Another one of her early friends, whom Mrs. Eddy ceased to love and grew to hate, was Richard Kennedy. He had been one of her earliest pupils, studying with her when she lived at the Wentworth house in Stoughton in the sixties; and they had carried on a sort of co-partnership at Lynn, Mrs. Eddy doing the teaching and Kennedy the healing. But she had had a falling out with Kennedy as with her other early friends, Spofford and Arens, and she had dragged him into court as she had dragged them, Kennedy was a young man and an easy victim. He gave Mrs. Eddy his promissory note for a thousand dollars for her teachings, and after he had paid two hundred and fifty dollars on account she brought suit against him for the balance, seven hundred and fifty dollars, but again she lost her case. After a time, somehow or other, the strange notion got into Mrs. Eddy’s head that Kennedy was the most malicious and Satanic of all her enemies, who were, by mental means, seeking her destruction. He was the very incarnation of the mind’s hellish power in its most malignant and effective form; and she denounced him in the following lurid language: “The Nero of today, regaling himself through a mental method with the tortures of individuals, is repeating history and will fall upon his own sword and it shall pierce him through. Let him remember this when, _in the dark recesses of thought_, he is robbing, committing adultery, and killing; when he is attempting to turn friend away from friend, ruthlessly stabbing the quivering heart; when he is clipping the thread of life, and giving to the grave youth and its rainbow hues; when he is turning back the reviving sufferer to her bed of pain, clouding her first morning after years of night; and the Nemesis of that hour shall point to the tyrant’s fate, who falls at length upon the sword of justice.” And in one of the editions of her book Mrs. Eddy went so far as to expressly accuse Kennedy of the crime of murder in the following extraordinary language: “The husband of a lady who was the patient of this malpractitioner poured out his grief to us and said: ‘Dr. K—— has destroyed the happiness of my home, ruined my wife,’ etc.; and, after that, he finished with a double crime by destroying the health of that wronged husband so that he died. We say that he did these things because we have as much evidence of it as ever we had of the existence of any sin. The symptoms and circumstances of the cases, and the diagnosis of their diseases proved the unmistakable fact. His career of crime surpasses anything that minds in general can accept at this period. We advised him to marry a young lady whose affection he had won, but he refused; subsequently she was wedded to a nice young man, and then he alienated her affections from her husband.” All of this, of course, by absent mental treatment!