The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 461 pages of information about The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories.

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 461 pages of information about The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories.

And so the tale goes on.  Witness after witness bulletins his claims, declares their prompt abolishment, and gives Mrs. Eddy’s Discovery the praise.  Milk-leg is cured; nervous prostration is cured; consumption is cured; and St. Vitus’s dance made a pastime.  And now and then an interesting new addition to the Science slang appears on the page.  We have ‘demonstrations over’ chilblains and such things.  It seems to be a curtailed way of saying ’demonstrations of the power of Christian-Science Truth over the fiction which masquerades under the name of Chilblains.’  The children as well as the adults, share in the blessings of the Science.  ’Through the study of the “little book” they are learning how to be healthful, peaceful, and wise.’  Sometimes they are cured of their little claims by the professional healer, and sometimes more advanced children say over the formula and cure themselves.

A little Far-Western girl of nine, equipped with an adult vocabulary, states her age and says, ’I thought I would write a demonstration to you.’  She had a claim derived from getting flung over a pony’s head and landed on a rock-pile.  She saved herself from disaster by remember to say ‘God is All’ while she was in the air.  I couldn’t have done it.  I shouldn’t have even thought of it.  I should have been too excited.  Nothing but Christian Science could have enabled that child to do that calm and thoughtful and judicious thing in those circumstances.  She came down on her head, and by all the rules she should have broken it; but the intervention of the formula prevented that, so the only claim resulting was a blackened eye.  Monday morning it was still swollen and shut.  At school ‘it hurt pretty bad—­that is, it seemed to.’  So ’I was excused, and went down in the basement and said, “Now I am depending on mamma instead of God, and I will depend on God instead of mamma."’ No doubt this would have answered; but, to make sure, she added Mrs. Eddy to the team and recited ‘the Scientific Statement of Being,’ which is one of the principal incantations, I judge.  Then ‘I felt my eye opening.’  Why, it would have opened an oyster.  I think it is one of the touchingest things in child-history, that pious little rat down cellar pumping away at the Scientific Statement of Being.

There is a page about another good child—­little Gordon.  Little Gordon ‘came into the world without the assistance of surgery or anaesthetics.’  He was a ‘demonstration.’  A painless one; therefore his coming evoked ‘joy and thankfulness to God and the Discoverer of Christian Science.’  It is a noticeable feature of this literature—­the so frequent linking together of the Two Beings in an equal bond; also of Their Two Bibles.  When little Gordon was two years old, ’he was playing horse on the bed, where I had left my “little book.”  I noticed him stop in his play, take the book carefully in his little hands, kiss it softly, then look about for the highest place of

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The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.