Mrs. Stetson’s excommunication is an interesting sequel to an incident that occurred in Concord, N.H., in April of 1907. Mrs. Eddy was then living at Concord, and the litigation by the sons had been commenced in the preceding month. It had been the talk of the newspapers, from time to time, that Mrs. Stetson was nourishing an ambition to succeed Mrs. Eddy in the leadership of Christian Science upon Mrs. Eddy’s demise, and it had even been said that, expecting Mrs. Eddy’s death to occur at a particular time, Mrs. Stetson had come to Boston prepared with a most magnificent costume for attendance upon Mrs. Eddy’s ascension. It was pretty generally known in Christian Science circles that Mrs. Stetson was maneuvering to succeed Mrs. Eddy as the official head of the movement, and doubtless the report reached Mrs. Eddy’s ears. At this time one Herman S. Herring was the first reader of Mrs. Eddy’s church at Concord and H. Cornell Wilson was acting as one of her secretaries at her home at Pleasant View. By some means, through the New York _World_, possession was obtained of a letter written by Herring to Wilson, dated April 27, 1907, in which he asked Mr. Wilson if “it would not be well to protect Mrs. Eddy from the Stetson argument specifically, or are the workers doing so?” The meaning of this, of course, is that Herring assumed Mrs. Stetson was, by malicious mental endeavor, operating adversely to Mrs. Eddy, either to cause Mrs. Eddy to designate Mrs. Stetson as her successor, or to hasten Mrs. Eddy’s departure, by ascension or otherwise, from the world; and the “workers” referred to are the corps of Christian Science mental practitioners always maintained by Mrs. Eddy at her home by concentrated mental effort to erect and maintain a mental bulwark around her that shall be impenetrable by Mrs. Stetson’s or any other malicious mental bullets. “It has troubled me,” said Herring, “but helped me, to hear that Frye was a channel for that diabolism.” Mrs. Eddy has always contended that she herself was so immaculate that malicious animal magnetism could not immediately approach her; but injury to her might be effected through some less pure personality close to her. As no one was closer than Frye, it appears that he was believed to be the medium through which Mrs. Stetson was supposed to be operating, or attempting to operate, against Mrs. Eddy. The newspaper reports of the Stetson trial and excommunication did not, so far as they came to my attention, contain any intimation that judgment had fallen upon Mrs. Stetson because of her mental attacks upon Mrs. Eddy; but there can be no doubt that Mrs. Eddy believes she had been the target of such attacks, and that the excommunication was Mrs. Eddy’s own act of retaliation upon Mrs. Stetson.