Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/246

206 several months. The schoolmistress, Miss Susie Magoun, had married and gone to live elsewhere. A new tenant was in the house. Mr. Kennedy’s social life in Lynn had prospered through Miss Magoun’s introductions. His youth, charm, and affable address had made him happy in the acquisition of some influential acquaintances. And when the day came on which Mrs. Glover and he mutually destroyed their contract he went his way quite content. Looked at from a purely worldly standpoint he had been honorable and had not wronged his teacher.

But Richard Kennedy, as a student, had absorbed a great deal of her time, and as a practitioner he had absorbed a great deal more. This was relatively unimportant; the vital injustice was that he had misrepresented her Science to a large number of patients and was to misrepresent her for many years. Perhaps he had done this unconsciously, even as he was the unconscious agent in the precipitation of her struggle with the counterfeit of her Science. Animal magnetism had to be apprehended, defined, and stamped as the “human concept.” Doubtless it was as well that the struggle should be precipitated through him as another.

The conflict of opinion between these two resulted in fixing the purpose of Mary Baker to write a textbook. She had thus far taught Mind Science by lectures and by writing out manuscripts for students. She distributed such manuscripts unsparingly. These were copies of “The Science of Man,” which had been copyrighted, and also disquisitions on the