Mental Healers by Zweig Stefan; Paul Eden; Paul Cedar

Author:Zweig, Stefan; Paul, Eden; Paul, Cedar [Stefan Zweig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1023169
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2012-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

METAMORPHOSIS INTO REVELATION

THE FOUNDATION STONE has been laid. Now let us build the new church, with its heaven-scaling towers and its great bells to carry the message far and wide. Yet how Lilliputian, how ludicrously provincial, are the developments of the early years! Kennedy the renegade has been replaced by a dozen new disciples, no more. One of them is a watchmaker’s assistant; another, a factory hand; two of them are old maids who have nothing better to do with their time. Solemnly these half-educated folk listen to Mary Baker’s lectures. Clumsyfingered, like the children in a village school, they do their best to inscribe in their notebooks the principles of the “science” as dictated to them by the domineering teacher. Open-mouthed they listen, every nerve on the stretch, while her oratory flows on. The scene must have been both grotesque and touching. It was in a stuffy little room which probably had a “poor smell” (reeking of toilworn clothes), and to a completely uncultured circle, that Mary Baker first expounded her great secret. As for her disciples, what were they but a handful of tired proletarians whose main object must have been to discover a more lucrative and less laborious means of livelihood? Such was the germ of one of the mightiest spiritual movements of the modern world.

Having paid his three hundred dollars and attended his twelve lectures, the student could cock his hat proudly and term himself “Doctor.” They had expected that after this promotion they would be able to carry on practice without troubling themselves further about Mary Baker (except insofar as they had promised to pay her a percentage of their fees), but they were to discover something which was not nominated in the bond. They could not break away from their instructress. For the first time there now became manifest how powerful was the radiation that emanated from this disturber of minds, this ruler of souls—a strange magic which enabled her to spur on even the most restricted and the most apathetic to great deeds, and to arouse passionate feelings in all whom she encountered, sometimes boundless admiration and sometimes fierce hatred. Within a few weeks of first making her acquaintance, most of her pupils had become her thralls, enslaved to her, body and soul. They could no longer think or speak or act without the aid of her who had won supreme control, her whose words had become a revelation to them, whose will had supplanted their own. Therein was shown this woman’s unexampled power, for the tension that overflowed from her inner life aroused a kindred tension in others—attraction it might be or repulsion, but always tension that was extreme. Soon her disciples began to vie with one another which could serve her most devotedly, all displaying a frenzy of self-surrender. She was to be more to them than the teacher of the new science; she was to be their spiritual guide in their daily lives. Witness the following document, compiled at about the same time as the publication of the first edition of Science and Health.

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