Her satisfaction in church-going was almost wholly in the sermon. For music she did not care, and there was nothing in ritual that appealed to her. But a well-reasoned sermon she enjoyed. Henry Ward Beecher was her favorite preacher, and she did not miss an opportunity of hearing him if she could help it. A truly great sermon or great address of any kind made a strong impression upon her; nor was it wholly intellectual. She was remarkably receptive and open to spiritual impressions. A woman of intellect and will, she was also a woman of unusually sensitive feelings and of deep, though controlled, emotions. She was ever eager to learn and had to the end of her life unshaken faith in the discovery and application of new truth.
It was reported in 1908 that Clara Barton had gone over to Christian Science. The report was not wholly correct. She became interested in Christian Science, but she never adopted it. The minister of the Universalist Church in Oxford, the Reverend Mr. Schoppe, became a Christian Science practitioner and reader, and she was much interested through him and his wife in this change on his part.
She was interested in Mrs. Eddy. It seemed to her a notable thing for a woman, alone and against great opposition, to have accomplished what she did.
She once witnessed the wreck of a sight-seeing automobile filled with Christian Science visitors to Boston, and she was impressed by the fortitude with which they bore pain.
Moreover, she had good reason to know that there is much reckless use of medicine and much needless surgery. She had memories of years in which she suffered many things of many physicians and was nothing better, but rather worse. She saw, in war and in peace, much use of the knife that seemed to her bloody and cruel. She saw women hurrying to the operating-table, sometimes, as she believed, for no better reason than to escape the risk of motherhood, and she scorned them. She expressed herself to me in terms anything but gentle concerning married women who willingly deprive themselves of the perilous privilege of motherhood by resort to surgery. She believed that people who take medicine usually take too much; and that cheerful and wholesome living is better than medicine.
Moreover, she was always ready for a thing that was new. Her delight in the discovery of something hidden and now revealed was intense.
For all these reasons she was disposed to give Christian Science a fair hearing.
In Dr. Epler’s excellent biography, free use is made of Miss Barton’s correspondence with Mr. and Mrs. Schoppe, in which she expressed her interest in their new faith. My own conviction is, that while Clara Barton was thus deeply interested, those letters tend to enlarge the degree of her permanent interest. I am confident that she was less near to being a Christian Scientist than the letters themselves would indicate if taken alone. Indeed, Mr. Schoppe himself gives what I think is a wholly truthful statement, as recorded by Mr. Epler, under date of December 17, 1914:
Clara Barton’s connecting point with Christian Science was on the positives it accented—not from its negative philosophy. She welcomed its doctrine of the Divine presence of God working with us and in us and working upon her own life—present to help. She was exceedingly grateful to Christian Science for bringing out this point of the Divine absoluteness.
Further than that she could not understand it; she could not go. She did not deny, but she believed (unlike the Christian Science negativism) in a perfectly vast realm of material and human progress. She traced it in the wonders of geological ages and historical evolution. She saw God’s handiwork in a colossal complex material creation. She never could bring herself to believe the material or human creation a mortal error!