“It was years after we were personally attacked by mental malpractice before we defended ourselves or taught our students self defence. Until this attack was aimed at our life, we never resisted or even investigated it thoroughly and so discovered the full purpose and extent of a mental malpractice. But we gave our attention to it and found how to save the scattering remnants of our Christian students that had been mown down like grass. We resolved in the strength of God to save them and others from the hands of these murderers and to find, as sure defence, the ever present help. Since God has shown us our way in Christian healing, our mind often heals involuntarily. The malpractitioners know this and often have asked us about their patients to direct our thoughts to them, knowing the benefit therefrom. They know, as well as we, that it is impossible for science to produce sickness, but science makes sin punish itself. They should have feared for their own lives in their attempts to kill us. God is Supreme and the penalties of their sins they cannot escape. Turning the attention of the sick to us for the benefit they may receive from us, is another milder form or species of malpractice that is not safe; for if we feel their sufferings, not knowing the individual, we shall defend ourselves and the result is dangerous to the intruder.”
The retaliatory method of mental treatment devised by Mrs. Eddy consisted in an endeavor mentally to hurl cancer back upon the person she believed to be attempting to afflict her with cancer, or tumor upon the person attempting mentally to transmit tumor to her, or consumption upon the evil one thinking consumption at her, and the various forms of chemical poison upon those endeavoring to think mercurial, arsenical or other forms of poison into her organism. She told her students that she had the power of discerning such malicious mental activity on the part of those she believed to be her enemies, and that the way to protect her was to hurl the malicious thoughts backward and cause them, as it were, to recoil upon and destroy their authors.
When Mrs. Augusta Stetson of New York was accused of attempts at mental murder, she justified or tried to justify such endeavors on the ground that they were defensive and, as such, taught and sanctioned by Mrs. Eddy. Whatever Mrs. Stetson and other Christian Scientists know about the power to commit murder by mental means, they have learned from Mrs. Eddy; and if it be an offence against the Christian Science Church, as was decided in the case of Mrs. Stetson, to attempt to cause disease and to kill through the employment of mental powers, then Mrs. Eddy herself should follow Mrs. Stetson into exile from the communion of the saints.
Mrs. Stetson’s excommunication is an interesting sequel to an incident that occurred in Concord, N.H., in April of 1907. Mrs. Eddy was then living at Concord, and the litigation by the sons had been commenced in the preceding month. It had been the talk of the newspapers, from time to time, that Mrs. Stetson was nourishing an ambition to succeed Mrs. Eddy in the leadership of Christian Science upon Mrs. Eddy’s demise, and it had even been said that, expecting Mrs. Eddy’s death to occur at a particular time, Mrs. Stetson had come to Boston prepared with a most magnificent costume for attendance upon Mrs. Eddy’s ascension.
It was pretty generally known in Christian Science circles that Mrs. Stetson was maneuvering to succeed Mrs. Eddy as the official head of the movement, and doubtless the report reached Mrs. Eddy’s ears. At this time one Herman S. Herring was the first reader of Mrs. Eddy’s church at Concord and H. Cornell Wilson was acting as one of her secretaries at her home at Pleasant View. By some means, through the New York World, possession was obtained of a letter written by Herring to Wilson, dated April 27, 1907, in which he asked Mr. Wilson if “it would not be well to protect Mrs. Eddy from the Stetson argument specifically, or are the workers doing so?”
The meaning of this, of course, is that Herring assumed Mrs. Stetson was, by malicious mental endeavor, operating adversely to Mrs. Eddy, either to cause Mrs. Eddy to designate Mrs. Stetson as her successor, or to hasten Mrs. Eddy’s departure, by ascension or otherwise, from the world; and the “workers” referred to are the corps of Christian Science mental practitioners always maintained by Mrs. Eddy at her home by concentrated mental effort to erect and maintain a mental bulwark around her that shall be impenetrable by Mrs. Stetson’s or any other malicious mental bullets.
“It has troubled me,” said Herring, “but helped me, to hear that Frye was a channel for that diabolism.”
Mrs. Eddy has always contended that she herself was so immaculate that malicious animal magnetism could not immediately approach her; but injury to her might be effected through some less pure personality close to her. As no one was closer than Frye, it appears that he was believed to be the medium through which Mrs. Stetson was supposed to be operating, or attempting to operate, against Mrs. Eddy.
The newspaper reports of the Stetson trial and excommunication did not, so far as they came to my attention, contain any intimation that judgment had fallen upon Mrs. Stetson because of her mental attacks upon Mrs. Eddy; but there can be no doubt that Mrs. Eddy believes she had been the target of such attacks, and that the excommunication was Mrs. Eddy’s own act of retaliation upon Mrs. Stetson.
“The highest degree of human depravity,” Mrs. Eddy calls this alleged power to cause sickness and to cause death, which, when successfully employed, should be expiated upon the scaffold; and, deliberately and solemnly, with full understanding of the meaning of my language, I affirm and I charge that Mary Baker G. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science and the pretended successor to, and equal of, Jesus, has again and again and again sought to exercise it; that she, herself, has repeatedly thus sought to cause sickness, sought to cause death, and this, as everything else I have alleged, I will prove by legal evidence whenever Mrs. Eddy may be pleased to require it.