Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/311

Rh crosses. Kennedy was still regarded as the Lucifer of mesmerism and the source of the corrupting influence. In the course of time he had fellows, but never a rival. It was when Mrs. Eddy would become agitated in talking of these three men that her students first noticed that violent trembling of the head, which was the beginning of the palsy which afterward afflicted Mrs. Eddy. Mesmerism became the dominating conception of her life, and it is difficult to find a parallel for such a constant and terrifying sense of evil unless one turns to Bunyan in the days before his conversion, or to Martin Luther in the monastery of Wittenberg, when he lived under such a continual oppression of sin that the gates of hell seemed always open just under the flagstones as he paced the cloisters. Her illnesses, like Luther's earache, were purely the result of a consciously malicious agency; but, unlike Luther's, Mrs. Eddy's depression never came from a feeling of unworthiness or a sense of sin.

After she left Richard Kennedy, Mrs. Eddy seems for some years to have given little thought to the project which she used to discuss with him of founding a new church. It is quite possible that even then by "church" she meant a new faith rather than an organised sect. In the first edition of Science and Health she expressed her opinion that church organisation was a hindrance rather than a help to the highest spiritual development.

We have no need of creeds and church organisation to sustain or explain a demonstrable platform, that defines itself in healing the sick, and casting