In a brief paragraph is related the actual, technical work of reducing her discovery “to the apprehension of the age” in a new terminology, the foundation upon which all her subsequent work was built, the naming of the fundamental conceptions. She says of this earliest work in the stating of her Science:
I named it Christian, because it is compassionate, helpful, and spiritual. God I called Immortal Mind. That which sins, suffers, and dies I named mortal mind. The physical senses, or sensuous nature, I called error and shadow. Soul I denominated Substance, because Soul alone is truly substantial. God I characterized as individual entity, but His corporeality I denied. The Real I claimed as eternal; and its antipodes, or the temporal, I described as unreal. Spirit I called the reality; and matter, the unreality.[1]
This is the actual work of several years. How it was accomplished who shall say? Who can say when it first grew clear in Mary Baker’s understanding that “matter neither sees, hears, nor feels Spirit” and that the five physical senses testifying that God is a physical, personal Being like unto man are testifying falsely? Was it while she was at the Crafts’ humble cottage home in Taunton, or while with the turbulent Wentworth family? Was it during the quiet hours spent with the motherly old woman in the great empty house on the banks of the Merrimac in Amesbury, or was it while leaving an
- ↑ “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 39.
