According to human standards, I was very young then, and my grandfather was very old.

"Grandpa, tell me about the day you met Abraham Lincoln!" I would plead, whenever I had opportunity. And he would tell me once again the story of that wonderful event in his own early childhood when Old Abe made a speech in the little town of Atlanta, Illinois.

"I was as close to Abe Lincoln as I am to you! I could have touched him. He looked at me and smiled."

Grandpa was such a vivid storyteller that the scene was always real to me, even though it had happened so long ago. Most real of all was the lean, tall, kindly Mr. Lincoln, telling his folksy stories before he discussed the problems convulsing the United States in those trying days just before the Civil War.

I thought of that scene, and how alive it had been for me, just recently when at last I "met" Mary Baker Eddy. No, I'm not talking about some spiritualistic encounter, but about my gaining a better understanding of Mrs. Eddy's humanity, her character, and her struggles to establish Christian Science and the Church of Christ, Scientist, in the late 1800s.

Christian Scientists love Mrs. Eddy, but they do not worship her human personality or regard her as they rightfully regard Jesus. There is only one Exemplar, and that is our Lord and Master, Christ Jesus.

But a correct view of Mrs. Eddy is more than a rich blessing to any student of Christian Science. It is, in fact, essential to gaining a deeper understanding of what Christian Science is and of the universal scope of Mrs. Eddy's accomplishment for mankind.

The route to my deeper appreciation of Mrs. Eddy began when I first attended a service at a branch Church of Christ, Scientist, soon after the Second World War, at the invitation of a young man I had just met. Recently discharged from the Navy, he was a Christian Scientist and was serving as soloist in that church.

At that time I had an entirely false and prejudiced impression of Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy. It had been acquired from well-meaning but misinformed people who had never really investigated this Science for themselves. I'd grown up in a very church going and reverent environment, but I wasn't spiritually satisfied by the concept of God that had been a part of my experience. That kind of God, vastly separated from mankind, had seemed to me to be punishing, unfair, capricious, and even cruel, and certainly seemed to have little to do with the God defined in the Bible as Love itself.

My family had suffered many tragedies, and my mother often said, "It is God's will." I found it difficult to worship such a God.

On that Sunday when I first attended a service in a Church of Christ, Scientist, I was at once interested in Christian Science. It seemed I had been seeking it all my life. The God I learned of there was truly Love, ever present and omnipotent, just and tender. And the man of His creating was His greatly beloved spiritual expression. Furthermore, I learned that the wonderful healing power shown by Christ Jesus was not regarded as being confined to the brief earthly life of our Master, nearly two thousand years earlier. It was a reality in the present, available to all.

The testimonies of healing I heard during my first visit to a Wednesday evening church service touched and thrilled me with their sincerity, humility, and faith.

Even before my new soloist friend and I were married, I had become a student of Christian Science, and later I became a member of The Mother Church and of a branch church. I lived this Science, or sincerely tried to do so to the best of my understanding, and even in the earliest days experienced many healings.

These healings made me realize that my original hearsay impression of Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of what was already a cherished religion to me, had been utterly mistaken. I began steadily and surely to gain a fuller comprehension of the spiritual stature of this great woman, unique in our age and in all ages, and of her importance to all mankind.

I not only respected and admired her for her courage in the face of mindless persecution and misunderstanding, her tireless work and devotion in establishing her great Church. I also began to be conscious of the vast number of people in the world who had been and were being healed and would be healed in ages yet to come—healed of disease, sorrow, sin, and even saved from death—by her discovery. These fruits convinced me that what she had brought to the world must be of God, a divine revelation that had come to her through her purity, prayer, inspiration, and devotion.

I even came at last to understand that this revelation was the fulfillment of a prophecy in the Bible. "And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth," Jesus said. And later in the same chapter in the Gospel of John, "But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you." ^{John 14:16, 17, 26.}

"The Comforter"—the divine Science which Mrs. Eddy discovered has been and still is that to me. Science is not simply words and theories about God. It brings a loving, warm comfort; it heals and saves.

I often thought of the people who had worked with Mrs. Eddy, known her, heard her speak. More than once I wished that I could have met her.

Over the years I did read all the soundly documented biographies of Mrs. Eddy and other books about her and her work, including the wonderful series of personal reminiscences by some of her contemporaries in We Knew Mary Baker Eddy. My appreciation of her intensified.

Many times I read her own statement "Those who look for me in person, or elsewhere than in my writings, lose me instead of find me." ^{The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 120.} I understood her meaning, her distaste for personal adulation, and that really wasn't what I felt. But I still wished sometimes that I'd known her, met her, or even attended a service in her Church when she spoke.

Then, not long ago, I had an insight into Mrs. Eddy that wholly transformed my view of her. In a sense, I felt that I had "met" her, and I continue to feel a closeness to her that is wonderful. Here's what occurred.

Some forty years after my first acquaintance with Christian Science, I began a term of service as First Reader at my branch church and found myself involved in a new experience of growth and joyful inspiration.

One particular Sunday started out like all the others. In the established order of service, after the congregation joined in silent prayer, we went on to repeat the Lord's Prayer, with its spiritual interpretation given in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy.

After the Second Reader led the congregation in repeating each beautiful line of the tender prayer our Master gave his followers, I, as First Reader, read the corresponding interpretation by Mrs. Eddy. It was when I came to her explanation of the line "Give us this day our daily bread" that the quietly wonderful thing happened to me.

I read, in my turn, "Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections." ^{Science and Health, p. 17.}

In reading that prayerful petition I felt as always the beauty and understanding and deep compassion in the words. But on this special day I felt something more.

It was because of Mrs. Eddy's choice of words. "Famished affections," she had written, not just "hungry" affections or "longing" ones, but famished, starved.

I'd always known, intellectually, that Mrs. Eddy had met the deepest human sorrows and anguish, travail, loneliness, despair. Yet I don't think I'd ever quite known it, as one might say, with my heart. Maybe I'd let my respect and gratitude and even awe for her spirituality get in the way of my perception.

And now the poignant, vital words she had been inspired to use here were so like what I too had felt in moments of reaching out to God, divine Love, when I had suffered, longed, agonized for healing or simply looked for some answer or understanding in working out a human problem. In that moment, I felt so close to her, close not in a personal way but in an understanding one—and I had reached that closeness by finding her in her writings, as she had instructed.

After this experience I understood better than ever what Mrs. Eddy had wanted, with all her being, to do for humanity, offering to them comfort, healing, answers to age-old questions about God and man. Is it any wonder Christian Scientists love their Leader?

I still have that precious feeling of having met her at last, and I know I have a deeper comprehension of her humanity, as well as of her spiritual mission to the world. I know, too, this is helping me do my part to fulfill this universal mission of bringing the Comforter to all mankind.