Page:Faithhealingchri00buckiala.djvu/290

276 homeopathy. She says that she has attenuated common table salt until there was not a single saline property left; and yet with one drop of that in a goblet of water, and a teaspoonful administered every three hours, she has cured a patient sinking in the last stage of typhoid fever. Describing a case of dropsy given up by the faculty, she says that after giving some medicines of high attenuation, she gave the patient unmedicated pellets for a while, and found that she continued to improve. Finally she induced the patient to give up her medicine for one day, and risk the effects. After trying this, she informed Mrs. Eddy that she could get along two days without the globules; but on the third day had to take them. She went on in this way, taking unmedicated pellets, with occasional visits from Mrs. Eddy, and employing no other means was cured. Thus Mrs. Eddy says she discovered that mind was potent over matter and that drugs have no power.

It is not to be inferred from the above that homeopathic remedies, which have been modified by the discoveries made and the experience attained since the time of Hahnemann, are generally powerless. That question is not essential to this inquiry. But the confession of Mrs. Eddy that her experiments were the means of teaching her that mind and not matter effects the cure, will be regarded by all who do not accept her theories as containing the principal key to the problem. She made the common error of generalizing from a few particulars, and ever since has endeavored to test facts by theory instead of making facts the test. Because she found a supposed mental cause adequate to a cure in a few cases, she leaped to the wild conclusion that all causes are mental. Notwithstanding these numerous absurdities and the radical error, it would be unwise to lose sight of the