Article November 23, 1912 Issue

The statement that Mrs. Eddy was once a "spiritual...

Frederick Dixon—London, England.

Chelsea Mail

The statement that Mrs. Eddy was once a "spiritual medium" is absolutely devoid of any foundation at all. It is simply a piece of gossip, which has been picked up from certain sources which would no doubt like people to believe it, and passed round, absolutely without inquiry; and the write of the letter to the Mail will fail to find any evidence whatever in support of it. Mrs. Eddy was an essentially experimental scientist. Brought up in the strict orthodoxy of a Calvinistic household, she gradually began to shake herself free from these fetters. The reading of the Bible made it clear to her, from the first, that the healing of sickness was not only not confined to a certain number of people, in a certain age, but was as much a command to Christians in every age as was the healing of sin. From first to last, the demand put forward by Jesus was that his followers should preach the gospel and heal the sick.

In due course Mrs. Eddy studied homeopathy. As she did this, she found that the healing was not dependent upon the drug, but was largely in proportion to the elimination of it. From this she drew her conclusion that healing was never dependent on material action, but always on some mental action. It was about this time that she heard of Mr. Quimby and became interested in the healing work he was doing, and this was perhaps an inevitable step in the process of experimental science in which she was engaged, but it was only a step. Gradually she began to perceive that the healing accomplished in this way was effected through the action of the human mind, and as such was not only liable to the grossest abuses but was absolutely incapable of permanence.

Jesus of Nazareth himself, she came to realize, had pointed out this very fact, when, accused by the Jews of healing through Beelzebub, that is to say, by the art of the exorcists of the day, he had pointed out that a house divided against a house was incapable of standing. That was merely his way of stating, in the metaphorical manner of the East, that a belief that good and evil are equal powers, is not a mental condition which can destroy the power of evil. The write of the Jehovistic manuscript of the book of Genesis had pointed out that the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ultimated in death. Jesus of Nazareth, face to face with the accusation that he healed by means of the exorcism practised commonly in Palestine, turned on the Pharisees with the demand by whom their children, the exorcists, cast out devils, and then went on to show that a house divided against a house, a mind believing in good and evil, could not stand, since, as he said elsewhere, it was impossible to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles.

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