These experiences, of which Catholic biographies are full, and which history not unfrequently emphasizes, certainly offer food for meditation. Theodore Parker related that when he was a lad at work in a field one day on his father's farm at Lexington, an old man with a snowy beard suddenly appeared at his side, and walked with him as he worked, giving him high counsel and serious thought. All inquiry in the neighborhood as to whence the stranger came or whither he went was fruitless; no one else had seen him, and Mr. Parker always believed, so a friend has told me, that his visitor was a spiritual form from another world. It is certainly true that many and many persons, whose life has been destined to more than ordinary achievement, have had experiences of voices or visions in their early youth.
At an early age Miss Baker was married to Colonel Glover, of Charleston, S.C., who lived only a year. She returned to her father's home—in 1844—and from that time until 1866 no special record is to be made.
In 1866, while living in Lynn, Mass., Mrs. Eddy (then Mrs. Glover) met with a severe accident and her case was pronounced hopeless by the physicians. There came a Sunday morning when her pastor came to bid her good-by before proceeding to his morning service as there was no probability that she would be alive at its close. During this time she suddenly became aware of a divine illumination and ministration. She requested those with her to withdraw, and reluctantly they did so, believing her delirious. Soon, to their bewilderment and fright, she walked into the adjoining room, "and they thought I had died, and that it was my apparition," she said.
THE PRINCIPLE OF DIVINE HEALING.
From that hour dated her conviction of the principle of divine healing, and that it is as true to-day as it was in the days when Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth. "I felt that the divine spirit had wrought a miracle," she said, in reference to this experience. "How, I could not tell, but later I found it to be in perfect scientific accord with the divine law." From 1866-'69, Mrs. Eddy withdrew from the world to meditate, to pray, to search the Scriptures.
"During this time," she said, in reply to my questions, "the Bible was my only text-book. It answered my questions as to the process by which I was restored to health; it came to me with a new meaning, and suddenly I apprehended the spiritual meaning of the teaching of Jesus and the principle and the law involved in spiritual science and metaphysical healing—in a word—Christian science."
Mrs. Eddy came to perceive that Christ's healing was not miraculous, but was simply a natural fulfilment of divine law—a law as operative in the world to-day as it was nineteen hundred years ago. "Divine science is begotten of spirituality," she says, "since only the 'pure in heart' can see God."
In writing of this experience, Mrs. Eddy has said:
I had learned that thought must be spiritualized in order to apprehend Spirit. It must become honest unselfish, and pure, in order to have the least understanding of God in Divine Science. The first must become last. Our reliance upon material things must be transferred to a perception of and dependence on spiritual things. For spirit to be supreme in demonstration, it must be supreme in our affections, and we must be clad with divine power. I had learned that mind reconstructed the body and that nothing else could. All science is a revelation.
Through homeopathy, too, Mrs. Eddy became convinced of the principle of mind healing, discovering that the more attenuated the drug, the more potent was its effects.