Mrs. Eddy Mentioned Them August 23, 1958 Issue

Three Who Touched Her Early Years

[Mentioned in Miscellany, p. 304, and in the Message for 1901, p. 32]

Sarah J. Bodwell (1810— 1880), daughter of a clergyman who was a graduate of Harvard, became principal of Sanbornton Academy in Sanbornton Bridge (now Tilton), New Hampshire. Mrs. Eddy was one of her pupils. Miss Bodwell married Colonel Charles Lane, of Laconia, editor of the Belknap Gazette, a periodical to which Mrs. Eddy contributed. A tribute to Miss Bodwell describes her as "public spirited, irradiating all her walks and ways with the sunlight of a singularly cheerful and graceful spirit."

The Reverend Enoch Corser (1787-1868) was born in Boscawen, New Hampshire, and except for his years at Middlebury College, a three-year term of teaching in Danvers, Massachusetts, and a brief period when he supplied the pulpit in Middleton, Massachusetts, spent his long life in his native state. For more than twenty years he was pastor of the First Congregational Church in Loudon and returned to this church in 1857. During his pastorate there were several impressive revivals.

From 1837 to 1843 he was pastor of the Congregational Church in Sanbornton Bridge with which the Baker family was connected. It was because of this connection that he became Mrs. Eddy's teacher for a time. He was a man of large physical frame and possessed uncommon intellectual powers. A stanch Calvinist, he was eloquent and outspoken, having no patience with artifice. It was he who received Mrs. Eddy into the church and communion. His son said of her, "She stands out in my mind distinctly as his brightest pupil and I also remember her great admiration for him."

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