The Faith Doctor: A Story of New YorkEggleston, Edward
General
The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York
Eggleston, Edward
New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
Then Phillida, her soul full of hope, talked to Mina of the power of
faith, going over the ground traversed by Mrs. Frankland. She read the
eleventh of Hebrews, and her face was transformed by the earnestness of
her own belief as she advanced. Call it mesmerism, or what you will, she
achieved this by degrees, that Wilhelmina thought as she thought, and
felt as she felt. The poor girl with shaken nerves and enfeebled
vitality saw a vision of health. She watched Phillida closely, and
listened eagerly to her words, for to her they were words of life.
"Now, Mina, if you believe, if you have faith as a grain of mustard
seed, all things are possible."
The girl closed her eyes a moment, then she opened them with her face
radiant.
"Miss Callender, I do believe."
Already her face was changing under the powerful influence of the newly
awakened hope. She folded her hands peacefully, and closed her eyes,
whispering:
"Pray, Miss Callender; pray!"
Phillida laid down the Bible and solemnly knelt by the invalid, taking
hold of one of her hands. It would have been impossible to listen to the
prayer of one so passionately sincere and so believingly devout without
falling into sympathy with it. To the bed-ridden and long-despairing
Wilhelmina it made God seem something other than she had ever thought
him. An hour before she could have believed that God might be persuaded
to take her life in answer to prayer, but not that he could be brought
to restore her. The moment that Phillida began to pray, a new God
appeared to her mind--Phillida's God. Wilhelmina followed the action of
Phillida's mind as a hypnotized subject does that of the dominant agent:
as Phillida believed, so she believed; Phillida's confidence became
hers, and the weak nerves tingled all the way from the nerve-centers
with new life.
"Now, Wilhelmina," said Phillida at length, slowly rising from her knees
and looking steadily into the invalid's eyes, "the good Lord will make
you whole. Rise up and sit upon the bed, believing with all your heart."
In a sort of ecstasy the invalid set to work to obey. There was a
hideous trick of legerdemain in the last generation, by which an
encoffined skeleton was made to struggle to its feet. Something like
this took place as Mina's feeble arms were brought into the most violent
effort to assist her to rise. But a powerful emotion, a tremendous hope,
stimulated the languid nerves; the almost disused muscles were
galvanized into power; and Wilhelmina succeeded at length in sitting
upright without support for the first time in years. When she perceived
this actually accomplished she cried out: "O God! I am getting well!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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