Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/285

Rh in the mode of thinking. The work of Descartes, Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton had become a common inheritance; the relation of physical effect with physical cause had become established even in ignorant and unthinking minds, and a schoolboy of 1878 would have rejected as absurd the evidence upon which Judge Hawthorne condemned a woman like Mary Easty to death.

Mrs. Eddy's attempt to revive the witch horror was only a courtroom burlesque upon the grimmest tragedy in New England history. It is interesting only in that it demonstrates how surely the same effects follow the same causes. When Mrs. Eddy had succeeded in overcoming in her students' minds the tradition of sound reasoning of which they and their century were the fortunate heirs, when she had convinced them that there were no physical causes for physical ills, she had unwittingly plunged them back into the torturing superstitions which it had taken the world so long to overcome. The capacity for estimating evidence in cases of physical causation, which John Fiske calls "one of the world's latest and most laborious acquisitions," once denied, the Christian Scientists had parted with that rational attitude of mind which is the basis of the health and sanity of modern life; which has abolished religious persecution as well as controlled contagious disease, and has made a revival of the witchcraft terror as impossible as a recurrence of the Black Death. This rational habit of mind once broken down, two good women like Lucretia Brown and Dorcas Rawson could suspect a good man of the malice of a fiend. Among this little group of people who had been friends and fellow-seekers after God, there broke out, in a milder form, that same scourge