Eddy became in other matters, she was never so in business. Through hysteria and frantic distress of mind, her shrewd business sense remained alert and keen. When, upon receipt of this letter, Mr. Spofford wrote her that he did not see how he could pay all the cost of printing, advertising, and putting the second edition upon the market, and still pay Mrs. Eddy her twenty-five cent. royalty upon each copy sold, she replied to him that her work upon the book would more than offset his invested capital:

"The conditions I have named to you," she wrote, "I think are just. I give three years and more to offset the capital you put into printing. . . . Now dear student you can work as your teacher has done before you, unselfishly, as you wish to and gain the reward of such labour; meantime you can be fitting yourself for a higher plane of action and its reward."

The above letters, with their refrain of dread, seem anomalous from one who had discovered the secret of health and happiness. Although she absolutely denied the influence of heredity, Mrs. Eddy told her students that she had a congenital susceptibility to assume the mental and physical ills of others. She felt that such a state was incompatible with a full realisation of the principles of Christian Science, and in the first edition of Science and Health she says of Christ:

He bore their sins in his own person; that is, he felt the suffering their error brought, and through this consciousness destroyed error. Had the Master utterly conquered the belief of Life in matter, he would not have felt their infirmities; he had not yet risen to this his final demonstration.^[7]

Mrs. Eddy believed that she herself in time overcame this weakness, and says in the edition of 1881:

In years past we suffered greatly for the sick when healing them, but even that is all over now, and we cannot suffer for them. But when we did suffer in belief, our joy was so great in removing others sufferings that we bore ours cheerfully and willingly. This self-sacrificing love has never left us, but grows stronger every year of our earth life.^[8]

Malicious mesmerism, an important addition to Mrs. Eddy's Science, was developed gradually, almost by chance. Even the most haphazard philosopher is likely at some time to have to account for the element of evil, but Mrs. Eddy came to do so purely through the exigencies of circumstances, and was quite unconscious that she was repeating history. She added to her philosophy from time to time, to meet this or that emergency, very much as a householder adds an ell or a wing to accommodate a growing family. Christian Science as it stands today is a kind of autobiography in cryptogram; its form was determined by a temperament, and it retains all the convolutions of the curiously duplex personality about which it grew.

When Richard Kennedy left Mrs. Eddy in 1872, she was confronted by a trying situation. It was inconceivable to her that, having broken away, he should not try to harm her, and she felt that his very popularity put her in the wrong. The means with which Mrs. Eddy met emergencies were often, indeed almost always, in themselves ill-adapted to her ends; but she had a truly feminine adroitness in making the wrong tool serve. When she thought it necessary to discredit Mr. Kennedy and to demonstrate that his success was illegitimate, she caught up the first weapon at hand, which happened to be mesmerism. Mesmerism loomed large in Mrs. Eddy's vision just then, for only a few months before Wallace W. Wright had published a number of articles in the Lynn Transcript, asserting that the Science taught by Mrs. Eddy was identical with mesmerism. She had been obliged to confess that there was an outward similarity. Here was the solution, ready made. When Kennedy left her, he left true Metaphysics behind. How, then, could he still succeed? By mesmerism, that dangerous counterfeit which so resembled the true coin. Mrs. Eddy thus explained her discovery:

Some newspaper articles falsifying the science, calling it mesmerism, etc., but especially intended, as the writer informed us, to injure its author, precipitated our examination of mesmerism in contradistinction to our metaphysical science of healing based on the science of Life. Filled with revenge and evil passions, the mal-practitioner can only depend on manipulation, and rubs the heads of patients years together, fairly incorporating their minds through this process, which claims less respect the more we understand it, and learn its cause. Through the control this gives the practitioner over patients, he readily reaches the mind of the community to injure another or promote himself, but none can track his foul course.^[9]

Without a doubt Mrs. Eddy had speculated somewhat upon the possibility of a malignant use of mind power before Kennedy's separation from her, but she never got very far with abstractions until she had a human peg to hang them on. Her indignation against Kennedy gave her reflections upon the subject of malignant mind power a vigorous impetus, and she fell to work to develop the converse of her original proposition with almost as much fervour and industry as she had bestowed upon the proposition itself. She thus explained her discovery of Kennedy's "malpractice":

Some years ago, the history of one of our^[10] young students, as known to us and many others, diverged into a dark channel of its own, whereby the unwise young man reversed our metaphysical method of healing, and subverted his mental power apparently for the purposes of tyranny peculiar to the individual. A stolid moral sense, great want of spiritual sentiment, restless ambition, and envy, embedded in the soil of this student's nature, metaphysics brought to the surface, and he refused to give them up, choosing darkness rather than light. His motives moved in one groove, the desire to subjugate; a despotic will choked his humanity. Carefully veiling his character, through unsurpassed secretiveness, he wore the mask of innocence and youth. But he was young only in years; a marvelous plotter, dark and designing, he was constantly surprising us, and we half shut our eyes to avoid the pain of discovery, while we struggled with the gigantic evil of his character, but failed to destroy it. . . . The second year of his practice, when we discovered he was malpractising, and told him so, he avowed his intention to do whatever he chose with his mental power, spurning a Christian life, and exulting in the absence of moral restraint. The sick clung to him when he was doing them no good, and he made friends and followers with surprising rapidity, but retained them only so long as his mesmeric influence was kept up and his true character unseen. The habit of his misapplication of mental power grew on him until it became a secret passion of his to produce a state of mind destructive to health, happiness, or morals. . . . His mental malpractice has made him a moral leper that would be shunned as the most prolific cause of sickness and sin did the sick understand the cause of their relapses and protracted treatment, the husband the loss of his wife, and the mother the death of her child, etc.^[11]

Mrs. Eddy had always been able to wring highly-coloured experiences from the most unpromising material, and she never accomplished a more astonishing feat than when she managed to see a melodramatic villain in Richard Kennedy. Her hatred of Kennedy was one of the strongest emotions she had ever felt, really a tragic passion in its way, and since the cheerful, energetic boy who had inspired it was in no way an adequate object, she fell to and made a Kennedy of her own. She fashioned this hypothetical Kennedy bit by bit, believing in him more and more as she put him together. She gave him one grisly attribute after another, and the more terrible she made her image, the more she believed in it and hated and feared it; and the more she hated and feared it, the more furiously she wrought upon it, until finally her creation, a definite shape of fear and hatred, stood by her day and night to harry and torment her.

Without Malicious Mesmerism as his cardinal attribute, the new and terrible Kennedy could never have been made. It was like the tragic mask which presented to an Athenian audience an aspect of horror such as no merely human face could wear. By a touch really worthy of an artist Mrs. Eddy made the 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.^[12]

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 since floated apart down the river of years." She charges this "mental assassin" with even darker crimes.

The husband of a lady who was the patient of this malpractitioner poured out his grief to us and said: "Dr. K—— has destroyed the happiness of my home, ruined my wife, etc."; and after that, he finished with a double crime by destroying the health of that wronged husband so that he died. We say that he did these things because we have as much evidence of it as ever we had of the existence of any sin. The symptoms and circumstances of the cases, and the diagnosis of their diseases, proved the unmistakable fact. His career of crime surpasses anything that minds in general can accept at this period. We advised him to marry a young lady whose affection he had won, but he refused; subsequently she was wedded to a nice young man, and then he alienated her affections from her husband.^[13]

The real Richard Kennedy must not be confounded with the smiling Elagabalus of Mrs. Eddy's imagination. While she was perfecting her creation, the flesh-and-blood Kennedy was establishing an enviable record for uprightness, kindliness, and purity of character. In 1876 he became prosperous enough to move his office to Boston. There he was, as he had been in Lynn, an active agent for good. He had made many friends and had built up a good practice, when, in 1881, in the third edition of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy broke forth into that tirade of invective which she called "Demonology"—the flower of nine years of torturing hatred. Kennedy's old friends in Lynn were stirred to mirth rather than indignation when a passage like the following was applied to a man whose amiability was locally proverbial:

The Nero of to-day, regaling himself through a mental method with the tortures of individuals, is repeating history, and will fall upon his own sword, and it shall pierce him through. Let him remember this when, in the dark recesses of thought, he is robbing, committing adultery, and 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.^[14]

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 was, like Kennedy, a man with a personal following, and his secession would mean that of his party. Though she never hated Spofford as bitterly as she hated Kennedy, he was the second of her seceding students who was deemed important enough to merit the charge of mesmerism—a charge which conferred a certain distinction, as only those who had stood in high places ever incurred it.

But in her book, published only two years before, Mrs. Eddy had clearly and repeatedly stated that the mesmerist could "depend only on manipulation," and could always be detected thereby. Now Mr. Spofford did not manipulate—he had been so soundly taught that he would sooner have put his hands into the fire. Accordingly, Mrs. Eddy got out a postscript to Science and Health. The second edition, which Mr. Spofford had laboured upon and helped to prepare, was hastily revised and converted into a running attack upon him, hurried to press, labeled Volume II., and sent panting after Science and Health, which was not labeled Volume I., and which had already been in the world three years. This odd little brown book, with the ark and troubled waves on the cover, is made up of a few chapters snatched from the 1875 edition, interlarded with vigorous rhetoric such as the following apostrophe to Spofford:

Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the sunshine of earth, that would sever friends, destroy virtue, put out Truth, and murder in secret the innocent befouling thy track with the trophies of thy guilt,—I say, Behold the "cloud, no bigger than a man's hand," already rising in the horizon of Truth, to pour down upon thy guilty head the hailstones of doom.

The purpose of this breathless little courier—a book of pages—in looks very unlike the sombre 480-page volume which had preceded it—was to announce that mesmerism could be practised without manipulation indeed, that the practice was more pernicious without a sign than with it. Mrs. Eddy thus explained her new light upon the subject:

Mesmerism is practised through manipulation and without it. And we have learned, by new observation, the fool who saith "There is no God" attempts more evil without a sign than with it. Since "Science and Health" first went to press, we have observed the crimes of another mesmeric outlaw, in a variety of ways, who does not as a common thing manipulate, in cases where he sullenly attempted to avenge himself of certain individuals, etc. But we had not before witnessed the malpractitioner's fable without manipulation, and supposed it was not done without it; but have learned it is the addenda to what we have described in a previous edition, but without manipulating the head.^[15]

Malicious Mesmerism, or Malicious Animal Magnetism, first conceived as a personal attribute of Richard Kennedy, was six years later stretched to accommodate Daniel Spofford. By 1881, when the third edition of Science and Health appeared, a personal animosity had fairly developed into a doctrine, and Mrs. Eddy was well on the way toward admitting a general principle of evil—a thing she certainly never meant to admit. She had decided that mesmerism was not merely a trick employed in practice, but a malignant attitude of mind, and that a person evilly disposed, by merely wishing his neighbour harm, could bring it to him—unless the object of his malice were wise in Metaphysics and could treat against this evil mind-power. Unless a man were thus protected by Christian Science, his enemy might, through Mesmerism or Mortal Mind, bring upon him any kind of misfortune; might ruin his business, cause a rash to break out upon his face, vex his body with grievous humours, cause his children to hate him and his wife to become unfaithful.

Having instanced a few cases of the evil workings of the hidden agency in our midst, our readers may feel an interest to learn somewhat of the indications of this mental malpractice of demonology. It has no outward signs, such as ordinarily indicate mesmerism, and its effects are far more subtle because of this. Its tendency is to sour the disposition, to occasion great fear of disease, dread, and discouragement, to cause a relapse of former diseases, to produce new ones, to create dislikes or indifference to friends, to produce sufferings in the head, in fine, every evil that demonology includes and that metaphysics destroys. If it be students of ours whom he attacks, the malpractitioner and aforesaid mesmerist tries to produce in their minds a hatred towards us, even as the assassin puts out the light before committing his deed. He knows this error would injure the student, impede his progress, and produce the results of error on health and morals, and he does it as much for that effect on him as to injure us.^[16]

The question is often asked, "How did Mrs. Eddy justify this evil power with her scheme of metaphysics? If God is all and all is God, where does Malicious Mesmerism come in?" The answer is evident; when the original Science of Man, as she had learned it from Quimby, and as she at first taught it, no longer met the needs of her own nature, Mrs. Eddy simply went ahead and added to her religion out of the exuberance of her feelings, leaving justification to the commentators—and she has rapped them soundly whenever they have attempted it.

No philosophy which endeavours to reduce the universe to one element, and to find the world a unit, can admit the existence of evil unless it admits it as a legitimate and necessary part of the whole. But the very keystone of Mrs. Eddy's Science is that evil is not only unnecessary but unreal. Admitting evil as a legitimate part of the whole would be to deny that the whole was good and was God. Admitting evil in opposition to good would be to deny that good and God were the whole. Whenever a train of reasoning seemed to be leading to the wrong place, Mrs. Eddy could always drop a stitch and begin a new pattern on the other side. Since neither the allness of God nor the Godhood of all could explain the injuries and persecutions which she felt were inflicted upon her, she fell back upon Mortal Mind.

"As used in Christian Science," she says, "animal magnetism is the specific term for Error, or Mortal Mind."

Mortal Mind is Mrs. Eddy's explanation of the seeming existence of evil in the world.^[17] Whatever seems to be harmful,—sin, sickness, earthquakes, convulsions of the elements,—are due to the influence of Mortal Mind. Now, Mortal Mind, she says, has no real existence except as a harmful tradition; she affirms that its very name is a fallacy, and she admits it merely for the sake of argument. Hence, though there is no such thing as evil, there is an accumulated belief in evil, a tradition which overshadows us, as Mrs. Eddy says, "like the deadly Upas tree." The belief in evil, then, is the only evil that exists. This belief is Mortal Mind, and Mortal Mind is Mesmerism.

Mrs. Eddy says:

The origin of evil is the problem of ages. It confronts each generation anew. It confronts Christian Science. The question is often asked, if God created only the good, whence comes the evil?

To this question Christian Science replies: Evil never did exist as an entity. It is but a belief that there is an opposite Intelligence to God. This belief is a species of idolatry, and is not more true or real than that an image graven on wood or stone is God.^[18]

But concerning the origin of the belief in evil, Mrs. Eddy is silent; and certainly with the belief we are immediately concerned, since that and that alone "brought death into the world, and all our woe." The cause of this knot or tangle in the human consciousness, however, remains unexplained down to the very last page of the very last edition of Science and Health.

The Rev. James Henry Wiggin, for some years Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser, said that "Mesmerism was her Devil," and it does seem that she has routed Satan from pillar to post only to be confronted by him at last. By designating evil as Mortal Mind, and declaring that it was non-existent, Mrs. Eddy evidently believed herself well rid of it; and she was bewildered to find that she was still afraid of it, and that it could do her harm. Unwittingly she was demonstrating Kant's proposition that "a dream which we all dream together, and which we all must dream, is not a dream, but a reality."

Mrs. Eddy's method of protecting herself against Malicious Mesmerism—the "adverse treatment" which later became such a prolific source of scandal in the Christian Science Church—was first practised by her students about 1875. By now mesmerism had become an indispensable household convenience. After she moved into her Broad Street house, Mrs. Eddy had a long succession of tenants and housekeepers, all of whom she at first found satisfactory, but against whom she soon had a grievance. She accused nearly all of them of stealing; of taking her coal, her blankets, her feather pillows, her silver spoons, and especially of taking her knives and forks, which kept magically disappearing like the food to which the clown sits down in the pantomime. It seemed as if the only way in which she could keep these knives and forks at all was actually to hold them in her hands. All this trouble she bitterly accredited to Kennedy. People came into her house well disposed toward her, she said; he set his mind to work upon their minds, and in a few days she could see the result. They avoided her, looked at her doubtfully, and her spoons and pillows began playing hide and seek again.

Mrs. Eddy talked of Kennedy continually, and often in her lectures she wandered away from her subject, forgot that her students were there to be instructed in the power of universal love, and would devote half the lesson hour to bitter invective against Kennedy and his treachery. This, of course, made an unfavourable impression upon new students, and Mrs. Eddy's advisers, Mr. Spofford, Mrs. Rice, and Miss Rawson, besought her to control her feeling and not to darken the doctrine of Divine love by the upbraidings of hatred. When thus advised she would tell her students how she had withdrawn herself from the world and laboured night and day through weary years, "standing alone with God," that she might give this great truth to men; and how Kennedy had perverted it and put it to evil uses. Not only did he rob her of her students and set the minds of men against her, she declared, but he pursued her mind "as a hound pursues its prey," causing her torment, sleeplessness, and unrest. She explained that even his cures were made at her expense; that when standing beside his patients and "rubbing their heads years together," he took up Mrs. Eddy in thought, united her mentally with the sick, and cured them by throwing the burden of their disease upon her. Thus weighed down by the ills of his patients, she could go no further. Unless some means were found of protecting her against Kennedy, she must sink under his persecution and her mission be unfulfilled. In this extremity she implored her students to save her by treating against Kennedy and his power.

Those of Mrs. Eddy's students who did not know Mr. Kennedy believed that their teacher was suffering acutely at his hands. She so wrought upon their sympathies that they actually consented to meet at her house and take part in this treatment, which they believed would injure the young man. One of the faithful students present in the circle would say to the others:

Now all of you unite yourselves in thought on Kennedy; that he cannot heal the sick, that he must leave off calling on Mrs. Glover mentally, that he shall be driven out of practice and leave the town, etc.

Mrs. Eddy was never present at these sessions, and her students soon discontinued them. One of the number, who used to meet with the others to treat against Kennedy, explains that he was unwilling to go on with it because he discovered that the more he wished evil to Kennedy, the more he felt the presence of evil within himself. He writes that "while thoughts born of love or its attributes are unlimited in their power to help both their author and their object, thoughts born of malice influence only those who originate them."

Although no open rupture occurred between Mrs. Eddy and Daniel Spofford until the summer of 1877, by the spring of 1877 Mrs. Eddy's feeling for him had begun to cool. It will be remembered that she had turned a number of her students over to Mr. Spofford for instruction in the Interpretation of the Scriptures. As a teacher, Mr. Spofford proved so popular that Mrs. Eddy repented the authority she had given him. His success in practice also made her restive,—doubtless one of the causes which led her to insist upon his turning his practice over to Asa Gilbert Eddy and devoting his time to pushing the sale of her book. It would be scarcely fair to draw the conclusion that Mrs. Eddy resented the success of her students in itself, but she certainly looked upon it with apprehension if the student showed any inclination to adopt methods of his own or to think for himself. Mrs. Eddy required of her students absolute and unquestioning conformity to her wishes; any other attitude of mind she regarded as dangerous. She often told Mr. Spofford that there was no such thing as devotion to the principle of revealed truth which did not include devotion to the revelator. "I am Wisdom, and this revelation is mine," she would declare when a student questioned her decision.

In July, 1877, Mr. Spofford closed out the stock of Science and Health, which he had received from George H. Barry and Elizabeth M. Newhall, the students who had furnished the money to publish the book. Mr. Spofford paid over the money which he had received for the books, something over six hundred dollars, to these two students, and although Mrs. Eddy had agreed to ask for no royalty upon the first edition, she was exceedingly indignant that the money had not been paid to her. She declared that Mr. Barry and Miss Newhall had advanced the money to further the cause, and that whatever was realised from the sale of the first edition should have gone toward getting out a second. Mr. Spofford told her that if Mr. Barry and Miss Newhall wished to put the money into a second edition, there was nothing to prevent their doing so, but that he had received from them a number of books which were their property, and he was in duty bound to turn over to them any money received for the same. Mr. Barry and Miss Newhall lost over fifteen hundred dollars on the edition, and Mr. Spofford paid out five hundred dollars of his own money for advertising and personal expenses, besides giving his time for several months. Mrs. Eddy made no effort to reimburse them.

The estrangement thus brought about between Mrs. Eddy and Mr. Spofford continued until, in January, 1878, Mr. Spofford was expelled from the Christian Scientists' Association and received the following notice:

Dr. D. H. Spofford of Newburyport has been expelled from the Association of Christian Scientists for immorality and as unworthy to be a member.

Lynn, Jan. 19th, 1878.

Secretary of the Christian Scientists' Association, Mrs. H. N. Kingsbury.

A notice also appeared in the Newburyport Herald, stating that Daniel H. Spofford had been expelled for alleged immorality from the Christian Scientists' Association of Lynn. Mr. Spofford brought no action against the Association, as he thought the charge would be considered absurd and could do him no harm.

"Immorality" was a favourite charge of Mrs. Eddy's; she insisted it meant that a student had been guilty of disloyalty to Christian Science. The very special and wholly unauthorised meanings which Mrs. Eddy had given to many common words in writing Science and Health doubtless confirmed her in the habit of empirical diction. An amusing instance of this occurred years afterward, when Mrs. Eddy quarrelled with a woman prominent in the Mother Church in Boston, and declared that she was an adulteress. When the frantic woman appealed to her to know what in Heaven's name she meant, Mrs. Eddy replied gravely, "You have adulterated the Truth; what are you, then, but an adulteress?"

The test of loyalty in a disciple was obedience. "Whosoever is not for me is against me," Mrs. Eddy declared in an angry interview with Mr. Spofford. If a student were "against" her, there could be but one cause for his hardening of heart—Richard Kennedy and Malicious Mesmerism. Mr. Spofford was amazed, therefore, in the spring of 1878, to find that a bill had been filed before the Supreme Judicial Court at Salem, charging him with practising witchcraft upon one of Mrs. Eddy's former students, Lucretia L. S. Brown of Ipswich.

Lucretia Brown was a spinster about fifty years of age, who lived with her mother and sister in one of the oldest houses in Ipswich, facing upon School-house Green. When she was a child, Miss Brown had a fall which injured her spine, and she was an invalid for the greater part of her life. Although not absolutely bedridden, she had often to keep to her bed for weeks together, and seldom walked further than the church. She conducted a crocheting agency, taking orders for city dealers, and giving out piece-work to women in the village who wished to earn a little pin-money. Miss Lucretia was noted for her system and her neatness. On certain days of the week she gave out this crochet work at exactly two o'clock in the afternoon, and whoever arrived a few minutes early had to await the stroke of the clock, as Miss Brown was not visible until then. The women who came for work gathered in the sitting-room, and one by one they were admitted to Miss Lucretia's sleeping chamber, where she received them in a bed incredibly white and smooth. They used to wonder how Miss Lucretia could lie under a coverlid absolutely wrinkleless, and how she could handle her worsted and give all her directions without rumpling the smoothness of the turned-back sheet, or marring the geometrical outline of her pillow. As the candidate retired from Miss Brown's presence, her bundle of yarn was sharply eyed by the other women who waited in the sitting-room, as there was a rumour that Miss Lucretia gave more work to her favourites than to others, and that they rolled their worsted up tightly to conceal the evidence of her partiality.

In the matter of good housewifery, the three Brown ladies were triumphant and invincible. They carried their daintiness even into their diet, regarding anything heavier than the most ethereal food as somewhat too virile and indelicate for their spinster household. The assertion was once made that Essex was the cleanest county in Massachusetts, and Ipswich was the cleanest town in Essex, and the Browns were the cleanest people in Ipswich. Even when Miss Lucretia was suffering from her worst attacks and was supposed to be helpless in bed, she was occasionally discovered late at night, slipping about the house and "tidying up" under cover of darkness.

Before Miss Lucretia knew Mrs. Eddy and Miss Rawson, she was a Congregationalist, but after she was healed by Christian Science she withdrew from her old church. Her cure was much talked about. After she was treated by Miss Rawson, she was able to be up and about the house all day and to walk a distance of two or three miles, whereas before she had made much ado to call upon a neighbour at the other end of the Green. After her healing she made some effort to practise upon other people, but Ipswich folk were slow to quit their family doctors in favour of the new method.

Miss Brown, however, remained a devout Scientist until her death in 1883, and up to that time occasionally took a case. The story goes that she got the cold she died of by airing the house too thoroughly after having treated one of her patients. Fifty years of frantic cleanliness were not to be overcome in an instant; and although Miss Lucretia well knew that disease was but a frame of mind, that contagion was a myth, and that dirt itself was only a "belief," the moment a patient was out of the house, up went the windows, and the draperies went out on the clothes-line.

In her last illness she called in her old family physician, but refused to let him prescribe for her, explaining that she merely wished him to diagnose her case so that her Christian Science healer would know what to treat her for. Her death was as orderly as her life. When she felt that her "belief" (pneumonia) was gaining on her, she called in her mother and sister, talked over her business, and put her affairs in order, telling them where they would find all her things. When she had given all her directions, she asked them if there were anything about which they wished to question her. When they replied in the negative, she said, "Good-bye, Mother. Good bye, Sister," and smoothing once again that never-wrinkled, turned-back sheet, she folded her hands and almost instantly died.

In 1878, when Miss Brown believed that Mr. Spofford had bewitched her, she was a patient of Miss Dorcas Rawson. Miss Rawson and her sister, Mrs. Rice, it will be remembered, were among Mrs. Eddy's first students in Lynn. They were daughters of a large family in Maine, and when they were very young girls came to Lynn to make their way in the shoe shops. Miranda soon married Mr. Rice and left the factory. After the two sisters had studied with Mrs. Eddy, Dorcas also left the factory and became a practising healer. She was as ardent in her new faith as she had been before in Methodism. While a Methodist she had been one of a number who "professed holiness," that is, who felt that in their daily walk they were so near to God that His presence protected them from even the temptation to sin. Miss Rawson was a thoroughly good and unselfish woman, and so earnest and forceful that perhaps in a later day she would have been called "strong-minded." However devoted in service, such a firm and independent nature would almost inevitably clash with Mrs. Eddy's at times, and Miss Rawson had more than one painful difference with her teacher. But it was hard for Miss Rawson to give up a friend, harder than to bear with Mrs. Eddy's unreasonableness. After these disagreements she always came back, telling her friends that she could not endure to be separated from Mrs. Eddy in spirit, and that, when she was, she felt her health failing and discouragement threatening to overwhelm her.

When, under her treatment, Miss Brown suffered a relapse, Miss Rawson, in her perplexity, went to Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Eddy had the solution at her tongue's end. Daniel Spofford, in his general opposition to truth, was exercising upon Miss Brown his mesmeric arts. Miss Rawson was at first loath to believe this. Mr. Spofford was an old and trusted friend; even had he been subsidised by Richard Kennedy, why should Mortal Mind, as exercised by Mr. Spofford, prevail over Divine Mind as employed by Miss Rawson? But Mrs. Eddy convinced her, with her will or against it, and also convinced poor Miss Brown.

Mr. Spofford's acquaintance with Miss Brown had been slight. When she was studying with Mrs. Eddy, she, with other students, had entered his class in the Interpretation of the Scriptures. When Miss Brown's health began to fail, he had not seen her for some months and was ignorant alike of her illness and the supposed cause of it. After Miss Lucretia had begun to regard him as the author of her ills, Mr. Spofford was in Ipswich one day and bethought him of calling upon his old student. Accordingly he went down to the Green and knocked at her cottage. Miss Brown herself came to the door and immediately fell into great agitation. Ordinarily a pale woman, her cheeks and forehead flushed so hotly that Mr. Spofford innocently thought that she must be making preserves and had just come from the stove. She stood for a moment, very ill at ease, and, without asking him to come in, begged him to excuse her and ran back into the house. When she reappeared, she seemed even more distracted than before, and Mr. Spofford now felt sure that he had intruded upon some critical moment in preserve-making, and told her that he would call again when he next happened to be in Ipswich. He went away, leaving Miss Brown to wonder whether he had merely come to see how his victim did, or whether he had come to do her further harm.

By this time Mrs. Eddy had Mr. Spofford upon her mind almost as constantly as she had Richard Kennedy. In April, a month before the charge of witchcraft was made against him, Mrs. Eddy filed a bill in equity against Mr. Spofford to recover tuition and a royalty on his practice. This suit was still pending when the witchcraft case came up, and was dismissed June 3d because of defects in the writ and insufficient service. The Newburyport Herald of May 16th, in commenting editorially upon the witchcraft case, said: "Mrs. Eddy tried, some time since, to induce us to publish an attack upon Spofford, which we declined to do, and we understand that similar requests were made to other papers in the county."

In preparing to prosecute the witchcraft case, Mrs. Eddy first selected twelve students from the Christian Scientists' Association—she has always been partial to the apostolic number—and called on these students to meet her at her house and treat Mr. Spofford adversely, as other students had formerly treated Richard Kennedy. She required each of these twelve students, one after another, to take Mr. Spofford up mentally for two hours, declaring in thought that he had no power to heal, must give up his practice, etc. Mr. Henry F. Dunnels of Ipswich was one of the chosen twelve. He says in his affidavit: "When the Spofford lawsuit came along, she took twelve of us from the Association and made us take two hours apiece, one after the other. She made a statement that this man Spofford was adverse to her and that he used his mesmeric or hypnotic power over her students and her students' patients, and hindered the students from performing healing on their patients, and we were held together to keep our minds over this Spofford to prevent him from exercising this mesmeric power over her students and patients. This twenty-four hours' work was done in her house."

Having thus prepared her case through the agency of Divine Mind, Mrs. Eddy next set about making the most of human devices. She went to her lawyer in Lynn and had him draw up a bill of complaint in Miss Brown's name, setting forth the injuries which Miss Brown had received from Mr. Spofford's mesmeric malice, and petitioning the court to restrain him from exercising his power and using his arts upon her. The text of the bill is in part:

Humbly complaining, the Plaintiff, Lucretia L. S. Brown of Ipswich in said County of Essex, showeth unto your Honours, that Daniel H. Spofford, of Newburyport, in said County of Essex, the defendant in the above entitled action, is a mesmerist and practises the art of mesmerism and by his said art and the power of his mind influences and controls the minds and bodies of other persons and uses his said power and art for the purpose of injuring the persons and property and social relations of others and does by said means so injure them.

And the plaintiff further showeth that the said Daniel H. Spofford has at divers times and places since the year eighteen hundred and seventy-five, wrongfully and maliciously and with intent to injure the plaintiff, caused the plaintiff by means of his said power and art great suffering of body and mind and severe spinal pains and neuralgia and a temporary suspension of mind, and still continues to cause the plaintiff the same. And the plaintiff has reason to fear and does fear that he will continue in the future to cause the same. And the plaintiff says that said injuries are great and of an irreparable nature and that she is wholly unable to escape from the control and influence he so exercises upon her and from the aforesaid effects of said control and influence.

As Mrs. Eddy's attorney flatly refused to argue the case in court, she arranged that one of her students, Edward J. Arens, should do so. At the opening of the Supreme Judicial Court in Salem May 14, 1878, Mrs. Eddy and Mr. Arens appeared under power of attorney for Miss Brown, attended by some twenty witnesses, "a cloud of witnesses," as the Boston Globe put it in an account of the hearing. When they were assembled at the railway station in Lynn to take the train for Salem, one of the witnesses went to Mrs. Eddy and protested that he knew nothing whatever about the case and would not know what to say were he called upon to testify. "You will be told what to say," replied Mrs. Eddy reassuringly.

Having arrived at the Salem Court House, Mrs. Eddy and her loyal band awaited in the jury-room the entrance of the chief justice. As soon as Judge Horace Gray had taken his seat, Mr. Arens arose and presented his petition for a hearing on the bill of complaint. He then made an exposition of the case to the Judge, who ordered that an order of notice be served upon Mr. Spofford, and appointed Friday, May 17th, for a hearing of the case. Mr. Arens at once took the train for Newburyport to search for Mr. Spofford, as Mrs. Eddy feared that he might escape into another State.

Meanwhile the Massachusetts press was making the most of the novel legal proceedings at Salem. A reporter from the Boston Globe called at Miss Brown's house in Ipswich, but was told that she was away from home. Of this call the Globe published the following account:

In an interview with a sister of Miss Brown, the latter being out of town, the lady informed the Globe reporter that she and her family believed that there was no limit to the awful power of mesmerism, but she still had some faith in the power of the law, and thought that Dr. Spofford might be awed into abstaining from injuring her sister further. That he does so she believes there is no possibility of a doubt. In answer to a query put by the reporter, she admitted that should Dr. Spofford prove so disposed, even though he be incarcerated behind the stone walls at Charlestown, he could still use his mesmeric power against her sister.

On Friday morning the crowd which had assembled at the Salem Court House was disappointed. Mr. Spofford himself did not appear, but his attorney, Mr. Noyes, appeared for him and filed a demurrer, which Judge Gray sustained, declaring with a smile that it was not within the power of the Court to control Mr. Spofford's mind. The case was appealed, and the appeal waived the following November.

So, after a lapse of nearly two centuries, another charge of witchcraft was made before the court in Salem village. But it was an anachronism merely, and elicited such ridicule that it was hard to realise that, because of charges quite as fanciful, one hundred and twenty-six persons were once lodged in Salem jail, nineteen persons were hanged, and an entire community was plunged into anguish and terror.

During the long years that the grass had been growing and withering above the graves of Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse and their wretched companions, one of the most important of all possible changes had taken place in the world—a change in the mode of thinking. The work of Descartes, Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton had become a common inheritance; the relation of physical effect with physical cause had become established even in ignorant and unthinking minds, and a schoolboy of 1878 would have rejected as absurd the evidence upon which Judge Hawthorne condemned a woman like Mary Easty to death.

Mrs. Eddy's attempt to revive the witch horror was only a courtroom burlesque upon the grimmest tragedy in New England history. It is interesting only in that it demonstrates how surely the same effects follow the same causes. When Mrs. Eddy had succeeded in overcoming in her students' minds the tradition of sound reasoning of which they and their century were the fortunate heirs, when she had convinced them that there were no physical causes for physical ills, she had unwittingly plunged them back into the torturing superstitions which it had taken the world so long to overcome. The capacity for estimating evidence in cases of physical causation, which John Fiske calls "one of the world's latest and most laborious acquisitions," once denied, the Christian Scientists had parted with that rational attitude of mind which is the basis of the health and sanity of modern life; which has abolished religious persecution as well as controlled contagious disease, and has made a revival of the witchcraft terror as impossible as a recurrence of the Black Death. This rational habit of mind once broken down, two good women like Lucretia Brown and Dorcas Rawson could suspect a good man of the malice of a fiend. Among this little group of people who had been friends and fellow-seekers after God, there broke out, in a milder form, that same scourge of fear and distrust which demoralised Salem from 1692 to 1694. In the attempt to bring the glad tidings of emancipation from the operation of physical law, which is sometimes cruel, Mrs. Eddy had come back to the cruelest of all debasing superstitions—that of attributing disease and misfortune to a malevolent human agency.

1. Four of Mrs. Eddy's students. Miss Brown was an invalid of Ipswich. Miss Norman was also of Ipswich, and a friend of Miss Brown. Mrs. Atkinson was the wife of Mayor Atkinson of Newburyport. Mr. George T. McLauthlen was a manufacturer of machinery in Boston.
2. Mr. Spofford's Christian name is Daniel Harrison. Mrs. Eddy always called him "Harry."
3. Key to the Scriptures.
4. The student from Ipswich referred to in the preceding letter.
5. Reference to George W. Barry's suit for payment for services rendered. See Chapter X.
6. Mr. Spofford had agreed to mark the typographical and other errors in two copies of the first edition of Science and Health.
7. Science and Health (1875), p. 130.
8. Science and Health (1881), chapter vi. p. 38.
9. Science and Health (1875), p. 375.
10. Throughout this chapter on Demonology Mrs. Eddy uses the editorial "we" in referring to herself. Mr. Eddy is designated as "our husband."
11. Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 2.
12. Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 34.
13. Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 6.
14. Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 38.
15. Science and Health (1878), p. 136.
16. Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 35.
17. Mortal mind includes all evil, disease, and death; also, all beliefs relative to the so-called material laws, and all material objects, and the law of sin and death.

    The Scripture says, "The carnal mind (in other words mortal mind) is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." Mortal mind is an illusion; as much in our waking moments as in the dreams of sleep. The belief that Intelligence, Truth, and Love, are in matter and separate from God, is an error; for there is no intelligent evil, and no power besides God, Good. God would not be omnipotent if there were in reality another mind creating or governing man or the universe. Miscellaneous Writings, p. 36, Sixty-sixth Edition (1883-1896).

18. Miscellaneous Writings (1896) p. 346.