"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