Tears for humanity

Mary Trammell | from The Christian Science Journal

Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton walked into his interview with Mary Baker Eddy in August 1907 “decidedly prejudiced” toward finding her mentally incompetent. The renowned expert on mental illness had spent the last 30 days investigating her case, including the allegations against her in the “Next Friends” lawsuit, which claimed that the 86-year-old leader of the worldwide Christian Science movement was unable to manage either her own affairs or those of her Church.

But the half hour Dr. Hamilton spent with Mrs. Eddy at her home totally upended his opinion. He later told The New York Times that she was unquestionably lucid, competent, and in command of her life. And something else struck Dr. Hamilton about Mary Baker Eddy: her extraordinary altruism. She was, he told The Times, “sincere in all she … does … unselfishly spend[ing] her money for the perpetuation of a church which, in her estimation, is destined to play an important part in the betterment of humanity” (The New York Times, Aug. 25, 1907, “Dr. Alan McLane Hamilton Tells About His Visit to Mrs. Eddy”).

Just days later Mrs. Eddy had a resounding victory in the court case. At that point W. T. MacIntyre of the New York American interviewed her again. He declared that she was “entirely mistress of her mentalities and both physically and mentally a phenomenon.” Like Dr. Hamilton, he was impressed with Mary Baker Eddy’s overriding commitment to humanity. He quoted her as saying (New York American, August 26, 1907):

I know that my mission is for all the earth, not alone for my dear devoted followers in Christian Science. All my efforts, all my prayers and tears are for humanity, and the spread of peace and love among mankind.

This universal compassion wasn’t just a phenomenon of Mary Baker Eddy’s final years. Even as a child, she felt deep empathy for other people and sensitivity to their suffering. Her caring gained force over the years. The sorrows she faced as a young woman, far from making her turn inward in bitterness or self-pity, only intensified her passion to help other people—to alleviate their heartaches and ills. The crucible of her life experience transformed what could have been tears for her own misfortunes into tears for humanity.

Lifelong caring

Growing up, Mary suffered from chronic poor health. Although she was housebound for months at a time, she managed to pour out affection to those in her rural New Hampshire world—her parents, sisters and brothers, schoolmates, and even the family’s farm animals. At home, she was the family peacemaker, settling fights between her brothers. At school, she gave away her mittens, hat, and coat to children who didn’t have anything warm to wear (see Irving C. Tomlinson, Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1994), pp. 3–4).

By far the greatest tragedy of Mary’s young adult years was her husband’s death, barely six months after their wedding. She and the strapping George Washington Glover were just setting up housekeeping in Wilmington, North Carolina, when financial reverses leveled his construction business. Then George contracted yellow fever. Days later, he died. Devastated, the nearly penniless—and now pregnant—young widow made the rigorous trip back to her parents’ home, accompanied by one of her husband’s fellow Masons.

Years afterward, Mary Baker Eddy would look back on George’s death and wonder whether that overwhelming loss had given her the driving compassion for others that eventually led her to discover Christian Science. She asked herself, “Did that midnight shadow, falling upon the bridal wreath, bring the recompense of human woe, which is the merciful design of divine Love, and so help to evolve that larger sympathy for suffering humanity which is emancipating it with the morning beams and noonday glory of Christian Science?” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 190).

The search for light

The next years of Mary’s life were arduous. After her son Georgie was born, she suffered such pain and weakness that she couldn’t take care of him. So the family handed him over to a nearby couple to raise. Hoping to regain custody of her son, Mary married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist. Years of poverty, invalidism, and eventual betrayal by her husband followed. Without her knowledge, relatives packed Georgie off to Minnesota. She didn’t see him again for more than 20 years.

Her search focused increasingly not just on improving her own life, but on helping other people.

Through it all, Mary pressed on with unquenchable hope that she would recover. But her search focused increasingly not just on improving her own life, but on helping other people. She studied the Bible. She combed through Jahr’s massive New Manual of Homeopathic Practice. And when people started coming to her with their ailments, she helped them by reducing the attenuations of drugs they were taking. Eventually the Portland mesmeric healer Phineas Quimby helped Mary herself feel better—at least temporarily. So she learned what she could from him and shared her insights in several public lectures—something Quimby himself had probably never done.

Finally, in February, 1866, Mary’s search and research culminated in a radiant moment of spiritual exaltation. She was lying in bed, helpless, after a bad fall. Suddenly, as she read her Bible, she had a revolutionary thought—that her life was in God. That her Life actually was God. With that, she got out of bed, dressed, and went out into the parlor to greet her surprised friends.

From that moment on, Mary had a new life purpose—one that virtually consumed her every thought and act. She was absolutely convinced that God had commissioned her to help humanity understand that their real life was in God, of God, and for God. “That short experience,” she later wrote, “included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 24).”

Telling the story

It’s no coincidence that one of Mary’s favorite hymns was “I love to tell the story (this popular “old-time” Christian hymn can be found in the Christian Science Hymnal, No. 414).” In the months after her recovery, she told the story of her healing to many friends and acquaintances. She felt deeply that the “principle” that had healed her wasn’t just for her alone. It was for everybody. She knew there had to be words to express it. And she felt compelled to find those words—to give this truth to the world.

So in the heat of summer, even as her husband deserted her in the shoe-manufacturing town of Lynn, Massachusetts, she was writing down the story of her discovery, in pages upon pages of what she later described as “infantile lispings of Truth” (Science and Health, p. ix). She read aloud her explanations to friends, and she corroborated her findings by healing people—a little boy at Lynn beach, whom she healed of a club foot; her niece Ellen, whom she healed of enteritis; and countless others.

The first news of Mary’s discovery went out like flickers of light from a tiny candle. But the shafts of light grew stronger day by day. Gradually Mary gathered students in and around Lynn. Like shoe-factory worker Hiram Crafts. And Mary Gale, who had been healed of pneumonia. Each of these people, in turn, healed others, as the radius of spiritual light broadened.

She labored for over three years to put her revelation down on paper.

But Mary realized that she needed a torchbearer to shine the light God had given her beyond where her personal practice and teaching could reach. That torchbearer, she believed, needed to be a book. She started writing a manuscript that would propel her discovery beyond Lynn, beyond New England, beyond even the United States, to the world. She labored for over three years to put her revelation down on paper. Destitute, she moved some 27 times while she was writing. She suffered ridicule because of her radical ideas. But her fervent love for humanity kept her going. When she finally finished her manuscript, she wrote to a friend, “I only wish I were able to … embrace the whole world in my love” (Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966), p. 230).

Science and Health, the book she published in 1875, is suffused with love. Actually, divine Love is the very heartbeat of Christian Science, the name she gave to her revelation. Love is what makes healing happen. The book explained, “If the Scientist reaches his patient through divine Love, the healing work will be accomplished at one visit, and the disease will vanish into its native nothingness like dew before the morning sunshine” (Science and Health, p. 365).

This healing Love isn’t an affection that some people have and some don’t. It’s Love that everybody can lay claim to. It’s the Love that is God—the Love Jesus healed with. And it’s the Love, Science and Health explained, with which all of God’s children can heal.

It was this pure Love that impelled the extraordinary series of acts that filled the remainder of Mary Baker Eddy’s life—acts that would ensure that the infinitely comforting message of Science and Health would eventually reach universal humanity.

All for humanity—and for all humanity

The most monumental of Mary Baker Eddy’s achievements after the publication of Science and Health was the refining of the text that she carried out over the next 35 years. With each of the over 400 revisions she published, her intent was the same—to make the meaning of the text more clear and more accessible to the vast, worldwide readership of the future.

Mary was also Science and Health’s first publisher, directing the financing, printing, marketing, and distribution of each new edition. In the early days, she developed promotional fliers about the book, persuaded booksellers to stock it, and sent copies of it to libraries around the globe.

They launched a number of initiatives geared to reaching a larger public.

At first, her resources were meager. Her chief supporter was Asa G. Eddy, the former sewing machine salesman whom she taught in 1876 and married in early 1877. Together, they launched a number of initiatives geared to reaching a larger public. Mrs. Eddy preached regular sermons in rented halls. She and “a little band of earnest seekers after Truth” formed The Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879 (Church Manual, p. 17). Mr. Eddy started a Sunday School for children. They moved her ministry to downtown Boston, where she established the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in order to teach spiritual healing.

Then, unexpectedly, Mrs. Eddy’s beloved husband died in 1882. She was crushed. For the moment all she could do was take refuge in Vermont with a few close friends. It was a time of tears and soul-searching prayer. But ultimately it was a time of triumph—of rededication to her mission to all earth’s people. Her tears for humanity would let her go only one way. Forward. She returned to Boston as the woman whom one biographer called “The new Mrs. Eddy”—and went on to lead her movement into a new day of service to humankind (Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy (Cambridge: Perseus, 1998), p. 293).

Within the year Mrs. Eddy plunged into magazine publishing, putting out the first copy of The Christian Science Journal. She was not only its editor and publisher, but also its chief writer. The magazine was a powerful vehicle for reaching the masses with the message of Christian Science—winning an expanded audience for Science and Health. By the end of the 1880s, Mary Baker Eddy had issued another major revision of her book, become a popular preacher in Boston, and expanded her Church to cities across America.

In 1889, she dissolved the Church and College, in order to radically rework Science and Health—making it much more public-oriented. When she reorganized the Church in 1892, it reflected a newly international vision, as “The Mother Church” with a worldwide system of branch churches. And, over the next decade, she initiated bold new channels for responding to humanity’s needs—including an international speakers’ bureau known as the Board of Lectureship, and a weekly magazine named the Christian Science Sentinel.

Final tears … and triumph

The last decade of Mary Baker Eddy’s life offered her more than ample reason to cry for her own sake, if she had wanted to. Disloyal students defied her. The popular humorist and author Mark Twain waged an ongoing war of words against her—even though he later admitted that, deep-down, he admired her. McClure’s magazine and the New York World newspaper leveled yellow-journalism attacks at her. Most treacherous of all, a consortium of litigants, including her own son, launched the Next Friends suit, challenging her competency.

Her prayers and tears turned outward to all peoples of the earth.

But more than ever, her prayers and tears turned outward to all peoples of the earth, rather than inward to herself. And her actions reflected this commitment. In 1903, she published the first magazine to reach beyond the English-speaking world, the German Der Herold der Christian Science. In 1905, she opened the way for students and faculty at university campuses to form Christian Science organizations. In 1908, she inaugurated a daily newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, with its world-inclusive mission “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind (Miscellany, p. 353).” And in 1910, she authorized the translation of Science and Health into German.

Yes, Dr. Hamilton was right. Mary Baker Eddy’s lifelong commitment was to the betterment of humanity. That was the standard she set for herself. And that was the standard she set for Christian Scientists. To care for humanity. To live for humanity. And to let God exalt their own tears, into tears for humanity.

Mary Trammell is the editor of the Christian Science periodicals.