All things are spirit surely enough; but the phenomena of matter, as transformed spirit, are related to each other under the laws of what we necessarily designate as material nature. Little by little, through long and hard exertion, we find out what these relations are, and how they are fitted to the human center of them. Some things are good to eat and to nourish us; others to poison and kill us. A cold or fever may be a manifestation of spirit, and an herb or drug may be another; but if the herb or drug counteracts and destroys the cold or the fever, and experience proves it ten thousand times, who cares to analyze a dose of aconite or a cup of saffron-tea into a draft of "mortal" or "immortal" mind? The process is a mere fooling with ideals--hysterics jumping at the moon. _On metaphysical grounds_--as far as anybody knows what metaphysics really means--there is no need that our physicians, if they are "good physicians," should trouble themselves much about a Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy. Esculapius came into the world long before her, and his followers will stay in it long after her materialized divinity has risen into a more spiritual and a more intelligent state. The same may be said of our theologians. Their creeds have not come out of nothing, however much the spirit of them may have grown thick and muddy through crude understandings. The Christian Church, surely, can yet offer to mankind something better than the Eddy "Church Scientist"; and if it can, it is in no ultimate jeopardy from a few, or a few hundred, congregations of half-educated faddists. For a student of history--not in its moments, but in its decades and centuries--it is easy to see that "Christian Science" has the reason of the fact and _the spread of it_, in its being a protest against the depressing materialism around it--a materialism which, though rationally decapitated by Kant, has shown marvelous activity, for a corpse, ever since the execution. The medical profession, too, has partly, if indirectly, been responsible for Mrs. Eddy's crazy horse of "metaphysics," running away in the dark, and butting its own brains out. From Dr. Mesmer to Dr. Charcot, it took about a hundred and twenty years for "animal magnetism," under the softer names of "hypnotism" and "suggestion," to achieve full and final standing in the French Academy of Medicine; and the mental phenomena attending "mesmerism" have still but little "respectability" among "regular physicians." But, that curative agencies are not confined to drugs has long been settled in the public mind--such part of the public mind, at least, as permits itself any considerable reading and thinking.