The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Chapter 12

by Sibyl Wilbur

CHAPTER XII

GERMINATION AND UNFOLDMENT

THERE is no period in the life of Mary Baker so difficult to delineate as the one before us. Its outward aspect might be rapidly sketched, the incidents of the next few years might be related comprehensively in a few pages, but the significance of these years, which is of vast importance, can only be indicated with the most reverent suggestion.

Whether outlining with bold pencil strokes or working up the picture from the canvas of environment with subtlest brush touches, how can one hope to convey the idea of a life such as this, gathered out of its past, confirmed for its great future, girded with purpose and panoplied for resistance? Luminosity is attained only by the greatest skill in portraiture, and by what perspicuous, lucid, sane observations of sympathy and understanding only the masters can tell. But even such portraiture meets with success only when the eye to which it is submitted will attentively comprehend. Discernment of transmutation in character must accompany the enlightenment of events.

Mary Baker was not ready to state the science of Mind-healing directly after her discovery through her own personal healing. She was not ready after she had healed others by this discovery; nor was she ready when she had fitted her first student to heal disease. How she was prepared for this work cannot be explained by the usual methods of the biographer, by rehearsing the facts of her residence in various places, her associates, or her occupations. A process of germination and unfoldment took place in her which must have had its apocryphal hours as well as apocalyptic moments, its seasons of doubt and fog as its times of certainty and sun. The work laid upon her was that of renaming, actually re-christening, the verities.

In her autobiography Mrs. Eddy has endeavored to explain how she approached this great work. He who runs may not read here. Loose conceptions arise from a careless use of terms, and, as in a trial where life depends on exact and technical phrasing, so in knowing the real Mary Baker Eddy one must apply himself to comprehend her terminology and how she came to adopt it in order to realize what business she was about.

“I had learned that thought must be spiritualized, in order to apprehend Spirit,” she has written. “It must become honest, unselfish, and pure, in order to have the least understanding of God in Divine Science. The first must become last. Our reliance upon material things must be transferred to a perception of and dependence on spiritual things. For Spirit to be supreme in demonstration, it must be supreme in our affections, and we must be clad with divine power. Purity, self-renunciation, faith, and understanding must reduce all things real to their own mental denomination, Mind, which divides, subdivides, increases, diminishes, constitutes, and sustains, according to the law of God.”^[1]

Thus in her own words we have the secret of her submission to adverse circumstances and conditions with a marvelous cheerfulness. It was submission to the spiritual sense of things, docility to the tutelage of divine inspiration. She further says:

I had learned that Mind reconstructed the body, and that nothing else could. How it was done, the spiritual Science of Mind must reveal. It was a mystery to me then, but I have since understood. All Science is a revelation. Its Principle is divine, not human, reaching higher than the stars of heaven.

I have said that her task was to re-christen the verities. She says that she withdrew from society for about three years to ponder her mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind that should take the things of God and show them to the creature and reveal the great curative Principle, — Deity^[2] How did she set about this task? She says:

The Bible was my text-book. It answered my questions as to how I was healed; but the Scriptures had to me a new meaning, a new tongue. Their spiritual signification appeared; and I apprehended for the first time, in their spiritual meaning, Jesus’ teaching and demonstration, and the Principle and rule of spiritual Science and Metaphysical Healing, — in a word, Christian Science.^[3]

In a brief paragraph is related the actual, technical work of reducing her discovery “to the apprehension of the age” in a new terminology, the foundation upon which all her subsequent work was built, the naming of the fundamental conceptions. She says of this earliest work in the stating of her Science:

I named it Christian, because it is compassionate, helpful, and spiritual. God I called Immortal Mind. That which sins, suffers, and dies I named mortal mind. The physical senses, or sensuous nature, I called error and shadow. Soul I denominated Substance, because Soul alone is truly substantial. God I characterized as individual entity, but His corporeality I denied. The Real I claimed as eternal; and its antipodes, or the temporal, I described as unreal. Spirit I called the reality; and matter, the unreality.^[4]

This is the actual work of several years. How it was accomplished who shall say? Who can say when it first grew clear in Mary Baker’s understanding that “matter neither sees, hears, nor feels Spirit” and that the five physical senses testifying that God is a physical, personal Being like unto man are testifying falsely? Was it while she was at the Crafts’ humble cottage home in Taunton, or while with the turbulent Wentworth family? Was it during the quiet hours spent with the motherly old woman in the great empty house on the banks of the Merrimac in Amesbury, or was it while leaving an inhospitable roof in a deluge of rain late on an autumn night? It is idle to inquire whether in calm or turbulence the spiritual facts grew clear. But both calm and turbulence were her lot, and sometime during these years of trial it became clear to her what her mission was and why it was that ceaseless toil and self-renunciation were laid upon her after years of physical suffering and the sundering of almost every natural or human tie of affection.

“It is often asked,” Mrs. Eddy has written, “why Christian Science was revealed to me as one Intelligence analyzing, uncovering and annihilating the false testimony of the physical senses. Why was this conviction necessary to the right apprehension of the invincible and infinite energies of Truth and Love, as contrasted with the foibles and fables of finite mind and material existence.

“The answer is plain. Saint Paul declared that the Law was the schoolmaster, to bring him to Christ. Even so was I led into the mazes of divine metaphysics through the gospel of suffering, the providence of God, and the cross of Christ. No one else can drain the cup which I have drunk to the dregs, as the discoverer and teacher of Christian Science; neither can its inspiration be gained without tasting this cup.”^[5]

Taking up the incidents which formed the setting of this work of germination and unfoldment, we find the last tie which bound her to family and home broken. Or to speak more exactly, we find her submitting to the severing of the last tie, for Mrs. Eddy never broke one tie with her own hands, never was herself the cause of one separation from all those who went out of her life, never neglected a duty to a relative or friend, or failed to show grateful remembrance for any service performed in her behalf.

There had been backward looks, many and often, to those loved ones of her family. Sitting alone in the twilight of many a day, she had reflected long and sadly on the lights and shadows of the past, dreaming of her mother’s love, dearer to her than her pen could relate. She wrote of that mother as she oftenest remembered her, bending over her and parting the curls to kiss her cheek. The dear love of sister and brother found a place in her poetry and the sterner affection, deep and tried, of her old father is often referred to. She had thought of herself as a young bride, of the lights of her own home, the remembered glance of her husband’s eye. Of all these memories that was most poignantly sweet which pictured

“… a glad young face,

“Upturned to his mother in playfulness;

“And the unsealed fountains of grief and joy

“That gushed at birth of that beautiful boy.”

These verses called “I am Sitting Alone,” were written in September, 1866, shortly after Dr. Patterson’s desertion and before she left Lynn with her first student. In the summer of 1867 her memories culminated in a passion of affection. She must see some of her family once more and look again upon the mountains around her old home, those hills to which she had lifted her eyes when a schoolgirl, walking in the garden with her pastor; when a young bride leaving home; when a young mother with her babe in her arms; and when coming back from a visit to her own mother’s grave.

Yes, Sanbornton Bridge or Tilton were dear to her. Her native soil and natal horizons drew her as they must always draw all that is human in the hearts of the least and the greatest. Perhaps her compelling impulse in visiting Tilton was to see her brother George who had returned from Baltimore and now resided there with his wife and child. He had become blind. This great sorrow rested upon him heavily, indeed so heavily that he shortly yielded to an illness and died. But a few months before his death she made this visit home. How sensible she was of his sorrow and affliction she revealed in certain other verses in which she would have conveyed to her brother more than sympathy, the understanding of her own faith. But this conveyance of her faith was not possible; he could not accept it, though her stanzas with a depth of affection beg him to dispel the shadow and give back from his earnest eyes the image of the soul of Truth and Light.

On the occasion of this home-going Mary visited her brother and her sisters Abigail and Martha. With Abigail she had her last talk. She was not able to reconcile her to her views any more than she was able to inspire her brother with her faith. There was much of homely criticism to be endured and passed over, much of that sort of reminding of the trivial which makes a prophet in his own land and in his own house unknown because the outward circumstances loom big and the inner life is unguessed. So it was with Jesus when in Nazareth. “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” they asked, and “are not his brothers and sisters here with us?” So “He did not many mighty works there.” In her sister Martha’s home Mary Baker did, however, perform a significant healing. Martha, who it will be remembered, married Luther Pillsbury of Concord, was now in Tilton with her daughter Ellen, then a young woman of twenty-one. This daughter lay critically ill of an abscess. Mary Baker went to the sick chamber and sat with her niece for a while. The girl lay supinely inert and helpless in bed; she is said to have been exceedingly ill and to have had perfect quiet ordered.

Shortly after her aunt’s visit to her sick chamber, they appeared together in the family living room. The young woman was dressed and expressed a desire to eat supper with the family. Every member of the household protested at once on seeing her. They were seriously alarmed. But Ellen, obeying her aunt, refused to return to her bed and suffered no ill effects. Ellen Pillsbury recovered completely, and within a few days returned to Taunton with her aunt Mary, a distance of a hundred miles. The story of this healing was told the author by Martha Rand Baker, widow of George Baker, who lived long in Tilton.

It is rather singular that such an incident as this should have had no convincing effect on Mary Baker’s family. As a matter of fact it only the more alienated them from Mary and her religion. Even Ellen Pillsbury came in after years to repudiate the healing, and repudiate it with resentment.

During the visit with her to Taunton this niece was detached in her affections from her aunt. Ellen was amazed at the simplicity and humbleness in which she found her Aunt Mary living at the home of the Crafts, was amazed at the social isolation, the rigorous application to a severe regimen of work which her aunt had imposed upon herself. Moreover, she resented a firm guidance which her aunt directed over her. All would have been made simple, beautiful, and acceptable had Ellen been able to imbibe the tenets of the faith which had healed her. But these she rejected. She returned to Tilton and ever after scoffed at the very mention of Christian Science. It was she who prevented her aunt Abigail in her last sickness from sending for Mary. She would turn pale with resentment when reminded that she had herself been lifted from a critical illness by her aunt. Her antipathy amounted to a passion, and was related with wonder by old neighbors. It is but another instance of many remarkable antagonisms which Christian Science healing has given rise to through its very unanswerableness. Ellen Pillsbury appeared to resent the notion that she was made to be a living witness of its power. She acted as the final disintegrating factor in Mary Baker’s home relations.

Shortly after Ellen Pillsbury returned to Tilton, Mary Baker severed her relations with the Crafts, finding that no further good could be done along the lines of procedure she had marked out with them. Mrs. Crafts was a confirmed Spiritualist, and after a very temporary lull in her resistance to Christian Science she renewed her opposition with all the energy of a narrow mind and found countless ways of expressing her resistance. Mary Baker went to Lynn for a short visit with the Winslows. She explained to them her desire for a quiet home in which she could write and work out her great problem. They suggested that she go to Amesbury and their reasons were clear. They were Quakers. In Amesbury, a quiet little town in the extreme Northeast corner of Massachusetts, situated on the Merrimac River, nine miles from the sea, dwelt the great Quaker poet, Whittier. It was natural for them to suggest this as an admirable place for literary seclusion. It was a quiet, peaceful village with historic tradition. The Winslows had friends there to whom they commended Mrs. Glover, as she was now called by her own request.

But to the Quakers she did not go. It will be remembered that the Winslows were disquietly affected by her ideas, even after being convinced of their healing power. They had told her if she persisted in presenting such doctrine she would be thought insane. This was also the opinion of a Unitarian clergyman and his wife. It was not in Mary Baker’s heart to arouse such opposition further or to carelessly enter another environment of resistance. She now turned her footsteps to the home of an elderly Spiritualist woman of whom she had heard much. Mrs. Eddy has told the author that her frequent removals during this period from one residence to another was due to the revolutionary character of her teaching. She found that Spiritualists revealed a greater willingness than others to receive truth, and she wanted to teach; she was ready to teach whomsoever would accept her doctrine. It was to the simple-minded that she was constrained to address herself and to the simplest society. How these uneducated and simple folk were variously wrought upon to receive and reject her compels the narration of many painful episodes. Of these Mary Baker was not unduly mindful. Mrs. Eddy has but recently pointed out to the author that the assaults of the trivial-minded counted for but little in comparison with the kind words of the nobly serious who, differing from her in belief, differed according to their honor and nobility. Of these Bronson Alcott was one who came to her in her darkest hour with the words, “I have come to comfort you.”

It was at the home of Mrs. Nathaniel Webster that Mrs. Glover applied for board. Mrs. Webster lived alone in a three-story house of some fifteen rooms at the foot of Merrimac street near the river. Her husband, a retired sea-captain, was at that time a superintendent of cotton mills in Manchester, and was away from home except for an occasional Sunday’s visit. With open heart and open arms Mrs. Webster received the religionist. She had a sympathetic and hospitable nature, and moreover an inquiring mind. She was agreeably impressed when Mary Baker told her that she was engaged on a very serious work and that her work required reflection and solitude. She explained to her that she was writing, but did not further enter upon a discussion of her ideas at the time. They came to an agreement for modest terms and Mrs. Webster gave her a large chamber at the Southeast corner on the second floor. Here she had sunlight and a view of the river.

The winter and part of the following summer were spent very quietly. These two women were placidly content together. If “Mother” Webster was inclined to discuss Spiritualistic “phenomena” this was not a new experience for Mary Baker. She had listened to these ideas before and in many instances had shown rare toleration, even as she did in this case. In some of their conversations Mrs. Glover endeavored to lead Mrs. Webster into an understanding of the Science of Mind. But the elderly woman showed but little comprehension. She so far failed to understand her as to think that Mrs. Glover was writing a revision of the Bible. Mrs. Webster had numerous guests of her own faith; many invalids came to her for a resting-place. With these Mrs. Glover sometimes mingled and performed not a few cures. These simple people came to speak of her with awe and reverence, and the rumor went abroad that a woman was living at Mrs. Webster’s who could perform miracles. When walking along the river banks on pleasant summer evenings with Mother Webster, Mrs. Glover attracted the villagers’ attention. Young people loitering on the bridge would gaze at her curiously, half expecting to see Mrs. Glover walk upon the water of the river. Such incidents made this sojourn in Amesbury a mingled experience. Seeking absolute retirement, she was forced to endure a somewhat unpleasant notoriety through the volubleness of the kindly old soul with whom she made her home.

What she was writing at this time was comments on the Scriptures, setting forth their spiritual interpretation, the Science of the Bible, and laying the foundation of her future book. Of these writings she has said:

If these notes and comments, which have never been read by any one but myself, were published, they would show that after my discovery of the absolute Science of Mind-healing, like all great truths, this spiritual Science developed itself to me until “Science and Health” was written. These early comments are valuable to me as waymarks of progress, which I would not have effaced.^[6]

This quiet work and spiritual unfoldment came to an abrupt halt in this home through the return to the house of a son of her hostess. In sardonic reminiscence the son has related that in spite of his mother’s protests he dragged Mrs. Glover’s trunk out upon the front veranda, ejected her into the night and storm, and locked the door upon her. He has explained that he wished to clear his mother’s house of strangers that his vacation might be agreeable. This is a startling account of a ruffianly act which almost any man would hesitate to tell of himself, and it gives rise to the question as to what really happened there that so unmannerly a deed should be unblushingly proclaimed.

As a matter of fact the incident did not occur as related by descendants of the family. There was cause for much offense, but the cause decidedly lay not with Mrs. Glover. She left the house of her own volition, left it with the same composure that she had first entered it. And her leaving was justifiable. A lady who was a guest of the house at the time accompanied her and together they went to the home of Miss Sarah Bagley. Here arrangements were made for Mrs. Glover's entertainment for the time being, as she expected shortly to return to Stoughton.

THE SQUIRE BAGLEY HOMESTEAD, AMESBURY, MASSACHUSETTS.

Where Mrs. Eddy met John Greenleaf Whittier in 1870

Miss Bagley's home, while simple and modest, was nevertheless a home of refinement, a place admirably adapted for a quiet and studious life, and some months later Mrs. Glover returned and passed a winter with her. The house was an old homestead built by Squire Lowell Bagley. It stood for a century, just below the hill clothed with cedar and pine on which the poet Whittier lies buried after living for fifty years in the quiet old town. Across the way and a little further up the street was the home of Valentine Bagley, who had been a sea-captain. Once in his wanderings he had been a castaway in Arabia. Suffering tortures of thirst in the desert, he resolved, if he reached home, to dig a well by the wayside, that no passer-by should ever want for water. This well was dug and Whittier, hearing the story, wrote his poem on the “Captain's Well.” Indeed, the town was full of the legends of the past which Whittier immortalized, of witches sent to Salem to be tried and put to death, of Friends deported or hounded across the boundaries. Historic old mansions built in the seventeenth century still stood upon the street.

When Squire Bagley died the townspeople were much surprised that he had not left a fortune to his daughters. He had led a retired life for a number of years and given his daughters a good education. Miss Sarah Bagley, however, found it necessary, when her father’s affairs were settled, to teach school for an income, and Whittier was one of her first committee-men. With him she had very pleasant associations. She taught for several terms and then remained at home to be with her sister who was not strong. They opened a small-wares shop in their home which stood so close to the street as to make it convenient. But in spite of these occupations which Miss Bagley found it necessary to take upon herself, and though she did some sewing in connection with tending her shop, it is an injustice to her memory to speak of her as the village dressmaker or schoolteacher with a show of condescension. She was well read and cultivated, a friend of Whittier, and regarded by him as a gifted woman. She was able to perform the service of bringing Mary Baker Eddy and John Greenleaf Whittier together in one or two significant though unrecorded meetings.

When Mrs. Glover came into this home quietly and composedly on a stormy evening of the late summer of 1868, after the unpleasant episode at the Websters’, she brought with her new life and new interests to the somewhat gray and saddened existence of the maiden daughter of the old squire whose fortunes had faded. Miss Bagley had been a Universalist and had become a Spiritualist in religious belief, but she soon became interested in Mrs. Glover’s doctrine. She was an agreeable companion who needed only the living touch of sympathy and interest to waken her from the apathy into which her dreary round of duties had drawn her. Mrs. Glover taught her the elements of Christian Science, for it must be remembered that she had not yet definitively grasped this Science herself.

After Mrs. Glover left her they corresponded for over two years, until Mrs. Glover returned again to live with her and teach her to heal. This event changed her whole subsequent life. She laid aside her needle and closed her shop, devoting herself to practising the healing art. She earned her living for twenty years as a practitioner and laid aside sufficient to keep her in comfort for the last ten years of her life during seven of which she was afflicted with semi-blindness. But Sarah Bagley was never a Christian Scientist. She did not follow her teacher out of the maze into the bright light of complete understanding. She refused, as did another student, to lay aside mesmerism and confused her practise with such doctrines.

While living in Stoughton with the Crafts, Mrs. Glover met Mrs. Sally Wentworth, who brought her daughter to her to be healed of consumption. Mrs. Wentworth invited Mrs. Glover to come and live with her, and wrote her while she was in Amesbury, repeating the request. Mrs. Glover now accepted the invitation, and was a member of the Wentworth household for about two years. This household was composed of father and mother, a son and daughter, and a married son who occasionally visited the house. The daughter, Lucy Wentworth, was a girl of fourteen; the brother Charles, a little older, was a high school boy, and the oldest son Horace, was a journeyman shoemaker, of a happy-go-lucky disposition, much averse to religious discussions.

In complying with Mrs. Wentworth’s earnest appeal that she should make her home with them and teach her Mind-science, Mary Baker did not entirely realize the conditions she was to encounter. Mrs. Wentworth was a domestic-minded woman, not over gifted with intellectuality, but of a receptive and teachable nature. She had been a practical nurse and had gone out to the sick of the neighborhood for years. But she was a Spiritualist, and believed in rubbing the limbs of her patients to give them comfort. She had eagerly drunk in all that Mary Baker had imparted to her of Mind-healing when she met her at the Crafts’, and thought she could combine this with her nursing and massage to make her a more practical healer.

From the very start Mary Baker had to disabuse her mind of such a hope. She talked to her of the fallacy of such a procedure, often illustrating by her experience with Phineas Quimby. In just what way this doctrine of rubbing and clairvoyantly reading the patients’ minds was inimicable to a cure in Mind-science Mary Baker did not herself at that time know. Hence she could not authoritatively govern Mrs. Wentworth in her thinking. Mrs. Wentworth was inclined to the Quimby method and Mary Baker had not found herself sufficiently to gainsay her predilection. She told Mrs. Wentworth freely all that she knew of Quimby’s method, but she herself worked on her own ideas, writing for hours in her room, struggling with the conflicting theories.

Mrs. Glover had with her a manuscript which she had prepared while at Portland under the sway of Quimby’s thought. Mrs. Wentworth wanted to copy this. She found in it certain comfort for her Spiritualistic leanings. Mrs. Glover did not refuse it to her, but felt so uncertain of its character that she did not want her to circulate it and made her promise to keep it only for her own perusal. Not yet certain enough to absolutely condemn it, she gravely doubted the statements which she had herself penned at an earlier date while still under Quimby’s influence.

Now, as has been said, Mary Baker was engaged on a manuscript concerning the spiritual significance of the Scripture. On this she was devoting the closest thought, endeavoring to make clear the apprehensions of pure spiritual doctrine. Mrs. Wentworth, as Mrs. Webster had done, spoke of this as Mrs. Glover’s Bible. So the family gossiped among themselves and came to speak of the manuscript Mary Baker loaned Mrs. Wentworth as the “Quimby” manuscript, and the one she was at work on as “Mrs. Glover’s Bible.” Horace Wentworth, the shoemaker, visiting home, caught up these phrases with the readiness of a jocular and jeering temperament. He had an able second in all his jests and gibes in the person of a cousin, a gay-hearted, mirth-loving girl, given to mimicry. Between them they tormented the patient mother with a burlesque of her work.

Mary Baker was never a witness of these hilarious scenes. She kept rather strict hours at her desk, varying her work with recreation of a suitable nature. She lived for nearly two years in this village surrounded with wooded hills. She knew well its quiet walks and inspiring vistas. In her room she wrote assiduously and spent many hours in meditation and prayer. Her relations with the two children living at home, as well as with the father and mother, were cordial and agreeable. Far from being a recluse, she welcomed the children to her room when not engaged with her writing, and made their joys and sorrows her own. The daughter Lucy was particularly devoted to her.

“I loved her,” Lucy Wentworth told the author, “because she made me love her. She was beautiful and had a good influence over me. I used to be with her every minute that she was not writing or otherwise engaged. And I was very jealous of her book. We talked and read together and took long walks in the country. I idolized her and really suffered when she locked her door to work and would not let me come to her. After she had worked for hours she always relaxed and threw off her seriousness. Then she would admit us, my brother Charles and me, and sometimes a school friend of Charles. The boys would romp in her room sometimes rather boisterously, but she never seemed to mind it. Our times together alone were quieter. When she finally left our house it seemed to me my heart would break.

“But a coolness grew up in the family toward our guest. I don’t know how it came about. My father thought she absorbed my mother too much and that she was weaning me away from them. Perhaps she was unconsciously, for she made a great deal of me. Yet her influence over me was always for good. We read good books and talked of spiritual things. She loved nature; she was cultivated and well-bred. Her manners seemed to me so beautiful that I imitated her in everything. I never missed any one as I missed her. She said good-by to me with great affection, held me in her arms and looked long into my eyes. ‘You, too, will turn against me some day, Lucy,’ she said. And if I have seemed to, did I not have reason? Why did she never write to me? I have never heard from her, not one word since she left our house thirty-five years ago.”

It was not in Mary Baker’s nature to wean a child from its parents. She had had her own heart-breaking experience of this herself. Her experiences with the Wentworths, following upon her experiences with the Crafts, taught her to avoid in the future a too close mingling with another family. And her conclusions were based on just analysis of human nature. Richard Kennedy of Boston, an early student with Mrs. Eddy, in commenting upon her relations with this family, made these observations to the author in explaining the situation there and elsewhere when Mrs. Eddy was working out her religious statement:

The Wentworths were well enough in their way, as were the Crafts with whom Mrs. Eddy lived at an earlier period, and the Websters of Amesbury. It was an unfortunate fact that Mrs. Eddy with her small income was obliged to live with people very often at this time in her life who were without education and cultivation. It was never her custom to keep apart from the family. She invariably mingled with them and through them kept in touch with the world. She had a great work to do; she was possessed by her purpose and like Paul the apostle, and many another great teacher and leader, she reiterated to herself, “This one thing I do.” Of course simple-minded people who take life as it comes from day to day find any one with so fixed an object in life a rebuke to the flow of their own animal spirits. Mrs. Wentworth was what old-fashioned New Englanders call “clever,” that is to say, kind-hearted. She looked well after the creature comforts of those under her roof. Lucy was a spirituelle young girl, Charles was a sensible, lively boy, but Horace was something of a scoffer, without any leanings toward religious inquiry.

Horace Wentworth, the scoffer, in later years did more than scoff at the memory of his mother's guest. He even made allegations of a grave nature against Mary Baker Eddy. He related that in leaving his father's house Mrs. Glover maliciously slashed the matting and tried to set the house afire by putting live coals on a pile of papers. He gossiped after this manner for many years, and finding that his stories went well in the village square, he eventually told them to newspaper correspondents and saw them printed in the metropolitan press. The apparent foundation for such slanderous gossip is that the children playing roughly in Mrs. Glover’s room tore the matting with their heavy shoes, and some dead ashes were laid on a newspaper to be removed with the rubbish. There was no thought of serious unpleasantness when Mrs. Glover left his father’s home, nor dared this son speak against his mother’s teacher so long as his mother lived.

But the scoffings of the son and the mimicry and mockery of his cousin Kate did create a discord in the home which came to wear on Mrs. Glover’s mind. She frequently overheard the wordy and worldly clamor in the rooms down-stairs. She heard the harsh laughter and mincing mimicry; she heard the passionate defense made of her by the young daughter Lucy; she heard Mrs. Wentworth sharply reprimanding her eldest son with the words, “If ever there was a saint on earth it is Mrs. Glover.” She heard the father interfere with a tolerant plea for his boy. The house was too small for her to live in unmindful of these indiscreet wranglings.

There seemed to be a hopeless division in the family over her, her personality, her teaching, her interpretation of the Bible. This division of opinion threatened to become a serious cause of difference in an otherwise united family. Mary Baker made up her mind one evening, after reading a letter from Miss Bagley, that she would return to the quiet home of this cultivated maiden lady in Amesbury and go on with her work where she would be less disturbed and in no way the cause of discussion.

But it was not Mary Baker’s idea of good-breeding to break off long-established relations rudely or with recrimination. She recognized the limitations of this family; she knew what she had to do and that she must be about it. She acquainted Mr. and Mrs. Wentworth with her intentions and her leave-taking was made with courteous attentions on both her part and theirs. She was escorted to the train by the elder Mr. Wentworth, who carried her bag and wraps. He found her a comfortable seat in the train and shook hands with her with expressions of regret at parting. This may not be as romantic an account as that of Horace Wentworth, who, from long embellishment of his reminiscences, came to say that his family had gone from home and that Mrs. Glover, after strewing a newspaper with smoking coals, fled clandestinely. However, the sober facts are that the leave-taking was quite devoid of adventure and as decorous as usual with well-behaved personages.

Returning to Amesbury in the fall of 1870, Mary Baker spent the winter completing certain manuscripts and teaching two students. These students were Sarah Bagley and Richard Kennedy. Kennedy was a young man a little past his majority, who boarded at the Captain Webster house where Mrs. Glover had previously lived. He had a small box factory in the town, employing a few hands and earning for himself a good living.

He was alert, active and clear-headed, and Mrs. Glover was persuaded by Miss Bagley to accept him with her as a student. The winter evenings were passed in conversation on metaphysics. The Socratic method of teaching was necessarily adopted by Mrs. Glover, as she had as yet no text-book. These early talks were later systematized, the dissertations were dignified into the form of lectures. And these lectures some of her early students declare to have been illuminating and inspirational beyond valuing in money.

Her dissertations as well as her writings were beginning to unseal the fountains of her inspiration. She had arrived by this winter’s work at a clear standpoint. She could now definitely wrap in words the spiritual concepts which had before been elusive and intangible. She was beginning to lay hold of the technical processes of her work. From this standpoint she lifted her eyes to a far horizon. The work now opened up before her, the work of promulgation.

By the spring of 1870 she had completed a manuscript which she entitled “The Science of Man.” This manuscript was copyrighted but not published until some time later. “I did not venture upon its publication until later,” she says, “having learned that the merits of Christian Science must be proven before a work on this subject could be profitably published.”^[7]

It was first issued as a pamphlet and is advertised in the first number of the Christian Science Journal. It was later converted into the chapter Recapitulation, embraced in later editions of “Science and Health.” It contains the fundamental principles of Christian Science and its simplest comprehensive tenet, the scientific statement of being. With this manuscript completed she knew that she could teach the science and extend her work, that the time was ripe for harvest.

Through four successive years she had labored carefully, patiently, earnestly, writing and rewriting, while the truth grew in her understanding. It is no refutation of her sublime discovery in 1866 or of her divine guidance in preparing and presenting its principles that the work was a growth and did not spring full blown into her mind. Mary Baker Eddy could never have made her discovery in 1866 had she not been prepared for it by long application to spiritual inquiry. Nor would she have written “Science and Health” had she not labored long and with perfect submission to imperative spiritual guidance. The preparation for the discovery is shown by the fact of her childhood and young womanhood and, as this narrative reveals, her statement of long preparation is sustained by the fact of her life. She says: “From my very childhood I was impelled by a hunger and thirst after divine things, — a desire for something higher and better than matter — to seek diligently for the knowledge of God, as the one great and ever-present relief from human woe.”^[8]

With regard to important dates in her memory concerning the portents of what was to be revealed to her she says: “As long ago as 1844 I was convinced that mortal mind produced all disease and that the various medical systems were in no sense scientific. In 1862, when I first visited Mr. Quimby, I was proclaiming to druggists, Spiritualists, and mesmerists that science must govern all healing.”^[9]

Her life, her acts, her conversations all sustain this statement, though mortal mind belongs to the terminology of later years. Before meeting Quimby the conception of that which “sins, suffers, dies” was growing in her thought, though as a vague apprehension. While in Groton she astounded the old man who visited her to pray with her by rising to meet him in no other strength than a faith groping blindly. In Rumney she healed the diseased eyes of a child instantaneously, and as a further proof that she was acquiring a more definite hold of this great truth, she was herself healed by her own religiosity while under Quimby’s magnetic treatment and in spite of his manipulations. No one should be confused by these facts concerning the definite discovery in 1866. Mrs. Eddy says: “The first spontaneous motion of Truth and Love, acting through Christian Science on my roused consciousness, banished at once and forever the fundamental error of faith in things material; for this trust is the unseen sin, the unknown foe, — the heart’s untamed desire, which breaketh the divine commandments.”^[10]

If she was thus prepared for her discovery, indeed re-prepared through experiencing the workings of magnetism, that her healing might be clear and definite, then we may believe she was by the same gradual process prepared for the writing of her book. Again it is best to take her own words for a description of the attuning of her faculties. She says:

Naturally, my first jottings were but efforts to express in feeble diction Truth’s ultimate. … As sweet music ripples in one’s first thoughts of it like the brooklet in its meandering midst pebbles and rocks, before the mind can duly express it to the ear, — so the harmony of Divine Science, first broke upon my sense, before gathering experience and confidence to articulate it. Its natural manifestation is beautiful, and euphonious, but its written expression increases in power, and perfection, under the guidance of the great master.^[11]

1. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 44.
2. Ibid., p. 45.
3. Ibid., p. 39.
4. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 39.
5. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 46.
6. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 42.
7. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 53.
8. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 47.
9. Christian Science Journal, 1887.
10. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 48.
11. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 43.