Needed: clarity of mind

Robert Peel has painstakingly recorded the different personalities of some early students of Christian Science. Many had great promise but fell by the wayside, some lured by visions of power and prestige; some mixing it up with Eastern thought – preferring “ascetic withdrawal from the world” to “commitment to active living” (p. 280, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial); some drawn to theosophy; some conflating it with “New Thought optimism” (ibid. p. 283); some falling into hypocrisy and selfishness; others founding their own churches like the Church of the Divine Unity (Scientist) – see page 305.

This tireless biographer points out the difference between “wishful thinking” and “exacting fact” (p. 305) and quotes Mary Baker Eddy's "new pamphlet Rudiments and Rules of Divine Science" published in 1887:

           A slight divergence is fatal in Science. Like certain Jews, whom St. Paul had hoped to convert from mere motives of self-aggrandizement to the love of Christ, these so-called schools are clogging the wheels of progress, by blinding people to the true character of Christian Science,--its moral power, and its divine efficacy to heal.

            The true understanding of Christian Science Mind-healing never originated in pride, rivalry, or the deification of self. The Discoverer of this Science could tell you of timidity, of self-distrust, of friendlessness and toil, under which she needed miraculous vision to sustain her, when taking the first footsteps in this Science.

            Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial pp 281-282

An unrepentant student claimed that if Mrs. Eddy “had no more monopoly on Christian Science than the first writer of a textbook on mathematics has a monopoly on that subject” (p. 318). Peel responds –

           A captious critic might reply that theoretically any number of people could deduce Newton’s theory of gravitation from the same facts which led Newton to it, but that a “restatement” of it by a high-school boy who had been studying it in an elementary physics course might justly be considered a trifle redundant, not to say questionable.

It occurs to me that everyone has access to all the notes of the musical scale but it was only Beethoven who wrote the Ninth Symphony and to whom the credit will always be given.

Whatever the criticism or confusion or enmity or disloyalty, Peel points out the ‘the villain, from Mrs. Eddy’s point of view, was [not the people, but]… the human mind’s resistance to the impersonal demands of truth…” (p. 319).

And yet, other students captured the essence of this Science and stayed the course. Peel describes Stephen A. Chase, Joseph Armstrong, and Edward Bates as “men of superior ability” (p. 296). 

Additionally, two men “would stand before the general public as Christian Scientists more prominently than anyone save Mrs. Eddy herself” (p. 297): Alfred Farlow and Edward A. Kimball. These men shared the “qualities of humility, common sense, and breadth of outlook, but Kimball brought to Christian Science a large clarity of mind which made his service to the growing movement almost unique” (p. 298). Peel applauds the “spiritual power and logical persuasiveness” of his lectures which drew “overflow audiences” (p. 299).

Annie Macmillan Knott -- "a tiny, feminine figure with a voice deep as a man's and a heart stout as a lion's" (p. 301) provides an example of one who rose "to the altitude of true womanhood" (p. 302) to fulfil lecturing duties.

How grateful we are for current faithful lecturers, practitioners and teachers of Christian Science who are holding the banner aloft with meekness and might. 

Julie Swannell

It's all about love

James Henry Wiggin* was a big help to Mrs. Eddy in “sprucing up” the text of Science and Health. However, he had added quotations from other authors, as for instance in the chapter epigraphs. Mrs. Eddy later dispensed with these, except for Martin Luther’s “Here I stand. I can do no otherwise; so help me God! Amen!” now found on page 268 of Science and Health.

I am reminded that literary people are frequently inclined to quote previous literary authors, it seems to me, to “keep the ball rolling.” Peel says she was “stripping the book down to basic Christian Science and eliminating the Victorian gingerbread” (Peel, p. 381).

I find the following point very interesting. On page 401, Peel writes about Mrs. Eddy’s work on revising Science and Health:

In the fiftieth edition she divided the chapter “Prayer and Atonement” into two separate and enlarged chapters. They had not yet been placed at the beginning of the book, where they would later go as the best possible introduction to the metaphysical topics that followed, but they already showed Mrs. Eddy's deepening conviction that the letter of Christian Science could be understood only through the spirit of Christ.

Mrs. Eddy’s exceptional expression of love is illustrated in her student Janet Colman’s** reminiscences –

I can see one thing truthfully that if I were asked today after all my experience with our Leader [1914] which was the greatest of them to me I would say this: I always found her loving her enemies, always ready to do them good, always would see those who had injured her if she could help them even before one who had been loving and kind to her.” [See Note 90, page 402.]

Now. I would love to share something from an article by Michael Mooslin in the March 3, 2025 Christian Science Sentinel titled Me, we, and them. The article mentions Mary Baker Eddy’s approach to church participation. I shall copy the whole paragraph:

According to a reminiscence by an early student of Christian Science, when asked what she would like to do if she were active in church work, Mrs. Eddy answered, “to serve on the Lesson Committee.” (This committee of The Church of Christ, Scientist, prepares the weekly Bible Lessons published in the Christian Science Quarterly, which are studied daily by students of Christian Science and then read aloud as the Sunday sermon in The Mother Church and all of its branches.) Mrs. Eddy explained that we don’t attend church to worship God but to express Him. “We study these lessons six days,” she continued, “then we go to Church to express God for the world—to give the world a treatment” (William Coffman, Memoirs of a Christian Scientist, 1955, p. 3).

 Joyce Voysey

Ed.

*See Robert Peel’s Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Trial, p. 379-385.

**There is a lovely photo of Colman in the centre photographs section.

Aiming high

On page 280 of our book Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial by Robert Peel, there is a useful explanation of the phrase the Word must become flesh*. Here is the relevant paragraph: 

Eastern thought might deny the reality of matter in terms that suggested Christian Science, but the latter insisted, along with traditional Christianity, that the Word must become flesh—the absolute must be experienced humanly as redemption and transformation, not merely as nonattachment and abstraction.  Moreover, the self-denial or surrender of will at the heart of Christianity meant commitment to active living, not ascetic withdrawal from the world.  Neither the mystic’s ecstasies nor the adept’s mental techniques were an adequate substitute  for the ethical imperatives and healing outreach of practical Christianity.

 Note 84 (on the same page) re Caroline D. Noyes tells us of the “high estimate Mrs. Eddy put on Mrs. Noyes’s potentialities—and the rugged demand she made on her most committed students”. When Mrs Noyes claimed that she had “done the best that [she] could”, Mrs. Eddy said, “On, no, you haven’t. Go right back and do better.” Peel notes that she “returned to Chicago—and did do better”! 

It seems unbelievable that some students worked without the Christianity of Christian Science in their healing work. See paragraph about three students—Swarts, Plunkett and Hopkins (bottom p. 280 to top p. 281). See also a quote (p. 313 last paragraph) from a letter from Mrs. Eddy to Mrs. Gestefeld, ““I have not been able to learn from your lips what your feelings are on the “Christian side of this Cause.”  Yet that, she added “is the only side.”” 

Oh dear! On page 293 we find an Eddy quote “...I am not doing for my church a tithe of what is needed.” One asks oneself, “What fraction of what is needed am I doing?” 

Page 336 gives a Jewish rabbi’s estimate of Christian Science (Maurice Lefkovits, The Attitude of Judaism toward Christian Science): 

Christian Science is more than a mere healing association.  It is primarily a religious organization.  It is a church. ... 

And it is a Christian religious organization. It is a Christian church community. … Its central figure is Christ Jesus. … It is he who is the original source and supreme sanction of Christian Science. There is hardly a page in “Science and Health” … on which the name of Christ Jesus does not occur once or more often. … 

           … Christian Science does not believe in the deity of Jesus, but it does believe that he was the offspring of Mary’s self-conscious communion with God; and it supplements this belief with the statement that thus far only he, and no one else, has had such consciously divine descent. Christian Science rejects the belief that the blood of Jesus atones for the sins of those professing faith in him, but it emphatically upholds the belief that he, of all men, was the Wayshower, that he, infinitely more than any one else, manifested the Christ spirit, and thus he pre-eminently pointed and still points man’s way to salvation. 

I like Note 39 on page 350: “These two forms, masculine and feminine, both appear in the words of Jesus to Peter recorded in Matthew 16:18: “Thou art Peter (petros), and upon this rock (petra) I will build my church.”” 

Page 377 has interesting information about the revision of Science and Health in 1888/89.  Mrs. Eddy employed Joshua Bailey, editor of The Christian Science Journal, to assist: 

The same qualities in Joshua Bailey which led her to choose him as editor of the Journal caused Mrs. Eddy to turn to him for help in the new project. At the end of 1888 she asked him to go through the book sentence by sentence and suggest rearrangements of material that would bring together scattered passages dealing with a single topic. He was not to change, delete, or add to her words except for necessary transitions. It was largely a scissors and paste job … Shortly after the work had begun, she wrote Bailey: “Your motives aims, and transfiguration are all known to me. I agree with your arrangement so far; perhaps our dear God will change it[;] if so amen.” Several times she had him stop work altogether, and eventually she wrote that she had had to throw aside all the work that he had done and start again. But the experiment was instructive, and at least one major recommendation by Bailey bore permanent fruit. In September, 1889, Frye wrote him, “Mrs. Edy consents to having you impersonalize [the chapter] ‘Reply to a Critic’...” 

The reader may wish to read around this paragraph for a better understanding of the matter.

Joyce Voysey

Ed. *John 1:14 "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth."

Unbounded love - the Knapp family

Ira and Flavia Knapp and their four children lived on a farm in Lisbon, New Hampshire. Lisbon is situated just south of Littleton in the upper north west of the state. It was named after Lisbon in Portugal. 

The couple took class instruction with Mrs. Eddy in 1884. Ira Knapp is described by Robert Peel in Mary Baker Eddy: the years of trial (2nd edition) as "a farmer with the flowing beard, blazing eyes, and invincible rectitude of an Old Testament prophet" (p. 236).  

Peel recounts that some time before this, Flavia had been "healed by Christian Science after years of invalidism" and afterwards "she walked to the next farm and back with her four children dancing around her for sheer joy at seeing their mother able to go out again" (ibid).

But at first the couple found the healing work difficult. Their teacher encouraged them to stay the course - "stand the test" and "be faithful over a few things" (p. 237). They did.

We next read about the Knapp family on page 337 when Mrs. Eddy sought "a little rest and perspective" (p. 336) and stayed at their farm at Lyman, New Hampshire. Peel says that here "she found solace in the four Knapp children, in the simple farm life so familiar to her from her own childhood, in the woods and fields through which she went walking... and in the unbounded love of all the Knapps" (p. 337). The family later moved to Boston.

The Longyear Foundation have lovely tributes to Ira Knapp ("an obedient disciple") and Flavia Knapp.

Hymn 59 from the Christian Science Hymnal comes to mind as I contemplate this family.

Run the straight race through God’s good grace,
Lift up thine eyes, and seek His face;
Life with its way before us lies,
Christ is the path, and Christ the prize.

Faint not nor fear, His arms are near;
He changeth not, and thou art dear;
On Him rely and thou shalt see
That Christ is all in all to thee.
(Christian Science Hymnal, No. 59:2, 3)

https://www.worldatlas.com/maps/united-states/new-hampshire

Julie Swannell

Early workers

In the formative years of the Christian Science movement, Mary Baker Eddy was learning that not every student would adhere to her exact teachings. There were many tangents. Further, she could not alone do all the teaching. On page 218 of Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (2^nd edition), author Robert Peel observes --

One thing was clear to Mrs. Eddy. If the purity of Christian Science was to be maintained, she must train qualified students to become teachers and not leave its propagation to the mercies of every cheerful rascal who chose to appropriate its name.

Peel also observes that

“[f]or the most part the students were not, at this time, wealthy or prominent or brilliant people” (ibid. p. 220).

And, for some reason I was surprised to read about the number of students from outside major towns and cities:

“more than half of Mrs. Eddy’s students came from rural districts and small towns, and the pattern of country visits to patients on lonely farms was a prominent part of the total Christian Science picture” (ibid).

What follows on pages 220-222 is a revealing and tender picture of a small band of earnest and faithful workers who were not just talking about Christian Science but giving their all to practice it and thereby to bless mankind.

A comment from Eddy’s pen provides insight into the lives of these early workers, their goals and their sacrifices, as well, of course into Mrs. Eddy’s own life:

The rare bequests of Christian Science are costly, and they have won fields of battle from which the dainty borrower would have fled. Ceaseless toil, self-renunciation, and love, have cleared its pathway.

The motive of my earliest labors has never changed. It was to relieve the sufferings of humanity by a sanitary system that should include all moral and religious reform.

          Retrospection and Introspection, p. 30: 3-9

Today’s sincere students have the same motive.

Julie Swannell

Insights into Mrs. Eddy's character and work

I love this passage which starts at the bottom of page 231 of Robert Peel’s Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (2^nd edition): 

Mrs. Eddy, in fact, had her feet very firmly on the ground.  When students gave abstruse metaphysical answers to questions which demanded simple common sense, she soon brought them down to earth.  If a young couple had no place to leave a child while they were studying, she would tell them cheerfully to bring the child along, and in at least one case she taught an entire class with a delighted little girl sitting on her lap.  When the summer heat caused a certain amount of restiveness in one of her classes, Mrs. Eddy asked dryly, “Shall we move to some cooler part of the city, or shall we remain and make our own atmosphere.”

 

Regarding social reform, Alzire Chevaillier wrote (top of page 247): 

Mrs. Eddy was very appreciative of my voluntary welfare work & 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 that 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. 

 

On page 252 Peel sort of defines syntax, when discussing Mr. Wiggin’s corrections to Eddy's book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Peel writes: 

In general, the ambiguities [for readers] lay in the area of syntax rather than diction—in the dangling participle, the misplaced subjunctive, a pronoun without visible antecedent, an unwieldy sentence or overloaded paragraph. 

 

Joyce Voysey

 

Ed. It may be of interest to readers that Science & Health was first published 150 years ago this year.

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Our Reading Room Book Club blog site is sponsored by Christian Science Society Redcliffe and was started to encourage us all to deepen our study of the Bible and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy and to practice writing so that we can also submit articles and testimonies to the Christian Science periodicals.

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"My duty, and how to carry it out"

This morning, I'm up to page 182. I've been here a while already because there is much to digest. Every way Mrs. Eddy turns, there seems to be another difficulty to face, not the least plagiarism, disaffected students, being misunderstood, and plain dishonesty. I wondered how long this would go on. How many years of Mrs. Eddy's life does this book include?

In the Preface to the First Edition of his work Mary Baker Eddy: the Years of Trial, Robert Peel wrote that he has

"written it from the point of view of one encountering Mrs. Eddy for the first time in 1876 when she was still Mrs. Glover of Lynn, the little-known author of a recently published book called Science and Health.”

He continues

"One cannot examine seriously the fifteen years of Mrs. Eddy's life that followed the publication of her first book without being brought up against the great existential questions of life and death, the self and the void--revelation, absurdity, purpose, commitment, pain."

And so, I have my answer: 15 years from 1876 to 1891. Peel again:

“It was a crucial period of trial and error for the Founder of Christian Science, barely hinted at in her own restrained statement in Science and Health: ‘We must have trials and self-denials, as well as joys and victories, until all error is destroyed.’ At the end of it, in 1891, she was seventy years old, ripe in experience and ready to begin what by most people’s reckoning would be a lifetime’s work.”

Back on page 182, we hear Mrs. Eddy warning the Christian Scientist Association of a coming “tidal wave” of opposition and misinformation. A former student is claiming that Christian Science was the brain-child of Phineas Quimby and subsequently stolen by Mrs. Eddy.

She assures the Association that

“this tidal wave need not harm us, although it is an awful responsibility to me. I give a great deal of time in the long hours of the night to study my duty, and how to carry it out.”

Duty is not a word we hear much of in 2025. The Oxford online dictionary describes it as: a moral or legal obligation, a responsibility, a task or action that one is required to perform as part of one’s job.

This question of authorship was to be worked out for a much wider purpose than the defence of her authorship. It was in defence of the truth and of the cause of Christian Science.

In the meantime, the 6^th edition of Science and Health was published. It now included the “Key to the Scriptures” section. And it eliminated “all personal references” to several disaffected students (ibid, p. 185).

Some years later she would report to her church:

The man of integrity is one who makes it his constant rule to follow the road of duty, according as Truth and the voice of his conscience point it out to him. (Miscellaneous Writings 1883—1896, p. 147: 14-16)

And in Science and Health she would assure her readers that

“Whatever it is your duty to do, you can do without harm to yourself” (p. 385:17-18).

This episode is a wonderful example of inspired leadership.

Julie Swannell

A close reading of Peel's book

FATHER-MOTHER

On page 124 of Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (2^nd edition) we find author Robert Peel (speaking of the motherhood of God) telling us that Mrs. Eddy never, in her final renderings of her works, used the pronouns “She” and “Her”. While she certainly emphasises the Father-Motherhood of God, I find that she does not use “Mother” by itself in speaking of God. 

There are instances of “Father and Mother”.  For instance, on page 530:10 of her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures she writes:

"…Jesus once said, ‘Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink,’ – presuming not on the prerogative of his creator, but recognising God, the Father and Mother of all, as able to feed and clothe man as He doth the lilies."

And in her Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, for example page 33:11:

“All clergymen may not understand the illustrations in ‘Christ and Christmas;’ or that these refer not to personality, but present the type and shadow of Truth’s appearing in the womanhood as well as in the manhood of God, our divine Father and Mother.”

She can refer to herself (as the Discoverer of Christian Science) as Mother, as in the phrase “Mother, thought-tired” (Mis. 125: 23).  She was mother of the idea of divine Science, Christian Science.                                                                  

The whole sentence reads:

"Beloved Brethren, Children, and Grandchildren: – Apart from the common walks of mankind, revolving oft the hitherto untouched problems of being, and oftener, perhaps, the controversies which baffle it, Mother, thought-tired, turns to-day to you; turns to her dear church, to tell the towers thereof the remarkable achievements that have been ours within the past few years: the rapid transit from halls to churches, from un-settled questions to permanence, from danger to escape, from fragmentary discourses to one eternal sermon; yea from darkness to daylight, in physics and metaphysics."

GILBERT EDDY

On page 88 of Peel’s book, the first full paragraph speaks of the time when the Eddys were living in Lynn and Mrs. Eddy was giving Sunday lectures in Boston. She and her husband, Gilbert Eddy, would travel by public transport.

Longyear Museum’s “Mary Baker Eddy’s weekly commute” offers some details of this journey:

"On Sunday mornings the Eddys might well have started out on a horse-drawn trolley, on rails that ran past their Broad Street home down the dirt road to one of the rail terminals in central Lynn. There they would board a train (perhaps the Eastern Railroad or the Boston & Maine, or perhaps the new Boston, Revere Beach, and Lynn narrow-gauge line) and travel south along the shoreline to East Boston. Transferring to a ferry, they would cross the harbor to Atlantic Avenue on the Boston side. A short walk would bring them to Haymarket Square in the city’s North End, where they would board another horse-drawn trolley car for the jolting ride far out along Shawmut Avenue. At the end of the line, they would walk the rest of the way to the church in the South End. The round-trip journey could take three or four hours."

Meanwhile, Peel gives an insight into the man Gilbert Eddy (p. 88):

"While Mrs. Eddy gave the lectures, Gilbert, “...always faultlessly attired in a Prince Albert, ushered, took the collection, and talked with interested newcomers afterward.  One of these, Arthur True Buswell, wrote later: 

While Mrs. Eddy, the eloquent, earnest pleader for her infant Cause was the chief object of interest, it was the gentle, yet evidently strong nature of Asa Gilbert Eddy which formed a necessary “background,” and seemed to make the meetings altogether complete.”"

                                    Joyce Voysey

Peel's dual perspective

Earlier in the month I got somewhat bogged down over a passage on page 49 of Robert Peel's Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial where he writes about “her ‘absolute’ metaphysics and her ‘relative’ psychology".*

I searched for the derivation etc. of psychology, took in Mrs. Eddy’s definitions of the term, and noted the definitions of ontology and theodicy.

The fog of it all was cleared through this sentence from the current Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly:

If God, the All-in-all, be the creator of the spiritual universe, including man, then everything entitled to a classification as truth, or Science, must be comprised in a knowledge or understanding of God, for there can be nothing beyond illimitable divinity.” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, p. 127:4).

Further clarification came from an article titled “True Psychology” by Nathan Talbot, a one-time editor of the Christian Science periodicals. See Christian Science Sentinel 31^st May, 1975.

Through it all, I discovered that the numbering system for the end-notes in the 1^st edition of Peel’s book differs from the numbering system adopted for the footnotes which appear in this new, 2^nd edition. I feel sure this is explained somewhere but I couldn’t find it in this book. Perhaps it appears in the previous book Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery.**

Speaking of author Robert Peel in the Foreword to the 2^nd edition, Thomas Johnsen says,

A devoted Christian Scientist, he brought to his work the insights of this dual perspective, concerned not only with representing the theology of Christian Science correctly but also committed to addressing fully the skeptical questions raised by thoughtful outsiders. (Trial, p. xi-xii)

Now back to my current reading of the text. On p. 64 Peel had a gem for me about Mrs. Eddy’s use of the terms “mortal mind” and “divine Mind”. Commenting on the publication of the 2^nd (“Ark”) edition of Science and Health in 1878, Peel writes:

For the first time she clearly and repeatedly defined God as Mind, as well as Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, and Principle. As a correlative step she began to substitute the term “mortal mind” for “personal sense,” though not abandoning the latter phrase altogether. Previously she had tended to use “mind” in a neutral sense which permitted it to be identified either with spiritual reality or with material appearances. Now she drew a clear distinction between “divine Mind” and “mortal mind,” not merely as two modes of thinking (a true and a false) but as two antithetical starting points (an infinite intelligence and a self-destructive ignorance).   [My underlining.]

Joyce Voysey

*Ed. Here is the whole paragraph –

               It has sometimes been said that Mrs. Eddy ruled Satan out of her metaphysics only to let him back through the doctrine of “aggressive mental suggestion” or “malicious animal magnetism.” It would be more exact to draw a distinction between her “absolute” metaphysics and her “relative” psychology". In the realm of absolute Truth, evil was absolutely powerless; in the human situation it had only as much power as belief gave it, in somewhat the same way that a mathematical error had power to produce wrong results only so long as it remained undetected and uncorrected.

**Ed. This might be helpful: The Publisher’s Note (pp. vii – ix) explains that the “first edition’s placement of these notes in a back section rendered them invisible to some readers and difficult to locate for those wishing to engage with their rich content. … The substantive material contained in the notes has been left in place… Additions deemed useful for the current edition are enclosed in brackets; these consist chiefly of new citations not found in the original.”

Her tread was as light as air.

It's 1878. In February of that year, Thomas Edison had been granted the copyright of his invention, the phonograph. 

In November, the "smartly dressed" (p. 84, 2nd edition Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial by Robert Peel) Mary Baker Eddy lectured at the Baptist Tabernacle in Boston, even though unprecedented difficulties assailed her. Robert Peel records that while "unhappy court cases dragged on", she "spoke with ... buoyant conviction" which attracted many newcomers. One later observer remarked that "Though she walked over thorns, her tread was as light as air" (ibid).

In her pamphlet No and Yes, she would write (p. 27: 23-26): 

"Who can say what the absolute personality of God or man is? Who living hath seen God or a perfect man? In presence of such thoughts take off thy shoes and tread lightly, for this is holy ground."

Julie Swannell

Times of crisis

Mrs. Eddy was no stranger to struggles and difficulties. Robert Peel's Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial makes that plain. 

With her discovery of Christian Science and the publication of the first edition of her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, students were coming to learn from her. But some of those students presented her with contradictions:  loyalty and disaffection, conspiracy and reconciliation, praise and scorn. (It is interesting that "they laughed [Jesus] to scorn" for his declaration that the dead-12-year-old girl was "not dead, but sleepeth". See Luke 8: 52-53.)

Through the turmoil, Peel gives us some insight into Mrs. Eddy's means of staying on course when confronted with evil intent. He explains (p. 46) that she had "redefined" evil as "error, demanding correction". Her beloved Bible would give her the means of correcting the error: 

Again and again in times of crisis she would note down in her Bible a particular verse through which she felt God had spoken to her and given her direction, noting also the date on which she had turned to it.

I love this. Her Bible was her "chart of life", as she was to note in Science and Health on page 24: 

Acquaintance with the original texts, and willingness to give up human beliefs (established by hierarchies, and instigated sometimes by the worst passions of men), open the way for Christian Science to be understood, and make the Bible the chart of life, where the buoys and healing currents of Truth are pointed out.

I ask myself if I turn to my Bible with such confidence? Am I acknowledging and noting in it the day-by-day the answers coming to me from its pages?

Peel reminds us that "discipline, energy, and persistence" were and are required - see p. 47. He warns that "...the struggles [of 1878] ...harried and  and almost destroyed Christian Science" (p. 50). 

Julie Swannell

holding hands

Robert Peel recounts a lovely story about Mrs. Eddy -- then Mrs. Glover -- when she was living at 8 Broad Street in Lynn, Massachusetts.

 https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Lynn,_Essex_County,_Massachusetts_Genealogy

A Mr. Orville Clough noticed her coming out of the house holding the hand of a small child and remarked on the "beautiful sign" on her home. It was the Cross and Crown emblem that she had adopted as a symbol of Christian Science and can be found on the cover of her work Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. 

Mrs. Glover remarked that: "We all have the Cross but each one must become as this little child before he can have the Crown." (See Mary Baker Eddy: the Years of Trial by Robert Peel, 2nd edition, footnote 43, p. 20.)

Julie Swannell