Part 40

"She is in the parlor, Miss."

Phillida rose and went up-stairs. She found awaiting her a woman rather above medium height. Phillida noted a certain obtrusiveness about the bony substructure of her figure, a length and breadth of framework never quite filled out as it was meant to be, so that the joints and angles of her body showed themselves with the effect of headlands and rocky promontories. She had a sallow complexion and a nose that was retroussé, with a prompt outward and upward thrust about the lower half of it, accompanied by a tendency to thinness as it approached its termination, quite out of agreement with the prominent cheek-bones. The whole face had a certain air of tough endurance, of determination, of resolute go-forwardness untempered by the recoil of sensitiveness. Miss Bowyer was clad in good clothes without being well-dressed.

"Miss Callender, I suppose," said the visitor, rising, and extending her hand with confidence. Her voice was without softness or resonance, but it was not nasal--a voice admirably suited, one would think, for calling cows. Her grasp of the hand was positive, square, unreserved, but as destitute of sympathetic expression as her vowels. "I've heard a good deal about you, one way and another," she said. "You've been remarkably successful in your faith-cures, I am told. It's a great gift, and you must be proud of it--grateful for it, I should think." She closed this speech with a smile which seemed not exactly spontaneous but, rather, habitual, as though it were a fixed principle with her to smile at about this stage of every conversation.

Phillida was puzzled to reply to this speech. She did not feel proud of her gift of faith-healing; hardly was she grateful for it. It was rather a burden laid on her, which had been mainly a source of pain and suffering. But she could not bring herself to enter on a subject so personal with a stranger.

"I don't know that I am," was all she said.

"Well, there's a great deal in it," said Miss Bowyer. "I have had a good deal of experience. There's a great deal more in it than you think."

"I don't quite understand you," said Phillida.

"No; of course not. I am a faith-healer myself."

"Are you?" said Phillida, mechanically, with a slight mental shudder at finding herself thus classified with one for whom she did not feel any affinity.

"Yes; that is, I was. I began as a faith-doctor, but I found there was a great deal more in it, don't you know?"

"A great deal more in it?" queried Phillida. "A great deal more of what, may I ask?"

"Oh, everything, you know."

This was not clarifying, and Phillida waited without responding until the metaphysical practitioner should deign to explain.

"I mean there's a great deal more science in it, as well as a great deal more success, usefulness, and--and--and remuneration to be had out of it than you think."

"Oh," said Phillida, not knowing what else to say.

"Yes," said Eleanor Arabella Bowyer with a smile. She had a way of waiting for the sense of her words to soak into the minds of her hearers, and she now watched Phillida for a moment before proceeding. "You see when I began I didn't know anything about Christian Science,--the new science of mental healing, faith-cure, psychopathy,--by which you act on the spirit and through the spirit upon the body. Matter is subject to mind. Matter is unreal. All merely physical treatment of disease is on the mortal plane." Miss Bowyer paused here waiting for this great truth to produce its effect; then she said, "Don't you think so?" and looked straight at Phillida.

"I haven't thought a great deal about it," said Phillida.

"No?" This was said with the rising inflection. "I thought not; mere faith-healing doesn't require much thought. I know, you see, having been a faith-healer at first. But we must go deeper. We must always go deeper. Don't you think so?"

"I don't understand just what you mean," said Phillida.

"You see," said Miss Bowyer, "faith-healing is a primitive and apostolic mode of healing the sick."

Miss Bowyer paused, and Phillida said, "Yes," in a hesitant way; for even the things she believed seemed false when uttered by Eleanor Bowyer.

"Well, ours is a scientific age. Now we practise--we revive this mode of healing, but in a scientific spirit, in the spirit of our age, and with a great deal more of knowledge than people had in ancient times. We reject the belief in evil; we call it unreal. Disease is a mistake. We teach faith in the unity of God the All-good."

Miss Bowyer evidently expected Phillida to say something at this point, but as she did not, Miss Bowyer was forced to proceed without encouragement.

"When I found that there was a great deal in it, I took the subject up and studied it. I studied mind-cure, or metaphysical healing, which strikes at the root of disease; I went into hypnotism, mesmerism, and phreno-magnetism, and the od force--I don't suppose you know about the od which Reichenbach discovered."

"No."

"Well, it's wonderful, but mysterious. Blue blazes seen by the sensitive, and all that. I studied that, and theosophy a little too, and I took up Swedenborg; but he was rather too much for me. You can't quite understand him, and then life is too short to ever get through him. So I only read what somebody else had printed about Swedenborgianism, and I understand him a good deal better that way. That's the best way to tackle him, you know. Well, now, all of these go to explain the unity of truth, and how the miracles of the Bible were worked."

Phillida said nothing, though her interlocutor gave her an opportunity.

"Well," proceeded Miss Bowyer, "this is what we call Christian Science. It's the science of sciences. It's as much above the rude method of primitive faith-cure practised by the apostles as the heavens are above the earth. We understand from knowing the philosophy of miracles the reason why we do not always succeed. We can not always secure the impressible condition by producing the quiescence of the large brain. But if we understand the theory of hypnotism we shall be able to put the cerebrum at rest and secure the passive impressible state of the cerebellum; that is, an introverted condition of the mind. This securing of interior perception is the basis of all success."