Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/338

294 student of Mrs. Eddy. She came to her in trouble and sickness. She was healed, taught, and provided with employment congenial to her mind. But after the most extravagant happiness in her new-found field of usefulness, she became the victim of a flattering woman from Detroit who came to study at the college. This woman was Mary H. Plunkett, known later in New York as an advocate of marriage by selection of soul affinity without regard to marriage and divorce laws. Mrs. Plunkett departed for New Zealand with her affinity, leaving her husband behind and was later reported to have wearied of her companion or to have been deserted by him and to have entered a religious order.

This woman succeeded by flattery and cajolement in turning the head of Emma Hopkins. She told her she would make her the greatest woman on the planet and succeeded in making the Andover professor’s wife believe herself a feminine genius whose name would go down the ages as another Hypatia. It was strange that a student could sit for two or three hours in a class-room under the spiritual teaching which led all into a rapt sense of the higher life; and then make her way to the office of a recognized aide de camp and there plot desertion and heresy.

However, it was so. Mrs. Hopkins left with Mrs. Plunkett for the West and began teaching a system of so-called metaphysics under her management in Detroit, Chicago, and other Western cities. Her teaching was a perversion of the doctrine she had learned from the founder of Christian Science, though the perversion was at first so subtle that it