In another era of fake news, a group of reporters came to Concord, New Hampshire, to dig up dirt on a prominent national figure: Mary Baker Eddy, who had founded a new Protestant religion dedicated to fulfilling Jesus’ promise, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also” (John 14:12). Following the example of his disciples and the early Christians who for several hundred years had done great healing work, she and her church had attracted many with their track record of Christian healing—and this had prompted sensationalist press coverage.
“We didn’t believe anything but the worst about anybody,” Louis Weadock, a star reporter for the New York Herald, later told Adela Rogers St. Johns, a fellow journalist. “And we wanted if possible to hold Mrs. Eddy up to scorn and ridicule, to expose and denounce her if we could” (see Yvonne Caché von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck, Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, Amplified Edition, pp. 378–384). The man Mrs. Eddy assigned to deal with the press was Irving Tomlinson. He recalled in a written account that she gave him a message for the “leading man” of this group of reporters, who had a long-standing, “extremely painful growth on his throat” that his colleagues believed may have been cancerous.
When Mr. Tomlinson called and asked for the head man, Mr. Weadock answered and said he “was too ill to come, could not come, and could not speak if he did come to the telephone, and could not speak any way.” But Mr. Tomlinson reiterated his request to speak to him because Mrs. Eddy had instructed him to be sure to talk to the chief man directly. The man came to the phone reluctantly and listened. When he turned away from the phone, “he not only could speak perfectly, but was healed” (see Irving C. Tomlinson, Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy, Amplified Edition, pp. 69–71).
