Mrs. Eddy applied herself, like other girls, to her studies, though perhaps with an unusual zest, delighting in philosophy, logic, and moral science, as well as looking into the ancient languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
Her last marriage was in the spring of 1877, when, at Lynn, Mass., she became the wife of Asa Gilbert Eddy. He was the first organizer of a Christian Science Sunday-School, of which he was the superintendent, and later he attracted the attention of many clergymen of other denominations by his able lectures upon scriptural topics. He died in 1882.
Mrs. Eddy is known to her circle of pupils and admirers as the editor and publisher of the first official organ of this sect. It was called the Journal of Christian Science, and has had great circulation with the members of this fast-increasing faith.
In recounting her experiences as the pioneer of Christian Science, she states that she sought knowledge concerning the physical side in this research through the different schools of allopathy, homeopathy, and so forth, without receiving any real satisfaction. No ancient or modern philosophy gave her any distinct statement of the science of mind healing. She claims that no human reason has been equal to the question.
And she also defines carefully the difference in the theories between faith cure and Christian Science, dwelling particularly upon the terms belief and understanding, which are the key words respectively used in the definitions of these two healing arts.
Besides her Boston home, Mrs. Eddy has a delightful country home one mile from the state house of New Hampshire's quiet capital, an easy driving distance for her when she wishes to catch a glimpse of the world. But for the most part she lives very much retired, driving rather into the country, which is so picturesque all about Concord and its surrounding villages.
The big house, so delightfully remodeled and modernized from a primitive homestead, that nothing is left excepting the angles and pitch of the roof, is remarkably well placed upon a terrace that slopes behind the buildings, while they themselves are in the midst of green stretches of lawns, dotted with beds of flowering shrubs, with here and there a fountain or summer-house.
Mrs. Eddy took the writer straight to her beloved "lookout"—a broad piazza on the south side of the second story of the house, where she can sit in her swinging chair, revelling in the lights and shades of spring and summer greenness. Or, as just then, in the gorgeous October coloring of the whole landscape that lies below, across the farm, which stretches on through an intervale of beautiful meadows and pastures to the woods that skirt the valley of the little truant river, as it wanders eastward.
It pleased her to point out her own birthplace. Straight as the crow flies, from her piazza, does it lie on the brow of Bow hill, and then she paused and reminded the reporter that Congressman Baker from New Hampshire, her cousin, was born and bred in that same neighborhood. The photograph of Hon. Hoke Smith, another distinguished relative, adorned the mantel.
Then my eye caught her family coat of arms and the diploma given her by the Society of the Daughters of the Revolution.