The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Chapter 20

by Sibyl Wilbur

CHAPTER XX

WITHDRAWAL FROM THE WORLD

WHILE the “jubilee of spirit” was being celebrated in Chicago during June, 1888, a quite different order of mental activity was causing fomentation in the Christian Scientist Association at Boston. Some of Mrs. Eddy’s students had become inoculated with the theories of Mr. Julius Dresser and Dr. Warren F. Evans. Both of these men had been patients of Quimby during the early sixties and both undertook to establish systems of healing. Both men printed and issued books on mental science. They attracted a small following which in later days came to be known as the New Thought Movement.

It was not so much the teaching of these writers on mental suggestion which attracted Mrs. Eddy’s students, — for those who had passed through her classes well knew that mental suggestion and Christian Science were as divergent as a chimeric dream and a scientific discovery, — but rather was it the thought that they might carry Christian Science itself outside the walls of its citadel and become writers and teachers and leaders among the philistines. Christian Science within the fold was too stringent in its demands. Not satisfied with manna, they would return to the flesh-pots of Egypt. The meat desired was intellectual divertissement; not only that, they would handle the things of God with more careless ease and roll the jewels of the temple upon the street for the delectation of the curious.

Thus it was that a group of rebels had coalesced within the Christian Scientist Association. They were not without examples for their dereliction. The group of students who departed from the church in Lynn had preceded them by about ten years and gone their ways into the inviting world of freedom. Mrs. Plunkett, Mrs. Hopkins, Mrs. Gestafeld had emulated Kennedy, Spofford, and Arens. But these examples were not edifying as solutions of the problem of finding happiness by returning to intellectual speculation after avowing allegiance to a spiritual ideal. Therefore this new group of Christian Science deserters would find a more plausible reason for their conduct.

In order that they might manage their departure without the shame of expulsion they took advantage of the absence of Mrs. Eddy and the secretary, William B. Johnson, to possess themselves of the Association’s books. These they placed in a lawyer’s hands and notified Mrs. Eddy on her return from Chicago that the books would not be surrendered until they had received an honorable dismissal from the Association. Expulsion, they felt, would be dishonorable, carrying with it the implication of unworthiness.

While the unmannerly abstraction of the Association’s books was the modus operandi of their rebellion, the casus belli announced was the Corner case. In the spring of 1888 Mrs. Abby H. Corner, a student and member of the Association, had attended her daughter in childbirth and the accouchement terminated fatally to both mother and child. Mrs. Corner was prosecuted for malpractise by the state but was acquitted when the facts were brought out that the cause of death was one which a medical practitioner could not have averted, namely hemorrhage. Certain members of the Association disagreed with Mrs. Eddy in respect to the propriety of certain proceedings relative to Mrs. Corner’s defense.

Although Mrs. Eddy did not approve of her students taking charge of the surgical part of obstetrical work unless they were surgeons or midwives duly qualified by the state requirements, she did not desert her student in time of trouble, and although the Association paid Mrs. Corner’s expenditures for defense, — a matter of two hundred dollars, — the disagreement over the Corner case was what the restless element in the Boston church needed for a plausible excuse to seek the world and its freedom, and to desert the pure ideality of the fundamental statement of Christian Science found in the scientific statement of being. Mrs. Eddy did not engage in any spiritual wrestling with these rebellious students, though she did ask them to come to her in Christian love and state their grievances to her personally. As none of them did so, they were eventually dismissed, thirty-six members going out of a congregation of about two hundred.

Although their tactics had been successful in securing the so-called letters of dismissal, after their expulsion the seceding students declared they had considered a plan for expelling Mrs. Eddy from her own church and the Christian Scientist Association. However, the points held by Mrs. Eddy on this occasion and with which the belligerent students disagreed are to-day reckoned among the commonsense practises of Christian Science, and this incident is an example of the numerous instances where the short-sightedness of the pupil has attempted to brush aside the more mature and accurate judgment of the teacher, and where Mrs. Eddy proved her worth as a leader of the Christian Science movement. With such deep-boring desire to explode the citadel of Christian Science faith and blow into the heavens its foundation stones, the insurrectionists would have accomplished destruction had it been in human power to do so, and the dust of centuries might again have settled over the spiritual revelation, as Spofford had once foretold would be the result if Christian Science were demolished.

“Under Divine Providence there can be no accidents,” Mrs. Eddy says in “Science and Health,” and the rebellion in the Boston church in 1888 was no more a fortuitous or calamitous occurrence than the rebellion in Lynn which resulted in the transplanting of the work to Boston, the establishment of the college and Journal, and the creation of the National Christian Scientist Association. Mrs. Eddy had safeguarded the text-book of Christian Science by copyrights, and in the months in which she waited for the culmination of the conspiracy in the Boston church she turned over in her mind the many-sided problem of safeguarding the organization. She was once more submitting herself for divine guidance, and in the sacred secrecy of such communion was evolving a plan by which security should be attained against explosive schism.

Now the first step toward the masterly solution of this great problem of organization which confronted her was a loosening of all the bonds which apparently held her students together. With absolute reliance upon the underlying, irrevocable compact of spirit, which constitutes the “church invisible,” Mrs. Eddy first closed the Metaphysical College and then a few months later dissolved the organization of the Boston church.

She had discontinued teaching classes at the college in May, 1889, and on October 29 of that year she closed its doors. Its dissolution was accomplished after due deliberation and earnest discussion by a vote of the board of directors of the college corporation. In announcing its purpose the board presented to the public resolutions in which it thanked the state for its charter, the public for its patronage, and declared its everlasting gratitude to its president for her great and noble work. The teaching was henceforth to be done by the qualified students.

In “Retrospection and Introspection” Mrs. Eddy has given her clearly defined argument for this procedure and it is an unmistakable disclaimer of delight in personal success. She says: “The apprehension of what has been, and must be, the final outcome of material organization, which wars with Love’s spiritual compact, caused me to dread the unprecedented popularity of my College. Students from all over our continent and from Europe were flooding the school. At this time there were over three hundred applications from persons desiring to enter the college, and applicants were rapidly increasing. Example had shown the dangers arising from being placed on earthly pinnacles, and Christian Science shuns whatever involves material means for the promotion of spiritual ends.”^[1]

It was the first way-mark of withdrawal. The dangers arising from personal adulation were in a thousand ways made apparent to Mrs. Eddy and the more she requested her students to look away from her and fix their eyes on truth, the more she was made to feel that danger of apotheosis which desired to set her on “earthly pinnacles.” Appealing to Cæsar seemed to be a fixed concept of a human sort among the students which required the most thorough-going denial. As the Romans would have made Nero a god, so the students seemed bent on making their spiritual leader a Cæsar of egotism, a peculiar reversal in human deduction. Mrs. Eddy was obliged to publish in the Journal the following notice:

I shall not be consulted verbally or through letters as to the following: Whose advertisement shall or shall not appear in the Journal.

The matter that should be published in the Journal.

On marriage, divorce, or family affairs of any kind.

On the choice of pastors for churches.

On difficulties if there should be any between students of Christian Science.

On who shall be admitted as members or dropped from the membership of Christian Science churches.

On disease, or the treatment of the sick.

But I shall love all mankind and work for their welfare.

Each and every one of these disclaimers of absolutism were sincere; they were avowals of a steadfast purpose to refuse to ascend a dictator’s throne. If it had for a time seemed wise for her to direct and guide the affairs of the church and association, experience had shown her in no unmistakable way the misconstruction which wilful human perversion may place upon such direction. The rebellious students of that year had announced as one of their grievances the opinion that Mrs. Eddy was too arbitrary in the conduct of the Christian Scientist Association. Such a statement she received as a premonitory signal. It was a mailed hand threatening Love’s dominion. Between those who would set her up and those who would drag her down, the founder of Christian Science stood serene in the consciousness of spiritual insight. She would not desert her post or be driven from it until she had led her students into the ways of self-direction.

But withdrawal was not desertion, and withdrawal more and more occupied her thoughts as a means to the end of establishing the impersonal guidance of the church. Certain personal and family matters crowded upon her for attention. She who had given so much to the world must consider somewhat her own affairs before taking up the problem, the great problem of the “church visible.”

During the difficulties of 1888 which may be realized as the clamoring of three hundred disappointed students who would have Mrs. Eddy to teach them and no other and the half hundred rebellious students who would rend if possible the local church, George Glover, Mrs. Eddy’s long-wandering son was present in Boston with his wife and children. Mrs. Eddy had seen her son but once before since he had been separated from her in his infancy. Having located him in 1879 in Minnesota, she had sent him a telegram requesting him to come to her. He was then a man thirty-five years of age. He came to Boston and visited her and Mr. Eddy at the home of the Choates where she was then residing temporarily.

While on his brief visit to Boston, Mrs. Eddy had studied the character of her long-alienated son with the eyes of maternal solicitude, and also the detached sense of independent individuality. Was this boy a Baker or a Glover? Moreover, was he a teachable man? In rehearsing his experiences on this visit to his mother in 1879, Glover is said to have since related to a newspaper correspondent that for some strange reason his mother would not hear of his returning to his Western home and that he stayed on for several weeks with her while she endeavored to teach him Christian Science, — which he modestly acknowledged he “made a mess of.” But having heard considerable about Richard Kennedy and his misuse of the science of Mind, and feeling that Kennedy was harassing his mother with false reports of her teaching, Glover one day, without revealing his plans to his mother, visited Kennedy’s offices and, according to Glover’s alleged statement, threatened him with a revolver. According to the newspaper which quotes Mr. Glover he declared that he told Kennedy he knew of his “black art tricks” to ruin his mother and he meant to stop him.

“Mother seemed very much surprised when I told her what I had done,” George Glover is said to have stated in March, 1907, referring to the visit of 1879. “But she did not scold me and in a few days she consented to let me return home to the West and to my wife and little son.”

How clearly George Glover had shown to his mother after weeks of effort to educate him, to teach him Christian Science, the ungovernable, untameable spirit of the man of the plains, no one but himself had ever told, if indeed he did relate his experiences on his visit East as quoted. Richard Kennedy absolutely denied the occurrence. But whether George Glover did bully him or did not, and whether or not he recounted a fiction to his mother and later to the press, his nature is shown to have been alien to her nature, to have been impervious to her doctrine. Destiny still parted them with an insurmountable barrier. Hungering for the plains, restless for the saddle, his leathern holster bulging beneath his coat, his hand nervously seeking his hip at the slightest altercation, what could a woman of sixty do with a man of middle age, settled in his habits? Here was no longer the problem of mother and son. Authority and obedience were as a dead letter. Time had set its seal upon him as a man and an individual.

Departing for the West, he went over the great divide in human concepts for another ten years, but in 1887 sent his mother a characteristically casual note stating that he intended coming East to pay her a visit. In a letter which Glover says he received from his mother dated October 31, 1887, she replied to her son in words pregnant of her apprehensions with regard to his character. “I must have quiet in my home,” she wrote, “and it will not be pleasant for you in Boston.” She told him that the Choates were no longer with her. “You are not what I had hoped to find you,” she continued, “and I cannot have you come. … The world, the flesh, and evil I am at war with. … Boston is the last place in the world for you or your family. When I retire into private life, then I can receive you if you are reformed, but not otherwise. I say this to you, not to any one else. I would not injure you any more than myself.”

But this letter which speaks volumes of maternal regret appears to have had no effect in deterring George Glover from seeking the mother whom he had disregarded for years. She was now nearly seventy years of age, spiritualized by years of self-abnegation and religious devotion. He was in his forty-fifth year and hardened in the ways of the flesh. He presented himself with the confidence of filial relationship. Yes, he was her son, and she received him as such. She provided for him a residence in Chelsea. With his children he visited her at her home and he attended the church and was cordially received by its members. Mrs. Eddy appeared upon the platform with the children around her and lovingly presented them to the world and her church.

After several months of enjoying himself in the reflected glory of his mother, George Glover with his family again returned to the West. He had taken no step to come to his mother’s standard of life and she had not urged him or repelled him. But she had studied him and reflected on the joy it would have been to her to have been able to find in him a son fitted to carry out certain demands of her work. Such reflection carried with it regret and finally resulted in an effort to find among her students one who could bear to her the relation of a dutiful, obedient, and worthy son, one who would perform the acts of filial respect and service that would insure her the nucleus of a spiritual household. In the enjoyment of such a home, quiet domesticity would take its natural course and as the years revolved she might withdraw to the heights of contemplation, putting off one by one the claims of the world.

Pursuing this idea in November, 1888, Mrs. Eddy legally adopted Dr. Ebenezer Johnson Foster in the Suffolk County (Massachusetts) Probate Court, stating as her reasons in the proceedings before Judge McKim that he was associated with her in business, home life, and life work, and that she needed his interested care and relationship. The plea was granted and Dr. Foster added Eddy to his name and became her son. This effort toward parental relationship was not a success, and may be briefly set forth.

Dr. Foster came from a small town in Vermont. He was a graduate of the Hahneman Medical College in Philadelphia and for two years a member of the clinics of the Blockley Hospital and of the Pennsylvania Hospital. He was later a member of the Vermont State Homeopathic Medical Society. Holding diplomas from both the regular and the homeopathic schools of medicine, he was attracted to Christian Science by the healing of a close friend who had been an old army comrade. He came to Boston an enthusiastic inquirer in the fall of 1887 and took a course of lessons under Mrs. Eddy’s instruction at the college. Before its close he taught one term in the college. Previous to his adoption he resided in her Commonwealth avenue home together with other students. He was one of that group of intimate students among whom were Julia Bartlett, Calvin Frye, Captain and Mrs. Eastaman, and William B. Johnson.

Dr. Foster-Eddy was an agreeable and accomplished man of forty with a clear, well-trained mind and the enthusiasm for work which was so necessary in the multitude of duties pressing upon all. He remained with Mrs. Eddy until 1896. In 1892 she made him her publisher when she removed William G. Nixon from that office. Dr. Foster-Eddy then lived at the Commonwealth avenue house, though Mrs. Eddy was residing in Concord. Away from her personal influence, he was not as attentive to business as the requirements of his office demanded, and he indulged in certain fopperies which brought down upon him scathing criticism from other students, not entirely unwarranted. It became necessary for Mrs. Eddy to remove him from the publishing business in the spring of 1896, when she made Joseph Armstrong, a former banker of Kansas, her publisher.

Mrs. Eddy then directed Dr. Foster-Eddy to go to Philadelphia to carry out certain plans in the work of the church. She gave him a letter to present to the Philadelphia church and minute instructions, but he did not carry out her directions. As her personal agent he misrepresented her and became persona non grata in that city. The Philadelphia church wrote a letter concerning him to Mrs. Eddy and she recalled him, but he did not return to her at once. He first went to Washington on a pleasure trip and finally presented himself at Pleasant View, bursting with a story of his fancied wrongs. Mrs. Eddy received him in the library and heard him out; then she left him in silence. He quitted the house and returned to Boston where she sent him a letter of admonition, kindly worded, but unmistakable in its rebuke. Instead of returning to Pleasant View, Dr. Foster-Eddy went West, traveled for a long time, and eventually returned to his old home in Vermont. Mrs. Eddy made no charge against him, nor did she ask for an explanation. She did not, however, erase him from her memory and in due time made a monetary provision for him.

It was after the adoption of Dr. Foster that Mrs. Eddy began looking about for a permanent home removed from Boston. In the early spring of 1889 Dr. Foster persuaded her to go to Barre, Vermont, with a view to spending the summer in the mountains. He preceded her there and engaged a furnished house, and Mrs. Eddy with Miss Martha Morgan, who was then her housekeeper, and Mr. Frye followed when arrangements were completed. She did not, however, remain long, for the surroundings were not desirable. Dr. Foster returned to Boston and selected a house in Roslindale, a suburb of Boston. This house Mrs. Eddy occupied for a short time; but this situation, too, proved not desirable. For as Barre was too remote from the center of affairs which she must still direct, Roslindale was too accessible to the interruptions of visitors.

While on her way to and from Barre, Mrs. Eddy had passed through her native town, Concord, New Hampshire. Its beauty and its dignity appealed to her so powerfully that she sojourned for a time there while the Roslindale property was being negotiated for. When Roslindale failed as a satisfactory habitation, her agreeable experience in Concord returned to her mind as an argument for its selection as an abiding place. But she would not again make a hasty decision or permit others to do so for her in so important a matter as a permanent home. So she decided to live for a time in a furnished house in Concord and look about her for the desirable home.

It was in the spring of 1889 that she retired to Concord, carrying out her purpose of withdrawal from the personal direction of the students in Boston. In Concord she resided at 62 North State street for a few months. While living there she took her daily drives in and around the little New Hampshire capital, so dear to her because of her earliest recollections of childhood. From one of those drives she returned by the road (now, through her gift to the city, a macadamized avenue) which stretches along the crest of a valley to the Southwest from the city. Halting her carriage about three quarters of a mile outside the capital, she looked out over the valley in contemplation. Mrs. Eddy saw here the vision of a home remote and yet accessible. She saw Bow, her birthplace, nestling in the ridge of blue hills away to the East and she discerned the hazy outline of Monadnock, far to the Southwest, rearing its august and lonely head. Below the pleasant upland upon which she stood lay all the broad valley, like the Valley of Decision, which her years had spanned, and doubtless she saw with the eloquent prophet of old “multitudes, multitudes in that Valley of Decision.”

What Mrs. Eddy beheld in vision she brought to pass. Land was bought uniting two estates and the old house encumbering the spot where she stood when she made her determination was moved back and under the direction of her student, Mr. Ira O. Knapp, rebuilt into a modest, modern country home. This place Mrs. Eddy named Pleasant View, and there she resided from 1892 until 1908, a period of about fifteen years. Those who have never seen this charming, idyllic spot can picture it by imagining a broad sweep of green acres, sloping gently to a little lake, a ribbon of river, and a line of hills away to the East. The house standing back from the road, surrounded by a well kept lawn, was given the picturesque addition of a small tower and broad Eastern veranda, with an unpretentious portico over the front entrance.

PLEASANT VIEW, CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE

Where Mrs. Eddy resided from 1892 until 1908, and where, from its rear balcony, she addressed a concourse of Christian Scientists in 1901

Within the soft gray-green walls of the simple frame dwelling a shining order, peace, and dignity came to prevail. Mrs. Laura Sargent, a student of Mrs. Eddy’s first class in Chicago, came from her home in Wisconsin to reside with Mrs. Eddy as companion, and remained with her continuously. And to her loving attendance much of the quiet order of that home may be attributed. A gentle veil of seclusion descended over Pleasant View, securing to it a quiet and dignity necessary to the detached life of contemplation, a life wherein things temporal may stand forth in their relation to things eternal as types of spiritual significance. It was the life of brooding love, a life of the highest rarity in human experience, wherein heaven leans and kisses earth. Here Mrs. Eddy spent the years of perfecting the type of organization under which she conceived the spiritual compact of her church to rest.

It was not without action, however, that she brought about the firm foundation of a Christian Science church which should be unassailable as the rock of her doctrine. Mrs. Eddy had been clearing the way before her for an activity which was to eventuate in the building of the Mother Church in Boston, not simply as a structure of stone, but as a structure of legal compact from which should flow order in the conduct of church affairs. Her first step in this work was to request that the local Boston church dissolve its organization. After this was done in obedience to her request she published in the Journal for February, 1890, the following notice:

The dissolution of the visible organization of the church is the sequence and complement of that of the college corporation and association. The college disappeared that the spirit of Christ might have freer course among its students and all who come into the understanding of Divine Science. The bonds of the church were thrown away so that its members might assemble themselves together to “provoke one another to good works” in the bond only of love.

With the National Christian Scientist Association adjourned in New York this same year, the bonds of organization were entirely loosed and what the future held in store for them Christian Scientists were unable to discern. They had now to live the life and perform the works which a living faith demanded of them, and to trust that their teacher, withdrawn from the clash of petty affairs, was working out a plan by which they might manifest to the world a perfect unity of purpose. And she was working out such a plan, — meantime by letters and communications in the Journal encouraging her students all over the country to organize local churches. Thus detached organization was progressing with wonderful strides throughout the country.

In Boston the church was homeless, but still holding meetings, which now convened in Chickering Hall. This church had endeavored to purchase a lot of ground in Falmouth street as early as 1886 with the idea of erecting an edifice thereon, but through various dissensions and rebellions it had been unable to complete its purchase so that in 1889 a heavy mortgage still hung over its head. In December, 1889, Mrs. Eddy personally satisfied this mortgage and gave the lot in trust to her student, Ira O. Knapp. Mr. Knapp reconveyed the property to three trustees, namely, Alfred Lang, Marcellus Monroe, and William G. Nixon. The purpose of forming this trusteeship was that donations might be received for a building fund from loving students throughout the field.

The building fund had been growing slowly but surely; now a hitch in the mind of one of the trustees brought it to a sudden stop. It was William G. Nixon, Mrs. Eddy’s publisher, who could not be satisfied with the ultimate purpose of the trusteeship, and demanded that the title of the land be scrutinized by legal eyes. A paroxysm of doubt among his fellow trustees followed with the result that all surrendered their trusteeship and returned to the donors the funds which had accrued for the church building.

Undismayed by this action Mrs. Eddy rose to the demands of the situation. She employed an attorney to search the statutes of Massachusetts for a law by which her contemplated gift to the church might be made good and valid. Her lawyer very shortly put his finger upon the necessary legal enactment, a statute seldom resorted to, which seemed a providential decree for this emergency. This statute provided that trustees might be deemed a body corporate for the purpose of holding grants and donations without the formal organization of a church. So on September 1, 1892, Mrs. Eddy again conveyed her gift of ground, which was now valued at twenty thousand dollars, to four new trustees who were Ira O. Knapp, William B. Johnson, Joseph S. Eastaman, and Stephen A. Chase. These trustees pledged themselves to erect upon this lot a church building.

That no doubt might exist in the minds of her students throughout the United States and elsewhere that her purpose was entirely unselfish and that it was for the ends to which they all looked, Mrs. Eddy now counseled a reorganization of the Boston church as a Mother Church, which should draw its membership from Christian Science churches throughout the world. Thus by her advice twelve students came together and perfected such an organization which so satisfied the wishes of her students that over fifteen hundred members united before the first annual meeting, held in October, 1893.

Now the building fund began to grow as it had not done before. The donations returned by the doubting Thomas were sent back doubled and trebled. In order to secure the more rapid completion of the Mother Church edifice forty students each contributed one thousand dollars in 1894. Mrs. Eddy privately summoned her student, Joseph Armstrong, to Pleasant View, placing in his hands the power of decision in vexatious questions that might arise, and through his able, loyal, patient direction the original Mother Church was completed in every perfection of detail on the night of December 30, 1894.

Thus was the great labor of her mind during the first five years of her retirement brought to a satisfactory conclusion. The little local church, which in 1888 had threatened to eject the founder of the Christian Science movement, was no more; it had been dissolved and swallowed up in that larger organization which, in the provisos of its trust deed, pledged itself to teach nothing within the church walls which should not be in strict harmony with the doctrine and practise of Christian Science as set forth by Mary Baker G. Eddy in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” The trustees, moreover, now constituted the board of directors of the Mother Church and they elected Mrs. Eddy pastor emeritus. The church was dedicated January 5, 1895.

So had Mrs. Eddy ably directed her students by love that was wise and counsel that was firm in the midst of dereliction, stubborn opposition, revolt, and schism to that state of mind and that perfection of organization that they found themselves self-operative under provisos which would prevent their straying from her teaching. And in doing this she succeeded in withdrawing her own personality from the clashing world of events, leaving only Truth enthroned for ruler. What wonder that with one accord the church bestowed upon her the loving title of Leader!

1. “Retrospection and Introspection,” p. 67.