Editorial March 26, 1984 Issue

"O God, is it all?"

BARBARA-JEAN STINSON

Many years before she discovered Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy wrote these despairing words in the margin of a poem she had been reading. The poem ended with these words: "Oh! life, is all thy song/Endure, and die?"^{Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966), p. 66.}

Evidently that apprehension of the struggles and fragility of all material life touched her deeply. She was twenty-two years old that summer and engaged to be married. One of her biographers, Robert Peel, writes in his book Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, "It would probably be a mistake to suppose that the foreboding poems she wrote and copied at this time represented her constant or even usual mood. Much of her time was undoubtedly given to excited preparations for departure, to all the normal delights and passing worries of a bride-to-be." But he adds, "Yet the premonition of mortality remained."^{Ibid., pp. 66-67.}

Haven't we all at times shared Mrs. Eddy's bleak premonitions about the promises of material life? Perhaps not so much while the family, the career, the promises of all the possibilities that the world offers, lie before us. But when things look dark and life seems empty we might feel the same way Mrs. Eddy did. "O God, is it all?"

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

The very circumstance, which your suffering...