mesmerism, its very antipodes, is one of them.  Hitherto we have never, in a single instance of our discovery, found the slightest resemblance between mesmerism and metaphysics.  No especial idiosyncrasy is requisite to acquire a knowledge of metaphysical healing; spiritual sense is more important to its discernment than the intellect; and those who would learn this science without a high moral standard of thought and action, will fail to understand it until they go up higher.  Owing to our explanations constantly vibrating between the same points, an irksome repetition of words must occur; also the use of capital letters, genders, and technicalities peculiar to the science.  Variety of language, or beauty of diction, must give place to close analysis and unembellished thought.  “Hoping all things, enduring all things,” to do good to our enemies, to bless them that curse us, and to bear to the sorrowing and the sick consolation and healing, we commit these pages to posterity.

Mary Baker G. Eddy.

APPENDIX B

The Gospel narratives bear brief testimony even to the life of our great Master.  His spiritual noumenon and phenomenon, silenced portraiture.  Writers, less wise than the Apostles, essayed in the Apocryphal New Testament, a legendary and traditional history of the early life of Jesus.  But Saint Paul summarized the character of Jesus as the model of Christianity, in these words:  “Consider Him who endured such contradictions of sinners against Himself.  Who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

It may be that the mortal life battle still wages, and must continue till its involved errors are vanquished by victory-bringing Science; but this triumph will come!  God is over all.  He alone is our origin, aim, and Being.  The real man is not of the dust, nor is he ever created through the flesh; for his father and mother are the one Spirit, and his brethren are all the children of one parent, the eternal Good.

Any kind of literary composition was excessively difficult for Mrs. Eddy.  She found it grinding hard work to dig out anything to say.  She realized, at the above stage in her life, that with all her trouble she had not been able to scratch together even material enough for a child’s Autobiography, and also that what she had secured was in the main not valuable, not important, considering the age and the fame of the person she was writing about; and so it occurred to her to attempt, in that paragraph, to excuse the meagreness and poor quality of the feast she was spreading, by letting on that she could do ever so much better if she wanted to, but was under constraint of Divine etiquette.  To feed with more than a few indifferent crumbs a plebeian appetite for personal details about Personages in her class was not the correct thing, and she blandly points out that there is Precedent for this reserve.  When Mrs. Eddy tries to be artful—­in literature—­it is generally after the manner of the ostrich; and with the ostrich’s luck.  Please try to find the connection between the two paragraphs.—­M.  T.