Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/419

Rh the people something they wanted, and that it was presented to them in a direct and effective way. "Demonstrate, demonstrate," was Mrs. Eddy's watchword. "Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons." Thus read the seal of Mrs. Eddy's college, and such were the instructions she gave her students when she sent them out into the field. She never took cases herself, but she made her students understand that they were to be proved by works, and by works alone, and that if they were children of the new birth at all, they must heal.

To appreciate the work of the healers, one must understand something about their preparation. Many of the students who left Mrs. Eddy's Metaphysical College and went out to practise knew much less about physiology, anatomy, and hygiene than the average grammar-school boy knows to-day. They had not been taught how to tie an artery or to set a broken bone, how to take a patient's temperature or how to administer the simple antidotes for poisons. Spinsters who had never even been present at a confinement went bravely out to attend women in childbirth. The healers' instruction had been after this manner:

Tumors, ulcers, tubercles, inflammation, pain, deformed joints, are all dream shadows, dark images of mortal thought which will flee before the light.

Have no fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed. . . . Your body would suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the trunk of a tree which you gash, were it not for mortal mind.

A child can have worms if you say so, or any other malady, timorously hidden in the beliefs, relative to his body, of those about him.

The treatment of insanity is especially interesting. . . . The