Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/164

126 met the first real obstacle to her faith in the weird doctrine of Phineas Quimby. How she strove to harmonize his strange theories with her faith, how she labored to evolve a philosophy from his incoherencies has been related. She had come to a crisis when her faith would no longer endure the association with ideas so incongruous. Her angel fought with the intruder which, veiled in obscurities, could not be named or recognized. The battle was terrific and it was prolonged. It had begun in 1862 and was still going on when the year 1866 dawned. The woman who was to promulgate a new understanding of Christianity, which would shake the world’s thought to its center, was undergoing the anguish, alarm, and terror of a cataclysmic upheaval which she concealed from all the world and bore alone.

She has written of this period that the product of her own earlier thought and meditation had been vitiated with animal magnetism and human willpower, the nature of which she was as ignorant of as Eve of sin before taught by the serpent. What serpent was to teach Mary Baker the nature of magnetism? That lesson was still far off. The unveiling of the angel’s face, the shining visage of Truth in her heart, was to precede the unveiled vision of error by years sufficient for her to grow to the fighting stature in the consciousness of its power.

But now she was all but dominated by the power of the darker error she has named mesmerism or magnetism, and her mental state was worse than the disease which had formerly tortured her body.