Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/276

234 thought the charge would be considered absurd and could do him no harm.

"Immorality" was a favourite charge of Mrs. Eddy's; she insisted it meant that a student had been guilty of disloyalty to Christian Science. The very special and wholly unauthorised meanings which Mrs. Eddy had given to many common words in writing Science and Health doubtless confirmed her in the habit of empirical diction. An amusing instance of this occurred years afterward, when Mrs. Eddy quarrelled with a woman prominent in the Mother Church in Boston, and declared that she was an adulteress. When the frantic woman appealed to her to know what in Heaven's name she meant, Mrs. Eddy replied gravely, "You have adulterated the Truth; what are you, then, but an adulteress?"

The test of loyalty in a disciple was obedience. "Whosoever is not for me is against me," Mrs. Eddy declared in an angry interview with Mr. Spofford. If a student were "against" her, there could be but one cause for his hardening of heart—Richard Kennedy and Malicious Mesmerism. Mr. Spofford was amazed, therefore, in the spring of 1878, to find that a bill had been filed before the Supreme Judicial Court at Salem, charging him with practising witchcraft upon one of Mrs. Eddy's former students, Lucretia L. S. Brown of Ipswich.

Lucretia Brown was a spinster about fifty years of age, who lived with her mother and sister in one of the oldest houses in Ipswich, facing upon School-house Green. When she was a child, Miss Brown had a fall which injured her spine, and she was an invalid for the greater part of her life. Although not absolutely bedridden, she had often to keep to her bed for