Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/364

314 of the result. Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science began to be talked of far away in the mountains and in the prairie villages. Lonely and discouraged people brooded over these editorials which promised happiness to sorrow and success to failure. The desperately ill had no quarrel with the artificial rhetoric of these testimonials in which people declared that they had been snatched from the brink of the grave.

Soon after the Journal was started, Mrs. Emma Hopkins, an intelligent and sincere young woman, came to Boston to assume the assistant editorship of the magazine. Mrs. Hopkins had first met Mrs. Eddy at the house of one of her friends, where Mrs. Eddy had been engaged to give a parlour lecture on Christian Science. Mrs. Hopkins became deeply interested in this new doctrine, and, although after her first meeting with Mrs. Eddy she carried away an unfavourable impression, she soon fell completely under the spell of that remarkable personality; thought her handsome, stimulating, inspiring, and very different from any woman she had ever known. She entered one of Mrs. Eddy's classes and went through the same experience that sensitive students of an earlier date describe; during the lectures she felt uplifted and carried beyond herself; and in describing the effect of Mrs. Eddy's words upon her hearers, Mrs. Hopkins uses the same figure that we have heard before in Lynn—that of the wind stirring the wheat-field. When Mrs. Hopkins became assistant editor of the Journal, she went to live in Mrs. Eddy's house in Columbus Avenue, where the editorial work was done. She remained there for two years, until, worn out by Mrs. Eddy's tyranny and selfishness, and saddened by her own disillusionment, Mrs. Hopkins