When the light of one friendship after another passes from earth to heaven, we kindle in place thereof the glow of some deathless reality. Memory, faithful to goodness, holds in her secret chambers those characters of holiest sort, bravest to endure, firmest to suffer, soonest to renounce. Such was the founder of the Concord School of Philosophy—the late A. Bronson Alcott.
After the publication of SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES, his athletic mind, scholarly and serene, was the first to bedew my hope with a drop of humanity. When the press and pulpit cannonaded this book, he introduced himself to its author by saying—"I have come to comfort you." Then eloquently paraphrasing it and prophesying its prosperity, his conversation with a beauty all its own reassured me. That prophecy is fulfilled.
This book, in 1895, is in its ninety-first edition of one thousand copies. It is in the public libraries of the principal cities, colleges, and Universities of America; also the same in Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Greece, Japan, India, and China, in the Oxford University and the Victoria Institute, England; in the Academy of Greece, and the Vatican at Rome.
This book is the leaven fermenting religion; it is palpably working in the sermons, Sunday schools, and literature of our and other lands. This spiritual chemicalization is the upheaval produced when Truth is neutralizing error, and impurities are passing off. And it will continue till the antithesis of Christianity engendering the limited forms of a national or tyrannical religion yields to the church established by the Nazarene prophet and maintained on the spiritual foundation of Christ's healing.
Good, the Anglo-Saxon term for God, unites Science to Christianity. It presents to the understanding, not matter, but Mind; not the deified drug, but the goodness of God—healing and saving mankind.
The author of "Marriage of the Lamb," who made the mistake of thinking she caught her notions from my book, wrote to me in 1894, "Six months ago your book, SCIENCE AND HEALTH, was put into my hands. I had not read three pages before I realized I had found that for which I had hungered since girlhood, and was healed instantaneously of an ailment of seven years standing. I cast from me the false remedy I had vainly used and turned to the Great Physician. I went with my husband, a missionary to China, in 1884. He went out under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal church. I feel the truth is leading us to return to Japan."
Another brilliant enunciator, seeker, and servant of Truth, the Rev. William R. Alger of Boston, signalled me kindly as my lone bark rose and fell and rode the rough sea. At a conversazione in Boston, he said, "You may find in Mrs. Eddy's metaphysical teachings, more than is dreamt of in your philosophy."
Also that renowned apostle of anti-slavery, Wendell Phillips, the native course of whose mind never swerved from the chariot-paths of justice, speaking of my work, said: "Had I young blood in my veins I would help that woman."
I love Boston, and especially the laws of the state whereof this city is the capital. To-day, as of yore, her laws have befriended progress.
Yet when I recall the past,—how the gospel of healing was simultaneously praised and persecuted in Boston,—and remember also that God is just, I wonder whether, were our dear Master in our New England metropolis at this hour, he would not weep over it, as he wept over Jerusalem! Oh, ye tears! Not in vain did ye flow. Those sacred drops were but enshrined for future use, and God has now unsealed their receptacle with His outstretched arm. Those crystal globes made morals for mankind. They will rise with joy, and with power to wash away, in floods of forgiveness, every crime, even when mistakenly committed in the name of religion.