Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/267

Rh was, like Kennedy, a man with a personal following, and his secession would mean that of his party. Though she never hated Spofford as bitterly as she hated Kennedy, he was the second of her seceding students who was deemed important enough to merit the charge of mesmerism—a charge which conferred a certain distinction, as only those who had stood in high places ever incurred it.

But in her book, published only two years before, Mrs. Eddy had clearly and repeatedly stated that the mesmerist could "depend only on manipulation," and could always be detected thereby. Now Mr. Spofford did not manipulate—he had been so soundly taught that he would sooner have put his hands into the fire. Accordingly, Mrs. Eddy got out a postscript to Science and Health. The second edition, which Mr. Spofford had laboured upon and helped to prepare, was hastily revised and converted into a running attack upon him, hurried to press, labeled Volume II., and sent panting after Science and Health, which was not labeled Volume I., and which had already been in the world three years. This odd little brown book, with the ark and troubled waves on the cover, is made up of a few chapters snatched from the 1875 edition, interlarded with vigorous rhetoric such as the following apostrophe to Spofford:

Behold! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the sunshine of earth, that would sever friends, destroy virtue, put out Truth, and murder in secret the innocent befouling thy track with the trophies of thy guilt,—I say, Behold the "cloud, no bigger than a man's hand," already rising in the horizon of Truth, to pour down upon thy guilty head the hailstones of doom.

The purpose of this breathless little courier—a book of