My critic says: “Rest assured that whatever possible effect Mrs. Eddy may have on the sick, it is by making them believe that she has a wonderful power from the Holy Spirit to remove disease.”
Does my critic wish to be understood as meaning that the members of a church have half the faith in a woman, whom they never met, that they have in their pastor? Let any clergyman try to cure his friends by their faith in himself. Will that faith heal them? I will take the same cases, and cure will follow. Is this the result of their faith in me, rather than in their pastor? I have healed infidels, whose only objection to my method was that I believed in the Holy Spirit, while they did not.
I honor Christianity wherever it is found; but when shall we arrive at the goal that word includes? From Puritan parents I received an early religious education. In childhood I often listened with joy to these words, falling from the lips of my sainted mother, “God is able to raise you up from sickness;” and I pondered the meaning of that Scripture I so often quote, “And these signs shall follow them that believe; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”
The conclusion is not valid, that I must be a Spiritualist or a medium because I am not a materialist. I never was a Spiritualist; and have always understood that the phenomena of Spiritualism came from the power of mortal mind over mortal mind, on this earthly plane of existence.
My critic and I are like two artists. One says: “I have spiritual mind-pictures indestructible and glorious. When others see them as I do, in their true light and
