Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/261

Rh philosophy from time to time, to meet this or that emergency, very much as a householder adds an ell or a wing to accommodate a growing family. Christian Science as it stands today is a kind of autobiography in cryptogram; its form was determined by a temperament, and it retains all the convolutions of the curiously duplex personality about which it grew.

When Richard Kennedy left Mrs. Eddy in 1872, she was confronted by a trying situation. It was inconceivable to her that, having broken away, he should not try to harm her, and she felt that his very popularity put her in the wrong. The means with which Mrs. Eddy met emergencies were often, indeed almost always, in themselves ill-adapted to her ends; but she had a truly feminine adroitness in making the wrong tool serve. When she thought it necessary to discredit Mr. Kennedy and to demonstrate that his success was illegitimate, she caught up the first weapon at hand, which happened to be mesmerism. Mesmerism loomed large in Mrs. Eddy's vision just then, for only a few months before Wallace W. Wright had published a number of articles in the Lynn Transcript, asserting that the Science taught by Mrs. Eddy was identical with mesmerism. She had been obliged to confess that there was an outward similarity. Here was the solution, ready made. When Kennedy left her, he left true Metaphysics behind. How, then, could he still succeed? By mesmerism, that dangerous counterfeit which so resembled the true coin. Mrs. Eddy thus explained her discovery:

Some newspaper articles falsifying the science, calling it mesmerism, etc., but especially intended, as the writer informed us, to injure its author, precipitated our examination of mesmerism in contradistinction to our metaphysical science of healing based on the science of Life. Filled