Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/262

220 with revenge and evil passions, the mal-practitioner can only depend on manipulation, and rubs the heads of patients years together, fairly incorporating their minds through this process, which claims less respect the more we understand it, and learn its cause. Through the control this gives the practitioner over patients, he readily reaches the mind of the community to injure another or promote himself, but none can track his foul course.

Without a doubt Mrs. Eddy had speculated somewhat upon the possibility of a malignant use of mind power before Kennedy's separation from her, but she never got very far with abstractions until she had a human peg to hang them on. Her indignation against Kennedy gave her reflections upon the subject of malignant mind power a vigorous impetus, and she fell to work to develop the converse of her original proposition with almost as much fervour and industry as she had bestowed upon the proposition itself. She thus explained her discovery of Kennedy's "malpractice":

Some years ago, the history of one of our young students, as known to us and many others, diverged into a dark channel of its own, whereby the unwise young man reversed our metaphysical method of healing, and subverted his mental power apparently for the purposes of tyranny peculiar to the individual. A stolid moral sense, great want of spiritual sentiment, restless ambition, and envy, embedded in the soil of this student's nature, metaphysics brought to the surface, and he refused to give them up, choosing darkness rather than light. His motives moved in one groove, the desire to subjugate; a despotic will choked his humanity. Carefully veiling his character, through unsurpassed secretiveness, he wore the mask of innocence and youth. But he was young only in years; a marvelous plotter, dark and designing, he was constantly surprising us, and we half shut our eyes to avoid the pain of discovery, while we struggled with the gigantic evil of his character, but failed to destroy it. . . . The second year of his practice, when we discovered he was malpractising, and told him so, he avowed his intention to do whatever he chose with his mental power, spurning a Christian life, and exulting in the absence of moral