Later she would warn her students against being overwhelmed by a sense of the odiousness of sin when it was brought to light by truth; but there is plenty of evidence that at first she herself was almost overwhelmed by what she felt she was discovering about the operations of mental evil. Putney Bancroft has described her attitude at that time: The difference between malicious animal magnetism and sickness would seem to be that one was premeditated wickedness, and the other merely a false belief with which it was comparatively easy to contend.