Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/269

Rh rash to break out upon his face, vex his body with grievous humours, cause his children to hate him and his wife to become unfaithful.

Having instanced a few cases of the evil workings of the hidden agency in our midst, our readers may feel an interest to learn somewhat of the indications of this mental malpractice of demonology. It has no outward signs, such as ordinarily indicate mesmerism, and its effects are far more subtle because of this. Its tendency is to sour the disposition, to occasion great fear of disease, dread, and discouragement, to cause a relapse of former diseases, to produce new ones, to create dislikes or indifference to friends, to produce sufferings in the head, in fine, every evil that demonology includes and that metaphysics destroys. If it be students of ours whom he attacks, the malpractitioner and aforesaid mesmerist tries to produce in their minds a hatred towards us, even as the assassin puts out the light before committing his deed. He knows this error would injure the student, impede his progress, and produce the results of error on health and morals, and he does it as much for that effect on him as to injure us.

The question is often asked, "How did Mrs. Eddy justify this evil power with her scheme of metaphysics? If God is all and all is God, where does Malicious Mesmerism come in?" The answer is evident; when the original Science of Man, as she had learned it from Quimby, and as she at first taught it, no longer met the needs of her own nature, Mrs. Eddy simply went ahead and added to her religion out of the exuberance of her feelings, leaving justification to the commentators—and she has rapped them soundly whenever they have attempted it.

No philosophy which endeavours to reduce the universe to one element, and to find the world a unit, can admit the existence of evil unless it admits it as a legitimate and necessary part of the whole. But the very keystone of Mrs. Eddy's Science