“During this time,” she said, in reply to my questions, “the Bible was my only text-book.  It answered my questions as to the process by which I was restored to health; it came to me with a new meaning, and suddenly I apprehended the spiritual meaning of the teaching of Jesus and the principle and the law involved in spiritual science and metaphysical healing—­in a word—­Christian science.”

Mrs. Eddy came to perceive that Christ’s healing was not miraculous, but was simply a natural fulfilment of divine law—­a law as operative in the world to-day as it was nineteen hundred years ago.  “Divine science is begotten of spirituality,” she says, “since only the ‘pure in heart’ can see God.”

In writing of this experience, Mrs. Eddy has said: 

I had learned that thought must be spiritualized in order to apprehend Spirit.  It must become honest unselfish, and pure, in order to have the least understanding of God in Divine Science.  The first must become last.  Our reliance upon material things must be transferred to a perception of and dependence on spiritual things.  For spirit to be supreme in demonstration, it must be supreme in our affections, and we must be clad with divine power.  I had learned that mind reconstructed the body and that nothing else could.  All science is a revelation.

Through homeopathy, too, Mrs. Eddy became convinced of the principle of mind healing, discovering that the more attenuated the drug, the more potent was its effects.

In 1877 Mrs. Glover married Dr. Asa Gilbert Eddy, of Londonderry, Vermont, a physician who had come into sympathy with her own views, and who was the first to place “Christian Scientist,” on the sign at his door.  Dr. Eddy died in 1882, a year after her founding of the “Metaphysical College” in Boston, in which he taught.

The work in the Metaphysical College lasted nine years, and it was closed (in 1889) in the very zenith of its prosperity as Mrs. Eddy felt it essential to the deeper foundation of her religious work to retire from active contact with the world.  To this college came hundreds and hundreds of students, from Europe as well as this country.  I was present at the class lectures now and then by Mrs. Eddy’s kind invitation, and such earnestness of attention as was given to her morning talks by the men and women present I never saw equalled.

MRS. EDDY’S PERSONALITY.

On the evening that I first met Mrs. Eddy by her hospitable courtesy, I went to her peculiarly fatigued.  I came away in a state of exhilaration and energy that made me feel I could have walked any conceivable distance.  I have met Mrs. Eddy many times since then, and always with this experience repeated.