Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/495

Rh Mrs. Eddy's early letters and newspaper contributions as evidence that she got her theory of mind-cure from Mr. Quimby. She criticised the English of Science and Health; ridiculed the Mother Room; insinuated that Mrs. Eddy had illegally conferred degrees, and had been compelled to close her college for that reason; accused her of an inordinate greed for money and of "trafficking in the temple." She declared that Mrs. Eddy had been a medium, and that she was the victim of demonophobia—the fear of witchcraft. Mrs. Woodbury stated that Mrs. Eddy claimed that she had cured the Prince of Wales, now King Edward VII., of his serious illness in 1871, and that to do so she had treated him through his royal mother, as the Prince's life had been such that she could not approach him directly. According to Mrs. Woodbury, Mrs. Eddy said that she treated President Garfield after he was shot, and would have succeeded in saving his life had not Kennedy and Arens maliciously interfered to prevent her from making this convincing demonstration.

It seems that in this article Mrs. Woodbury wished to explain how she had been led to make such extraordinary claims regarding the birth of her son, Prince. She asserts that Mrs. Eddy taught her women students that they might become mothers by a supreme effort of their own minds, and that girls were terrified by the doctrine that they might be made pregnant through the influence of demons. Mrs. Woodbury had probably repented her own efforts to give a concrete example of Mrs. Eddy's theory of "mental generation," and she attacks her on this point with peculiar bitterness. She quotes the following passage from Science and Health: