MARY BAKER EDDY

FREDERICK DIXON.

There is a sentence of Abraham Lincoln's, occurring in his famous address on the battlefield of Gettysburg, which comes instinctively to memory in reading the multitudinous articles which have been contributed to the press of the world, during the last few weeks, with respect to Mrs. Eddy, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here," he declared, "but it can never forget what they did here." These articles have been, on the whole, extraordinarily appreciative. Here and there some writer, with little knowledge and less wisdom, has indulged the passion to wound, here and there sectarian bigotry may have shown that intolerance which never knows when to be silent, but the columns of remarkable tributes, printed in the Christian Science Sentinel for Dec. 17 last, are witness to the respect and admiration felt for Mrs. Eddy by the press of her native land. Still, these are words: and words, unless indeed they are the expression of some mighty purpose, are not apt, in Lincoln's phrase, to be much noted nor long remembered. That recognition is reserved for deeds; and when the story of the world's achievement in the nineteenth century comes to be written, the foundation of the Christian Science church will occupy, in the perspective of the ages, an importance very different from that so frequently assigned to it by the prejudices of contemporaries, who, testing all things on the touchstone of their own ideals, demand with wearisome monotony, "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?"

To those who have known Mrs. Eddy personally, she has always been a very different figure from that conjured up by critics who had never seen her face, nor held her hand, nor listened to her voice, but who wrote or spoke with all the foolish dogmatism born of ignorance, I remember her now as I last saw her in the workroom of her house, on the outskirts of Boston, one day in the year which has just closed. She was sitting in a low chair beside a table piled with papers in the bow window with its glorious view of the Massachusetts hills marching with the coast on which the Pilgrims landed, the gentlest, sweetest, and most refined lady I have ever known. Yet with all that gentleness she possessed the fire of a great reformer; with all that sweetness she was none the less the deepest of thinkers; while her innate refinement did not prevent her from being the foremost leader of men in the world-battle of good against evil. "No one," once declared one of the "great Commoner's" great officers, "ever entered Mr. Pitt's cabinet who did not leave it a braver man;" and no one, it may fearlessly be said, ever entered Mrs. Eddy's study who did not leave it not only a braver but a better man.

Fear, indeed, had no resting-place in Mrs. Eddy's presence. The greatest debt perhaps that humanity owes to her is that she has shown it that it need not be afraid of fear. It is impossible for an observant person to go about the world today without discovering that men and women are crushed beneath a load of fear. Half their activities are devoted to taking precautions against fear—fear of sickness and death, fear of sorrow and want, fear of man's inhumanity to man. In the midst of this medley, standing like some tenth legion in the throbbing sauve qui peut of physical existence, there is an ever-increasing army of people which, in the light of Mrs. Eddy's teaching, is learning to understand, and understanding to prove, what Christ Jesus meant when he said, "Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." The kingdom of God is within men, and where that kingdom is there is peace and not fear.

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