MARY BAKER EDDY

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 751, 26 August 1929, Page 14

MARY BAKER EDDY

U.S. SENATOR RECALLS FAMOUS WOMAN KNEW HER WELL I Capitol Park lay cool and green under its branching trees, despite a scorching sun, as I sat in the window of Senator Moses’s office looking out upon it, writes Willis J. Abbot in “The Christian Science Monitor.” Senator Moses enjoyed an experience not shared by many men in public life. He was a friend of Mary Baker Eddy when she lived in Concord N.H. I asked him to tell me something of her. “Of course I knew Mrs. Eddy well,” he said, “and esteemed her highly. Perhaps an expression I have frequently used in reference to her expresses my views now in retrospection as it did when she was still active. I used to say that she was exactly the sort of woman I should have liked my grandmother to have been. “She was earnest, sincere, cultivated. I don’t mean she had that basic culture that is gained from a college course. In her days there were few, if any, colleges for women. But she had native ability, supplemented by a good common school training, and the educational guidance of New England clergymen, prominent educators, and a brother who, entering public life via the law office of Franklin Pierce, might have gone far but for his untimely passing. “Moreover, she was naturally of an intellectual type, and during the days when I knew her was constantly extending her mental horizons by reading and study. I sat through one of her classes once at her invitation, and while I am not, and never was, a Christian Scientist, I was impressed by her grasp of metaphysical problems and the clarity with which she expressed her convictions. “It has always been a reason for profound gratitude on my part that I was a member of that class. It was the last one she ever taught,) held in 1898, and for many reasons was esteemed by her as peculiarly notable. It had enrolled in it students from Canada, England, and Scotland, and as it numbered exactly 70, she liked to draw the parallel between it and the 70 disciples whom the Master sent out to preach and to heal throughout the land of Palestine. “In addition to my observation of her as the teacher of this class, I had been able to be of service when there appeared to be danger that the development of the State Fair Grounds near her house at Pleasant View might affect the latter unfavourably. In her endeavours to adjust the matter, I was impressed by her reasonableness, restraint, and serenity. “Indeed, she was always the most reasonable of women—that, and an invariable serenity, were her chief characteristics. “Her family was of good old New England stock—the sort that does not lend itself to pretence or hypocrisy. She may have been mistaken in some of her convictions, or right for all I can say, hut one thing is sure, and that is that her convictions were her own, not borrowed, but worked out arduously by her own mental efforts. PROVED HER COMPETENCY “I had long known her before the effort was made to prove her mentally incompetent—unable to handle her own affairs. You doubtless recall the case. There was evidence and legal argument a-plenty, but what really settled the case was her own testimony before the three masters to whom the case was referred. “Edgar A. Aldrich, a district judge, had appointed three associates to conduct the inquiry with him. She appeared, and sustained a most searching inquisition, at her own home. It was an ordeal before which any woman might have shrunk—certainly one which none not equipped with a keen intellect and ready wit could have undergone with success.”