The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Chapter 03

by Sibyl Wilbur

CHAPTER III

EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT

THOUGH we instinctively give heredity and natural environment a close scrutiny, and in viewing a character are prone to believe these to be principal formative agents; we still fancy we behold how destiny strikes through circumstances, and grasping a life, drags it root and all from its soil and culture to replant it for its great development. We shall see how Love inspired Mary Baker and drew her tenderly out of Puritanism to fit her for leadership in a warfare against materialism.

All the Baker children went to school at the crossroads, about a mile from the farmhouse on the way to Concord. When Mary began her schooling, her oldest brother, Samuel, with New England pertinacity, had gone to Boston to learn the trade of mason, from which he steadily developed into a contractor and builder of considerable importance. He built many brick buildings and rows of houses which stood long in Boston. Her brother Albert entered Dartmouth College when Mary was nine and returned home when she was thirteen. He studied law with Franklin Pierce at Hillsborough, and later spent a year in the office of Richard Fletcher of Boston and was admitted to the bar in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The youngest brother was also through with the district school when Mary began her formal studies.

Abigail, Martha, and Mary trudged to school alone along the country roads, their brother George calling to fetch them home in stormy weather. It soon developed that Mary could not endure the severe routine of the district schoolroom where restless farmers’ children, with noisily shuffling feet, droned through their lessons, and indulged in occasional rude pranks that ended in birchings. The ungraded district schools were at that time overcrowded and nerve-straining to pupil and teacher alike.

Mary, who could not endure to hear the calves bawl or the pigs squeal in their own farmyard without an effort to comfort them, was depressed or excited by the turbulence of school life. She was therefore soon taken out of that experience and went on with her books at home. The grandmother, full of years, had passed out of the home scene and Mary now came directly under the guidance and observation of her mother and also saw her father more freely now that the boys were away. Her mother she thought a saint, her father an embodied intellect and will.

Her father would enter the house from his farm work, his mind abstracted with business purposes, and would seat himself at the old secretary to write for an hour or arrange papers from his strong box. He was called upon to do much business for his town, making out deeds and settling disputes. Up to the front door would drive two wrangling farmers with a grievance. Mary, a shy spectator, beheld her father’s unvarying courtesy, his stern repression of profanity or angry speech. On one occasion when his judgment was not accepted and one of the disputants angrily protested, the child from her corner, imitating her father’s dignified bearing, though in the soft voice of her mother, interpolated, “Mr. Bartlett, why do you articulate so vociferously?”

The unexpected rebuke coming from a child and in such unfamiliar words, caused a burst of laughter, followed by general good humor and the neighbors departed in peace. “Mary settled that quarrel,” said her father with his grim smile, and for years after her speech was quoted whenever a turbulent social spirit threatened the general harmony.

Often the minister from Pembroke, “Priest” Burnham, as he was called, the man who was active in founding Pembroke Academy, would drive up to the farm to discuss with Mark Baker church matters, prolonging his visit to elucidate the faulty doctrine of a rebellious parishioner. Condemning all such to eternal judgment with theological satisfaction, the clergyman would offer prayer, after which, before departing, he would accept with benign graciousness the hospitality Mr. Baker would offer him at the corner cupboard. Mary watched such scenes with the gravest interest and remembered them vividly in after years, not without a peculiar relish of humor. Her father was a great churchman and often visited “backsliders” with this same “Priest” Burnham, to labor with them in matters of conscience, and presently she herself became the object of such solicitation.

Among the visitors that came to their home was Governor Benjamin Pierce. He had served through the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 and attained the rank of Major-General. He was twice governor of New Hampshire. Mark Baker was chaplain of the state militia, and a figure of some consequence in politics. Their politics were congenial, both being ardent Democrats and advocates of states rights. The old general sometimes brought with him on his drives to Bow his granddaughter, Fanny McNeil, who was related to the Bakers through her father, and while Mark Baker and the governor talked politics, the women discussed more congenial topics.

Mary liked best to listen to the weightier conversation, especially when it touched the welfare of some one dear to her heart. Once she heard the governor laughing merrily with her father over the way Mark Baker had got the best of his son, Franklin, in a lawsuit involving the towns of Loudon and Bow over a question of pauperism.

“You are not a lawyer, and yet my son says you beat him with your arguments,” said the governor.

“He bore his defeat in good spirit and offered me his congratulations,” replied her father. “He is a magnetic young man destined for great things. It is gratifying in these days of general bad manners to have an opponent of such courtesy and good-will. He swept me a bow like a soldier saluting his commander-in-chief — no less; and then shook hands with me like a kinsman.”

“And kinsmen we are in some sort, they tell me. See here, Mr. Baker, send your son Albert to see us when he comes home again. Get him into politics right! he can’t understand these matters too young, and Franklin is a zealous Democrat, you know.”

Somewhat later Albert made a visit to the Pierces’, and he, the undergraduate, formed a sincere and devoted attachment for the future president. Something about the young man attracted Franklin Pierce to him. He reminded him, no doubt, of that other devoted friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, his college mate at Bowdoin. Perhaps it was young Baker’s passion for abstract metaphysics.

“When you’ve finished college; come to me,” Franklin Pierce said in parting, “and I’ll start you reading law.”

The next time Mark Baker was in Concord, the governor entertained him at dinner. Governor Pierce, the politician, was pleased at the prospect of a close alliance with an old family of such wide ramifications as the Bakers of Bow and Pembroke with their numerous voters, and in signification of his satisfaction offered Mr. Baker a gold-headed walking-stick as he was leaving. Mr. Baker declined it, saying he never used a cane. His pride was as unbending as his rugged figure, which he carried erect to his grave.

The love between Albert Baker and his youngest sister was most tender, and she beheld these arrangements for his future with an interest beyond her years. She had seen him leave for college with a pang of desolation, and now with what impatience she watched with face pressed against the pane for his first return home!

When he finally came he caught her up, the frail little girl of nine, and set her once more on his shoulder to queen it through the house.

“Mother,” he said, “Mary is as beautiful as an angel.”

“Well, my son,” said the good mother; “she is as gentle and sweet-tempered as one.”

“Now, little sister, tell me about the books,” was his first question, when he had kissed her cheeks and stood her before him at the old secretary. “Have they let you have the books again?”

Vibrating with the bliss of having again with her this beloved brother, she leaned upon his breast and looked up into his face with eyes like dewy violets. She clasped and unclasped her hands around his neck and nestled to his heart. The excess of her emotional nature disquieted him vaguely. Here was no farm girl’s prosaic temperament.

“Now tell your brother,” said he, holding her gently, for he felt again what he had forgotten, how fragile and gentle she was, how like a flower that might be crushed. It was a moment of rare intimacy, such as seldom occurs between members of the same family, except with highly organized natures. It was moreover a moment which yielded important results in her after life.

Standing before him, she explained all her heart with shy candor; how it was that she loved him so because he was brave and honorable and a scholar; how she recognized his bravery because he had persisted in his determination to go to college; and his honor, because he had never cried out against the hardship of labor that went hand in hand with his studies.

“And I want very much to be a scholar, too,” she said.

“A scholar, and why, little sister?”

“Because when I grow up I shall write a book; and I must be wise to do it. I must be as great a scholar as you or Mr. Franklin Pierce. Already I have read Young’s ‘Night Thoughts,’ and I understand it.”

“Well, sister,” said Albert Baker seriously, “we will have this for a secret and I will teach you. You are still a very little girl, you know; but study your grammar and my Latin grammar. Next summer when I’m home I will teach you to read Latin. Does that make you happy?”

Ah, the deep embrace when Mary flung herself into her brother’s arms! Albert Baker was true to his word. He taught his sister during all his vacations. Mrs. Eddy has said that at ten she was as familiar with Lindley Murray as with the Westminster Catechism which she had studied with her sisters every Sunday since her babyhood. During the four years of her brother’s undergraduate work she read with him moral science, natural philosophy, and mastered the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew grammars. He was an able teacher and she an apt pupil. A friend wrote of him after his death that he was “fond of investigating abstruse metaphysical principles and schooled himself by intense and incessant study.” Mary corresponded with her brother and also with her cousin who was at college and her fame gradually spread as a young prodigy of learning whose writing fell naturally into poetry and whose thought was forever brooding on spiritual matters.

In spite of her intelligence, Mary Baker’s spiritual experiences continued to be grave and unusual, as had been her “Voices.” She was what her family thought morbidly devout, reading her Bible with absorbed interest, making its characters the familiar friends of her mind. When she discovered that Daniel prayed seven times daily, she formed the habit of doing so likewise. A curious fact is that she kept a record of these prayers in order to examine herself from time to time to learn if she had improved in grace. This was kept up through a number of years and was doubtless her first effort at composition. Her phrases were formed on the style of the psalmist and the prophets. So, when with his cousin, Albert commented on the unusual diction of Mary’s letters, he declared he could only account for it by the habit she had of constantly reading her Bible and writing and rewriting prayers in emulation of David.

Her religious experience reached a grave crisis when she was twelve years of age, though she did not unite with the church until five years later at Sanbornton Bridge. While still in Bow, writing and studying, her father’s relentless theology was alarmed at her frequent expression of confidence in God’s love. He held to a hard and bitter doctrine of predestination and believed that a horrible decree of endless punishment awaited sinners on a final judgment day.

Whether it was logic and moral science taught her by her brother, or the trusting love instilled by her mother who had guided her to yield herself to the voice of God within her, Mary resisted her father on the matter of “unconditional election.” Beautiful in her serenity and immovable in her faith, the daughter sat before the stern father of the iron will. His sires had signed a covenant in blood and would he not wrestle with this child who dared the wrath of God?

And well he did wrestle and the home was filled with his torrents of emotion. But though Mary might have quoted to him her own baby speech, she was too respectful and his “vociferations” went unrebuked. It is a remarkable thing to note, the conscience of a child in defense of its faith. Can any one suppose it an easy thing to resist a father so convicted with belief in dogma, a father, too, whom all their world honored and heeded? We may be sure it was not easy; that, indeed, to do so tortured this little child’s heart. But Mark Baker was acting according to his conscience, and the child knew it and respected him. She did not view this struggle of consciences as a quarrel, and repudiated all her life the idea that she ever quarreled with her father.

The notion went abroad, however, that Mark Baker and his daughter Mary were at variance over religion. The silly gossip of their world reported that she would not study her catechism. They said that Mary had a high temper for all her learning, she of whom her mother had said, “When do you ever see Mary angry?” They even said that Mr. Baker had reported in his anguish to his clergyman, “If Mary Magdalene had seven devils, our Mary has ten.” The struggle, it may be seen, was no casual argument, but a deep wrestle of souls. At last the child succumbed to an illness and the family doctor was summoned. When Mark Baker drove to fetch him his religious intemperance must have given way to paternal affection and fear. He is said to have stood up in his wagon and lashed his horse, crying out to a neighbor who accosted him that Mary was dying.

The physician declared Mary stricken with fever. He left medicines, recommending her to her mother’s most watchful care and admonishing her father to desist from discussions. Mrs. Eddy has said of what followed:

My mother, as she bathed my burning temples, bade me lean on God’s love, which would give me rest if I went to Him in prayer, as I was wont to do, seeking His guidance. I prayed; and a soft glow of ineffable joy came over me. The fever was gone and I rose and dressed myself in a normal condition of health. Mother saw this and was glad. The physician marveled; and the “horrible decree” of Predestination—as John Calvin rightly called his own tenet—forever lost its power over me.^[1]

It is true that Mary Baker made a religious profession at this time. She was examined at the age of twelve by the pastor who eagerly put to her the usual “doleful questions,” declaring that he must be assured that she had been truly regenerated. With the eyes of the church members upon her and her own father’s haggard face visible from his place in their family pew, she answered without a tremor:

“I can only say in the words of the psalmist, ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.’”

Her childish, but resolute figure, and the grave words so earnestly spoken, brought about a reaction in her favor and the oldest church members wept. Her pastor relented toward her and the ordeal was over. However, it was not until the age of seventeen that she united with the Congregational church.

The circumstances of her struggle with her father made a profound impression on her and the watchful love of her mother saw fit to send her on a visit to a friend in the suburbs of Boston under the care of her brother Samuel. These friends received her with kindness and sought to draw her thoughts away from serious questions with bright entertainment and pleasant diversion. That they did not entirely succeed is shown in some of her verses written at this time in which, while she shows a rapturous love of nature, she declares that all this is the poet’s world-wish and only a shadow hastening away. She asserts, however, that hope lifts the thought to “soar above matter and fasten on God,” which at this very early age presaged her future religious revelation in no uncertain outline.

The entrance of Albert Baker into Franklin Pierce’s law office at Hillsborough; his absorption into the politics of that region which he represented in the New Hampshire legislature for two successive terms; the establishment of Samuel Baker in business in Boston; and the desire of George Baker to enter the cloth mills of Sanbornton Bridge are various reasons which caused Mark Baker to remove from Bow to the mill town eighteen miles north of Concord. He relinquished his share of the title in the Bow property to his brothers’ children and bought a farm about a mile from Tilton.

The Baker home life now became more social and less patriarchal. Mary was fifteen, her sisters, Martha and Abigail, eighteen and twenty. All three sisters were notable for their beauty and good breeding. The mother’s agreeable temperament, together with her hospitable nature no less than Mr. Baker’s great interest in public affairs, drew many guests to this house in which the family lived for seven years. Mr. Baker became prominent in the church with which he and his wife very soon united. He conducted the “third meeting” and George Baker led the village choir. George was now established in Alexander Tilton’s mill and rose rapidly to become a mill agent and later a partner of the owner, who before that time had married his sister Abigail.

A frequent guest of the family was Professor Dyer H. Sanborn, who kept a private school to which the children of the wealthier families were sent to finish their studies. Boys were prepared by him for college and girls were given a certificate of graduation with academic honors. Mary Baker became his pupil and graduated from this school. Professor Sanborn was the author of a grammar and a man of literary tastes. He trained Mary particularly in rhetoric and corrected the faults which private study had engendered.

The Rev. Enoch Corser, pastor of the Tilton church for all the period of their residence at the farm, was also a frequent and honored guest of the Bakers. He was a man of liberal culture as may be imagined from the fact that he privately tutored his son Bartlett, sending him to college prepared to eliminate the first two years of Greek, Latin, and mathematics. This was Mary Baker’s pastor who first received her into communion. His son has declared his father’s disposition toward her to be one of highest esteem, deep admiration, and warm interest. This pastor regarded Mary as his special pupil and the brightest he ever had.

THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH AT TILTON, NEW HAMPSHIRE

Mrs. Eddy was a member of this church for many years and taught a class in the Sunday-school

An intellectual comradeship grew up between Mary and her pastor who, as his son declared, preferred to talk with her to any one of his acquaintance. They discussed subjects too deep to be attractive to other members of the family, which the family freely and good-humoredly admitted. Walking up and down in the garden, this fine, old-school clergyman and the young poetess, as she was coming to be called, threshed out the old philosophic speculations without rancor or irritation.

He was a fine-looking old Calvinist, with leonine head covered with a mane of silver, and shaggy brows beneath which rolled eyes of eloquence and compassion. His mouth was wide but firm, suggesting both humor and melancholy. His shoulders had the scholar’s droop. One can picture them of a fine summer evening, the slender girl and the old scholar, on their usual promenade in the garden. She must have declared to him something from her philosophy, — perhaps that one drop of divine love melted his eternal hells. As she looked up at her pastor, her great blue eyes poured sunshine upon him and she smiled with such radiance that he was struck dumb in the midst of his defense of Hades. They would be by the willows which long remained a vital relic of the old place, and below them rolled the valley with the village nestling there in the summer twilight.

“Mary, your poetry goes beyond my theology,” cried her pastor; “why should I preach to you!”

As they turned they encountered his son Bartlett and Abigail; for Bartlett was a suitor for Abigail’s hand and she once pinned a rose on his coat in this garden. It is possible that both men were uplifted as they walked down the hill from the Baker home, and that it was then the father, halting his son with a hand on his shoulder, declared to him what he at some time certainly said: “Bright, good, and pure, aye brilliant! I never before had a pupil with such depth and independence of thought. She has some great future, mark that. She is an intellectual and spiritual genius.”

The young man may not have marked it then, absorbed in his thoughts of the other sister. But he lived to remember it and to pay tribute to that genius by recalling his father’s words. He never married or entered a profession. His father left him well off in lands and money, and with his two maiden sisters he lived for years at Boscawen, a village between Tilton and Concord made famous by Daniel Webster. He was a country gentleman of literary tastes and. hospitable habits. Abigail, after rejecting him, married Alexander Tilton, a wealthy mill owner, and became the great lady of the town. Martha, after teaching for a time in the academy, married a state warden.

While Mary was attending the academy an incident occurred which was long related by old residents of Tilton. A lunatic, escaped from the asylum at Concord, invaded the school yard, brandishing a club and terrifying the children who ran shrieking into the house. Mary Baker advanced toward him, and the children, peering through the windows, saw him wield the club above her head. Their blood tingled with horror for they expected her to be struck down before their eyes. Not so. She walked straight up to the man and took his disengaged hand. The club descended harmlessly to his side. At her request he walked with her to the gate and so, docilely, away. On the following Sunday he reappeared and quietly entered the church. He walked to the Baker pew and stood beside Mary during the hymn singing. Afterwards he allowed himself to be taken in charge without resistance.

Mary Baker must have been a gladsome sight in that grim old meeting-house. She has been described as slender and graceful, with a shower of chestnut curls, delicate, refined features, and great blue eyes that on occasion of unwonted interest became almost black. She wore a fashionable mantle over her silk gown and the bonnet of the period which came around her face, relieved with a delicate ruching of white. Her curls escaped from the bonnet and shaded cheeks which were so glowing they rivaled the rose. She taught the infants’ class in the Sunday-school and an elderly lady in Boston who was in that class related to the author:

“She always wore clothes we admired. We liked her gloves and fine cambric handkerchief. She was, as I have come to understand, exquisite, and we loved her particularly for her daintiness, her high-bred manners, her way of smiling at us, and her sweet musical voice.” Indeed, in those days her name might have been sung for that of Annie Laurie in the old ballad, so beautifully did her girlhood culminate.

Within two years two events transpired which broke forever the old home circle, and changed Mary from girlhood to womanhood. In 1841 Albert Baker was nominated for Congress in a district where nomination by his party insured election. Before that came to pass he died at the age of thirty-one. His death was regarded as a calamity by his party, and his family felt it as a blow to their greatest ambition. Of Mary’s grief it is sufficient to say that this brother was, after her mother, the dearest of her kindred. She had developed as a flower in his heart. It was well for her that another love came to break a too long-continued sorrow.

George Washington Glover, formerly of Concord, had been associated with Samuel Baker in Boston and with him learned the first step in his business, that of a contractor and builder. He was now established at Charleston, South Carolina. He visited Tilton with Samuel Baker and fell deeply in love with the young sister. He was an impetuous wooer and won Mary Baker’s heart.

1. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 22.