Science and Health 527" merism, animal magnetism, and similar terms marked merely the reversion to a Mid-Victorian type of which most women of Mrs. Eddy's later years had scarcely heard. But she kept at her task, mainly alone, since hers was not the temperament to get much help from the outside. James Henry Wiggin, from 1885 to 1890, gave more aid perhaps than anybody else in putting into conventional literary form her earnest thinking. As a cultivated New England man in the inner circle of literary Boston, Mr. Wiggin seems to have been the "paid polisher" whose hand Mark Twain discovered in the book. At first she gave him much freedom in revising, though insistent both on her thought and on its special phraseology. But her helper never took her seriously. A jovial Falstaff, with a modern education, he could not altogether satisfy a woman so profoundly serious as was Mrs. Eddy. At last she began to complain to her publisher about her helper's "flip- pancy," and the disillusioned cosmopolitan to whom the task, unspeakably sacred to the author, appeared to be "pot-boiling," dropped in 1890 out of her life. With or without help, she presssed forward through the years, endeavouring to make her leading idea, increasingly to her a solemn revelation, as clear to others as it was to her. Not a day passed even in her latest years — it is credibly reported — that she did not put some touch upon the book. Not even Lincoln surpassed her in the patient effort to learn how to write good English. Her mind was on a single track, but to her apprehension and to that of many others the track led heaven- ward. She thought it worth her while to try and try until the end. Certainly her . subjunctive gradually grew more obedi- ent. She ceased to give subjects to participles, and her tenses learned "to stay put." Toward the close, her mode of expres- sion became more logical and more connected, and a certain lofty and sonorous distinctiveness emerged, as her personality dominated by the constant consciousness of God, became increasingly serene, prophetic, and influential far beyond the reaches of her voice and pen. Her best qualities seem to be illustrated in the following quotations which are believed specially to have commended themselves to Christian Scientists : "Truth's immortal idea is sweeping down the centuries,
