Sibyl Wilbur

“ Mind-Science has begun to abolish the necessity of surgery, healing of itself the lame, the blind, the deaf; teaching mothers to bear children without pain, children to grow normally without malformation, men and women to abandon evil habits which bring consumption, scrofula, leprosy; nations to abandon wars which slaughter and cripple and leave a heritage of poverty and disease, — slowly but surely it works its way like civilization transforming savagery and the jungle. ”

“ For truth's sake, divest your mind of all speculation and conjecture by which the true story of this life has been so ruthlessly caricatured; divest it at least for the time, and approach without prejudice for an acquaintance with this truly great and singular character. We as human beings owe something to the consciousness of the age, the great highway of souls to come after us. We should make the path straight by rejecting wilful scandal, however amusing and diverting, and by choosing to know the simple gospel truth. ”

“ NO mystery to-day surrounds the life story of Mary Baker Eddy. Her birth, her ancestry for two hundred years, her education, her social development, and her individual service to the world have been scrutinized with the strong search-lights of both love and criticism. Every event of her long career has been established by unimpeachable records and testimony. It is no longer possible to invent fiction concerning the environment in which she was born and reared or the acts which made up her life. ”

“ Eddy’s students, — for those who had passed through her classes well knew that mental suggestion and Christian Science were as divergent as a chimeric dream and a scientific discovery, — but rather was it the thought that they might carry Christian Science itself outside the walls of its citadel and become writers and teachers and leaders among the philistines. Christian Science within the fold was too stringent in its demands. ”

“ Patterson, afterwards Mrs. Eddy, lived in Lynn, she was known as an unusual woman holding peculiar religious views. Never have I heard anything more against her, and I used to see her every day for many years. It was said she held peculiar views at which many people laughed. But no one spoke against her otherwise.”
Yet it was her very life that they were against, these friends of hers; for life meant nothing to her without religion. She could more easily give up society, culture, books, even church, than she could give up speaking of the understanding of God which had come to her. ”

“ Patterson encouraged, advised, and supported her student in all he did. During the evenings she discussed the principle of healing with him. Every cure that he made, however simple, was a further demonstration of the science. She was as deeply interested and as greatly rejoiced over each cure as was the practitioner. It was a season of wonder and delight to both teacher and student, and also at times to the faithful Martha of their household. But doubting relatives filled Mrs. Crafts with dissatisfaction and suspicion. To make shoes was a tangible, legitimate method of earning a living. ”

“ The discovery of the use of ether as an anesthetic and the discovery of Mind-Science also occurred in relatively the same period. Whatever appeals to the senses gains an audience with humanity more quickly than the gentler, more insistent appeal to the intelligence. Yet the former palls and dies, and the latter nourishes and lives. Hate, war, and death astound us and fill us with consternation; thought, love, and life come unawares like dawn and grow tenderly, gently into meaning, blessedness, and power. Gunpowder created a special hell, movable types the blessedness of literature. ”

“ Mary Baker did live in that consciousness, fully and deeply. Just as she lived in the consciousness of political struggle, just as she drank in the new literary atmosphere of that glorious school of New England writers, she was aware of that oscillation in religious notions. Every circumstance of her education and breeding had given her the habit of dealing with life in a large way. She who dared to set aside her father’s and sister’s political opinions to maintain her own convictions, most certainly had ideas concerning Spiritualism. ”

“ She had come to a crisis when her faith would no longer endure the association with ideas so incongruous. Her angel fought with the intruder which, veiled in obscurities, could not be named or recognized. The battle was terrific and it was prolonged. It had begun in 1862 and was still going on when the year 1866 dawned. The woman who was to promulgate a new understanding of Christianity, which would shake the world’s thought to its center, was undergoing the anguish, alarm, and terror of a cataclysmic upheaval which she concealed from all the world and bore alone. ”

“ Visible through the small-paned windows was the farm’s center of activity where the father and brothers went to and fro, now to the fields and now to the town, removing logs and rock, tending sheep and cattle, handling grain and fruits. Within the kitchen, mother and daughters worked not less continuously, laundry and dairy, needle and loom, claiming the attention in rhythmic succession. And of all these workers one knows the mother was earliest astir and latest to rest.
And so Mary Baker grew through infancy at her grandmother's knee and imbibed her grandmother’s stories and songs ”

“ They are sustained in their life of toil by the same enchantment. But one circumstance of life, one sacred influence they have lost, homely but potent. That is the fireplace of their ancestors. In the living room of the early farmhouses huge logs were burned, and this resinous fire, like a pure spiritual force subduing nature to the will of man, yielded a glory to the homely walls, lighted up the faces of the family circle, drawing each member into a hallowed area, making a sanctified center of their existence. ”

“ If in describing the conditions of life which bred New Hampshire giants, with its granite in their will and its hemlock in their soul’s fiber, one should neglect to indicate the beauty of summer days, or the clear, cold magnificence of winter months, in that mountainous upland, one would err in stating but half-truths of the environing influences, even though his efforts were but timid strokes. ”

“ Let no one think that even the greatest philosopher could contemplate the ruin of so many earthly hopes without heart pangs. Her child, long ago alienated from her by wile and subterfuge, was now a man roaming through the wild life of the West; the husband who had promised so much had gone in disgrace to live out his aimless whims for many years and die alone in his hermit’s hut. Her parents were both gone and her sister was obdurately set against the deep faith of her heart. ”

“ Whoever in any age expresses most of the spirit of truth and love, the principle of God’s idea, has most of the spirit of Christ.
“If Christian Scientists find in my writings, teachings, and example, a greater degree of this spirit than in others, they can justly declare it. But to think or speak of me in any manner as a Christ is sacrilegious. Such a statement would not only be false, but the absolute antipode of Christian Science, and would savor more of heathenism than of my doctrines.” ”

“ Who would begrudge her her hard-won right to retirement, peace, and serenity? It would be difficult to believe, did not all the world know, that in October of this same year two representatives of a New York newspaper did present themselves at Pleasant View and demand an audience with the venerable founder then in her eighty-fifth year. So churlish and so threatening was their demand, so steeped were they in a strange suspicion, that the faithful protectors of Mrs. Eddy’s home life knew not what to say. ”

“ I believe a new redemption is even now conceived of the Divine Spirit in the human heart, that is itself as a woman, broken in dreams and yet sustained in faith, patient, long-suffering, looking towards home. ”

“ With such deep-boring desire to explode the citadel of Christian Science faith and blow into the heavens its foundation stones, the insurrectionists would have accomplished destruction had it been in human power to do so, and the dust of centuries might again have settled over the spiritual revelation, as Spofford had once foretold would be the result if Christian Science were demolished. ”

“ Eddy did not write the entire contents of the Journal, far from it; there were numerous excellent articles by her students and co-workers. But her impress is strongly visible, and in glancing through its pages one can almost see her at work at her desk, so direct and vital is the editorial contact. It is journalism which has the keen and bracing atmosphere that was felt in the old days from such great dailies as Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. ”

“ 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 think I would give a thousand dollars to see her able to walk.”
“The demonstration of the principle is enough reward,” said Mrs. Patterson. “I know she can walk. You go to business and leave us alone together.”
“But I want to see you perform your cure, Mary,” said Charles Winslow, half mirthfully. “Indeed, I won’t interfere.”
“You want to see me perform a cure,” cried Mary Baker, with a flash of her clear eyes. “But I am not going to do anything. Why don’t you understand that God will do the work if Mrs. Winslow will let Him? Leave off making light of what is a serious matter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This argument is advanced only by those who have a vague and confused idea of Quimby. Its claims are these: that Quimby cured Mary Baker of her invalidism, that he gave her the germ ideas of her philosophy, that he presented her with manuscripts which she afterwards claimed as her own, that he focussed her mind, that he was the impetus of all her subsequent momentum. Were these contentions just, none but a perfidious ingrate would deny them. But not to deny them, circumstantially and in totality, is to leave open the gate to the quagmire that Christian Science is mesmerism religionized. ”

“ Something bigger, greater, more portentous, more far-reaching than domestic trials of a tragic character, than even the sense of the struggles of her country for honor and perpetuity, — and to Mary Baker these struggles were real affairs of her own living interest, — yet something more far-reaching than home or national life was making war Titanic in the subjective regions of her soul. ”

“ So if the intelligence was sometimes staggered in the search for the truth about this illustrious woman by encounter with malicious inventions, clearly discernible because of the known facts, the provable facts, which correct them, it was also frequently cheered and uplifted by touching the store of thought emanating from persons “whose spirits and cleanliness and freshness of mind and body make old age lovely and desirable.” ”

“ Her news-letters to the Lynn Reporter from Swampscott, the suburb in which she lived, were bright, gossipy communications in which she mentions affairs of the church, the schools, the construction of new and beautiful homes, with descriptions of the laying out of estates in agreeable schemes of landscape gardening. They indicate that she was a special writer of ability with a style peculiar to herself which characterized all her later writings. They betray a vivacity, color, fancy that give a sense of a living, glowing, radiant personality to whom life is always a wonderful revelation. ”

“ Patterson readily made friends whose attachment was strong. Her social success was easy, and she quickly gained a place of high regard among the most reserved. Her immediate conquest of strangers was through her indefinable charm which among the ruggeder qualities of both men and women came like the gentle graciousness of a Southerner. Society in New England cities has been remarked for a certain brusqueness, a downrightness which often ruffles the stranger. ”

“ It is as fundamentally incontrovertible as the axiom that truth is eternal, or that error dies of its own nature.
This great discovery depended largely on the fall of Mary Baker in Lynn, causing her to grapple with the violence of magnetism, rousing her from a mesmeric lethargy, and bringing to her developed spiritual nature the understanding of the principle of life. ”

“ It may appear extravagant to credit with notions of transcendentalism a shoe-worker of Lynn; but in great mental movements in a nation such as the American, or in a race such as the Anglo-Saxon, history has shown that the artisans, craftsmen, and farmers share in the intellectual experience of the scholars, if that experience is more than a passing ripple. This is especially true in the United States. If they are somewhat later than the scholars in arriving at their convictions, the sympathies and antipathies of the laboring class go deeper and are more compelling. ”

“ Eddy realized this; she desired to prepare for it, to have in readiness processes of amelioration for the miseries of an age more or less in the bondage of fear, an operative organization by which humanity might lay hold of the new hope which should thrill it. Christian Science must go forward, it must be presented to the world beyond this little city of Lynn, it must be organized.
To trace in any great movement, as Lecky the historian of rationalism has pointed out, the part which belongs to the individual and the part which belongs to general causes is an extremely delicate task. ”

“ Eddy, that she sent to the Boston Herald a kind tribute of appreciation.
But this interview did not satisfy a certain element of the press of America. The picture of a saintly character, living a contemplative and spiritual life of retirement did not accord with its preconceived notion, false as its own mental vision was. It yearned to press home upon the minds of the world its own image in a dramatic, first-page “story,” and for that end a newspaper of New York decided to make such a powerful demand for an audience that it should not be gainsaid. ”

“ 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. ”