The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Chapter 19

by Sibyl Wilbur

CHAPTER XIX

THE WIDE HORIZON

THE modest appeal of The Christian Science Journal very early began to create results which were first apparent in the arrival of students from the West at the Metaphysical College in Boston. And no sooner had the first Western students returned to their homes than they began to insert their cards as practitioners in the Journal, and thereafter letters of inquiry poured in from Milwaukee and Chicago, and Mrs. Eddy’s morning mail began to assume bulky proportions. She published a notice in the magazine referring the inquirers to her Western students, but they were not to be satisfied with anything but information from headquarters.

In the spring of 1884 a pressing demand came from Chicago that a teacher of Christian Science be sent there — if Mrs. Eddy herself would not come. So manifold were the demands on Mrs. Eddy’s time that the idea of a Western trip seemed out of the question. Her correspondence, her classes, her Thursday evening lectures, and Sunday morning sermons, to say nothing of the editing of the Journal, left her no time for the slightest recreation and seemed too imperative to be laid down for a fraction of an hour. Conducting a class in Chicago would mean a month’s absence. In the emergency she looked about her for a suitable and capable person to send out to the Macedonia of the West.

Among the names that suggested themselves to her was that of Mrs. Clara Choate, a student who had occasionally taken her place in the pulpit and who had performed excellent work as a practitioner and teacher. But when she broached the subject to Mrs. Choate she found her unwilling to go. Mrs. Choate had a large practise in Boston, her home ties seemed strong. She had living with her an aged parent and her child was in school. Mrs. Eddy recognized the weight of the objection and did not urge the request upon her, but it became something for discussion among the students that Clara Choate was at variance with her teacher. A situation not exactly harmonious appeared to be arising. To dispel this Mrs. Eddy called together the students resident in her house for a prayerful consideration of the duties of all and their obligations to her as faithful disciples. She foresaw that the work was growing with such giant strides that faithfulness to duty must be exacted and yielded if the call for missionaries was to be answered.

It was not possible for Mrs. Eddy to call a conference in this somewhat over-eager community of students without enormous significance attaching itself to the occasion. Realizing this, she requested the students of the house to regard the meeting for counsel as a private meeting, and directly the name Private Meeting was coined. The Private Meeting society, or the “P. M.,” as it was immediately dubbed, became talked about among the students outside the house who felt that something was being planned from which they were to be excluded. The P. M. society met but twice, but so widely was its existence discussed that Mrs. Eddy was obliged four years later to write an account of its deliberations. She related that the meetings had considered two topics, first, “There is no Animal Magnetism;” second, “God is all; there is none beside Him.” These topics were given out without instructions and the students who joined in the meeting were expected to quietly treat the disharmony in their midst.

“If harm could come from the consideration of these two topics,” Mrs. Eddy wrote, “it was because of the misconception of those subjects in the minds that handled them. … I dissolved the society and we have not met since.”^[1]

In April Mrs. Eddy decided that she herself would go in response to the increasingly urgent call from the West. She handed over the charge of the Journal to Mrs. Hopkins, arranged for a suspension of her Thursday night lectures, and provided for certain of her students to fill the pulpit during her absence. Class work in the college was likewise suspended. The arrangements for the journey were left to Mr. Frye, who was to travel with her as secretary while Mrs. Sarah Crosse attended her as a companion. She spent a month in Chicago teaching a class in a private house on the West Side. Double parlors were taken for the class work, beside the suite of rooms engaged for her party.

Students came from towns outside of Chicago as well as from various parts of the city. The parlors soon proved inconveniently small, but the work was successful for her teaching met with enthusiasm. The great Christian Science movement of the West resulted from that early visit of Mrs. Eddy, a visit undertaken in such perplexity as this call, colliding with her stress of work, had brought about. But by business punctiliousness and executive command she had been able to lay down the duties which had at first seemed imperative of personal direction. Few of her followers could then understand the amazing fortitude this required. But the Western field in the years following justified its demand upon her time. Its response was an abundant harvest of idealism in the midst of vaunting materialism.

When she returned to Boston it was with vision rested by that far horizon which was presently to stretch to the Pacific. Not many months later there appeared in the Journal this notice: “The California Metaphysical Institute affords an opportunity on the Pacific Coast for receiving a course of instruction in the rudiments of Christian Science. Those desiring to enter a class, or to obtain further information, will address Sue Ella Bradshaw, C. S. B., San José, California.” And one month later a similar card advertised the establishment of the Illinois Christian Science Institute, incorporated, at Chicago. This was but the beginning of what rapidly grew into a network of academies and institutes for the dissemination of her doctrine.

When the church showed signs of outgrowing its Boston and New England environment it became necessary to look to the needs of the field at large. Mrs. Eddy realized this need almost before it was apparent, certainly before it was obvious to other eyes than hers. She had done everything hitherto to promulgate her doctrine; now it was forced upon her that she must safeguard it from adulteration and heresy. In her very first class in Chicago there arose a mind to lead a rebellion. Mrs. Ursula Gestafeld was the student who subsequently led a movement of mental scientists in the Western city, and her innovation, counterfeiting the teaching she had received, was but a type of what might and did occur in other localities.

“For many successive years,” Mrs. Eddy writes, “I have endeavored to find new ways and means for the promotion and expansion of scientific Mind-healing, seeking to broaden its channels, and, if possible, to build a hedge round about it, that should shelter its perfections from the contaminating influences of those who have a small portion of its letter, and less of its Spirit. At the same time I have worked to provide a home for every true seeker and honest worker in this vineyard of Truth.

“To meet the broader wants of humanity, and provide folds for the sheep that were without shepherds, I suggested to my students, in 1886, the propriety of forming a National Christian Scientist Association. This was immediately done, and delegations from the Christian Scientist Association of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, and from branch associations in other states, met in general convention at New York City, February 11, 1886.”^[2]

Thus Mrs. Eddy describes how, from her address to the association in Boston which held its tenth annual meeting on January sixth of that year at the college building, the action was immediately taken to carry out her views and wishes for the associations in other cities to be drawn into a unity of purpose. On February tenth the first regular meeting of the national association was held in New York City with delegates present from Boston and Chicago. This national association held four subsequent meetings and was of tremendous aid in the formative period of the church. It held its second meeting in Boston, its third meeting in Chicago, its fourth meeting in Cleveland, and its final meeting in New York, when Mrs. Eddy requested its members to adjourn for an indefinite period. She had then other plans for the church which unfolded successfully and harmoniously.

It was somewhat in consequence of the forming of the national association, somewhat in the gradual missionary work of the Journal, and largely because of the healing work of the students, who went out from the college month after month, that the Christian Science doctrine spread to every part of the country. This book is not a history of the Christian Science movement, hence it is not within its province to show how it came about that thirty academies were in existence in 1888. But so it was, and these schools were in Colorado, Kansas, California, Iowa, Nebraska, New York, The District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, and Kentucky.

This inspiring growth of adherents in all parts of the country did not result instantaneously or miraculously from Mrs. Eddy’s visit to Chicago, but grew with a healthy, sturdy activity during the four years intervening between the spring of 1884 and 1888. Mrs. Eddy was meantime faithfully pursuing her work at the college on Columbus avenue. Her house became the center of much interest and was for several years a very notable residence in Boston. It was substantial without being pretentious, its arrangement was typical of modern city residences and Mrs. Eddy relaxed somewhat the rigid order of its furnishings as the months flew by and her financial resources were more abundant and secure. On the first floor was a suite of parlors continuous with a small reception-room. These rooms could all be thrown together by opening sliding doors, and this was done on Thursday nights when the curious Boston literary folk came to hear the new doctrine. For, had they not read what Bronson Alcott said of this new teacher of metaphysics, and was not Bronson Alcott a prophet to be heeded?^[3]

So it became a common question in the drawing-rooms of the eighties, “Have you met Mrs. Eddy, have you heard her lecture, have you been to her college?” And to Mrs. Eddy’s home came many distinguished persons during the years from 1884 to 1887. It was not then so difficult a matter to meet the founder of Christian Science as it became later. One had only to ring her bell and state his purpose of inquiry to a student on duty, and as soon as Mrs. Eddy could lay aside the work of the moment she would come to the reception-room, a kindly and sympathetic hostess with the rare charm of perfect composure through which shone a radiant readiness to believe the highest and best and noblest of whomsoever presented himself. Among such callers and inquirers into her teaching were Frances Hodgson Burnett and Louisa M. Alcott. These two women, since crowned with literary laurels and embalmed for the future with a fame all their own, went together, one day, as was related by a literary woman of Boston, to meet Mrs. Eddy and acquaint themselves with her doctrine from her own lips.

“Mrs. Burnett appeared to receive Christian Science like a birdling fed,” said this literary lady, herself the editor of a journal. “But Miss Alcott, though her father was a transcendentalist and some years before had more than half avowed a faith in the new system of metaphysics, did not take to it. She was of a very practical, matter-of-fact mind. She had had enough of idealism and was determined to keep her feet upon terra firma. But she was impressed with Mrs. Eddy’s personality.”^[4]

If Miss Alcott was impressed with her personality, she certainly did not correctly apprehend the doctrine, as she revealed her understanding of it in an article written for the Woman’s Journal, a magazine devoted to woman’s suffrage and conducted by Miss Alice Stone Blackwell. Mrs. Eddy replied to her article in the Christian Science Journal, kindly pointing out the difference between hypnosis and her own teaching. It is interesting to note that Miss Blackwell was herself a contributor to the Christian Science Journal on the subject of suffrage in April, 1887.

In printing the article on suffrage in her journal, in frequent references to the educational advancement of women, and in reviewing books on diverse subjects, Mrs. Eddy revealed a broad interest in woman’s work all over the world. She likewise maintained an active, alert interest in the sermons and public speeches of eminent men, and either herself or through her editors reviewed philosophic treatises that came from the press.

Of Madame Blavatsky and theosophy she had somewhat to say and printed an article which, while it radically disagreed with theosophic occultism, gave the Russian woman credit for broad scholarship. On the other hand, in a review of a publication on George Eliot’s essays and verse by Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, Mrs. Eddy praises Miss Cleveland for her felicity as an editor and in a genuine outburst of sincere appreciation of the great English novelist declares her womanly and heroic with firm, unfaltering adherence to honest conviction and conscientious reasonableness. “Her metaphysics purge materialism with a single sentence,” declares Mrs. Eddy, quoting the sentence as follows, “One may know all that is to be known about matter and nothing that needs to be known about man.”

Lilian Whiting, author of “The World Beautiful,” then a Boston journalist and correspondent for Western papers, described a visit to Mrs. Eddy in an article for the Ohio Leader, dated July 2, 1885. As Miss Whiting was not a Christian Scientist her description is edifying as to how Mrs. Eddy appeared to the casual visitor of those days. Miss Whiting wrote that her note requesting permission to call was replied to with a courteous invitation to do so at an hour named. She continues:

“Accordingly at eight o’clock on that evening I rang the bell of the large and handsome residence on Columbus avenue near West Chester Park, known as the Metaphysical College. A maid ushered me into a daintily furnished reception-room where pictures and bric-a-brac indicated refinement and taste. Presently Mrs. Eddy came in and greeted me with a manner that, while cordial and graceful, was also something more, and had in it an indefinable element of harmony; and a peace that was not mere repose, but more like exaltation. It was subtle and indefinable, however, and I did not think of it especially at the time, although I felt it. The conversation touched lightly on current topics and finally recurred to the subject of metaphysics.”

Describing her singular experience as a result of the call, she says: “I remembered afterwards how extremely tired I was as I walked wearily and languidly up the steps to Mrs. Eddy’s door. I came away, as a little child friend of mine says, ‘skipping.’ I was at least a mile from my hotel and I walked home feeling as though I were treading on air. My sleep that night was the rest of Elysium. If I had been caught up into paradise, it could hardly have been a more wonderful renewal.” Miss Whiting continues as though loath to cease the description and, with many adjectives, dwells on her “exalted state,” the “marvelous elasticity of mind and body,” and “an utterly unprecedented buoyancy and energy which lasted days.” She then remembers to state that all this was the result of a half hour’s conversation on metaphysics with “the most famous mind-curer of the day.”

Such were some of Mrs. Eddy’s experiences with the sisterhood of writers who now rendered grave or excited appreciation and anon intellectual disparagement. But whether they were critical or effusive of praise, Mrs. Eddy never turned one of them away, or refused an audience to any inquirer. To doctors, clergymen, and philosophers she gave intellectual attention and while she lived in the world of affairs, she lived in it broadly, deeply, generously, acting her own part as a leader wisely, but yielding courteous consideration to all other leaders in whatever movement and without regard to sex.

The increasing number of her students, their teaching and healing in the wider field, now opening up for the establishment of the new church, created an ever-increasing demand for her text-book, “Science and Health.” The book had been through fifteen editions, and there were therefore fifteen thousand copies in circulation, but letters came to her from the West, complaining that the book was not obtainable. It was necessary to put forth a fresh edition, and Mrs. Eddy determined to revise the book and give to it the benefit of her experience in elucidating many of its statements.

On her return from the visit to Chicago she did not take up the active editorship of the Journal, but contented herself with supervising its columns, applying herself in all spare moments to the rewriting of “Science and Health.” For many months she worked on the manuscript and in August, 1885, she had prepared a completed first draft. This manuscript contained all the essential matter of the earlier editions, — as a comparison will show, — but it had been amplified and clarified and given illuminating touches throughout by Mrs. Eddy’s higher unfoldment in metaphysical understanding.

Having completed the first draft of her work, Mrs. Eddy engaged the Rev. James Henry Wiggin to read the manuscript with a view to indexing it and also to preparing it for the printer with the privilege of making proper technical emendations such as are usually given all manuscripts by the editors of a publishing house. Mr. Wiggin was a man whom many Boston authors had employed for such work, and, because of his reputation for honor and ability, she believed that her book might be entrusted to his hands without fear that he would overstep his privilege and tamper with its subject matter or context. Such proved to be the character of his workmanship.

Mr. Wiggin was a prominent figure in Boston literary circles during the eighties and nineties. He was a retired Unitarian clergyman and for a time an editor for the University Press. While he was, in a sense, a man of the world, that is to say, a social fraternizer with the literary, musical, and artistic Bohemia of two continents, — for he traveled somewhat in Europe, — he was a man of character and enjoyed the friendship of men highly esteemed. John Wilson and Edward Everett Hale were his friends.

It is difficult to understand why after he passed to another world the claim was made in his name that he practically rewrote “Science and Health.” Mr. Wiggin himself never made such a claim in any writings which he left, and it may be sincerely doubted if he would have considered it honorable to strike so vitally at the integrity of any writer for whom he had worked as to cast a doubt upon the product of his mind. To even make the claim of polishing and giving style to a writer’s expression is, as it were, to assert that he has something to say and does not know how to say it. The fact that Mrs. Eddy’s book had gone through fifteen editions before Mr. Wiggin came on the scene proved that she both had something to say and knew how to say it.

Mr. Wiggin used the pseudonym Phare Pleigh in writing for The Christian Science Journal, and it is doubtful if Mr. Wiggin would think it fair play to print his personal letters after his death. He was a friend of Mrs. Eddy, though never a convert to Christian Science, and being a man of the world, he expressed himself on the subject of the new religion at various times in various ways according to his mood and the character of the friend he was with. But what Mr. Wiggin thought as to Mrs. Eddy’s authorship he expressed in an extensive review published in 1886 entitled “Christian Science and the Bible.” In this review the following passage occurs:

“Now in this century there has arisen a sect called Christian Scientists. Their founder and cornerstone is Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Eddy. Born in Concord, New Hampshire, and afterwards a resident of Sanbornton and Lynn, she has been for several years a resident of Boston, where she is pastor of the Church of Christ, Scientist. She is also president of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, a school of the prophets whose students are taught Mrs. Eddy’s views as they are set forth in “Science and Health,” a book which she first published ten years ago, and which has since passed through many editions, though she practised and taught the Science years before the book was printed or the college established.”

Through a period of five years Mr. Wiggin wrote many articles for The Christian Science Journal and he used his brain and talents in its defense, taking up the cudgels against clergymen in all parts of the country who essayed in sermon or magazine article to ridicule the new faith. Is it necessary to assume that he was acting the part of a hypocrite or merely enjoying a tilt with professional theologians under the cover of his pseudonym like a masked knight at a tournament?

It is possible that he was more strongly attracted to Christian Science than some of his worldly associates knew. In one of his articles in the Journal, “Heard at the Clubs,” he tells how a political discussion in which he was interested was interrupted by a reference to Christian Science and how an editor, an actor, and others testified to its benefits to the astonishment of a noted literary divine from Great Britain. He declared, “the talk everywhere turns on Christian Science and whoever has met the founder has been impressed with her integrity of purpose.” His various articles may be found in volumes three and four of the Journal.

Men of great parts have elsewhere and often been attracted to a cause, served it for a time earnestly and faithfully, and then fallen away from it. But in such instances it is seldom asserted that they gave it its life blood and then grew ashamed of it and ridiculed it. Such men do not give life blood to anything. They may be clever and gifted, but they are never the inspiration of a movement.

After Mr. Wiggin had handled Mrs. Eddy’s manuscript for the sixteenth edition of her book this announcement was made in the Journal for January, 1886: “Attention is called to this volume. It is worth the notice not only of Christian Scientists, but of all who are interested in the progress of truth. It is from the University Press, Cambridge, and this is a guaranty for its typographical appearance. All the material of other editions is herein retained, but all of it has been carefully revised and rewritten by Mrs. Eddy, and greatly improved. The arrangement of the chapters has been changed. One new chapter has been added, on the Apocalypse, giving an exposition of the bearings on Christian Science of the twelfth chapter of Revelation, to which it is believed by Mrs. Eddy to particularly relate. A special feature is a full index, prepared especially for this edition by a competent gentleman. In these days no important book has a right to come before the public without a proper index.”

For about five years Mr. Wiggin gave Mrs. Eddy the benefit of his literary training in reading the proofs of her successive editions and also the proofs of the Journal. She paid him fittingly for his work and cherished a kindly regard for him. It is regrettable that a revelation of his personal vanity as shown in private correspondence should have been given to the world in recent pamphlets — since vanity and egotism are common weaknesses shared in some degree by all mankind. In a playful protest against his learned profundities exhibited on one occasion in a philosophic review printed in the Journal, Mrs. Eddy wrote: “‘Now Phare Pleigh evidently means more than ‘hands off.’ A live lexicographer of the Anglo-Saxon tongue might add to the definition the ‘laying on of hands’ as well. Whatever his nom de plume means, an acquaintance with the author justifies one in the conclusion that he is a power in criticism, a big protest against injustice, — but the best may be mistaken.”^[5]

With Mrs. Eddy’s own gentleness of characterization and generosity of appreciation, Mr. Wiggin may fall into his rightful place in the story of her life as an aid and not a marplot, and his memory need not be stigmatized with the reproach of literary caddishness.

During the summer of 1888 Mrs. Eddy spent a few weeks in Fabyans, New Hampshire, at the White Mountain House. Her student, Mrs. Janette E. Weller, traveled with her. She gave an informal address at the Fabyan House to the summer guests, who gathered from various resorts in the mountains when they learned that she was sojourning a few days at this hotel. She afterward withdrew with her secretary and traveling companion to the farm of Ira O. Knapp for absolute retirement. She had just closed an eventful year in which she had formulated the subject matter of a new book, written during the winter and put forth in May, 1888, changed her residence, and paid an eventful visit to Chicago.

“Unity of Good and Unreality of Evil” was advertised in these words in the Journal: “This little book is at last ready for the public. Next to ‘Science and Health’ it is the most important work she has written.” And it remains to-day the most important because of its absolute metaphysics. Her entire list of publications in that year included “Science and Health,” “Unity of Good,” “Christian Healing,” “People’s Idea of God,” “Christian Science, No and Yes,” “Mind Healing, an Historical Sketch,” and “Rudiments and Rules of Divine Science.”

It was becoming well-nigh impossible for Mrs. Eddy to have even an hour of her waking time to herself for the purpose of meditation, deliberation, or consideration of the larger plans that were now imperative. How “Unity of Good” was written is a mystery, for while she lived at the college whoever sought her had but to knock on her door. The large chamber over the parlors at the college was more of a library, a study, an office, than a quiet chamber for rest. Her door was thronged from early morning until late at night, and the uselessness of such distraction was that the most insistent besiegers were those with the least important business.

For such reasons, and because the field actually demanded her wisest deliberations, Mrs. Eddy took steps to remove from the college building. During the holiday season of 1887 she left Columbus avenue to reside in a house she had purchased at 385 Commonwealth avenue. This was the first house she had owned since the Broad street house in Lynn, for she leased the college building at a rental of one thousand dollars annually. Her new home was on the outskirts of Boston, overlooking from the rear in those days the Charles River and fronting on a boulevard parkway where stands to-day the superb Anne Whitney statue of Lief Ericsson. The house included twenty beautiful rooms. It was fitted up suitably, though not extravagantly and Mrs. Eddy established herself here with her secretary and her companion. Her life was fixed by a very punctilious order; she wrote at certain hours, received at certain hours, attended the college to teach her classes, and began to take the daily drive which was to be the only recreation she insisted upon from that time until her earthly departure.

The West was calling for her again. Letters which poured in told her that she must go out to the field once more. The National Christian Scientist Association was to meet in Chicago in 1888, and Mrs. Eddy determined to deal with all her students’ needs and wants at that focal point and meet them for the purpose of satisfying their insistent claims upon her attention. In order that the occasion might be a gratifying one to the entire field, and that the church might be renewed and refreshed for its pioneer work, Mrs. Eddy issued a call for this convention which was printed in the Journal for May. She said:

Christian Scientists: For Christ’s and for humanity’s sake, gather together, meet en masse, at the annual session of the National Christian Science Association. Be of one mind in one place and God will pour you out a blessing such as you never before received. He who dwelleth in eternal light is bigger than the shadow, and will guard and guide His own. Let no consideration bend or outweigh your purpose to be in Chicago on June the 13th.

This call was not without its effect. Hundreds journeyed to Chicago to attend what was anticipated as a “week’s jubilee of spirit.” It was the first great gathering of Christian Scientists from many parts of the United States. The knowledge had gone abroad that Mrs. Eddy would herself attend the convention, and this served to draw together not only the students who had graduated from her classes, but also hundreds who had been healed by her students and who wished to know more of her philosophy. Mrs. Eddy made the journey accompanied by Captain and Mrs. Eastaman, and her secretary Calvin Frye. Dr. E. J. Foster, a young physician who had studied with her, and whom she afterwards legally adopted as her son, joined the party in Chicago.

The national association held its business meetings in the First Methodist church of Chicago, then situated on Washington and Clark streets. On the second day the convention assembled at Central Music Hall for a program of addresses to be delivered by practising students. The doors being opened to the public, much to the astonishment of the eight hundred delegates, there assembled an audience of about four thousand, among whom were many prominent Chicagoans, for the newspapers had not failed to advertise the fact that the Boston prophetess, as they chose to call her, was in the city. All unaware of the curiosity her coming had aroused, Mrs. Eddy attended the meeting, expecting to occupy a seat upon the platform among her students, but to take no part in the program. Her purpose was to greet and cheer her students.

Destiny was not to have it so. The Rev. George B. Day, pastor of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Chicago, had decided to introduce her as the speaker of the day and on his own authority had inserted a notice in the papers that she would make an address. As he led Mrs. Eddy: through the anteroom to escort her to the stage, he acquainted her with his purpose. His fear that she would refuse to accede had led him to delay telling her until the last moment before she stepped upon the platform. A student much beloved of Mrs. Eddy who was standing near the door, saw her protest with an outward sweep of her hand and a slow negative shake of the head, and declare with emphasis that she was in no way prepared to speak. The clergyman, all excitement and nervousness, persisted and Mrs. Eddy halted for a moment on the threshold of the stage and lifted her eyes as though for inspiration and guidance. A newspaper report of what followed says:

Without a subject selected and without notes she entered the platters when, as by some preconcerted plan, the whole vast audience rose to its feet and welcomed her. She walked to the center of the stage and after being introduced recited the first verse of the ninety-first psalm and in the address which followed her voice filled that immense auditorium so that those most remote from her could hear distinctly.

The address thus delivered without preparation, outline, or text has been pronounced by many of her students to be one of the greatest statements of Christian Science ever made from a rostrum. Like Lincoln’s great unreported speech, delivered in Bloomington, it came upon the delegates as a surprise, and so spellbound were the hearers that the very reporters forgot to take notes. It was inadequately reported, and though the substance of it was sent out to the papers, and was printed in the Journal, and the report was subsequently reprinted in “Miscellaneous Writings” under the subject, Science and the Senses, it is certain that something of the spirit of her utterances was lost in the transcription, for the amazing effect of her address cannot entirely be understood from reading it to-day.

When she ceased speaking, the scenes which immediately followed were intensely dramatic, extraordinary, unprecedented. In the audience were many who had been healed from grievous illnesses by reading her book, and scarcely any of her hearers but had known of marvelous cures; hence the audience was anticipating a miraculous wave of health and it received it at flood tide. Whatever had been on the program was forgotten for the time, swept aside by an impetuous forward rush of that audience to the platform, indifferent to the chairman’s attempts to get a hearing.

It was well Mrs. Eddy was elevated above the throng or she would have been borne down by it. As it was, men leaped to the stage and assisted women to follow. They wanted to take her hand, to tell her of wonderful healings, to touch her dress if nothing more. A babble of rejoicing broke forth above which came the cries of many who were crowded to the rear, beseeching attention to themselves. A mother who failed to get near held high her babe, an old woman held up palsied hands, crying, “Help me!” Some persons declared the address had healed them spontaneously. Men and women wept together.

So carried away by the tide of emotion as to neglect details, the newspaper correspondent who reported these events for a Boston paper declared simply that many were healed there and then. As a matter of fact the cases verified were actually eleven. The Boston Traveler reporter said: “As the people thronged about Mrs. Eddy with blessings and thanks, meekly and almost silently she received their homage until she was led away from the place, the throng blocking her way from the door to the carriage.”

While in Chicago Mrs. Eddy lived at the Palmer House, and access to her being easily gained, importunate callers besieged her doors. It was no part of her plan to hold a public reception in Chicago, or in fact to do anything of a public nature. Her amazement at the publicity thrust upon her left her without choice, and how to satisfy the sudden demand for personal greeting was a difficult question to decide. In the evening of the day on which she experienced such an ovation, she decided to go to the parlors for a short time to satisfy the persistent callers.

Learning of her decision, the hotel hurriedly decorated the rooms with a profusion of flowers, giving a festive and brilliant appearance for an impromptu reception. This was to prove a singular function. Men and women of wealth and fashion crowded and elbowed persons from the humblest walks of life. The parlors, the corridors, the stairways were thronged. When Mrs. Eddy came from her private suite and entered the drawing-room, the assemblage almost immediately lost its head in one concerted, intense desire to touch the hand of the woman who had so eloquently preached God’s love as to make the sick well at the sound of her voice. They pressed forward upon her regardless of each other. Silks and laces were torn, flowers crushed, and jewels lost. Mrs. Eddy drew back from the pressure of humanity and as she looked upon the flushed faces she seemed to shrink within herself, as if asking, “What came you here to see?” She turned to her secretary and companion for assistance and almost immediately withdrew by a side door. When the company learned that she had withdrawn they gradually and disappointedly dispersed.

From such scenes Mrs. Eddy had always shrunk with peculiar sensitiveness. As she had told her students when first coming to Boston, she now reiterated to her immediate helpers, “Christian Science is not forwarded by these methods.” A year later in Steinway Hall, New York City, Mrs. Eddy had a similar experience. There the audience was requested to file by her across the stage, and obedience to the request was enforced by the ushers. In the confusion of the reception, however, strange scenes occurred. Faithful students were startled to see Mrs. Mary H. Plunkett press forward, take Mrs. Eddy’s hand, and leaning forward, dramatically kiss her cheek. Thus she publicly associated herself with the teacher whose work she had misrepresented and whose trust she had betrayed.

Public functions and such scenes of worldly ambition had much to do with a resolve which was growing in Mrs. Eddy’s mind to withdraw entirely from public life that the adulation of her personality might cease and the truth she taught have opportunity to make its way through the work of her students.

1. “Miscellaneous Writings,” p. 350.
2. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 73.
3. “The profound truths which you announce, sustained by facts of the immortal life, give to your work the seal of inspiration — reaffirm in modern phrase the Christian revelations. In times like these, so sunk in sensualism, I hail with joy your voice, speaking an assured word for God and immortality, and my joy is heightened that these words are of woman’s divinings.” — Bronson Alcott in a letter to Mary Baker Eddy, dated Concord, Mass., and quoted in the “Journal.”
4. Katherine Conway, of The Pilot, in an interview.
5. It was a great mistake to say that I employed Reverend James Henry Wiggin to correct my diction. It was for no such purpose. I engaged Mr. Wiggin so as to avail myself of his criticisms of my statement of Christian Science, which criticisms would enable me to explain more clearly the points that might seem ambiguous to the reader. Mr. Calvin A. Frye copied my writings, and he will tell you that Mr. Wiggin left my diction quite out of the question, sometimes saying, “I would n’t express it that way.” He often dissented from what I had written, but I quieted him by quoting corroborative texts of Scripture.

   In Christian Science my diction has been called original. The liberty that I have taken with capitalization in order to express the “new tongue” has well nigh constituted a new style of language. In almost every case where Mr. Wiggin added words, I have erased them in my revisions.

   Mr. Wiggin was not my proof-reader for my book, “Miscellaneous Writings,” and for only two of my books. I especially employed him on “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” because at that date some critics declared that my book was as ungrammatical as it was misleading. I availed myself of the name of the former proof-reader for the University Press, Cambridge, to defend my grammatical construction, and confidently awaited the years to declare the moral and spiritual effect upon the age of “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” … I hold the late Mr. Wiggin in loving and grateful memory for his high-principled character and well-equipped scholarship. Mary Baker Eddy.⁠

   Pleasant View, Concord, New Hampshire, Nov. 20, 1906.
   

   ⁠— Statement printed in the “New York American,” November 22, 1906.