The reports that came from some one purporting to be in your family demand a few words in reply from me. You know the history of a few years since I first saw Alice when she was but a mere child and you called me to speak to her because she, as you said, had become strongly attached to me. Now you remember I had no interest in her then, and it was a trouble to me to be beset with so many attentions You remember also, that as her attachment increased you told me it was nothing strange for her to feel so, that she had manifested just such enthusiasm in friendship for some of her teachers, that you thought it once made her sick parting for a short time with one of them –

Alice has told me the same story

Then how dare you report that I am presenting motives for such conduct, or using any hidden influence as mediums and mesmerists alone understand how to do, and remember As Written: rember that God is just, and the wrongs you do me will rest in their final results on yourself.

Alice shall be more just to me than to conceal a letterEditorial Note: This letter is not extant. that I wrote her, if she has it now, in which I forbade such attachment as seemed unnatural in stern and kind remonstrance, telling her I should not write to her or see her if she was so frenzied in her friendship. This caused her great grief and even offence at the time.

I have not called on you or her for nearly two years I asked you let her stop as a companion with me a short time after the death of my husband and you said you were willing, but I thought you were not, and sent her home when she wanted to stay. Does this look like taking advantage of her folly? Have you no sense of justice, and are yielding to the influence of minds that practice just what they would be glad to make it appear I could do, when if they know aught of Christian Science, what I teach and practice they would know it were impossible for me to produce their psychal wickedness.

I have taught AliceEditorial Note: Alice M. Sibley was in Mary Baker Eddy’s August 1882 class. what, as the President of a Metaphysical College I am receiving $300Editorial Note: $300.00 in 1883 is the equivalent of $7,835.27 in 2016. for, is this one of my crimes? You have owned what I have done for her health before, but seem to have forgotten it under this spell, whether mesmeric or otherwise, of injustice.

Now I have no desire to ever speak again to Alice if I am not required to help her in sickness, until you accord me the unselfish motives that have actuated me hitherto in a friendship forced upon me. I have all the friends I desire of this sort who only serve themselves out of me.