Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/428

374 through the community and itself erects a barrier against generosity or even fair compensation. The Science is lowered in the public estimation, the healer humiliated, if not weakened, and the chances of success in doing good greatly lessened. Selfishness still remains to imprison the patient unless his thought, in this, as in other directions, be changed."

Mrs. Buswell, a healer at Beatrice, Neb., was once summoned before the court under charge of practising medicine unlawfully. She objected that her treatments were in the nature of a religious exercise and did not come under the jurisdiction of the medical laws of the state. When, upon question, she admitted that she accepted money for these treatments, the judge cited to her the reply of Peter to Simon the sorcerer: "Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." But the Christian Scientist's God is not at all the God of Christian theology. He is, as Mrs. Eddy ceaselessly reiterates, Principle. There was really no more irreverence in Mrs. Buswell's realising the Allness of God for money than there would have been in her realising the truth of a proposition of Euclid.

Every patient healed was practically a new Christian Scientist made. If he were to keep well he must do so by studying Science and Health. The new converts always became immediately estranged from their old church associates, and very often from their oldest friends. They met together at one another's houses to discuss Christian Science and to hold services. These circles were, indeed, very much like that first one which used to meet in Mrs. Damon's parlour in Lynn. As soon as such groups of believers were able to do so, they formed a