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