Comments on Wilbur's book

Oh! How I have neglected the Book Club!

Yesterday, I had cause to check up on Jerry, Mrs. Eddy's carriage horse (one of them), so found him on the blog (See post dated 17 October 2015.) Do you remember his story? I think we could stand a repeat -

“On one occasion a different horse than usual was harnessed to her carriage.  'Where is Jerry?' asked Mrs. Eddy. 'Jerry is lame,' was the reply. 'Put Jerry in the harness,' said Mrs. Eddy. The coachman obeyed, and soon the carriage came up the driveway, with Jerry in the harness, limping at each step. 'Jerry,' said Mrs. Eddy, 'mind your own business,' and Jerry stopped limping” (p. 585, note 9, Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, expanded edition).

While hunting for that quote in the biographies, I came up with another interesting quote about horses from John Salchow's reminiscences about Mrs. Eddy's horses, “It is true that they wore blinders and a checkrein, but in those days it was felt that a horse kept his mind on  his business better with blinders on and was therefore easier to drive” (p. 386, We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, expanded Vol. 1).

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Now a few words about The Life of Mary Baker Eddy by Sybil Wilbur.

The author had quite a clear understanding of Christian Science when she wrote the book. She must have been a good student. I think I am right in saying that she had Class Instruction after that writing.

It confuses me somewhat as to whether she is reconstructing an event exactly or using her story-telling skills to make an more interesting story.

Now, I have read Mrs. Eddy's Retrospection and Introspection in which she tells of her experience of hearing her name mysteriously called many times. At these times she says she was in the presence of her grandmother. All of those readings have left the grandmother as a passive by-stander for me. But on reading about it this time, I recalled my daughters and their influence on their grandchildren at this time, and realised that this was no passive grandmother. I can imagine the happy and productive times they had.

There is a paragraph on page 47 which talks to me of Shostakovich and his Symphony about the Siege of Leningrad, the 7^th Symphony. A biography of the man gives a vivid description of these terrible times in the history of Russia during the second World War. (I am sorry I cannot quote the book's name or author.) Although I have never heard the music, that paragraph evoked, for me, something of the pathos of those terrible times. 

Perhaps a little fanciful of Miss Wilbur in relating Mrs. Eddy's life to music and its effects?

On page 162 I found the phrase 'years of trial.' Interesting that Robert Peel used that phrase in the title of the second of his trilogy, i.e. Mary Baker Eddy:Years of Trial. Although, for Peel, it is the second phase of the life, while Wilbur is referring to the earlier period, dubbed by Peel as the Years of Discovery.

There is history in this book which I think is not recorded in any of the other biographies of Mrs. Eddy. For instance on pages 162/3 about early students and the hazards of mesmerism. 

On page 268 we see this, “...the deadliest poison is a secretion engendered by the working of hatred.”

And on page 355, it is pleasing to find the phrase “the betterment of humanity.”  It is echoed in the Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity, that wonderful facility in Boston where we can to for information about Mrs. Eddy, her writings, and her life.

I am indebted to Wikipedia for this description of the Library:

The Mary Baker Eddy Library is a research library, museum, and repository for the papers of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

The library is located on the Christian Science Center, Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts, and housed in a portion of the 11-story structure originally built for the Christian Science Publishing Society. While the library holds the archive for the letters and manuscripts of Mary Baker Eddy, it contains other exhibits, including the Mapparium, a three-story stained-glass globe that allows visitors to stand inside a globe depicting the world of 1934.

My “few words” have finished up quote a few, I notice.

Joyce Voysey

The Christian Science textbook: "It will stand"

We are continuing with Sibyl Wilbur's The Life of Mary Baker Eddy this month, April 2018.

Writing, like any craft, takes focus, intent listening, careful refinement, dedication and seclusion. Mary Baker was writing a book like none other. It would become a textbook for Christian Scientists worldwide and down the ages. She felt God's hand directing it. Wilbur describes the tiny attic bedroom which doubled as Mary's work room:

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...On the wall she had hung the framed inscription, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." (p. 205)

With the 1875 publication of her work came the critics, the scoffers. Wilbur carefully assesses the responses from the famous Mark Twain, who she refers to as "the satirical assailant" (p. 208).  

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." 

She then amplifies his stance:

First, the book is absurd; the critic couldn'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." (Quoted words are from Mark Twain's Christian Science, p. 284). 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...

The critic went on to say: "She has delivered to them [her followers] 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." (ibid, p. 286)

"Let the reader turn to the chapter of prayer...that wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of work..." (ibid).

But it is the third point to which Wilbur pays special attention. Twain had written:

"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."

Wilbur concludes her concise answer to this last claim: 

Neither internal evidence nor higher criticism will divorce this work from its author, Mary Baker Eddy, the spiritual seer of her age....It has been plagiarized and pirated from, vilified and burlesqued, but it will stand."

Just as one cannot divorce a great work of art from the artist's hand that painted it, nor separate a great piece of music from the person who conceived its notes and harmonies, so an author's work must be acknowledged as their own. 

Julie Swannell