eep of law. Everything that
happened was a special Providence and it was hard enough to fit the
trying facts of life into an understanding of Divine Love when there was
apparently so much in life in opposition to Divine Love.

A very great deal of the ferment of the time was just the endeavour to
find some way out of all this and the group of which Mrs. Eddy was a
part were really the first to try to find their way out except as roads
of escape which were, on the whole, not ample enough had been sought by
the theological liberalism of the time of which Unitarianism was the
most respectable and accepted form. There are, as has been said, curious
underground connections through all this region. We find homeopathy,
spiritualism, transcendentalism, theological liberalism and faith
healing all tied up in one bundle.

The line which Mrs. Eddy now came to follow is, on the whole, clear
enough. She becomes in her turn teacher and healer, giving her own
impress and colour to what she called the science she taught, claiming
it more and more as her own and not only forgetting, but denying as she
went on, her indebtedness to any one else. The whole thing gradually
became in her mind a distinct revelation for which the ages had been
waiting and this revelation theory is really the key to the
contradictions and positive dishonesties which underlie the authorized
account of the genesis of Christian Science. She associated herself with
one of the more promising of her pupils who announced himself as Dr.
Kennedy, with Mrs. Eddy somewhat in the background. Kennedy was the
agent, Mrs. Eddy supplied him with the material of what was a mixed
method of teaching and healing. She had always been desperately poor;
now for the first time she had a respectable bank account.

There were corresponding changes in her personality and even her
physique. She began to give lessons, safeguarding her instructions from
the very first in such ways as to make them uncommonly profitable. Her
pupils paid $100 for the course and agreed also to give her a percentage
of the income from their practice. In the course of litigation which
afterward follows, the courts pronounced that they did not find in her
course of instruction anything which could be "in any way of value in
fitting the defendant as a competent and successful practitioner of any
intelligible art or method of healing the sick." The court, therefore,
was of the opinion that "consideration for the a