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