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