Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/368

318 at ease than in her more strictly sacerdotal one, and in her contributions to her paper she sounds all the stops of her instrument. As she says, she "commands and countermands" and "thunders to the sinner," but for happier occasions she has a lighter tone, and she is by turns peppery and playful. A student in Chicago offends, and Mrs. Eddy calls her a "suckling" and a "petty western editress." Her students send her a watch at Christmastide, and she thanks, them for their "timely" gift. They give her a fish-pond, and she asks them to pond-er.

During the early years Mrs. Eddy opened each number of the Journal with a crashing editorial, and, in addition to this, she conducted, under her own name, a "Questions and Answers" column, in which she met and settled queries like the following:

Has Mrs. Eddy lost her power to heal?

Has the sun forgotten to shine and the planets to revolve around it? Who was it discovered, demonstrated and teaches Christian Science? etc.

Mrs. Eddy did not hesitate to answer personal criticism and to reply to gossip in the columns of her paper. On one occasion she replies to the old story, which was forever cropping up in Lynn, that she was addicted to the use of morphine. She says that when a mesmerist was attempting to poison her, she did take large doses of morphine to see whether she were still susceptible to poison. "Years ago, when the mental malpractice of poison was undertaken by a mesmerist, to thwart that design, I experimented by taking some large doses of morphine to watch the effect, and I say it with tearful thanks, the drug had no effect upon me whatever,—the hour had struck, 'if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.' "