The letter Miss L. M. Alcott published in the Woman's Journal of April 18th, gave me great satisfaction,—not because of her reported failure to recruit her wasted energies, as all lovers of her brilliant pen do truly desire that she may,— but because it gives a Christian Scientist the long-waited-for opportunity to have publicly repudiated the class of healing practitioners whom the Scientists' Association have been so often denounced as bigoted and uncharitable for having adjudged malpractioners.
No member of the Christian Scientists' Association was in charge of Miss Alcott's case. Not a single member of that order but could have cured her headache at once, without the "air walking" and "trance" experiences she alludes to as part of the effect of the condemned mesmeric practice of those who have no part or lot with the only real mental healers— the college-sanctioned practitioners. True healing in pure Christian Science does, indeed, accomplish all the mighty works declared of it; but the mesmeric influence, conscious or "unconscious," to which Miss A. was subjected, the discoverer of the Science condemns in the strongest terms, and again and again affirms the drugs of materia medica far preferable.
Let the sick beware how they submit to the mind-over-mind theory so boldly proclaiming its identification with Christian Science, but as far removed, even from similarity with it, as heaven from earth.
