If that isn’t witchcraft, I don’t know what witchcraft is. The Omnipotent finger will point out these criminals, who operate through silent and invisible mental influences, and justice will be meted out to them by the human executioner!
In a personal letter to a student Mrs. Eddy said:
“The mental malpractitioners or mesmerists employ the argument of poison to kill people. They cause you or your patients to suffer from arsenical poison in the blood or stomach, mercurial poison, morphine or any other form of mineral, vegetable or animal poison which they may name in their arguments.”
In the latest editions of her book, and in formal communications to her followers, Mrs. Eddy reaffirms her belief in this malicious power of mind, and again warns her followers against it. Her personal teaching to her students was even more extravagant than the language of her published works, and it was a common occurrence for her to frighten young girls and children nearly into fits with the dreadful fear that a malicious mind was seeking to cause them unspeakable disaster. She has taught that the malicious action of mind alone might, of itself, cause, and had caused, the pregnancy of woman, with consequences I must leave to your imagination. And all this damnable doctrine is accepted and believed by Mrs. Eddy’s “intelligent” followers as the truth revealed by God through the founder of Christian Science—believed with a belief that trembles.
I have talked with a gentleman who, years ago, with his family, lived for some six months in the house with Mrs. Eddy; and he said to me with great earnestness: “I lived there six months, and I tell you, sir, I would rather spend ten years in hell than another six months in Mrs. Eddy’s company. She nearly drove my children into frenzy with her malicious animal magnetism business.” Malicious animal magnetism is the name by which Mrs. Eddy now calls her witchcraft.
It has been also a regular part of the teachings of that bogus institution, the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, of which Mrs. Eddy was president, that malicious minds may, and today are, causing sickness, death and disaster to Christian Scientists and their families. I know it to be a fact that the lecturer there literally taught that Mrs. Josephine C. Woodbury, whom he named, possessed this power, and used it to the detriment of Christian Scientists and the cause; and to such an extent has this teaching regarding this particular lady spread that I think it would be hard to find a Christian Scientist in the United States who did not, or had not, believed Mrs. Woodbury had possessed and had exercised this power.
A Christian Scientist healer, guilty of an unpardonable impropriety with young lady patients, is called to account by their father, and, acknowledging his offence, says that he can only account for it on the ground that Mrs. Woodbury made him do it, by malicious animal magnetism. An aged lady, a Christian Scientist in a distant city, having fallen unaccountable several times upon the street, explains to her daughter that the cause of it is “that vile Mrs. Woodbury of Boston.” The child of a member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, dies, and the grief-stricken mother entertains the firm conviction that Mrs. Woodbury killed it. The husband of a member of Mrs. Eddy’s church has been sick for years here in Boston, and for years, without having known or seen Mrs. Woodbury, such has been the teaching at the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston and of the alleged “College,” that she has had no doubt that Mrs. Woodbury caused her husband’s illness, and she has continually sought to protect her husband by a mental effort to throw the illness back upon Mrs. Woodbury. Meantime Mrs. Woodbury is, of course, utterly unconscious of all of these happenings and entirely innocent of any such criminal purposes and deeds.
And all this deviltry as revealed by God! All this medieval witchcraft in the name of Christ! Out upon it! I say. Let it no longer be tolerated amongst us!
Three hundred years ago, some nineteen or twenty estimable people in the town of Salem in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, because of the finding of a Court that they were witches, were legally hanged by the neck until they were dead. And should the inspired and infallible founder of Christian Science prevail in her benevolent intention of “instructing human justice so that these secret criminals shall tremble before the omnipotent finger that points them out to the human executioner,” the supposed offences of malicious animal magnetism, the invention of her disordered imagination, would be atoned upon the gibbet or at the stake.
In her published work Mrs. Eddy has expressly justified the employment of this alleged power for retaliation or defense. She says: