Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/257

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FIRST EDITION OF SCIENCE AND HEALTH
215

chapter should be written. Months had passed since the printer received her copy. He had been paid nearly $1,000 but he still delayed, and all efforts to persuade him to finish the book were in vain.

Contrary to her inclinations, Mrs. Glover set to work at the painful task of delineating the counterfeit of Christian Science. She wrote out the manuscript for a complete chapter and with this started to Boston to confer with the stubborn printer. The printer had himself started to see her, however, to tell her that he had already prepared the copy which he had in hand and wished her to give him sufficient more to comprise a closing chapter. They met at the Lynn railway station and both were astonished. He had come to a standstill through motives and circumstances unknown to her, but had resumed his work, as his explanations showed, at the same time that she had begun writing the pages she had been reluctant to pen; and now that he was ready for more copy he met her on her way to him with the closing chapter of the first edition of “Science and Health.”

The book came out in the fall, the edition numbering one thousand. It was a stout volume bound in green cloth, a succinct, concise, and lucid statement of Christian Science. Though Mrs. Eddy many times revised this book, her revision was always for what she believed to be an improvement of expression. The essential statements are the same as in the original volume. Because of these subsequent labors, because she rearranged the order