Article February 7, 1925 Issue

Will you kindly afford me space to correct a false impression...

W. Clyde Price, Committee on Publication for the State of Utah

Tribune

Will you kindly afford me space to correct a false impression left upon your readers through an article recently published in your columns?

When writing under the caption, "How to Keep Well," a gentleman truthfully stated that Mrs. Eddy did not believe in animal magnetism. He entirely misstated the fact, however, when he went on to say, "But what she wrote about it always had a flavor of a defense reaction." To infer that Mrs. Eddy defended, or sanctioned, or even feared animal magnetism implies a gross ignorance of her writings or teachings on the subject. Mrs. Eddy has been foremost among the world's writers in unmasking and denouncing animal magnetism. One may properly judge the "flavor" of her writings on this subject by giving a little thought to the following words found on page 213 of her book "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany": "The malicious aim of perverted mind-power, or animal magnetism, is to paralyze good and give activity to evil. ... Be ever on guard against this enemy." And when teaching how to disarm and prove the nothingness of this evil, she further writes on page 364, "Animal magnetism, hypnotism, etc., are disarmed by the practitioner who excludes from his own consciousness, and that of his patients, all sense of the realism of any other cause or effect save that which cometh from God."