Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/263

Rh restraint. The sick clung to him when he was doing them no good, and he made friends and followers with surprising rapidity, but retained them only so long as his mesmeric influence was kept up and his true character unseen. The habit of his misapplication of mental power grew on him until it became a secret passion of his to produce a state of mind destructive to health, happiness, or morals. . . . His mental malpractice has made him a moral leper that would be shunned as the most prolific cause of sickness and sin did the sick understand the cause of their relapses and protracted treatment, the husband the loss of his wife, and the mother the death of her child, etc.

Mrs. Eddy had always been able to wring highly-coloured experiences from the most unpromising material, and she never accomplished a more astonishing feat than when she managed to see a melodramatic villain in Richard Kennedy. Her hatred of Kennedy was one of the strongest emotions she had ever felt, really a tragic passion in its way, and since the cheerful, energetic boy who had inspired it was in no way an adequate object, she fell to and made a Kennedy of her own. She fashioned this hypothetical Kennedy bit by bit, believing in him more and more as she put him together. She gave him one grisly attribute after another, and the more terrible she made her image, the more she believed in it and hated and feared it; and the more she hated and feared it, the more furiously she wrought upon it, until finally her creation, a definite shape of fear and hatred, stood by her day and night to harry and torment her.

Without Malicious Mesmerism as his cardinal attribute, the new and terrible Kennedy could never have been made. It was like the tragic mask which presented to an Athenian audience an aspect of horror such as no merely human face could wear. By a touch really worthy of an artist Mrs. Eddy made the