Eddy's "oceanic correspondence" and other observations

The opening paragraph on page 215 of Robert Peels' Mary Baker Eddy - The Years of Trial, reminds me of the disciple Peter's mother-in-law. It seems to me that her fever could have been brought on by concern about her son-in-law's leaving his trade and going off to follow an itinerant preacher. Jesus healed her, and “she arose and ministered unto them.” (See Matt. 8:14, 15.) Here Peel is talking about family ties and being a prophet, and how the ties are undone in almost every case.

Mention is made of Mrs. Eddy's sister-in-law, Mary Ann Cook Baker, on pages 216 and 364. Mrs. Baker wrote in praise of Mrs. Eddy's Christianity. If only the Christian world would recognise and celebrate Mrs. Eddy for the outstanding Christian she was!

Peel says Mrs. Eddy had "oceanic correspondence": all hand-written in those days, with a steel-nibbed pen!

Here we read about outstanding men; students that were coming to the fore. Hanover P. Smith, Alfred Farlow, Stephen A. Chase, Joseph Armstrong, Edward Bates, and Edward A. Kimball, are all mentioned on page 219.

Peel writes that “...by the turn of the century, [Kimball and Farlow] "would stand before the general public as Christian Scientists more prominently than anyone save Mrs. Eddy herself”: Kimball as practitioner, teacher, writer, thinker; and Farlow as the first Committee on Publication, with great talent for correcting false notions in the press about Christian Science.

There was an amazing array of mind-curers coming on the scene with their magazines. Page 227 lists some of them: Mental Healing Monthly; Church of Divine Unity; Mental Science Magazine; Truth, A Magazine of Christian Science; The Chicago Christian Scientist; Messenger of Truth. These were inclined to steal from Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. There was plenty of work for Alfred Farlow!

This morning, in my consecutive reading of Mrs Eddy's Prose Works, I came to Miscellaneous Writings, p. 269:25-26, which satisfies my thought on this business: “Christian Science may be sold in the shambles, Many are bidding for it, – but are not willing to pay the price.”

I love this on page 234 of Peel's book. Talking of a Mrs. Gestefeld's "Statement of Christian Science", a correspondent to The Christian Science Journal wrote, “I recognize the same difference between Mrs. Gestefeld's lectures and your book, that I do between the zeal of Saul and the zeal of Paul. Her Lectures lack regeneration. She has not yet been to Damascus.”

Joyce Voysey

Armed warriors

Peel titled chapter three “church militant” and there are certainly signs of war in its pages. Three passages remain with me.

1. We are told that Mrs. Eddy’s response to an apparently “grumbling” George Choate was the advice to “have more fight” in himself (p. 72).

2. In the 1880s, while researchers were discovering various disease-filled microbes, and Louis Pasteur was devising his “immunization through vaccination” theory, Eddy was responding with terms such as “mental molecules…germs of truth, microbes of sin, the virus of hatred” (p. 76). Peel points out that as her emphasis changed from warring against a person or persons, to warring with “evil thoughts and aims” (see p. 77), so the medical folk moved away from describing the microbe as the cause of disease, to observing its reception in the “terrain” of the “host organism”. Indeed, Peel quotes Pasteur: “…the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything.” (p. 77).

3. Eddy enlisted the help of two medical men in her quest to make Christian Science “more respectable in the eyes of society” (p. 81). Peel introduces his readers to an unconventional and independent thinker, Rufus King Noyes, M.D., author of “The History of Medicine for the Last 4000 Years”, and then to an almost shady character, one Charles J. Eastman.

And so, the enlightened spiritual warrior soberly dons “the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation” (I Thessalonians 5: 8).

Julie Swannell

Solid basis in Christianity

A student of Christian Science to-day may find it hard to comprehend the way people in the 1880's were trying to practise Mrs. Eddy's teachings without having a solid basis in Christianity. Peel tells us all about them. [Ed. See Peel Years of Trial, page 206 as an example.] What a student was our Robert Peel! I love that we are told in a recent blog that he got lots of laughs in amongst his labours.

However, these difficult students caused Mrs. Eddy to give us, at that time, some of the precious little books we find in her Prose Works: Rudimental Divine Science; Unity of Good; and No and Yes. Books so crucial to a student's progress in Christian Science.

Peel (Note #68 p. 360) points us to No and Yes 34:18-28 as a “typical example of the book's double-edged approach to traditional theological questions, in this case the doctrine of the sacrificial blood of Christ.” [Ed. This appears in a section titled "Is There No Sacrificial Atonement?"]

I love that we have a reference to the “Word becoming flesh” in our book, especially as the passage “...all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6 all) is the Golden Text for this week's Lesson-Sermon. See Christian Science Quarterly's Bible Lesson for week ending March 19, 2017. In Peel's words: “the absolute must be experienced humanly as redemption and transformation, not merely as nonattachment and abstraction" (p. 205).

It was interesting to learn that the Theosophical Society was formed two weeks after Science and Health was published. We are told about it on pages 206-207. Madame Blavatsky is perhaps the only famous name we hear of in regard to its teachings.

Joyce Voysey

The emerging movement

A reader from the Sunshine Coast, Meg McCauley, writes that although her reading of the Years of Trial is progressing very slowly, she is "appreciating it much more" than the first time around. 

In fact Meg first read it as a Sunday school student and felt that "nobody could be that good"! Later, as she was re-discovering Christian Science, her Mum gave her the set of three books and for Meg "it was through reading them that I began to appreciate and love Mrs. Eddy and the scale of her discovery and love for all mankind."

My reading is also progressing slowly, but am just loving what I'm discovering. For instance, reading the opening paragraph of chapter three, I was struck by the fact that Mrs. Eddy was lecturing in the Baptist Tabernacle in Boston. Her topic was "The Art of Healing by Divine Power", the first in a series of lecture-sermons which were followed by open discussion (page 61). Peel indicates that it was through the interest generated by these lectures, along with often "electrifying" testimony from ordinary folk, that "Christian Science began to strike roots in Boston". 

The following pages follow the emerging movement and its structuring as a church body and it's interesting to read that while just nine members voted to form the fledgling church in April 1979, by August there were 26 members.

As I'm concurrently reading Julia Baird's new book Victoria, the Queen, I was interested to read that Gilbert Eddy was "always faultlessly attired in a Prince Albert". It seems that Victoria and her consort's influence reached beyond the realm of Britain and her colonies, though I am not sure of the actual garments which might make up such a costume. 


Julie Swannell

Peals of laughter

One of our readers, Pam Gasteen, has given new insight into Peel's research process for the Mary Baker Eddy trilogy. 

She recalls a story from Christian Science teacher and one-time editor of the Christian Science periodicals, Geoffrey Barratt. During the period of his editorship, Robert Peel was researching and writing his trilogy, and those in the editorial department would hear peals of laughter coming from the archives section of the building - at Mrs Eddy's humour and the anecdotes he was discovering during his searching. 

What a charming picture!

And Pam reminds us that Peel's sister Doris was a wonderful poet. Her lovely poems can be found in the Christian Science periodicals.

Thank you Pam.

Julie Swannell

Educated students

Julie's piece about the court case against Gilbert Eddy and the newspaper which stirred the matter up had me thinking about "FAKE NEWS".

Nothing is new under the sun they say, though the ways of disseminating Fake News (lies published as fact) have changed enormously since the 1880's. I find that the typewriter was first invented in 1860's, and went on to a lot of improvements. So the person/s who invented the Fake News/Lie would probably have had the story typed and given to a newspaper. The newspaper, after 1884, would have a linotype machine which would set type in slugs of about 4 inches (24 or 25 m's, my printer husband says) in length for the main copy; headings would have been set by hand, i.e. one small piece of metal with a letter impressed on it at a time. Newspaper printing would have the pages of type set into a form from which a stereotype was taken. This allowed for printing on a rotary press. Once printed, the pages would have to be collated and folded, and the finished product had not left the newspaper house yet! This was not a quick method - quite a while from conception to reception by the public. To-day the whole process can be done by one person, on their phone, to access perhaps millions – in seconds.

[I have slowed up in my reading of this book, because we will continue with it for a while. There has been a lot happening at Redcliffe's Christian Science Society lately. Yesterday I had lunch in the Reading Room/Sunday School. Very nice too. It was in between Maryl Walters' lecture and her ecumenical workshop.]

Page 183 has an “illuminating reminiscence” re social reform:

Mrs. Eddy was very appreciative of my voluntary welfare work and in a serious talk I had with her one of the many evenings she invited me to speak with her, she admitted when I said the other half of Christian Science would demand human brotherhood practically applied in every relation of life. But she said the first thing is to implant firmly in human consciousness the Power of God to heal sickness,sorrow, etc. When that has taken hold of mankind, the other will in time follow as a necessary sequence. (Alzire Chevaillier)

Here us something I would like to have heard: Mrs. Eddy's spiritual interpretation of the sea. See page 184. There is no explanation.

It is well to realise that the piece Taking Offence (Mis. 223:24) is not from Mrs. Eddy's pen. She prefaced it in the Journal with “Somebody has written these wise words”.*

Hints to editors on page 186: Mr. Wiggin was expected to correct syntax rather than diction in his work on Mrs. Eddy's books. This included fixing: a dangling participle; a misplaced subjunctive; a pronoun without visible antecedent; an unwieldy sentence or overloaded paragraph. How fascinating!

On page 190 we find that Wiggin saw that opposition to Christian Science came from learned professions in a similar fashion to the opposition in Jesus' day from priests and rabbis.

Ah! I say. I see something of Peel's arguments which seem to indicate that he felt the same opposition in his professional environment and wished so much to counteract it.

He points out on page 194 that Mrs. Eddy appreciated and wished to see “teachers who are educated by the schools of learning first, next by me.” And Note 24 (p. 357) quotes her letter to Mrs. Larminie, “I see the need of educating students in common branches before we can fill the important posts of our Cause.”

How grateful we can be for those who, to-day, are educated to fill the important posts; the Board of Directors, the Editors, the teachers, all the way to branch church workers – Readers, Librarians in Reading Rooms, etc.

Joyce Voysey

*Ed. Readers might be interested to check out what The Mary Baker Eddy Library has to say on this matter: http://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/research/the-authorship-of-taking-offense/

It seems the matter of authorship has never been satisfactorily settled. 

Treachery afoot

The episode where Daniel Spofford "disappears" (presumed murdered according to press reports), and the subsequent jailing of Gilbert Eddy and Edward Arens (pp. 50-52) has always seems so absurd as to be almost impossible. Peel's comments on p. 51 set the scene for a realistic view of the proceedings:

   What sounds a century later like a black joke burst on the Christian Scientists like the end of the world. Over the years, biographers have tended to shrug off the episode as an inexplicable product of seething emotions in the Lynn teapot, but it deserves a closer and more careful look than that.

The press had pronounced Gilbert Eddy guilty at the outset and words like "notorious", "murder", and "conspiracy" flowed through their pages. What lies were constructed and assumptions made. And what a mystery to be solved. Excellent detective work, an admission of fault, and vigorous leg work and attention to detail overturned the case, but left unanswered the original perpetrator. Peel continues the detective work on pp. 57-58 as he thinks aloud with the reader in his analysis of the events and possible motivations. Perhaps more recent biographers have shed new light on the case.

Peel comments on the enduring misunderstanding about Mrs Eddy's life. Note #68 on page 329 is astute: Peel refers to the "lack of seriousness" allocated to her, even by "the more benevolent of [her] fellow Christians".

Julie Swannell