The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Faith Doctor, by Edward Eggleston

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Title: The Faith Doctor
A Story of New York

Author: Edward Eggleston

Release Date: November 6, 2008 [EBook #27168]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE

FAITH DOCTOR

_A STORY OF NEW YORK_

BY

EDWARD EGGLESTON
AUTHOR OF THE HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER, ROXY, ETC.

[Illustration: Publisher's emblem]

_THIRD EDITION_

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1891

COPYRIGHT, 1891,
BY EDWARD EGGLESTON.

_All rights reserved._

PREFACE.

Though there is no life that I know more intimately and none that I have
known for so long a period as that of New York, the present story is the
first in which I have essayed to depict phases of the complex society of
the metropolis. I use the word society in its general, not in its narrow
sense, for in no country has the merely "society novel" less reason for
being than in ours.

The prevailing interest in mind-cure, faith-cure, Christian science, and
other sorts of aerial therapeutics has supplied a motive for this story,
and it is only proper that I should feel a certain gratitude to the
advocates of the new philosophy. But the primary purpose of this novel
is artistic, not polemical. The book was not written to depreciate
anybody's valued delusions, but to make a study of human nature under
certain modern conditions. In one age men cure diseases by potable gold
and strengthen their faith by a belief in witches, in another they
substitute animal magnetism and adventism. Within the memory of those of
us who are not yet old, the religious fervor of millenarianism and the
imitat