Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/244

204 she beheld Kennedy remove himself from her tutelage. He was blind, deaf, and immovable. He was incapable of perceiving what she would have pointed out to him, and revealed himself as never having comprehended the nature of Mind Science and to be actually working with the processes of mesmerism and the hypnotic action of mental suggestion.

That Kennedy actually could not or would not understand that a line of cleavage separated Mind Science from mesmerism Mary Baker now realized. She realized it with sorrow, because of himself and because he had practised in her name. She had taught him principle, but had permitted him to make use of the method of laying his hands upon his patients. So she had permitted Hiram Crafts, Mrs. Wentworth, and Miss Bagley. The results now shown were personal, magnetic, confusing. In Kennedy’s case, it now appeared, he had surrounded himself with a bevy of patients who were not seeking truth but Kennedy. Through such methods and practises the pure doctrine of divine healing was liable to become a byword.

Some years later a suit was brought in her name, though without her consent, against Tuttle and Stanley for the object of collecting unpaid tuition. At the trial all three of these students, Tuttle, Stanley, and Kennedy, exhibited unreservedly their utter lack of comprehension of the first postulate of Mind Science. But Kennedy in particular, out of his own mouth, proved himself incapable of grasping it. In his testimony, which was preserved in the notes of the presiding judge, he said: