dence, her
extreme impatience may have resulted from a more personal motive. It
is, indeed, very probable that Mrs. Eddy left Concord for the same
reason that she left Boston years ago: because she felt that malicious
animal magnetism was becoming too strong for her there. The action
brought by her son in Concord last summer she attributed entirely to
the work of mesmerists who were supposed to be in control of her son's
mind. Mrs. Eddy always believed that this strange miasma of evil had a
curious tendency to become localized: that certain streets,
mail-boxes, telegraph-offices, vehicles, could be totally suborned by
these invisible currents of hatred and ill-will that had their source
in the minds of her enemies and continually encircled her. She
believed that in this way an entire neighborhood could be made
inimical to her, and it is quite possible that, after the recent
litigation in Concord, she felt that the place had become saturated
with mesmerism and that she would never again find peace there.

_Mrs. Eddy at Eighty_

The years since 1890 Mrs. Eddy has spent in training her church in the
way she desires it to go, in making it more and more her own, and in
issuing by-law after by-law to restrict her followers in their church
privileges and to guide them in their daily walk. Mrs. Eddy, one must
remember, was fifty years of age before she knew what she wanted to
do; sixty when she bethought herself of the most effective way to do
it,--by founding a church,--and seventy when she achieved her greatest
triumph--the reorganization and personal control of the Mother Church.
But she did not stop there. Between her seventieth and eightieth year,
and even up to the present time, she has displayed remarkable
ingenuity in disciplining her church and its leaders, and adroit
resourcefulness and unflagging energy in the prosecution of her
plans.

Mrs. Eddy's system of church government was not devised in a month or
a year, but grew, by-law on by-law, to meet new emergencies and
situations. To attain the end she desired it was necessary to keep
fifty or sixty thousand people working as if the church were the first
object in their lives; to encourage hundreds of these to adopt
church-work as their profession and make it their only chance of
worldly success; and yet to hold all this devotion and energy in
absolute subservience to Mrs. Eddy herself and to prevent any one of
these healers, or preachers, or teachers from attai