The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy/Chapter 16

by Georgine Milmine

CHAPTER XVI

MRS. EDDY'S BOSTON HOUSEHOLD—A DAILY WARFARE AGAINST MESMERISM—THE P. M. SOCIETY—AN ACTION AGAINST ARENS FOR INFRINGEMENT OF COPYRIGHT

The Massachusetts Metaphysical College, in Boston, was first at 569 Columbus Avenue, and later at 571, the house next-door. The houses, which are still standing, were then exactly alike, narrow three-and-a-half-story dwellings with gray stone fronts and slate roofs, a type of house very common in Boston. When Mrs. Eddy returned to the city in the fall of 1882, attended by Mr. Buswell and Mr. Frye, she at once resumed her classes; this, of course, meant that the college had reopened, for Mrs. Eddy was still the president and entire faculty. Half a dozen or more of her students now made their home in Mrs. Eddy's house, or, as they expressed it, "lived at the college." Among these were Calvin Frye, Arthur Buswell, Julia Bartlett, Hanover P. Smith, E. H. Hammond, and Mrs. Whiting. (Luther M. Marston and Mrs. Emma Hopkins came later.) They lived on a coöperative plan, each contributing his share toward the household expenses, while Mr. Frye did the marketing, engaged the servants, kept the accounts, and superintended the housekeeping. Mrs. Eddy fitted up an office on the first floor, where most of her resident students saw their patients. They observed a system of rotation, and each had his fixed office hours, so that the one room met the needs of several practitioners. These practitioners, in one way and another, helped to arouse an interest in Christian Science, and Mrs. Eddy's classes began to grow larger. Her teaching was not so much of a tax upon her strength as might be imagined, for the twelve lectures were, by this time, an old story to her and the same lecture was always given in practically the same language. The lectures dealt with but one idea, and progressed rather by figurative illustrations and repetitions than by the development of a line of reasoning. But her duties by no means ended with her lectures. She kept a sharp eye on the finances of the college and the household expenditures, more than once taking Mr. Frye to task for his mistakes in bookkeeping. Mrs. Eddy's correspondence was now very large, and she usually attended to it herself. She frequently occupied the pulpit at Hawthorne Hall on Sunday, and was constantly writing replies to attacks upon her church and college, besides press notices, which Mr. Buswell took about to the editors of the Boston papers in the hope of further advertising Mrs. Eddy and her work. What with preaching, teaching, writing, and editing, Mrs. Eddy had very little time for friendly personal intercourse. She was, as her students used proudly to declare, in the saddle day and night. She went out of the house but seldom; though she liked to take a daily drive when she had time for it. With her friends and resident students she never talked of anything but Christian Science and the business problems which confronted her. When other subjects were introduced, she grew absent-minded. She read very little except the newspapers and the New York Ledger, which she had read since her young womanhood, and which she still read regularly every week. In earlier times Mrs. Eddy had been very fond of Mrs. Southworth's novels, but now she discouraged the reading of fiction, and Science and Health was the only book she kept in her room. When she lectured before her classes, Mrs. Eddy usually had a vase of flowers upon the table at her side, and, to illustrate the non-existence of matter, she often explained that there were really no flowers there at all, and that the bouquet was merely a belief of mortal mind. She was fond of flowers in spite of the fact that she had always been totally without a sense of smell—she used, indeed, to tell her students that the absence of a physical sense meant a gain in spirituality.

There was singularly little social intercourse among the students who resided at the college. Mrs. Eddy was no idler, and she found plenty of work for all her assistants. Occasionally, in the evening, a fire was lighted in the parlour downstairs, and she joined her students for an hour or two; but this did not occur often. The two memorable festivities of the Christian Scientists in the early '80's were the reception which Mrs. Clara E. Choate gave for Mrs. Eddy upon the latter's return from a visit to Washington, April 5, 1882, and the picnic at Point of Pines, July 16, 1885, which commemorated the ninth anniversary of the founding of the Christian Science Association, and was also Mrs. Eddy's sixty-fourth birthday. At this picnic E. H. Harris, a dentist, and a new protégé of Mrs. Eddy's, gave a talk in which he mentioned the advantages of Christian Science in the practice of dentistry; Mrs. Augusta Stetson, who had recently come into the Association, and who had been a professional elocutionist before she became a Christian Scientist, recited two poems; and Mrs. Eddy gave a "spiritual interpretation" of the ocean.

The atmosphere of Mrs. Eddy's house derived its peculiar character from her belief in malicious mesmerism, which exerted a sinister influence over every one under her roof. Her students could never get away from it. Morning, noon, and night the thing had to be reckoned with, and the very domestic arrangements were ordered to elude or to combat the demoniacal power. If Mrs. Eddy had kept in her house a dangerous maniac or some horrible physical monstrosity which was always breaking from confinement and stealing about the chambers and hallways, it could scarcely have cast a more depressing anxiety over her household. Those of her students who believed in mesmerism were always on their guard with each other, filled with suspicion and distrust. Those who did not believe in it dared not admit their disbelief. If a member of that household denied the doctrine, or even showed a lack of interest in it, he was at once pronounced a mesmerist and requested to leave.

Mr. Eddy's death had given malicious animal magnetism a new vogue. Mrs. Eddy was now always discovering in herself and her students symptoms of arsenical poison or of other baleful drugs. Her nocturnal illnesses, which she had for years attributed to malicious mesmerism, were now more frequent and violent than ever.

One of the principal duties of the resident students was to treat Mrs. Eddy for these attacks. These seizures usually came on about midnight. Mrs. Eddy would first call Mr. Frye, and he, after hurrying into his clothes, would go about the house, knocking at the doors of all the students, and calling to them to dress immediately and hurry down to Mrs. Eddy's room. After arousing the inmates of the house, he would hasten through the deserted streets, summoning one after another of the healers whom Mrs. Eddy considered most effective. When they arrived at the college, they would find a group of sleepy men standing in the hall outside Mrs. Eddy's door, talking in low tones. They were called, one by one, by Miss Bartlett or Mr. Frye, and admitted singly into Mrs. Eddy's chamber. Sometimes she lay in a comatose condition, and would remain thus for several hours, while each student, in his turn, sat beside the bed and silently treated her for about twenty minutes. He then left the room by another door than the one by which he had entered, and another student took his place. Again, the students would find Mrs. Eddy sitting up in bed, with a high colour, her hair in disorder, wringing her hands and uttering unintelligible phrases. On one occasion, when Mrs. Eddy was walking the floor with a raging toothache, metaphysical treatment was abandoned, and several of her students rushed up and down Tremont Street after midnight, trying to persuade some dentist to leave his bed and come to her relief.

In animal magnetism Mrs. Eddy found a satisfactory explanation for the seeming perversity of inanimate things. Mesmerism caused the water-pipes to freeze and the wash-boiler to leak. She was convinced that all the postal clerks and telegraph operators in Boston had been mesmerised, and on one occasion, when she was sending an important telegram to Chicago, she sent Luther M. Marston, one of her students, to West Newton to despatch it via Worcester, so that it need not go through Boston at all.

When a contagion of influenza spread about Boston in the early '80's, a number of the students in Mrs. Eddy's class were affected by it. She paused one day in the midst of a lecture to say: "I notice that a number of you are sneezing and coughing, and the cause is perfectly apparent to me. Kennedy and Spofford are treating you for hashish. Just treat yourselves against hashish, and this will pass."

Even the students under Mrs. Eddy's own roof were at times accused of resorting to malicious malpractice. On one occasion Mr. Buswell secured the Rev. Dr. Andrew P. Peabody of Cambridge to preach before the Christian Science congregation at Hawthorne Hall. It was announced by Mrs. Eddy, before the students started for the service, that Mr. Frye was to introduce Dr. Peabody to the audience. When the minister ascended the rostrum, however, he was alone, and no one introduced him. After several days had passed, Mr. Frye knocked at Mr. Buswell's door late one night, and told him that he was wanted in the parlour. Mr. Buswell rose, dressed, and went downstairs, where he found Mrs. Eddy and half a dozen resident students sitting about the room. Mr. Buswell sat down, and for a few minutes every one was silent. Then Mr. Frye rose and said, "Mr. Buswell, I charge you with having worked upon my mind last Sunday, so that I could not introduce the speaker." Mrs. Eddy listened while Mr. Buswell defended himself. Several other students spoke, and then everybody went off to bed.

In the summer of 1884 Mrs. Eddy taught her first class in Chicago. She had now fallen out with Mrs. Clara Choate, and for several weeks before she went West Mrs. Eddy was in a state of great anxiety lest Mrs. Choate should "prostrate" her through mesmerism, as she believed that Mrs. Choate herself wished to go to Chicago to teach. Mr. Frye had bought tickets for Mrs. Eddy and himself when, on the very night before they were to start, she fell ill. Next day she was not able to leave the house, and many of her students were summoned to the college to treat against Mrs. Choate.

This adverse treatment, now conducted with some system, was an important feature of the daily life at the college. A regular society was organised among Mrs. Eddy's most trusted students and was called the "P. M." (Private Meeting).^[1] This society met daily after breakfast in the morning and after supper at night, gathered in Mrs. Eddy's parlour, and "took up the enemy" in thought. Mrs. Eddy was not always present at these sittings, but she usually gave out the line of treatment. She would say, for example: "Treat Kennedy. Say to him: 'Your sins have found you out. You are affected as you wish to affect me. Your evil thought reacts upon you. You are bilious, you are consumptive, you have liver trouble, you have been poisoned by arsenic,' " etc. Mrs. Eddy further instructed her practitioners that, when they were treating their patients, they should first take up and combat the common enemy, mesmerism, before they took up the patient's error. The adverse treatments given by the students at the college were usually conducted in perfect silence, and the participants sat with their eyes closed.^[2] Miss Bartlett, a very devout woman, as she sat in this silent circle, absorbed in her task, her eyes closed, her head bowed, had a habit of idly passing a side-comb again and again through her hair. Mrs. Eddy, who, when she was there, always kept an eye on the circle, on one of these occasions suddenly broke the stillness by a sarcastic remark to the effect that better work would be done if less time were spent in hair-combing and more in combating error. Miss Bartlett blushed as if she had been caught committing a mortal sin.

But Mrs. Eddy's policy of sharp rebuke proved to be a wise one. On the whole her students liked it, and on the whole they needed it. Her business assistants and practitioners were, most of them, young men whose years had need of direction. In the nature of the case, they were generally young men without a strong purpose and without very definite aims and ambitions. Whether it was that Mrs. Eddy did not want men of determination about her, or whether such men were not drawn to her and her college, the fact remains that most of the men then in her service were of the eminently biddable sort. Some of them, before they came into Christian Science, had tried other vocations and had not been successful. Mrs. Eddy drew young men of this type about her, not only because she could offer them a good living, but because she was able to give them an impetus, to charge them with energy and endow them with a certain effectiveness which they did not have of themselves. Loyal Christian Scientists point to this or that man who once worked under Mrs. Eddy and who afterward broke with her, explaining that he was more successful and useful under her than he has ever been since he went over to the enemy. In some instances this is true. Many of her students never worked so well after they withdrew from her compelling leadership, and their contact with her remained the most vivid and important event in their lives. Out of her abundant energy and determination Mrs. Eddy has been able to nerve many a weak arm and to steel many an irresolute will, and she has done much of her work with tools which were temporarily given hardness and edge by the driving personality behind them.

As the college grew and her classes increased in size, Mrs. Eddy exacted, and for the most part obtained, the same absolute obedience which she had demanded of the faithful in Lynn. She had a custom of sending telegrams to students who had left Boston, summoning them to report at the college immediately, and giving no explanation of the order. When they arrived there, they sometimes found that she had merely been experimenting to see how quickly they could reach her in case of need. If they were prompt in this sort of drill, she seemed pleased and reassured. On the Fourth of July, especially, she demanded that all her students be subject to call, and that none of the resident students leave Boston on that day. She explained that on the Fourth "mortal mind was in ebullition," and she feared animal magnetism more then than at any other time.

In 1883 Mrs. Eddy brought an action against Edward J. Arens for infringement of her copyright upon Science and Health, and won the suit. Arens was forbidden to circulate his book,—to which there has already been a reference in Chapter XV,—and the copies which he had on hand were ordered by the court to be destroyed. Mr. Arens' defence was that Science and Health was not Mrs. Eddy's own work, but that it had been taken largely from P. P. Quimby's manuscripts. As none of Mr. Quimby's manuscripts had been published or copyrighted, and as Mr. Arens did not have them in his possession, the defendant's position was obviously untenable. Although this decision had to do merely with the validity of Mrs. Eddy's copyright, and did not touch upon the authorship of the book, Mrs. Eddy chose to construe it as being a court decision to the effect that she was the sole author of Science and Health, and the founder and discoverer of Christian Science; and her construction cheered and encouraged her quite as much, perhaps, as an actual decision to that effect would have done. She afterward referred to this decision as her "vindication in the United States court."

The years from 1882 to 1885 were years of rapid advancement for Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science. Although a list of the members of the Christian Scientists' Association, made June 2, 1884, shows that but sixty-one persons then belonged to the Association, many people were interested in Christian Science who had not actually allied themselves with it, and Mrs. Eddy was steadily gaining some sort of recognition for herself and her teachings. She had now a considerable number of graduate students who were in practice, and their success, as well as hers, depended upon the growth of Christian Science and of the college. They sent their patients to study under her, and canvassed widely among their friends and acquaintances. Some of these students went to distant places to practise, and did the work of missionaries, encouraging their patients to go to Boston and study under Mrs. Eddy. A degree from the Massachusetts Metaphysical College meant, in most cases, a lucrative practice. In the West especially, where Boston is regarded as the sum of all that is conservative, and where even the banks consider it an advantage to have a Bostonian among their directors, a degree from a Boston institution meant a great deal, and the "Massachusetts Metaphysical College of Boston" suggested an institution devoted to higher scholarship. A combination of Boston and metaphysics seemed to leave little to be desired in the way of learning, and many a Western student, after having "gone East to college," returned home to find that, for the purpose of making a living and commanding respect among his neighbours, a degree from the Massachusetts Metaphysical College served him quite as well as a degree from Harvard. Graduate students had lectured and practised in Chicago, and when Mrs. Eddy taught a class there in the summer of 1884, she inspired a sentiment which was ultimately to build up a strong church.

The Christian Science Church was now conspicuous enough to be the object of occasional attacks from conservative theologians. These attacks were neither frequent nor bitter,—indeed, they were usually humorous or mildly ironical,—but Mrs. Eddy made the most of them, and answered them with promptness and fire, getting her replies published in the Boston newspapers whenever it was possible to do so, and, when editors proved intractable, resorting to her own periodical, the Christian Science Journal. She realised the value of persecution, even when it had to be helped along a little, and in the Journal for April, 1885, she cries: "Must history repeat itself, and religious intolerance, arrayed against the rights of man, again deluge the earth in blood?" In the Journal we find that in March of the same year, Mrs. Eddy was permitted to speak at a religious meeting held at Tremont Temple, and there to reply to a letter by the Rev. A. J. Gordon denouncing Christian Science, and that she gloriously vindicated her church.

 Photograph by H. G. Smith

MARY BAKER G. EDDY

Taken about the year 1886, while at the head of her college in Boston

As she looked in 1870, when she first taught Christian Science in Lynn, Mass.

Mrs. Eddy was now president of the "Massachusetts Metaphysical College," editor of the Christian Science Journal, president of the Christian Scientists' Association, and pastor of the First Church of Christ (Scientist). To the latter office her students had ordained her, without the aid of the clergy, in 1881, and her official letters and press communications were now usually signed "Reverend Mary Baker G. Eddy." Her classes now numbered from fifteen to twenty-five students each. The course of instruction took only three weeks, which, with a class of twenty-five, would mean that Mrs. Eddy's fees for that period of time amounted to $7,500. It is safe to say, however, that at least one-fourth of her students were admitted at a discount and paid only $200 each. Men and women of intelligence and some experience of the world began to frequent her college. Among these were Dr. J. W. Winkley, then a Unitarian minister, who had a church at Revere; Mrs. Emma Hopkins, Mrs. Ursula Gestefeld of Chicago; Mrs. Augusta Stetson, then an elocutionist in Somerville, Boston; Mrs. Ellen Brown Linscott; Mrs. Josephine Woodbury and her husband; the Rev. J. H. Wiggin, and the Rev. Frank E. Mason.

To understand the early growth of Christian Science in Boston, one must remember, first, that Boston was then, as it is now, the stronghold of radical religious sects; secondly, that, while fundamentally Mrs. Eddy never changed at all, superficially, she was continually changing for the better, and her shrewdness, astuteness, and tact grew with every year of her life. After her removal to Boston, she constantly learned from her new associates, even to the extent of resolutely breaking herself of certain ungrammatical habits of speech—no mean achievement for a woman above sixty. But the most important thing that Mrs. Eddy learned was to admit—to herself only—her own limitations. She began to submit her editorials, pamphlets, and press communications to certain of her students for grammatical censorship. She now granted interviews to strangers and new students only when she felt at her best. She withdrew herself from her followers somewhat, and built up a ceremonial barrier which was not without its effect. In writing, she acquired more and more facility as time went on. Her style of expression remained vague, but that suited her purpose, and her excessive floridity delighted many of her readers, and was condoned by others as a survival of the old-fashioned flowery manner of writing. Her letters of this date are better spelled and punctuated, and are written in a firmer and more vigorous hand, than those written when she was forty.

Mrs. Eddy now began to limit the number of her public addresses, and she delivered her Sunday sermon before her congregation at the Hawthorne rooms only when she felt that she could rouse herself to that state of emotional exaltation which it was her aim to produce in her hearers. Often as late as Sunday morning, she would notify one of her students to fill the pulpit. At other times, after she had appointed a substitute, she would decide at the last minute to go herself, and, after the audience at Hawthorne Hall had been waiting for perhaps half an hour, Mrs. Eddy's carriage would swing into Park Street, and she would alight amid a crowd of delighted students, sweep rapidly up the aisle, ascend the rostrum, and at once begin to deliver one of her most effective sermons; perhaps a discussion of how, in His resurrection, Christ made the highest demonstration of the healing powers of Christian Science, or perhaps a prophetic discourse upon a text of which she was particularly fond, and which she always delivered with astonishing conviction: "Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

1. The sessions of this secret society later caused a good deal of discussion and criticism. In the Christian Science Journal of September, 1888, Mrs. Eddy admits that she "did organise a secret society known as the P. M.," but that its workings were not "shocking or terrible."
2. Calvin Frye, Arthur Buswell, Hanover P. Smith, Luther M. Marston, E. H. Hammond, Mrs. Whiting, and Miss Julia Bartlett were at various times members of this circle.