The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Chapter 02

by Sibyl Wilbur

CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD DAYS

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.

The allurement which drew settlers into this region in the early days was doubtless the glorified face of Nature. Here was no prairie, easily tilled; here were no gold mines, promising sudden wealth. But there was a constant uplift for the heart, vaguely felt more often than it was understood. There is an enchantment in the New Hampshire panorama, the series of great pictures which unroll in one continuous stretch of glorious scenery, an enchantment so pervading that it is never forgotten. A logger on the mountain-side to-day looks down with indifference upon a transient tourist. The logger’s cup of content is full if he can make a bare living in the forest.

Summer spreads for the son of New Hampshire a shimmering wonder of green and gold with silver rivers winding placidly, fed by those headlong torrents farther up in the rocky hills, where the burning breasts of the mountains are lifted from their headless shoulders. There, too, like Victory’s, is seen the stride of their sheer descents, throwing back the clouds for draperies. This is summer, summer of ripening grain fields, summer of odorous, melodious South winds, balsam-scented and hemlock-tuned.

Autumn’s brilliant moment of splendor passes and the traveler flees before the sere and drear November, gray, brown, and sodden with fog and freezing tears. The mountaineer stays and cuts his logs. Now the great nature painting of all the seasons is preparing. The frost has bitten, the snow has fallen, and once more the sun shines forth. Behold the blue peaks, lifted above the green of the hemlock and the pine, and the dazzling sweep of virgin snow. The air is stimulating and purifying. Over this land bends a sky which gathers its true sons to her heart, whose stars are eloquent, whose storms are majestic, whose day-dawns are passionately tender.

The farmer and the mountaineer of to-day feel the divine salute of Nature as did the early settlers of the state. 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.

So it should be realized it was the union of beauty and severity that gave to the New Hampshire character at its best the giant soul, — giant for wrestling toil, giant for deep and long-enduring pain, giant in its capacity for thinking and loving.

MRS. EDDY'S BIRTHPLACE IN BOW, NEW HAMPSHIRE

As it looked when she was a child. From a chalk drawing by Rufus Baker, steel engraved

Engraving copyrighted by Rufus Baker

Mark Baker’s farm in Bow lay on the uplands. It was cleared and cultivated by his father and older brothers before him. The farmhouse was situated on the summit of a hill from which, in gradual undulations, the land sloped to the Merrimac River. The view included three townships and was broad and picturesque rather than grand. Mountains there are in the distance; but this region of the state is scarcely in the foot-hills, though its rugged uplift gives promise of the vast range on the far horizon.

The farmhouse faced the East. It was unpainted in those days and consisted of a two-story and a half main building with a sloping-roofed ell. In the main building was the living room with its great fireplace and the best chamber adjoining. Above these were two chambers and the garret. In the rear were kitchen and butteries with chambers above. The stables were on the West, so that a long feeding-shed connecting them with the house-shed at right angles made a windbreak against the North wind for the dooryard. This was a sunny spot for the farm fowls, and a place also where logs were trimmed, horses groomed, and wagons loaded for the market.

A sunny garden surrounded the front door in which in summer were lilacs and roses and old-fashioned marigolds. To the East was the orchard enclosed by a stone wall three feet broad, part of which is still intact, though necessarily it has been rebuilt and repaired innumerable times. The breadth of the walls tells the story of the labor involved in clearing the farm not only of timber but of rocks. Across the road were pastures and grain fields, while to the North and beyond the orchard and stables were woodlands.

That the house was well constructed and comfortable was attested by its century-old frame which stood swept by storm and brooded over by sunshine on the untenanted lands still belonging to Baker descendents until 1910. The sheds were torn away and only the shell remained. It was removed to a place by itself on the edge of the pasture land, and one old apple tree bloomed each spring at the chamber window where Mary Baker first saw the light and throughout the period of her earthly existence. The author ate of its fruit while Mrs. Eddy yet resided at Pleasant View.

The day of her birth was July 16, 1821. Mary was the youngest child. Her brothers were Samuel, Albert, and George; her sisters, Abigail and Martha. The children were not far apart in years. Albert was ten and Abigail scarcely more than six when Mary was born. Albert and Abigail, of them all, were especially tender to the baby sister, and in the years to come exercised greater care for her, — the brother in her education, and the sister during her invalid widowhood.

A beloved member of the household when Mary was born was the venerable grandmother Baker who received this babe into her arms with a special solicitation to God. She conferred upon it the name Mary, which was her own name and that of her mother before her. Grandmother Baker’s chair stood by the fireplace. She overlooked the farmyard, and its busy occupations when she glanced up from her knitting; or, sending her glances out through the front door, open on a heated summer day, she saw the bees drowsing in the flowers, the bending grain beyond where the South winds made billows of light and shade. A precious care was in her charge. Ever and anon she touched with her foot the rocker of the cradle, or bent to scan the features of the babe sleeping there and so through the heat of August and the cool September she was the good angel watching and guarding.

The household tasks were not light for the mother of early New England days; she could not brood over a cradle. Mrs. Baker was industrious and placid of spirit, and the placidity meant much for the spirit of her home. She could brew and bake and care for her dairy, scour and sew and weave and dye — all women did this in those days — and it is reported of Mrs. Baker that she was “capable.” But Mrs. Baker found time for the unusual, for visiting the sick and administering to the needy; for entertaining her friends and maintaining the social life; for overseeing her children’s education and holding the family to high spiritual ideals. It is not sufficient to say of her that she was a capable, conscientious New England woman; this she was, but more. And she has left behind her memories that attest it.

Mrs. Baker was one of those rare mothers of that period who found time for reading; and when guests filled her house, relatives, clergymen, or men of affairs, her judgments and observations were sought and her influence in conversation was reported inspiring and uplifting. She was no Penelope, silent at her own fireside while the guests alone enjoyed social discourse. From touching mind and heart with these guests while serving them with hospitable attentions, she deduced ideas for the benefit of her children, ideas which she applied to each according to his temperament. After her death her clergyman, the Rev. Richard S. Rust, D.D., “who,” Mrs. Eddy has said, “knew my sainted mother in all the walks of life,” wrote of her as one who possessed a presence which made itself felt like gentle dew and cheerful light. He said she possessed a strong intellect, a sympathizing heart, and a placid spirit, and as a mother was untiring in her efforts to secure the happiness of her family.

But the hands of this mother who labored untiringly were filled with duties in a home made prosperous through personal toil. It was an early American farm and the farm life hummed industriously from early morn until starlight, forwarded by the energy and will of both parents. 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; her grandmother’s recollections and store of spiritual wisdom were poured into the hungering mind agape like a young robin's mouth. And what stories these were and how they thrilled the awakening imagination! for this grandmother, descended from the Scotch Covenanters, could tell dramatic tales of a land torn by religious dissensions for nearly a century.

We can imagine the little Mary on a certain day taken by her grandmother to visit the garret. Up the steep stairs they climb together, the baby hand confidingly in the brown and wrinkled one. Up here under the low-slanting roof, amidst odors of lavender, catnip, and sage, in a dusty gray twilight, weird because of the stray sunbeams that pierce it, grandmother takes from the depths of an old chest the sword of a far-away Scottish ancestor, the blade rusting in its brass scabbard. The child is allowed to handle it, tries to draw the blade, and with great eyes hears its history. Then as she still tugs at it, grandmother kneeling back on her heels sings in quavering accents, “Scots who hae wi’ Wallace bled.”

“How long ago was it that Sir William Wallace drove the English out of the highlands and back to their own lands?”

“Five hundred years ago. Yes, for five hundred years that sword has been handed down from kinsman to kinsman. My father’s father’s fathers were Highlanders, wore the kilt and trampled the purple heather and played the bagpipes that summoned the clans.”

“But why did your father and mother leave Scotland, grandmother?”

“We came away for religious liberty, child, that we might worship God according to our conscience.”

“But I should not have run away. And I should have worshiped God according to my conscience. And they could have taken their swords and killed me.”

“Ay, they did that, my bairn; the blood was spilled of many a God-fearing man. Your ancestors wrote their names on the covenant in blood, and that meant they would keep the covenant with their life blood. Ay, dearie, dearie; it was a long and bitter and terrible strife, but religion was more to our ancestors than their lives.”

“What is religion?” asks the child, dropping the sword and resting her hands on her grandmother’s shoulders.

“Religion is to know and worship God.”

And there in the twilight of the garret the child fell a wondering, doubtless making then and there her covenant, while the grandmother returned to rummaging in the old chest which had crossed the ocean. Now the grandmother took from the chest some old newspapers, yellow with age, together with certain old manuscripts. She carried these down to the living room and there on occasions read from them various stories to the little girl.

These stories were of Washington, of Valley Forge, of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, of the farewell of the commander-in-chief to his troops, and of the death and burial of the first American president. The stories made a deep impression on the child’s mind and she put many questions to her father concerning these events, causing the theme of the family conversation around the fireside to be set to a patriotic key.

“I remember,” says Mrs. Eddy in “Retrospection and Introspection,” written at least sixty years after these times, “reading in my childhood certain manuscripts containing Scriptural sonnets besides other verses and enigmas which my grandmother said were written by my great-grandmother. … My childhood was also gladdened by one of my grandmother Baker’s books, printed in olden type and replete with the phraseology current in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among grandmother’s treasures were some newspapers yellow with age. Some of these, however, were not very ancient, nor had they crossed the ocean, for they were American newspapers, one of which contained a full account of the death and burial of George Washington.”

The grandmother cherished the idea that Hannah More was a relative in some way to her mother. She talked of the pious authoress and of the fact that her mother had written the manuscripts she displayed. The family rejected the idea of relationship with the English authoress, but Mary, listening to these discussions of literary talents inherent in the blood of her forebears, early resolved to grow up wise enough to write a book. There is no doubt that the great resolutions of her life, already infused with tenacious qualities of loving and willing, were made under the inspiration of the religious grandmother.

From the reading of these old books and papers the child acquired a grave and dignified way of speaking. Mary's sayings were quoted frequently, in a different spirit, by different members of the family. The grandmother would repeat them dotingly, the father, with grim humor to his guests, and her gifted brother, teasingly and lovingly. He was at this time preparing for college.

Mark Baker was too busy a man for much leisure with his family, yet he had time to guide each son to a successful career. Mary, the youngest daughter of the flock, delicate in health from her birth, was not easily understood by this man of iron will. She perplexed him with her sage sayings and grave doings. The strange stories told about this little one by the grandmother and mother made him wonder sometimes with deep concern.

The story that most perplexed him was that of Mary's “Voices.” When but eight years old Mary frequently came to her mother, asking her earnestly what she wanted of her. “Nothing, child,” her mother would reply.

“But, mother, who did call me?” she would beseech. “I heard some one call ‘Mary’ three times!”

This assertion that some one was calling her was continually made by the child for nearly a year, until her parents grew anxious for her health. “Take the books away from her,” said her father; “her brain is too big for her body.”

Accordingly she was sent to romp in the fields, to gather berries and wild flowers along the walls, to sing among the bees. She must not hear so many exciting tales, or be allowed to brood in fancy. As the summer turned into fall she must needs be more indoors, but her brother Albert found her on a drear November evening, huddled close to the pasture wall, singing softly. The noisy pigs were squealing in the sty and the child had stolen out from the warm fireside to sing to them, thinking they needed comfort before they would go to sleep. Carrying her in on his shoulder, her brother deposited her in her grandmother’s arms, telling merrily of the quaint lullaby.

“But,” said the child excitedly, “they are crying and it must be because it’s cold and dark out there.”

“God cares for all his creatures, my bairn,” said the grandmother, soothing and caressing the chilled little maiden.

The voices had not ceased to call the little girl, but Mary had ceased to respond to them. Mrs. Eddy has told of these persistent callings which were heard by her for some twelve months, and in her autobiography says:

One day when my cousin, Mehitable Huntoon, was visiting us, and I sat in a little chair by her side, in the same room with grandmother, the call again came, so loud that Mehitable heard it, though I had ceased to notice it. Greatly surprised, my cousin turned to me and said, “Your mother is calling you!” … I then left the room, went to my mother, and once more asked her if she had summoned me. She answered as always before. Then I earnestly declared my cousin had heard the voice and said that mother wanted me. Accordingly she returned with me to grandmother's room, and led my cousin to an adjoining apartment. The door was ajar and I listened with bated breath. Mother told Mehitable all about this mysterious voice and asked if she really did hear Mary's name pronounced in audible tones. My cousin answered quickly and emphasized her affirmations. That night before going to rest my mother read to me the Scriptural narrative of little Samuel, and bade me, when the voice called again, to reply as he did, “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.” The voice came; but I was afraid, and did not answer. Afterward I wept, and prayed that God would forgive me, resolving to do next time as my mother had bidden me. When the call came again, I did answer in the words of Samuel, and never again to the material senses was that mysterious call repeated.^[1]

What wisdom and love in this spiritual-minded mother, causing her to guide her child into the full benefit of her first deep religious experience! She did not contradict, rebuke, or deride; but guided gently part of the way, then left the child to go up alone to that mount of sacred experience which no two human beings, however tender their relation, can ascend together.

1. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 17.