Touching lives by our spirituality

 As I open my copy of Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer (Amplified Edition) by Yvonne Cache von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck this morning, I like what it says on the very first page: "Many historical records related to Mary Baker Eddy's life, including those used in this biography, are held at The Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston, Massachusetts. The Library's collections are available for public research."

While I have not visited the MBE Library in person, its rich resources are freely available online at https://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/  and anyone can ask questions if they can't find answers already on the site. 

So, it's reassuring that our book this month has used those resources in its compilation.

I was interested to read the quotes from Phillips Brooks* and Mary Baker Eddy on the following page, and I wondered about Mr. Brooks. Wikipedia gives this brief summary: "Phillips Brooks was an American Episcopal clergyman and author, long the Rector of Boston's Trinity Church..." He is also mentioned in a post on The Mary Baker Eddy Library's site about WWII internees in Hong Kong because he wrote the words to the hymn "O little town of Bethlehem" which some internees had hand-copied for their church services during that harrowing time. (See A Remarkable Story of Persistence.) Readers will enjoy reading this.

Here are the two quotes which appear on one of the unnumbered early pages of our book:

God has not given us vast learning to solve all the problems, or unfailing wisdom to direct all the wanderings of our brothers' lives; but He has given to every one of us the power to be spiritual, and by our spirituality to lift and enlarge and enlighten the lives we touch. -- Phillips Brooks

The secret of my life is in the above. -- Mary Baker Eddy

Let us now open our hearts to that "power to be spiritual" as we read this volume about Mary Baker Eddy and how her life's work has touched and blessed so many lives, then and now.

Julie Swannell

* A search under "Phillips Brooks" on https://jsh.christianscience.com/console yields 270 results! He was a very much respected and quoted theologian. One article which mentions Brooks is "The next 90 years" by Mark Swinney (See Christian Science Sentinel 27th December 2010. If you don't have access to jsh-online, feel free to call your local Christian Science Reading Room to access this article for you.)