Name: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy
Author: Sibyl Wilbur

Front matter

Fourth Edition

Permission

MRS. EDDY'S HISTORY

I HAVE not had sufficient interest in the matter to read or to note from others' reading what the enemies of Christian Science are said to be circulating regarding my history, but my friends have read Sibyl Wilbur's book, “Life of Mary Baker Eddy,” and request the privilege of buying, circulating, and recommending it to the public. I briefly declare that nothing has occurred in my life's experience which, if correctly narrated and understood, could injure me; and not a little is already reported of the good accomplished therein, the self-sacrifice, etc., that has distinguished all my working years.

I thank Miss Wilbur and the Concord Publishing Company for their unselfed labors in placing this book before the public, and hereby say that they have my permission to publish and circulate this work.

Mary Baker Eddy.

The above statement by Mrs. Eddy was published in the Christian Science Sentinel of March 12, 1910.

Prefatory Quote

IT is commonly said that, if he would be heard, none should write in advance of his times. That I do not believe. Only, it does not matter how few listen. I believe that we are close upon a great and deep spiritual change. I believe a new redemption is even now conceived of the Divine Spirit in the human heart, that is itself as a woman, broken in dreams and yet sustained in faith, patient, long-suffering, looking towards home. I believe that though the Reign of Peace may be yet a long way off, it is drawing near: and that Who shall save us anew shall come divinely as a Woman, to save as Christ saved, but not as He did, to bring with Her a sword.

William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod) in The Isle of Dreams

Illustrations

ILLUSTRATIONS

{|width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" | Mary Baker Eddy | Frontispiece

|- |Pleasant View, Concord, New Hampshire |style="text-align: right"|338 |- |style="padding-left: 2em; font-size: smaller"|Where Mrs. Eddy resided from 1892 until 1908, and where, from its rear balcony, she addressed a concourse of Christian Scientists in 1901. |- |The Mother Church in Boston |style="text-align: right"|354 |- |style="padding-left: 2em; font-size: smaller"|With the Temple Extension. |- |Mrs. Eddy's home, Chestnut Hill, Brookline, Massachusetts |style="text-align: right"|368 |}

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

NO mystery to-day surrounds the life story of Mary Baker Eddy. Her birth, her ancestry for two hundred years, her education, her social development, and her individual service to the world have been scrutinized with the strong search-lights of both love and criticism. Every event of her long career has been established by unimpeachable records and testimony. It is no longer possible to invent fiction concerning the environment in which she was born and reared or the acts which made up her life.

It is possible, however, to minds careless of verity or those dominated by prejudice, to distort facts by exaggerated statement, to deduce erroneous conclusions from improper handling of data, to make wilful and far-fetched conjectures, and to suppress illuminative information in relating incidents, — information which would reveal the true inwardness of a situation otherwise left dark and sinister. Such coloring and molding of evidence is a modern method used for deducing a readable story from statistical documents.

A story told dramatically, with high lights of speculation and deep shadows of conjecture, with all the fascinating and engaging charm of the narrator's personal fancy woven into the texture, does make racy and entertaining reading. It requires a strong mind to hold fast to simple truth under such guidance. Because of the pleasure taken in a good story, whole pages of history are mistold and some of the noblest characters in the world's annals have been misrepresented.

The average modern, rationalistic and sophisticated, would far rather read Renan's “Life of Jesus,” with its vivid coloring, its subtle suggestion, its bold deduction, and human sympathy, than the simple gospel of St. Mark. Renan flatters his intellect and panders to his sensuality; he is made to feel himself superior in intelligence to the Lord of this earth, and his sensual nature is elevated in importance by the argument that it was the illusion of an impassioned woman which gave to the world the idea of a Deity resurrected from the grave.

What an interpretation of Christ's agony and victory and its proclamation by the purified and sanctified Mary Magdalene, — she who gave Christendom that immortal phrase, “He is risen!” To be dominated by such interpretation is no less than a moral catastrophe occurring in the region of consciousness; for not only does Renan's “Life of Jesus” entertain, flatter, and excite the intellect as an adventure in the realm of ideas, but, as in the case of most intellectual audacities, it leaves the adventurer in disastrous confusion. Renan, indeed, professes a delicate and reverent appreciation for the divine character he so ruthlessly handles and at the close of his drama you behold him a dejected chorus with tear-bedimmed eyes, inviting you to sigh with him over the monstrous blunder of Gethsemane. But the reader finds no tears to shed. Renan has skilfully unpacked his heart of its treasure, and, by lure and wile, stolen its birthright, its title to divine heritage.

Immensely destructive is the usual commendation of this “Life.” Destructive to what? Can imagination and diction destroy reality, or, rather, can they destroy that faith by which the world lives, the faith in the reality of spiritual experience?

Now the simple gospel narrative tells a straight story of Jesus' life. It is not concerned to compare the subject of its text to other men of the times in order to prove his reality. It declares his acts as they were, whether raising Jairus' daughter, walking upon the Sea of Galilee, or feeding the multitude; it reveals him scourged, spat upon, and crucified, without comment, and without comment relates his resurrection and ascension. The gospel is there for all time. It was in no haste to win attention and therefore did not need coloring or tricking out in fancy. Yes, the gospel stands after all documentary investigation, after the best modern documentary and comparative criticism can do, even after Renan and Strauss.

I have a life story to relate and I plant myself unreservedly on the methods of St. Mark. St. Mark, I believe, was a scribe who related what he had been able to gather from witnesses in a direct and unvarnished way. Now I shall endeavor to do simply that. It is not for me to explain or to expound. The facts of this life shall be left to elucidate themselves when set in an orderly and unembellished array before the world; the import must carry to that consciousness able to receive it. I shall concern myself only to report the truth.

In gathering the facts from the past I have often encountered the disappointments of imperfect memories of a small, a very small, group of men and women of advanced years who knew Mrs. Eddy in her youth; but the records in town books have yielded sufficient information to trace accurately Mrs. Eddy's residence from year to year. This data refutes certain unfounded assertions which float about as loose rumors, such as that related by an aged woman in Malden and printed in the form of an interview in the Boston Herald. This story was that a Mary Baker told fortunes by reading cards in a mean street in Boston before the Civil War, and had told this woman's fortune and she believed the fortune-teller to be Mrs. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. In the late fifties Mrs. Eddy was no longer Mary Baker, but had been twice married. She was then Mrs. Patterson, an almost helpless invalid, living in North Groton, a village in Northern New Hampshire. She had not visited Boston for a long period of years and did not visit it for many years to come. Another rumor there was that a certain Mrs. Glover, who was a spiritualistic medium, in and around Boston during the sixties, could be identified with Mary Baker Eddy as one and the same individual. It is not necessary to discover who that Mary Baker was or who that Mrs. Glover, or to establish that they were individuals in nowise related to Mrs. Eddy. It is only necessary to tell minutely the facts of Mrs. Eddy's life which are exclusive of all practices of charlatanism, and are at all times stainless and honorable.

All statements of facts made in this narrative are founded on reliable evidence, town registers, church books, and court records. As to the memories of a few old people interviewed by the author, who associated with Mary Baker in her youth, it must be said that they were not always all that could be desired, and it is fortunate that public records can usually be depended upon to rectify careless assertion. Compared together these memories sometimes contradicted each other; referred back to themselves, they frequently shifted and showed instability; and a deplorable thing was that they betrayed evidence of having been tampered with by suggestion, the imagination having been incited by vanity or cupidity.

To remember a thing suggested, with a gift in full view, is a natural enough performance to children and to those in second childhood. But what should be said of the bribers in such a case? It is to the honor of human nature that both men and women have resisted the offer of large sums of money to remember that which would have been convenient to the theories of malicious-minded critics who preceded me in their investigations.

So if the intelligence was sometimes staggered in the search for the truth about this illustrious woman by encounter with malicious inventions, clearly discernible because of the known facts, the provable facts, which correct them, it was also frequently cheered and uplifted by touching the store of thought emanating from persons “whose spirits and cleanliness and freshness of mind and body make old age lovely and desirable.” The writer has nowhere interfered with these memories, neither in interview nor in transcription; and at the risk of seeming unkind to lonely and impoverished old men and women, whom a slight kindness by way of gift might have enlivened, has refrained from any such act, lest it might be said, to the detriment of this history, that the writer, too, had set forth an invention, instead of the truth.

But it is a task which I have imposed upon myself to take the wheat of memory and leave the chaff. I have refused ignoble deductions volunteered as information. I have refrained from handling the relics of rural jealousy strong enough to endure for eighty years, babbling what it merely conjectured almost a century ago concerning a nature it could not then and cannot now comprehend.

I ask the reader to refuse to accept as biography such gossip which the ephemeral press has detailed. For truth's sake, divest your mind of all speculation and conjecture by which the true story of this life has been so ruthlessly caricatured; divest it at least for the time, and approach without prejudice for an acquaintance with this truly great and singular character. We as human beings owe something to the consciousness of the age, the great highway of souls to come after us. We should make the path straight by rejecting wilful scandal, however amusing and diverting, and by choosing to know the simple gospel truth.

Ancestry and Genealogy

THE LIFE OF

MARY BAKER EDDY

ANCESTRY AND GENEALOGY

F years after the close of the American Revolution Mary Baker was born in the town of Bow, New Hampshire. Her birthplace was a farmhouse in the midst of cultivated acres, situated on a crest of hills overlooking the broad valley of the Merrimac River. Bow was not a village, but a cluster of farms with a town government, and four or five district schools, centers of education and rural politics. There was a meeting-house, as the homely phrase of those days described the church edifice, but many of the God-fearing of the community attended divine worship either in the adjoining town of Pembroke, across the river, or in the neighboring city of Concord, the capital of the state, from which Bow is five miles distant.

Bow was a rural settlement, but it was not remote from the stirring forces of the life of its day. The men who owned its homesteads had been born in the heat of political struggle. Their mothers' birth-pangs coincided with those of a nation. They were born individualists and democrats. New Hampshire, a mountainous state, originally covered with dense forests, had presented to its settlers a stern struggle with nature. The grandsires of the men of this day had been forest clearers, woodsmen who had hewn down a wilderness of primeval pines over two hundred feet in height. Their sons had grown tall and sinewy like the trees they felled.

New Hampshire lay on the Canadian frontier and the French and Indian War had swept it. Its exposed settlements were constantly menaced by the Indians, and, during the wars with England, subject to descents from Canada. In those early days the sons of New Hampshire held back the red men from the less exposed colonies, themselves coming face to face with that treacherous warfare of the forests. This life of woodsman, mountaineer, and Indian fighter had produced a generation of physical giants. Intellectually these men had been well-nigh as vigorously exercised. The colonial settlement had been fraught with bitterest disputes over grants and regrants from England, and the surveying of those woodlands was made in the heat of contention. New Hampshire sent its delegates to the first Continental Congress, and two signatures stand for this state on that charter of American liberty, the Declaration of Independence. Two delegates represented her in the Federal Congress, and, ninth of the states in ratifying the Constitution, New Hampshire in a critical hour insured the success of the Union. Two New Hampshire regiments were at the battle of Bunker Hill. The battle of Bennington, that turned the scale of the war, was won by New Hampshire and Vermont troops under General Stark, who bore a commission from New Hampshire. All through the War of Independence New Hampshire's contingent to the army was liberal. When the war closed New Hampshire men returned to the duties of clearing farms, building schoolhouses, and worshiping God. Dartmouth College was founded in 1789; and soon the little red schoolhouses marked the cross-roads newly surveyed. There was a high average attendance at these district schools during the winter months and learning was prized in every home. Thus were men living, acting, and feeling in the early years of the nineteenth century in this particular community. Religion, schooling, politics, and every man his own master, the owner of his own land, made that early American life a throbbing, vital experience.

Men who counted in these communities could not be ignorant and unsocial. They were robust from contending with nature and savages, intensely patriotic and versed in statescraft, as they had but recently been evolving a constitution for the new world; religious, for they were reestablishing a church of Christ, suiting it to democracy where each man must meet God for himself; scholarly they were, too, in a large sense, for they read the best books of England and studied the journals of the day, jealously watching the Old World, that the New World of their dreams might not be found wanting in intellectual progress. These men founded colleges.

For six generations the Bakers had been in New England. Their history is exactly the history of the typical son of New Hampshire. They had swung the ax, carried the surveyor’s chain, shouldered the musket, fought off the savages, and taken part in government and the establishing of churches and schools. Mark Baker lived on his own farm, a tract of five hundred acres inherited with his brother James. His father was the largest taxpayer in the town. Mark Baker was a justice of the peace for his township, a deacon of the church, a school committeeman, and for many years chaplain of the state militia. His friends were the clergy, the lawyers of Concord and surrounding towns, a governor of his state, upon whose staff a son served. A future president of the United States was an occasional guest at his home. But his friends also were astute men of business, mill owners, builders, men destined to change the character of the state from agricultural to manufacturing.

The family life at Bow was not set in a deadly routine of depressing labor. To so conceive it is to fail to rise to the true viewpoint which shall help us to understand the character we are considering. There never was a time in history when a people were more alive and progressive than the Americans after the War of Independence. There was no neighborhood in America more admirably situated to reap the full benefit of that peculiar, intense, spiritual culture than was the town of Bow, five miles from the city of Concord. Franklin Pierce and Daniel Webster were reared under these identical conditions. Emerson and Hawthorne have declared the conditions admirable for developing genius.

Mary Baker Eddy’s ancestry can be traced clearly through six generations to the first Baker in America, her earliest emigrant ancestor being John Baker, who was freeman in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1634. The generations succeeding, eliminating all but the direct line, are Thomas, of Roxbury; a second Thomas, of Roxbury, who married Sarah Pike; Joseph, born 1714, deacon of the Congregational church, who held a captain’s commission. He was the surveyor of several towns in that part of the colony of New Hampshire which was claimed by Massachusetts, — among the rest, of Pembroke, where he afterwards settled. He married, 1739, Hannah Lovewell, only daughter of Captain John Lovewell. Hannah was born 1721, was heir to one third the estate of Captain Lovewell and inherited with her brothers the lands assigned to her distinguished father in Pembroke.

Captain Joseph Baker had a son Joseph, born 1740, who married Marion Moor McNeil, a descendant of the Scotch Covenanters. They settled in Bow. Their youngest son was Mark Baker, born 1785. He was the father of Mary Baker. So the generations run thus: Mary, Mark, Joseph, Joseph, Thomas, Thomas, John, — which takes the record back almost to Plymouth Rock.

An examination of the genealogy of the wives of the Bakers reveals that the influx was of good blood through the maternal strains. The Pikes of New England have an honorable and interesting genealogy. Hannah Lovewell, great-grandmother of Mary Baker and born just one century before her, transmits the courageous heart of her soldier father. Captain John Lovewell lost his life in a severe fight with the Indians at Pigwacket, now Fryeburg, Maine, an encounter so desperate that it is recorded in Colonial records and is known as Lovewell’s Fight. This Lovewell’s father was an ensign in Cromwell’s army and lived to the great age of one hundred and twenty years. Hannah Lovewell was one of the bravest women of the colonies.

Marion Moor McNeil, the paternal grandmother of Mary Baker, was a descendant of the McNeils of Edinburgh. Her father and mother, John McNeil and Marion Moor, came to America seeking religious liberty and bringing a rich store of memories and traditions. They possessed a heavy sword encased in a brass scabbard, with the inscription of an ancestor’s name that stated it had been bestowed by Sir William Wallace. General John McNeil of New Hampshire, who won distinction by leading a bayonet charge in the battle of Chippewa in the War of 1812, was a cousin of Marion McNeil Baker.

Leaving the Baker genealogy for Mrs. Eddy’s maternal ancestry, in the same history of New Hampshire families it is stated that Mark Baker married Abigail Ambrose of Pembroke. She was the daughter of Deacon Nathaniel Ambrose, a man at once pious and public-spirited. He gave the money for the first Congregational church built in Pembroke. Mrs. Eddy’s mother and the grandmother of Hoke Smith, ex-governor of Georgia, and later, United States Senator from Georgia, were sisters. Governor Smith’s father wrote the following letter at the time of a public discussion of Mrs. Eddy’s family, a discussion which lacked a proper comprehension of the family’s standing in its community and its honorable connections. Mr. Smith sent the letter to the Committee on Publication of The Mother Church, which allows this reprint:

582 West Peachtree Street, Atlanta, Ga., Dec. 28, 1906.

I have known the Rev. Mary Baker Eddy from childhood. She is my first cousin. Her mother

was my mother's younger sister. She [Mary Baker Eddy] was always a beloved visitor in our home. We corresponded for several years while I was in college; the correspondence ended with my regret. I have always admired my cousin's sincerity and devotion to good works. Her brother Albert was one of the ablest lawyers of New Hampshire; but Mary was deemed the most scholarly member of her family. She has always held a sacred place in my heart. It gives me great pleasure to find that God is always protecting her.

H. H. Smith.

Childhood Days

CHILDHOOD DAYS

If in describing the conditions of life which bred New Hampshire giants, with its granite in their will and its hemlock in their soul’s fiber, one should neglect to indicate the beauty of summer days, or the clear, cold magnificence of winter months, in that mountainous upland, one would err in stating but half-truths of the environing influences, even though his efforts were but timid strokes.

The allurement which drew settlers into this region in the early days was doubtless the glorified face of Nature. Here was no prairie, easily tilled; here were no gold mines, promising sudden wealth. But there was a constant uplift for the heart, vaguely felt more often than it was understood. There is an enchantment in the New Hampshire panorama, the series of great pictures which unroll in one continuous stretch of glorious scenery, an enchantment so pervading that it is never forgotten. A logger on the mountain-side to-day looks down with indifference upon a transient tourist. The logger’s cup of content is full if he can make a bare living in the forest.

Summer spreads for the son of New Hampshire a shimmering wonder of green and gold with silver rivers winding placidly, fed by those headlong tor farther up in the rocky hills, where the burning breasts of the mountains are lifted from their headless shoulders. There, too, like Victory’s, is seen the stride of their sheer descents, throwing back the clouds for draperies. This is summer, summer of ripening grain fields, summer of odorous, melodious South winds, balsam-scented and hemlock-tuned.

Autumn’s brilliant moment of splendor passes and the traveler flees before the sere and drear November, gray, brown, and sodden with fog and freezing tears. The mountaineer stays and cuts his logs. Now the great nature painting of all the seasons is preparing. The frost has bitten, the snow has fallen, and once more the sun shines forth. Behold the blue peaks, lifted above the green of the hemlock and the pine, and the dazzling sweep of virgin snow. The air is stimulating and purifying. Over this land bends a sky which gathers its true sons to her heart, whose stars are eloquent, whose storms are majestic, whose day-dawns are passionately tender.

The farmer and the mountaineer of to-day feel the divine salute of Nature as did the early settlers of the state. They are sustained in their life of toil by the same enchantment. But one circumstance of life, one sacred influence they have lost, homely but potent. That is the fireplace of their ancestors. In the living room of the early farmhouses huge logs were burned, and this resinous fire, like a pure spiritual force subduing nature to the will of man, yielded a glory to the homely walls, lighted up the faces of the family circle, drawing each member into a hallowed area, making a sanctified center of their existence.

So it should be realized it was the union of beauty and severity that gave to the New Hampshire character at its best the giant soul, — giant for wrestling toil, giant for deep and long-enduring pain, giant in its capacity for thinking and loving.

As it looked when she was a child. From a chalk drawing by Rufus Baker, steel engraved

Engraving copyrighted by Rufus Baker

Mark Baker’s farm in Bow lay on the uplands. It was cleared and cultivated by his father and older brothers before him. The farmhouse was situated on the summit of a hill from which, in gradual undulations, the land sloped to the Merrimac River. The view included three townships and was broad and picturesque rather than grand. Mountains there are in the distance; but this region of the state is scarcely in the foot-hills, though its rugged uplift gives promise of the vast range on the far horizon.

The farmhouse faced the East. It was unpainted in those days and consisted of a two-story and a half main building with a sloping-roofed ell. In the main building was the living room with its great fireplace and the best chamber adjoining. Above these were two chambers and the garret. In the rear were kitchen and butteries with chambers above. The stables were on the West, so that a long feeding-shed connecting them with the house-shed at right angles made a windbreak against the North wind for the dooryard. This was a sunny spot for the farm fowls, and a place also where logs were trimmed, horses groomed, and wagons loaded for the market.

A sunny garden surrounded the front door in which in summer were lilacs and roses and old-fashioned marigolds. To the East was the orchard enclosed by a stone wall three feet broad, part of which is still intact, though necessarily it has been rebuilt and repaired innumerable times. The breadth of the walls tells the story of the labor involved in clearing the farm not only of timber but of rocks. Across the road were pastures and grain fields, while to the North and beyond the orchard and stables were woodlands.

That the house was well constructed and comfortable was attested by its century-old frame which stood swept by storm and brooded over by sunshine on the untenanted lands still belonging to Baker descendents until 1910. The sheds were torn away and only the shell remained. It was removed to a place by itself on the edge of the pasture land, and one old apple tree bloomed each spring at the chamber window where Mary Baker first saw the light and throughout the period of her earthly existence. The author ate of its fruit while Mrs. Eddy yet resided at Pleasant View.

The day of her birth was July 16, 1821. Mary was the youngest child. Her brothers were Samuel, Albert, and George; her sisters, Abigail and Martha. The children were not far apart in years. Albert was ten and Abigail scarcely more than six when Mary was born. Albert and Abigail, of them all, were especially tender to the baby sister, and in the years to come exercised greater care for her, — the brother in her education, and the sister during her invalid widowhood.

A beloved member of the household when Mary was born was the venerable grandmother Baker who received this babe into her arms with a special solicitation to God. She conferred upon it the name Mary, which was her own name and that of her mother before her. Grandmother Baker’s chair stood by the fireplace. She overlooked the farmyard, and its busy occupations when she glanced up from her knitting; or, sending her glances out through the front door, open on a heated summer day, she saw the bees drowsing in the flowers, the bending grain beyond where the South winds made billows of light and shade. A precious care was in her charge. Ever and anon she touched with her foot the rocker of the cradle, or bent to scan the features of the babe sleeping there and so through the heat of August and the cool September she was the good angel watching and guarding.

The household tasks were not light for the mother of early New England days; she could not brood over a cradle. Mrs. Baker was industrious and placid of spirit, and the placidity meant much for the spirit of her home. She could brew and bake and care for her dairy, scour and sew and weave and dye — all women did this in those days — and it is reported of Mrs. Baker that she was “capable.” But Mrs. Baker found time for the unusual, for visiting the sick and administering to the needy; for entertaining her friends and maintaining the social life; for overseeing her children’s education and holding the family to high spiritual ideals. It is not sufficient to say of her that she was a capable, conscientious New England woman; this she was, but more. And she has left behind her memories that attest it.

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The Life of Mary Baker Eddy

About this book

Front matter

Permission

Prefatory Quote

Illustrations

Introduction

Ancestry and Genealogy

Childhood Days

The end

The Life of Mary Baker Eddy

About this book

Front matter

Permission

Prefatory Quote

Illustrations

Introduction

Ancestry and Genealogy

Childhood Days

The end

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