Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/171

Rh also occurred in relatively the same period. Whatever appeals to the senses gains an audience with humanity more quickly than the gentler, more insistent appeal to the intelligence. Yet the former palls and dies, and the latter nourishes and lives. Hate, war, and death astound us and fill us with consternation; thought, love, and life come unawares like dawn and grow tenderly, gently into meaning, blessedness, and power. Gunpowder created a special hell, movable types the blessedness of literature. Ether anesthesia brought in its train an elaborated surgery; Mind-Science has begun to abolish the necessity of surgery, healing of itself the lame, the blind, the deaf; teaching mothers to bear children without pain, children to grow normally without malformation, men and women to abandon evil habits which bring consumption, scrofula, leprosy; nations to abandon wars which slaughter and cripple and leave a heritage of poverty and disease, — slowly but surely it works its way like civilization transforming savagery and the jungle. It is as fundamentally incontrovertible as the axiom that truth is eternal, or that error dies of its own nature.

This great discovery depended largely on the fall of Mary Baker in Lynn, causing her to grapple with the violence of magnetism, rousing her from a mesmeric lethargy, and bringing to her developed spiritual nature the understanding of the principle of life. There was an interval before she could demonstrate what dawned upon her in that hour. When the apple fell for Newton and the kettle