For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful: the power,
through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and
pains and grief--all--with a word, with a touch of the hand! This power
was given by the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the converted.
All--every one. It was exercised for generations afterwards.
Any Christian who was in earnest and not a make-believe, not a
policy--Christian, not a Christian for revenue only, had that healing
power, and could cure with it any disease or any hurt or damage possible
to human flesh and bone. These things are true, or they are not. If they
were true seventeen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago it would be
difficult to satisfactorily explain why or how or by what argument that
power should be nonexistent in Christians now.

To wish to exercise it could occur to Mrs. Eddy--but would it?

Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees--money,
power, glory--vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent,
pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate,
shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines,
immeasurably selfish--

Of course the Great Idea could strike her, we have to grant that, but
why it should interest her is a question which can easily overstrain the
imagination and bring on nervous prostration, or something like that,
and is better left alone by the judicious, it seems to me--

Unless we call to our help the alleged other side of Mrs. Eddy's
make and character the side which her multitude of followers see, and
sincerely believe in. Fairness requires that their view be stated
here. It is the opposite of the one which I have drawn from Mrs. Eddy's
history and from her By-laws. To her followers she is this:

Patient, gentle, loving, compassionate, noble hearted, unselfish,
sinless, widely cultured, splendidly equipped mentally, a profound
thinker, an able writer, a divine personage, an inspired messenger whose
acts are dictated from the Throne, and whose every utterance is the
Voice of God.

She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their
lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and
flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has
no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with
a break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into
eternity as fancies of the waking day melt