The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Chapter 14

by Sibyl Wilbur

CHAPTER XIV

THE FIRST EDITION OF SCIENCE AND HEALTH

HER application to her purpose from 1872 to 1875 was more rigid, more exclusive, more laborious than it had ever been. Her experience in Stoughton and Amesbury had yielded the “Science of Man” manuscript and also certain commentaries on the Bible. Now the book which she purposed writing was to contain the complete statement of Christian Science. It was the book and nothing but the book which engrossed her. These three years saw her in public rarely, except for the walks she took by the sea, those visits to the Red Rocks where she used to linger long in meditation. Of these three years there is very little to record of her activity. But they flowered in the first edition of “Science and Health.” If any one reading this life thinks this great work was accomplished easily, or that when she said the book was given to her as a revelation, she meant that a personal Deity literally guided her hand across the pages, framing the words for her, let him consider the ceaseless mental toil and spiritual application stretching between the miraculous recovery in 1866 and the publication of her book in 1875.

When Mrs. Glover severed her relations with Richard Kennedy, he removed to another house but she remained in her rooms at South Common and Shepard streets for several months. She had with her a great deal at this time a little girl named Susie Felt, a child of twelve. Mrs. Glover took her meals at the child’s home and the little maid was so attached to her that she spent as much time with her as she was permitted. The child found this woman, whom her elders sometimes thought distant and somber, to be lovely, gracious, and sweet. Like Lucy Wentworth she was devoted to her. In later years she cherished a ring, a book, and a picture as mementos of those happy hours when she had the companionship of this great soul, relaxed from the toil of the day, when she would tell her the most wondrous things her ears had ever heard. Such hours were hers in the twilight alone with Mary Baker when the divine overflow suffused sweet dew that could not harm the tender violets of a child’s unfolding thoughts.

But the dove-like cooing of a little child’s questions or the harmonious enfolding of the diapason of the sea, when she listened to its voice, crouched alone on the brown rocks, were not all that reached her. The change and fluidity of life was in the waves, in the flight of the gulls, and in the drifting ships. Returning to the city from what was in those days a rough unwalled beach, she would see the lights of the Lynn factories betokening the passionate struggle of human endeavor. Had she stood erect on those rocks by the sea, erect in spirit while her body crouched for safety against its boulders, had she felt her ego slip away from her in some supreme moment when divine sense lifted her to the consciousness of spiritual being above the waves of time? Even so, she must still return to the city, to the work in hand, and alas, to the shock of events.

Most of her students had remained loyal to her and to her teaching. Of these were George Barry, S. P. Bancroft, Dorcas Rawson, and Miranda Rice. She lived for a time with Dorcas Rawson, and she lived at several boarding-houses until she secured a home of her own. When she left South Common street, a student, George Barry, took charge of her furnishing. She returned to live for a time with the Clarks where she had resided directly after Dr. Patterson’s desertion. George Clark, who supplied the graphic picture of Mrs. Eddy in those days, was a witness for her in her divorce suit brought in Salem in 1873. He said that Mrs. Eddy waited until nearly night for her case to be called and they thought it would not be disposed of that day. But when she was called to the witness stand the judge asked her why her husband had deserted her. She replied, “Because he feared arrest.” “Arrest for what?” asked the judge. “For adultery,” Mrs. Eddy replied quietly. The judge made a brief examination of her witnesses and the decree was granted.

George Clark said that Mrs. Eddy worked very industriously at her writing while at his mother’s house and he at one time carried a prospectus of her book to Adams & Co., Publishers, in Bromfield street. Her manuscript was not accepted, but one of his own which he had taken with him at the same time was. Clark’s book was a boy’s story of sea-going life which the publisher felt would sell well. He rejected Mrs. Glover’s book for the reason that he saw no possibilities in it for profit.

Mrs. Glover had accompanied Clark to Boston and they returned together late in the afternoon. She made no comment on her failure, but cheerfully encouraged the young man over his own venture, saying his wholesome, breezy story would sell well and he might come to be a great author. He was much engrossed with those thoughts of greatness when they walked through the Lynn streets in the early evening nearing home. She suddenly caught him by the arm. “Stop, George,” she cried. “Do you see that church? I shall have a church of my own some day.”

She struck her hands together as she said this and then stood for a minute lost in thought. The young man was ashamed of his selfishness, and for a time really wished that it had been her book, and not his, which had been accepted. But her book was not ready, nor was it to be published in the ordinary way for the profit of a bookman.

In the spring of 1875 Mrs. Glover was living in a boarding-house at Number 9 Broad street. She had moved in these three years several times. Her doctrine and her absorbed life had brought her in conflict with many minds and many persons. Discussion, controversy, and ridicule had pursued her, making application to her work doubly difficult. She had nearly completed her book, however, and what she needed was absolute peace and seclusion in order that she might put those important finishing touches to her work which would bring it together, unify it, complete it. Leaning at the window of her room, she gazed down the leafy street, thinking of the dining-room below stairs and its many discordant personalities, the latest gibes of her worldly critics, the latest smiles and glances and expressive shrugs. Was every step of the way of this book to be disputed by such hindrance and intrusion? Leaning there at the window, she breathed a silent prayer for a resting-place.

Lifting her eyes, she saw across the way a little frame house with a sign affixed stating that it was for sale. It was a two story and a half dwelling with a small lawn around it and a shade tree at the corner. It had little bow windows and tiny balconies. Contemplating it, she resolved to own it. It should be the first home of Christian Science; there she would complete her book.

This was not an impossible venture. Mrs. Glover had received for tuition some funds which she had guarded against the possibility of publishing her own book. Her life had been frugal, orderly, and well-planned. Nothing but the book had kept her from organizing large classes. With her own home, her work could now go forward with better progress. She unfolded her plan to her little group of students and certain of them undertook the business arrangements. The Essex County registry of deeds shows that on March 31, 1875, Francis E. Besse, in conconsideration of $5,650, deeded to Mary Baker Glover the property of Number 8 Broad street.

THE “LITTLE HOUSE IN BROAD STREET,” LYNN, MASSACHUSETTS

Where Mrs. Eddy completed the text of the First Edition of Science and Health

When Mrs. Glover moved into her new home her means were so limited she was obliged to lease the greater part of the house. She reserved for herself the front parlor on the first floor for a class-room and furnished it plainly with chairs and tables. On the attic floor she also reserved a small bedroom, lighted only by a skylight which was in the sloping roof and could be lifted like a trap for ventilation. In this garret chamber she finished her manuscript of “Science and Health,” practically the work of nine years. Here she read the proofs of the first edition and prepared the revisions for the second and third editions. The room was austerely furnished with a carpet of matting, a bed and dressing bureau, a table and straight-backed chair. Its one article of luxury was an old-fashioned hair-cloth rocker. No one entered this room but Mary Baker until the book was finished. On the wall she had hung the framed inscription, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

The greater part of Mrs. Glover’s new home was given over to tenants. Necessity compelled her to depend on such sources for an income. She was sometimes fortunate in her tenants, but occasionally otherwise. Her own simple and well-regulated life, entirely devoted to religion, was never the cause of comment, except as criticism always attaches to a new religious movement. The history of Methodism, of Quakerism, of Unitarianism abundantly shows this. The daily attendance of her students, their devotion to their teacher, and zeal for their faith created astonishment in Lynn and so caused some gossip. The purple-and-gold sign, “Christian Science Home,” which arched the door was the cause of much speculation. It became a common thing for cripples and invalids to go to the house for treatment, and many remarkable cures which Mrs. Eddy performed instantaneously are recorded.

During the summer the little place grew most attractive. The affectionate zeal of her students, many of whom she had healed from serious complaints or diseases and some of whom she had reclaimed from intemperate lives, made her gardens bloom, kept her grass-plot like velvet, and relieved the austerity of her parlor with decoration. Mrs. Glover’s balconies were filled with calla lilies of which she was particularly fond, and when she stood among them tending and caring for them with the sunlight sifting through the leaves of the elm, making splashes of green and gold upon her cool white gown, she made a picture of composure and purity.

Early in the summer Mrs. Glover gave the manuscript of her book into the hands of a printer. A fund was subscribed to by some of the students to insure its publication, and was repaid to them under circumstances to be related. There was some halt in its publication, even now that everything had apparently been done for its forthcoming. Mrs. Eddy has stated in her autobiography the peculiar circumstances of this delay. She had hesitated to include in the book a chapter on animal magnetism, and she believed it was the Divine purpose that this 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 of the chapters, enlarged the explanation in certain passages, curtailed it in others, altered the sequence of sentences, struck out unnecessary illustration to make room for the irresistible enforcement of the declaration of her doctrine, certain critics have said that the original work has disappeared in the book that stands to-day, and a brilliant satirist went so far as to say that “Science and Health” was the product of another mind than Mary Baker Eddy’s.

Because of the supreme audacity and unscrupulous wickedness of such an assertion, this first edition is indeed a “precious volume.” It holds, like the Grail, that receptacle in which the wine was given to the disciples, the verities of Christian Science. Was ever a book so attacked as this? First, this famous critic declared it absurd; second, that its ideas were not original; third, that “every single detail of it was conceived and performed by another.” Witness the three different standpoints of the satirical assailant. First, the book is absurd; the critic could n’t understand it; he would “rather saw wood” than to try, for he did not find the work of analyzing it easy. Second, maybe she who claimed to be author did write it, but the ideas are not original, for the great idea of this book, “the thing back of it,” the critic came to see, is “wholly gracious and beautiful; the power, through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and pains and griefs.”^[1] And he did not see how such an idea could possibly interest the accredited author. He did not see! But mark the culminating effect of the book upon him and then come to his third standpoint.

Why should such an idea interest Mary Baker Eddy, he wondered, unless she was, as her followers believe, “patient, gentle, loving, compassionate, noble-hearted, unselfish, sinless — a profound thinker, an able writer, a divine personage, an inspired messenger.”^[2] And why should they not so believe? The critic went on to say: “She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with a break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into eternity.”^[3]

“Let the reader turn to the chapter on prayer and compare that wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of work with the aforesaid preface [the preface to the third edition] and with Mrs. Eddy’s poetry,” said this critic.

Indeed, let him compare it with Mrs. Eddy’s sublime hymn,

“Shepherd, show me how to go

“ O’er the hillside steep,

“How to gather, how to sow,

“ How to feed Thy sheep.”

But the critic’s third standpoint was: “I think she has from the very beginning been claiming as her own another person’s book, and wearing as her own property laurels rightfully belonging to that person — the real author of ‘Science and Health.’”

Who is this real author who was first, absurd; second, unoriginal; third, an inspired messenger? The real author of every word of the first edition, and every word, phrase, paragraph, and chapter of the very last edition is the one who wrote the limping verses of girlhood, the so-called “Quimby” manuscripts with their confusion of ideas, the statement of the Science of Man, Genesis and Apocalypse, and finally “Science and Health.” She was the precocious and nervous girl educated for the most part at home; she was the suffering invalid whose pure religion was tampered with by the mesmeric influence of a hypnotist; she was the poor and devoted Christian, healing without price and distributing her manuscripts to whomsoever would read them; she was the absorbed student and devotee, maligned by unfaithful students.

Who else was it that the scoffing Horace Wentworth declared he did not dislike but thought ridiculous when she sat in his mother’s parlor and said she had a mission from God to complete the work of Jesus Christ on earth? Who else was it that wrote the manuscript which Mrs. Catherine I. Clapp, the Wentworth’s cousin Kate, was employed to copy and which this amanuensis has herself said contained the first form of the ideas subsequently given to the world in “Science and Health,” certain paragraphs of which she used to scoff at and make fun of to her intimates? Who else was it who worked on the book Mother Webster called Mrs. Glover’s “Bible” when rustics of Amesbury gapingly watched to see her walk upon the Merrimac River? Who else was it that prepared the prospectus that George Clark carried to a Boston printer and had rejected? Who else was it that wrote the manuscripts the student Stanley contended for and thought he was wronged because he could not possess? Who else was it that prepared that closing chapter on animal magnetism and carried it to the printer? Who else was it wrote the scientific statement of being?

Internal evidence or higher criticism will not divorce this work from its author Mary Baker Eddy any more than it will divorce the fourth gospel from St. John. The first edition of “Science and Health,” which the critics of that day fell upon with ironic glee, stands as the model of the finished structure of to-day. It was written under the severest hardships and was revised painstakingly in the midst of the multitudinous duties of a leader. It has been plagiarized and pirated from, vilified and burlesqued, but it will stand.

1. Mark Twain, “Christian Science,” p. 284.
2. Mark Twain, “Christian Science,” p. 285.
3. Ibid., p. 286.