The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
THE DISCOVERY OF THE PRINCIPLE OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
IN the autumn of 1864 Mrs. Patterson rejoined her husband in Lynn. After some desultory practise in the offices of other dentists, he had established himself in an office of his own, and the results of his application to business had made it possible for him to send for his wife.
Lynn, a manufacturing center, eight miles from Boston, was now to be her home, save for short periods, for fifteen years, and here her great discovery was made and first promulgated. Lynn is too large and important a city to be thought of as a suburb of Boston, though towns more distant from the metropolis of New England bear that relation to the larger city. Lynn is now a foremost city of Massachusetts and was then a thriving town, where the largest shoe manufacturer in the world had his establishment. It is on the seacoast, but has not a shipping port; residential streets skirt the shore; there is a broad plaza, sea-wall, and promenade along the ocean front, and a beautiful drive connects the town with quaint old Marblehead. This drive marks the beginning of what is known in New England as the North Shore, which extends all the way to Gloucester, about thirty miles, and along which stretch of ocean view are situated Manchester-by-the-Sea, Prides Crossing, and Magnolia, the summer homes of the greatest wealth of America.
Though Ocean street, Lynn, has many handsome residences, — the people living there boasting that nothing intervenes between them and Ireland save the stormy Atlantic, — still the city is not regarded as a summer resort, nor a residential district of Boston, but, as a factory town, one of the most important shoe factory centers in the world. When the American Civil War made a great demand for shoes, the old-fashioned method of producing foot wear by hand labor was not adequate to meet the demand. Men who held patents on machines for sewing sole leather found it lucrative to rent their machines and many small factories sprang up at this time, not only in Lynn, but in other towns adjoining Boston where land rent was cheaper than in the city and where labor could be attracted. Lynn easily led in this industry. Its situation was beautiful, the climate healthful, the accessibility to Boston with its many advantages easy. This industry very early attracted women workers as well as men and whole families went into the shoe factories, for women and children could operate the machines and find employment in the many divisions of the labor which arose from the factory method. Thus the character of a large proportion of the population of Lynn is indicated, and it will be readily grasped that this was an excellent starting point for a great religious work, even as Jesus found a seed place among the fishermen of Galilee and Paul among the tent-making Thessalonians.
The thriving town attracted professional as well as business men. A dentist should find plenty to do where so many of the population of both sexes earned good wages. Dr. Patterson after frittering his time away here for months had been to see his wife’s family and doubtless had been admonished by both Mark Baker and Mrs. Alexander Tilton. The latter, believing rigidly in the conventionalities as she did, thought it not proper that Dr. Patterson should keep up his meandering and his desultory occupations. His fitful, incoherent busying of himself with first one project and then another bore no relation to the continuity of existence and compelled his wife to remain in suspended expectation, a guest of relatives and friends, awaiting his mood. Thus Abigail Tilton had taken him to task roundly, and smarting under her words, he had rented the office in Lynn and, with a revival of exuberance and excessive overconfidence, had inserted an advertisement in the local paper in which he asked those whom he had met in his brother dentists’ offices to patronize him in the future and stated that he hoped to secure the patronage of “all the rest of mankind.” He gradually secured a respectable practise, for he was a good dentist and might have succeeded very well had he been less idle, boisterous, and romantic. But he was a born rover, and coupled with his restlessness was a silly vanity in his powers of fascination over equally silly and romantic women. When Mrs. Patterson rejoined him after over two years of separation, it was for but a brief reunion of little more than a year’s duration. It was her final effort, a serious and praiseworthy effort, to reconcile her husband to regular living and social obligations. She had no light task in holding to right conduct her handsome, wayward, uncouth husband, whose nature craved the flesh-pots, the gauds and baubles of sentimentalism, the specious glamour of notoriety, and over whom “sweetness and light” had but little sway.
With a loyal devotion Mrs. Patterson strove to fulfil her duty as a wife, never betraying what her gentler nature suffered in outraged pride, wounded sensibility, or humiliated aspiration. This man was her husband, she threw the cloak of love over his shortcomings and sought to interest and lead him into the highest associations with which he could be affiliated. During the months which followed, as they were not householders and she had no home duties, she occupied herself with writing, many of her poems and prose articles appearing in the Lynn papers. She attended church and became acquainted with some of the excellent old families of the city, of which friendships some interesting associations continued throughout a long period of her life.
Mrs. 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. But though the New Englander is used to this sort of manner, he is not insensible to the gentler appeal and invariably falls captive to the foreigner or Southerner who more easily practises graciousness. Mrs. Patterson was gentle and engaging, her manner in meeting a stranger winning and convincing in its frank sincerity. Her substantial qualities of natural gifts and cultivation, however, held what she so readily gained. Entering into this larger life of Lynn after a long absence from any extended social intercourse, she at first felt the instinct to enjoy its natural pleasure; but she must have been forced soon to the discovery that she could not maintain a social life suitable to her breeding, for people who received her with every evidence of pleasure were but ill-disposed toward the flamboyant dentist whom they must sooner or later encounter. It would be remarked as a disappointing and amazing bit of social data that so gifted and attractive a woman should be married to a man so ordinary, if not vulgar. What could follow for Mrs. Patterson but a social aloofness and a tuning of her strings to suit the necessities?
Ordinary was not the word for Dr. Patterson, since common persons more often than otherwise possess the virtues. Extraordinary was the word for him, who was florid, pretentious, and bombastic. He who had so effectively disported his frock coat, silk hat, kid boots and gloves in the rural mountain districts, making artisans and farmers’ wives yearn after his departing figure, in the keener social light of Lynn appeared as rather a boorish Beau Brummel, not overnice in the proprieties. In fact gross Impropriety was soon to stamp him unmistakably and thereafter claim him for her own.
Not for the satisfaction, therefore, of any aspiration of her own, but to interest her husband and give him a social environment in which he would not trip at every step, Mrs. Patterson joined him in uniting with the Linwood lodge of Good Templars. The “Worthy Chief” of that organization found that Mrs. Patterson wrote for the press occasionally and was gifted as a speaker and that when she could be prevailed upon to address the lodge, she was listened to with unfeigned interest. Her well-stored mind invested any subject she handled with vital interest and her pleasing address made her a most engaging speaker.
“Mrs. Patterson was unusual in almost every particular,” the lodge president has said, “unusually well-bred, cultivated, and fine-looking, and of excellent taste in matters of dress and the toilet. Some people would comment unfavorably through a sense of inferiority, I firmly believe, and would call her affected, for she was unusually scrupulous in the observation of social form. She had a quiet way about her of commanding attention and in the delivery of an address was, in a strangely quiet way, impressive.”
With such a member on their lists it was not long before the lodge chose her as presiding officer of the Legion of Honor, the women’s branch of the association, and members have said she was in this capacity gracious and dignified, displaying a courteous charm with executive force. It is likely that in this office, obscure and unimportant as it was, Mrs. Eddy learned her first lessons in organization and leadership.
Thus the Pattersons lived an outwardly calm and decorous existence, and whatever was transpiring underneath of social waywardness on the part of the husband no outward sign was allowed to manifest itself through the wife’s deportment. No breath of scandal was ever circulated as to their domestic harmony. Mrs. Patterson’s writings occupied the time she spent alone. Some of her poems written at this time were outbursts of patriotic feeling. The Civil War was drawing to a close, and the woman born with the blood of heroes in her veins found expression in verse for her deep love of country and her sympathy with emancipation. Her poems were printed side by side with those of John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Phœbe Cary and are preserved in the files of the Lynn papers. She wrote of the bells that rang out the proclamation of emancipation, of the fighting heroes at the front and those fallen in battle, of “our beloved Lincoln,” who “laid his great willing heart on the altar of Justice.” Thus she showed an ardent interest at all times in the affairs of her country. While her verse would not take rank with either Whittier’s or Holmes’ in poetic rhythm or diction, it expressed the fervor of her heart for the cause of freedom. In other instances she revealed an exquisite sensibility to the beauty of nature. Her sublime faith in God is a constant and pervading influence in all her writing, whether verse or prose.
Outwardly calm and decorous, Mrs. Patterson’s interior life was far from tranquil. She had come to Lynn from a period of philosophic abstraction, had come to fulfil her obligations as a wife and this task, as has been shown, was by no means a light or simple one. But difficult, almost desperate as it was, and doomed to failure in the end, it was not the greatest or most important problem of her existence. In meeting the demands of such a task she found the ordinary exercise of long trained domestic and social faculties available. In writing verse and news-letters she exercised developed mental powers. 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.
But underneath all assumption of gaiety and social charm, underneath the outward calm and sweetness of wifely devotion, there was a desolating war going on in the heart of this woman. It betrayed itself only occasionally and in half light to those who were most intimately associated with her and was the occasion of the withdrawal of some half-proffered friendships. She spoke too much of religion was the complaint of the shallow worldlings. No one of them comprehended, save one family of true friends, the depth of her struggle at this period. 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 far the effort has been to portray Mary Baker’s spiritual life side by side with the account of the incidents of her worldly experiences. She has been shown as a docile little girl absorbed in books, a beautiful young woman marrying and leaving home, a bereaved widow in her parents’ house comforting the declining years of her mother, a heart-broken mother herself, a much tried wife in a second marriage, — but through all the various changes in her outward fortune her spiritual life had been developing consistently. This life, awakened in the days of her loving communion with a devout mother, was strengthened in her conscientious struggles with a dominating Calvinistic father; it was stimulated by the uplifting companionship with her clergyman teacher; it was confirmed in the subsequent personal seeking for God in the cloistered suffering in the mountain home. Going out from that cloister she met the first real obstacle to her faith in the weird doctrine of Phineas Quimby. How she strove to harmonize his strange theories with her faith, how she labored to evolve a philosophy from his incoherencies has been related. 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.
She has written of this period that the product of her own earlier thought and meditation had been vitiated with animal magnetism and human willpower, the nature of which she was as ignorant of as Eve of sin before taught by the serpent. What serpent was to teach Mary Baker the nature of magnetism? That lesson was still far off. The unveiling of the angel’s face, the shining visage of Truth in her heart, was to precede the unveiled vision of error by years sufficient for her to grow to the fighting stature in the consciousness of its power.
But now she was all but dominated by the power of the darker error she has named mesmerism or magnetism, and her mental state was worse than the disease which had formerly tortured her body. While held in this state she still ascribed her cure to Quimby. His thought, his personality, was still obtruding itself between her and God. He was squarely in the light. Her religious peace, her faith, her spiritual being were threatened. Her anguish was intolerable and to no one could she turn for counsel to obtain relief.
Out of this smothered torment in which she sounded a deeper hell than Calvinists had ever imagined, she was lifted suddenly by a physical shock which set her free for her great discovery and revelation. This shock was caused by an accident which carried her to death’s door and from which she recovered in what seems a miraculous manner on the third day following.
This accident has been called, with various shades of sentiment, the “fall” in Lynn. To many thousands that fall with its subsequent uplifting has been the fall of their own torment, mental and physical, and the uplifting of their lives with Mary Baker Eddy’s. The incident or event, as one may look upon it according to his own experience, was recorded in the Lynn Reporter of Saturday morning, February 3, 1866, as follows:
Mrs. Mary Patterson of Swampscott fell upon the ice near the corner of Market and Oxford streets on Thursday evening and was severely injured. She was taken up in an insensible condition and carried into the residence of S. M. Bubier, Esq., nearby, where she was kindly cared for during the night. Dr. Cushing, who was called, found her injuries to be internal and of a severe nature, inducing spasms and internal suffering. She was removed to her home in Swampscott yesterday afternoon, though in a very critical condition.
When this fall occurred Mrs. Patterson was returning to her home from some meeting of the organization of Good Templars. A party of the lodge members was walking with her. She was in the full tide of that life which she had taken upon herself as a duty, but which lay so far apart from the path her conscience would have had her follow. In the midst of apparent light-hearted social gaiety she slipped on the ice and was thrown violently. The party stood aghast, but soon lifted her and carried her into a house, where it was seen that she was seriously injured. Then certain of them volunteered to sit by her bedside during the night. When the physician arrived he said little, but his face and manner conveyed more than his words. It was apparent to the watchers that he regarded her injuries as extremely grave and they believed him to imply that the case might terminate fatally. But Divine Will had another fate in view for Mary Baker.
Forty years after this event Alvin M. Cushing, who was the physician, began to say that it was he, and not God, who cured Mrs. Patterson of her injuries after the fall. The author interviewed Dr. Cushing at Springfield, Mass., in 1907. He stated that he administered a remedy which he called the third decimal attenuation of arnica which he diluted in a glass of water. He related that Mrs. Patterson was taken up unconscious and remained unconscious during the night and he believed her to be suffering from a concussion, and possibly spinal dislocation.
On the following morning, having visited her twice during the night, he found her still semiconscious but moaning “home, home.” He therefore administered one eighth of a grain of morphine as a palliative and not a curative, and procured a long sleigh in which she was laid wrapped in fur robes and carefully driven to her suburban residence.
This physician said he afterwards prescribed a more highly attenuated remedy which he himself diluted in a glass of water and of which he gave the patient a teaspoonful. He did not know whether she took more of it or not, but when he called again she was in a perfectly normal condition of health and walked across the floor to show that she was cured. He did not remember being told anything at the time of a miraculous cure through the power of prayer. But he was, according to his own reminiscence, an unusually popular man at the time, and had sixty patients a day. He drove a dashing pair of trotters and was much in evidence on the speedway when not in the consulting room. It is possible he was told of the manner of the cure, that he did congratulate his patient and then forgot the incident. But one thing he did not forget, for he claimed to have it in his memoranda, and that is the remedy he prescribed. He doubtless wrote it down in his tablets that the third decimal attenuation of arnica had marvelous curative properties for a concussion of the brain and spinal dislocation with prolonged unconsciousness and spasmodic seizures as concurrent symptoms.
Mrs. Eddy’s account of this accident differed from the physician’s and she knew what healed her and how she was healed and when it occurred. She was not responsible for the calling of the physician and only took his medicine when she was roused into semi-consciousness to have it administered, of which she had no recollection. After the doctor’s departure on Friday, however, she refused to take the medicine he had left, and as she has expressed it, lifted her heart to God. On the third day, which was Sunday, she sent those who were in her room away, and taking her Bible, opened it. Her eyes fell upon the account of the healing of the palsied man by Jesus.
“It was to me a revelation of Truth,” she has written. “The lost chord of Truth, healing as of old. I caught this consciously from the Divine Harmony. The miracles recorded in the Bible which had before seemed to me supernatural, grew divinely natural and apprehensible. Adoringly I discerned the principle of His holy heroism and Christian example on the cross when he refused to drink the vinegar and the gall, a preparation of poppy or aconite, to allay the tortures of the crucifixion.”[1]
A spiritual experience so deep was granted her that she realized eternity in a moment, infinitude in limitation, life in the presence of death. She could not utter words of prayer; her spirit realized. She knew God face to face; she “touched and handled things unseen.” In that moment all pain evanesced into bliss, all discord in her physical body melted into harmony, all sorrow was translated into rapture. She recognized this state as her rightful condition as a child of God. Love invaded her, life lifted her, truth irradiated her. God said to her, “Daughter, arise!”
Mrs. Patterson arose from her bed, dressed and walked into the parlor where a clergyman and a few friends had gathered, thinking it might be for the last words on earth with the sufferer who, they believed, was dying. They arose in consternation at her appearance, almost believing they beheld an apparition. She quietly reassured them and explained the manner of her recovery, calling upon them to witness it. They were the first doubters. They were there on the spot; they had withdrawn but a short time since from what they supposed was her death-bed. She stood before them fully restored to health. They shook their heads in amazed confusion. Although the clergyman and his wife rejoiced with her, they could not comprehend her statements. But for all the dissent of the opinion of friends, and later of medicine and theological dogma, Mrs. Patterson escaped, if not death, the clutches of lingering illness and suffering.
Mary Baker did more than experience a cure. She in that hour received a revelation for which she had been preparing her heart in every event of her life. She had really walked straight toward this revelation, though seemingly through a backward-turning path. The backward-turning was a part of the marvelous fitting of her nature, the enlightenment of her mind for the immense service later of delineating the counterfeit of spiritual healing and to post the warning signs against the dangers of hypnotism. She herself has written of the discovery:
In the year 1866 I discovered the Christ Science, or divine laws of Life, and named it Christian Science. God had been graciously fitting me, during many years, for the reception of a final revelation of the absolute divine Principle of scientific being and healing.[2]
When apparently near the confines of mortal existence, standing already within the shadow of the death valley, I learned these truths in divine Science: that all real being is in God, the divine Mind, and that Life, Truth, and Love are all-powerful and ever-present; that the opposite of Truth, — called error, sin, sickness, disease, death, — is the false testimony of false material sense — of life in matter; that this false sense evolves, in belief, a subjective state of mortal mind which this same so-called mind names matter, thereby shutting out the true sense of Spirit.[3]
Of the great discoveries in the world’s history it may be well to consider a moment which have blessed the human race most. The discovery of gunpowder and the invention of movable types came in about the same period. 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. Ether anesthesia brought in its train an elaborated surgery; 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. 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. There was an interval before she could demonstrate what dawned upon her in that hour. When the apple fell for Newton and the kettle steamed for Watt, natural scientific truth dawned on them, but each must apply himself to make clear his conception through years of careful elucidation and working out to a demonstrable point his scientific statement of principle. Mrs. Eddy writes:
My discovery that erring, mortal, misnamed mind produces all the organism and action of the mortal body, set my thoughts to work in new channels, and led up to my demonstration of the proposition that Mind is All and matter is naught, as the leading force in Mind-science.[4]
Indeed her thoughts were to work in new channels. She had risen as it were from death. Her friends immediately set up an argument that she was self-deluded, that she ought to be flat upon her back, that she was defying the laws of nature. This clamor of fear had a temporary effect upon her; it bewildered her into some doubt of her ability to maintain her discovery, even into some doubt as to its basis in truth. Two weeks after she had risen from her prostration she wrote a letter which was a last backward glance to Quimby and Quimbyism, — and yet a letter which sounded the small notes of the clarion. The letter was written to a former patient of Quimby, for Quimby was now dead. He had died the preceding month and could not again obtrude his unformulated theories between her mind and its own spiritual apprehensions. Her discovery waited for her full comprehension and acknowledgement. Yet she wrote a letter which, had it been answered differently, might have taken her back into animal magnetism and the confusion of hypnotism.
In the letter she describes her accident and says that the physician attending her had said that she had taken the last step she ever would, yet in three days she had gotten up from her bed and would walk. She says “I confess I am frightened, and out of that nervous heat my friends are forming, spite of me, the terrible spinal affection from which I have suffered so long and hopelessly. Now can’t you help me? I believe you can. I think I could help another in my condition.”
To this request the former patient replied that he did not know how Quimby had performed his cures and doubted if any one did. He distinctly declined the task of reviving Quimbyism or attempting to stand in the shoes of the mesmerist. So there was a closed door against that refuge from her own responsibility, a refuge which had presented itself to her mind as a last temptation. Quimby was dead; Quimbyism had perished with him. No one remained of those who had gathered round him in life to perpetuate his peculiar influence. Her fall had destroyed the very work she had so long credited him with. Everything must begin anew for her; life must be made completely over. She was forced to turn to God.
Her whole environment was about to be changed, for she was to be left without family and with the barest means of subsistence. Her faith faltered, her limbs trembled, but backward she could not go. It dawned upon her more and more insistently that God had laid a work upon her. The truth of spiritual being had illumined her and to acquaint humanity with this truth became imperative.
Some years after this period, when her work had begun to make headway, the patient of Quimby to whom she had written came forward to harass her with a pamphlet in which he displayed her former eulogies of Quimby and her letter to him asking him to take up Quimby’s work. She replied to this pamphleteer in the article on “Mind Healing History” in the Christian Science Journal, from which a quotation is given in regard to the manuscript controversy. In it she says:
Was it an evil hour when I exchanged poetry for Truth, grasped in some degree the understanding of Truth and undertook at all hazards to bless them that cursed me? Was it an evil hour when I discovered Christian Science Mind-healing and gave to the world in my work called “Science and Health” the leaves that are for the “healing of the nations.” Was it for some strange reason that the impulse came upon me to endure all things for Truth’s sake? Does ceaseless servitude while treading the thorny path alone and for others’ sake arise from a purely selfish motive? After the death of the so-called originator of mind-healing it required ten years of nameless experience for me to reach the standpoint of my first edition of “Science and Health.” It was after the death of Mr. Quimby and when I was apparently at the door of death that I made the discovery of the Principle of Divine Science. After that it took ten years of hard work before the first edition of “Science and Health” was published in 1875.[5]
Mary Baker very shortly began to walk the “thorny path” of which she writes, began the “nameless experience” with its incidents of painful humiliation which she has never recounted or disclosed. She has covered this period with the brief statement that she retired for a time from the world to carry out the work which was before her. The first painful incident came quickly on the heels of the illness resulting from the fall. Shortly after her recovery, Mrs. Patterson’s remarkable experience centered her attention fully upon the philosophy of religion. She determined that she would state the principle of health and life and that she would devote her pen to that purpose; she would no longer write for money or fame, but abandon herself utterly to. this great cause.
Dr. Patterson’s reaction to the resolution of his wife was characteristic. His response to her unworldliness was entirely worldly. He left Lynn mysteriously, deserting her, and not only did he leave her but he did so shamefully. He eloped with the wife of a wealthy citizen who had employed his services professionally. Sometime after the partner of his adventure came to the house where Mrs. Patterson was living and asked to see her. Mrs. Patterson received the repentant woman kindly and listened to her story. The woman said she had presumed to come to beg forgiveness and sue her for a favor because Dr. Patterson had so often spoken of his wife’s religiousness. The favor she had to beg of the woman she had wronged was that she would make intercession for her with the deserted husband that she might go home. This Mrs. Patterson undertook to do and succeeded in bringing about a complete reconciliation. She even persuaded the husband to forego a plan he had for confining his wife to her apartment for a period of penance, and by such persuasion so induced this man to allow sweetness and light to prevail that his home was thereafter a happy one. This was the second time in. her life that she performed the office of peacemaker for a woman who had been party to the desecration of her own home.
The summer months of 1866 were for Mary Baker a time of reconstructing and dedication of her life. Her husband had gone, gone forever. She could no longer in reason contemplate a life with him. He came back to ask forgiveness after the elopement; it was in his nature to do that, for to him there was no finality to the good-will he expected, however great his offense. But his wife did not receive him. “The same roof cannot shelter us,” she said quietly. “You may come in, certainly, if you desire, but in that case I must go elsewhere.” He stood fumbling with his hat upon the doorstep and then placed it upon his head. “Of what use would that be, Mary?” he faltered. “No, it is I who will go.”
Dr. Patterson thereafter roamed from town to town in New England, falling from the social standard of conduct on various occasions and losing social caste by degrees, until he was forbidden houses which had at first received him and, losing his practise when well begun in different towns, he at last retired to live the life of a hermit in Saco, Maine. In 1873 Mrs. Patterson secured a decree of divorce from him in the courts of Salem, Massachusetts. Directly after visiting his wife for the last time he went once more to the Tiltons. Mark Baker was dead; he had passed away the preceding autumn. Mrs. Tilton heard the dentist’s confession in silence. She had nothing to offer by way of advice for the patching up of difficulties. She saw they had reached a climax. But her practical mind made one suggestion as the amende honorable for the husband, that he should settle some sum, however meager, on Mary and not leave her utterly destitute. To this the doctor agreed and a sum was fixed upon to be paid twice a year. This was continued a few years, until Mrs. Patterson refused longer to accept it.
When the doctor had taken his departure, Abigail wrote to her sister to come home. “We will build a house for you next to our own and settle an income upon you,” she said. “You shall have suitable surroundings and not be annoyed by the friction of life in another home than your own. We can be together very much, and you can pursue your writing. There is only one thing I ask of you, Mary, that you give up these ideas which have lately occupied you, that you attend our church and give over your theory of divine healing.”
To this Mary Baker had but one reply, “I must do the work God has called me to.” But Abigail did not believe her sister. She decided to let her alone for a time. She felt sure that the grip of poverty, the silence of her family, the desertion of her husband would operate in time to bring her back to the old relations. She wanted her sister, but not keenly enough as yet to sacrifice one iota of her pride. Her boy Albert was just twenty-one, handsome, and a bit wayward; but she meant to master that and make a successful man of him. Her daughter Evelyn was only twelve, delicate, studious, pious, the idol of her father. She had great hope of her future. So then Mary, the sister, was after all outside her immediate concern, — save only she hoped Mary did not mean to disgrace them.
Sometimes, indeed, she had inward fears lest that strange spiritual genius of Mary’s really would make itself felt in the world and bring the reproach of “queerness” upon them. Up to this hour their family had been conventional New Englanders, farmers, manufacturers, wealthy, influential and orthodox both in politics and religion. Mary had stood out for abolition when it was unpopular and fanatical to do so. Her difference had made the townspeople talk years before. She had proclaimed curious religious ideas when she was last at home, ideas that had made the ladies of the sewing circle wonder and gossip. Perhaps after all it was as well that Mary should wear out her theories among strangers. Some day she would come back to them and they would take care of her. So thought Abigail Tilton, reckoning and weighing the contents of the situation with a mind of worldly prudence.
Poor Abigail. Husband and children were to be taken from her, too. Strangers who thought mainly of her fortune were to flatter her in her declining years of dictation, until dictation was no longer a joy. And pride which had separated her from her beloved sister so long kept her from imparting her last farewell to the one whom she truly loved deepest and best.
So Mary Baker sat alone through these summer months. She had her saddest thoughts to scan at the beginning and not the close of her career, for to her this was truly the beginning. She was forty-five years old and had lived through the experiences of more than a normal life. 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. Without worldly resources or even the social status of recognized widowhood, deserted by all who should have cherished her, might she not with sanction lay her head low to mourn?
Whether for many days or weeks she thought on these things, certain it is that this same year saw her gathering up the strands, strengthening her heart with courage, accepting her mission, and venturing forth steadfastly upon her destiny never again to turn back. From this year the story of Mary Baker’s life deals with religion. She has given up family for voluntary poverty, society for the contemplation of a new faith. She will for a time nourish this truth, elucidate it to her own mind with her pen, to her own heart with prayer, and in a decade will begin the work of promulgation.
- ↑ Christian Science Journal, June, 1887.
- ↑ “Science and Health,” p. 107.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 108.
- ↑ “Science and Health,” p. 108.
- ↑ Christian Science Journal, June, 1887.