In 1893 the World’s Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago, used, in all its public sessions, my form of prayer since 1866; and one of the very clergymen who had publicly proclaimed me “the prayerless Mrs. Eddy,” offered his audible adoration in the words I use, besides listening to an address on Christian Science from my pen, read by Judge S.J.  Hanna, in that unique assembly.

When the light of one friendship after another passes from earth to heaven, we kindle in place thereof the glow of some deathless reality.  Memory, faithful to goodness, holds in her secret chambers those characters of holiest sort, bravest to endure, firmest to suffer, soonest to renounce.  Such was the founder of the Concord School of Philosophy—­the late A. Bronson Alcott.

After the publication of “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” his athletic mind, scholarly and serene, was the first to bedew my hope with a drop of humanity.  When the press and pulpit cannonaded this book, he introduced himself to its author by saying, “I have come to comfort you.”  Then eloquently paraphrasing it, and prophesying its prosperity, his conversation with a beauty all its own reassured me. That prophecy is fulfilled.

This book, in 1895, is in its ninety-first edition of one thousand copies.  It is in the public libraries of the principal cities, colleges, and universities of America; also the same in Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Greece, Japan, India, and China; in the Oxford University and the Victoria Institute, England; in the Academy of Greece, and the Vatican at Rome.

This book is the leaven fermenting religion; it is palpably working in the sermons, Sunday Schools, and literature of our and other lands.  This spiritual chemicalization is the upheaval produced when Truth is neutralizing error and impurities are passing off.  And it will continue till the antithesis of Christianity, engendering the limited forms of a national or tyrannical religion, yields to the church established by the Nazarene Prophet and maintained on the spiritual foundation of Christ’s healing.

Good, the Anglo-Saxon term for God, unites Science to Christianity.  It presents to the understanding, not matter, but Mind; not the deified drug, but the goodness of God—­healing and saving mankind.

The author of “Marriage of the Lamb,” who made the mistake of thinking she caught her notions from my book, wrote to me in 1894, “Six months ago your book, Science and Health, was put into my hands.  I had not read three pages before I realized I had found that for which I had hungered since girlhood, and was healed instantaneously of an ailment of seven years’ standing.  I cast from me the false remedy I had vainly used, and turned to the ’great Physician.’  I went with my husband, a missionary to China, in 1884.  He went out under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church.  I feel the truth is leading us to return to Japan.”