If the adult prefer foolishness to wisdom, if he prefer suicide to life, by the Christian Science or any other method, he may enjoy his preference. It is no business of mine to come between him and the grave; but no man and no woman has any right, whatever be the motive or the relation, to stand silently by and permit a child needlessly to suffer and needlessly to die. The laws of the land should provide, as they do in some States, for the punishment of such cruel offences; and to the extent that my opposition and my protest may avail, no man and no woman shall be permitted to murder little children by a wilful neglect that is based upon an insane belief in the wicked teachings of a wicked woman, in her cruel, greedy fraud, in her brazen, murderous lies.
If any one be disposed to feel that my language sounds extravagant thus early in the narrative, I beg that judgment may be suspended until I have concluded, when the moderation of my speech will, I think, be cause for wonder.
The Detached Heart
Mary Baker Glover Eddy was born in the town of Bow, New Hampshire, on July 16, 1821, of good New England parentage; but never received anything but the most rudimentary education. The stories of her higher education are all fables. She pretends to have studied the classic languages, and to have been familiar with Hebrew. She has never known anything of any of these languages, and any one who has been compelled, as I have, to peruse her unedited personal correspondence knows that she has never been on any, but the most distant of speaking terms, with her mother tongue. She was graduated, she says, from Dyer H. Sanborn’s Academy at Tilton, New Hampshire; but her old schoolmates, still living, say there was no such academy, although Sanborn did teach a few children each year in a room over the district school. There was no regular course of study and were no graduations. According to these same schoolmates, Mary Baker completed her education upon reaching long division in arithmetic, and her culture, in advanced years, may be somewhat gauged by her written attribution in her seventieth year, when, if ever, one’s education may be assumed to have made some little progress, of the authorship of Irving to the Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens. “The language is decaying as fast,” she says, “as that of Irving’s Pickwick Papers.”
One may be moved, by this reflection upon our poor speech, to something like commiseration for the language that has been so useful to us for centuries past. But it is consoling to reflect that the race may have access, throughout coming ages, to Mrs. Eddy’s exhaustless well of English undefiled as it appears in her various immortal publications. Her private correspondence, it must be admitted, however, does not exhibit any considerable degree of excellence in the matter of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization; but an inspired person may be excused for a little carelessness in the use of words.
Mrs. Eddy accounts for her amazing deficiency of education and entire lack of culture by an ingenious fairy tale. “After my discovery of Christian Science,” she says, “most of the knowledge I had gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined, that grammar was eclipsed.” If any scraps of knowledge were ever possessed by this peculiar creature, vanished, dreamlike or otherwise, they surely did; and without quite assenting to the illumination of learning hypothesis, I find no ground for dissenting from the view that, at some time or other, grammar underwent total eclipse.
The first fifty years of her life were lived in great poverty and complete obscurity. Before her alleged discovery of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy at one time eked out a precarious existence in and about Boston as a Spiritualist medium, giving public seances for money. Sweet converse with the illustrious dead could be had of Mrs. Eddy at any time by any one who had the price. Her interest in the dead seems to have been strictly confined to the illustrious departed.
In December, 1843, when twenty-two years of age, she married George W. Glover, a young bricklayer by trade, and with him, shortly after the marriage, went to Wilmington, North Carolina, where wages were somewhat higher than in New Hampshire. There Glover, three months after the marriage and six months before the birth of her only child, died of yellow fever. He was buried in Wilmington, but the spot is, to this day, unknown even to his widow.
Mrs. Eddy has for many years been exceeding rich in this world’s goods. In her personal conversation, and in her published works, she has spoken in terms of the highest praise of this her first husband, “whose tender devotion to his young wife was remarked,” she says, “by all observers.” He was the father of her only child, yet all that is mortal of him has for nearly seventy years lain with the unclaimed, forgotten and abandoned dead at Wilmington, North Carolina.