Pursuing the "high goal"

Having covered the years of Mary Baker Eddy's life up to 1882, Gill now opens the second part of her biography. Her theme is always to weigh up the evidence she is uncovering against the writing of earlier biographers. 

She explains to the reader her own initial reluctance to treat Eddy's life purpose as God-ordained or God-directed and her subsequent reconciling with the idea that "[w]hat matters, from both a historical and a biographical viewpoint, is whether the [individual's] vision changes the person's life and activates him or her to achieve practical things which...would be placed between difficult and impossible" (297). 

Here, Gill notes the often derogatory effect of Eddy's gender on the interpretation of her life-work by many commentators. In short, she contends that much of the opposition to Christian Science and its leader has been opposition to the idea of a female religious leader.

And so, chapter 16 "The Massachusetts Metaphysical College" opens a window on the newly widowed sixty-year-old Mary Baker Eddy and her imperative need for "good lieutenants and aides" (302) to help her in her mission. Gill now introduces the reader to thirty-seven-year-old widower, the "incorruptible" (304) Calvin Frye. She suggests that his life in Eddy's employ enabled him to be "in an environment wholly different from his parents' desolate home" (ibid). Here he was a willing and vital participant in a thrilling new movement that "was changing the landscape of American religion and medicine" (ibid). 

Meanwhile, Mrs. Eddy was at work! Gill lists some of the herculean tasks she embarked on at this time and comments that one of her students, Julia Bartlett, "was in awe before Mrs. Eddy's energy and capacity for hard work" (305).

Trials and tribulations abounded, but Mary Baker Eddy kept her eye on "the high goal", a prescription laid out in the Christian Science textbook:

The discoverer of Christian Science finds the path less difficult when she has the high goal always before her thoughts, than when she counts her footsteps in endeavoring to reach it.
(Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 426:5–8)

Julie Swannell