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.
Some years ago, friends of Mrs. Eddy at Wilmington erected a
stone to the memory of Mr. Glover over a grave supposed to be
his; but a descendant of the person really buried there
ruthlessly tore the stone from the place he believed it to
desecrate, and poor Glover’s final resting place remains unknown
and unnoticed.
After reaching the dignity of leader of a great religious
movement, Mrs. Eddy elevated the poor bricklayer husband to the
proud position of Colonel of Volunteers, and she thus glorified
him for approximately forty years. Sad to relate, however, he is
“Colonel” no longer. In the recent litigation, instituted by Mrs.
Eddy’s sons, one of the witnesses I was examining produced in
evidence a letter from Mrs. Eddy in which she said, “I called my
late husband” (she should have said late first husband, as a
second, a third and perhaps a fourth had then intervened), “I
called my late husband Colonel, because he was connected with the
militia, and I had got mixed on his rank.” She might just as well
have called him General for the same reason.
As a matter of fact, if Glover ever belonged to the militia, he
never arose beyond the dignity of high private and having been a
man of simple life and honest purpose would, no doubt, if he
could know of it, be a little uncomfortable in his narrow bed at
the undreamed military distinction thrust upon him by his famous
widow; but it would sadden him a little to know that, after
having elevated him to the exalted rank of Colonel, she should in
later years have reduced him to the less imposing position of
Major, by which military title he now is distinguished in Mrs.
Eddy’s conversation.
As a second matrimonial venture, Mrs. Eddy in 1853 allied herself
with one Daniel Patterson, who in her autobiographical sketches
has been completely ignored, although he shared twenty years of
connubial life with her. He does not seem to have left behind him
the sweet aroma of the more chivalrous Glover, who survived the
marriage only three months. Patterson was an itinerant dentist of
little or no practice, and life with him does not appear to have
been a pathway strewn with flowers.
It profits not to dwell upon the Patterson episode. When he was
not pursuing the elusive dollar that perpetually fled away, he
appears to have been chasing the festive bullfrog whose dismal
croak jarred upon his wife’s sensitive nerves. Suffice it to say
that Daniel and Mary endured one another, with what serenity and
fortitude they might, for twenty long, weary years, when, in
1873, a divorce was granted her for his desertion. Mrs. Eddy says
the divorce was granted for a different cause, but the record
contradicts her. The record always contradicts her. She has
declared herself to be opposed to divorce for any but the single
Biblical cause; but the record of the Superior Court at Salem
shows her to have obtained a divorce from Patterson for desertion
seven years after the time God, as she says, had revealed to her
the final religion.
Mrs. Eddy does not believe in marriage—for others. She was
inspired of God to teach that it is not good—for others—to marry
and she has inspired into the minds of her faithful followers the
belief that marriage is of the earth very earthy indeed, and that
life in the realm of spirit is impossible to those in the holy
estate of matrimony. But so far as she herself was concerned, it
cannot be denied that she seems to have had a distinct fancy for
marriage, and I may go so far as to say something approaching
fondness for variety in the marriage state.
In any event, after the termination by operation of law of the
second marriage, that is to say on January 1, 1877, Mrs. Eddy
made another and third venture into marriage and conferred upon
one Gilbert Asa Eddy the proud and happy distinction of successor
to the deceased Glover and the departed Patterson. The record of
this marriage (another record, be it noted) discloses the amusing
fact that Mrs. Eddy’s age was given as forty years, the marriage
having been celebrated fifty-six years from the date of her
birth; so that instead of blossoming and blooming in garlands gay
for a fair, young, winsome thing of forty summers, the roads were
decked with garlands somewhat somber for the third glad nuptials
of the blushing bride of fifty-six. But what is a little matter
of sixteen years in the life of a person who is superior to time
and of whose life here in the flesh there shall be no end?
After years of toil and trouble, of conflict and disharmony, of
stress and strain, in which some of Mrs. Eddy’s early friends
strongly sympathized with Mr. Eddy, who complained that neither
he nor God Almighty could please his exacting spouse, this
husband, too, was gathered to his fathers and Mrs. Eddy was for a
third time a widow.
In her efforts to impose upon the credulity of simple-minded
people, Mrs. Eddy has not hesitated to claim the power to triumph
over death, and to have actually restored the dead to life. To
her intimates she has claimed to have thus twice restored to life
this lamented third husband, Asa G. Eddy.
If Mrs. Eddy has, or had, this power, the mind of the incredulous
will wonder why the poor man is now dead, why his potent helpmate
did not restore him to life the third time he died. Presumably,
Mrs. Eddy reasoned with herself that it was really expecting too
much of a woman, even a woman Messiah, that she should recall
from death the third husband three times, and as husbands had
become, to some extent, a matter of habit with her, it is not,
perhaps, remarkable that she consented finally to part with this
one after such unmistakable evidence of his persistent desire to
be separated from her even by death.
Mrs. Eddy has in her book, “Miscellaneous Writings,” modestly
given us this husband’s estimate of her in these words: “Perhaps
the following words of her husband, the late Dr. Asa G. Eddy,
afford the most concise, yet complete, summary of the matter,
‘Mrs. Eddy’s works are the outgrowth of her life. I never knew so
unselfish an individual.’” So, perhaps, she let Eddy go, finally,
out of pure unselfishness. Sweet as was his companionship, she
could not keep him by her side when repeatedly assured of his
unalterable wish to go hence.
The first husband, Glover, survived the marriage but a few
months; the second husband, Patterson, unappreciative wretch that
he was, ran away, and, as Mrs. Eddy tells us, found consolation
in the affection of the “wealthy lady” who ran away with him
(although it must be said that no corroboration whatever of the
“wealthy lady” feature of Mrs. Eddy’s story exists); and the
third husband, Eddy, after having been twice recaptured, finally
escaped by death’s door.
There is another singular, grewsome incident connected with the
death of Mr. Eddy, husband number three. He died of heart
disease. There was no manner of doubt about that; but Mrs. Eddy
had professed to have the power to cure heart disease in the most
advanced stage, and she must find an explanation of her husband’s
death consistent with the possession, by her, of such power. So
she said that Eddy did not die of heart disease after all. He
died of poison, of arsenical poison, that’s what he died of; and
he didn’t die of arsenical poison mixed with his food or drink or
otherwise in chemical form smuggled into his organism. He died of
arsenical poison mentally administered, _thought_ into him by her
enemies.
Now even a woman Messiah could not be on the lookout all the time
against these malicious thoughts directed at her third husband
and, in a moment of inadvertence, one of them got by and killed
Eddy, and killed him _dead_.
To confirm her singular notion and prove the presence of the
symptoms of arsenical poison in the body, Mrs. Eddy procured the
performance of an autopsy upon her late husband’s remains.
Dr. Rufus K. Noyes of Boston, who performed the autopsy, tells me
that, having removed the diseased organ from Mr. Eddy’s breast,
he exhibited it upon a platter to the sorrowing widow, who craved
the ocular demonstration, and pointed out to her curious and
eager inspection the precise cause of death in its diseased
condition. And it was after, and notwithstanding, her close
scrutiny of the physical heart that had so robustly throbbed with
love of her, that, much to Dr. Noyes’ amusement, Mrs. Eddy gave
out the statement, to the extent of a column or more in the
newspapers, that arsenical poison mentally administered by absent
treatment had in fact torn her loved one a third time, and
finally, from her clinging grasp.
How sweet, how _charming_, is the wifely devotion, that, kissing
the lips of death, speedily and forever loses track of the sacred
ashes of the beloved _first_ husband, rushes into the divorce
court for freedom from the truant _second_, and, having twice
restored the adored _third_ to life, when a third time he thus
eludes her refuses, positively and coldly refuses, to bring him
back and looks with calm and critical eyes upon the formerly
attached, but now, alas, detached heart!
To the soft impeachment of these three several marriages, this
pronounced opponent of marriage pleads a bashful guilty, but many
are they who believe there was yet a fourth marriage, and that
the widow Eddy in course of time became, and is today, the wife
of one, Calvin A. Frye.
Frye is, ostensibly, at least, Mrs. Eddy’s servant, her man of
all work. He is her footman, and in the livery of a footman rides
upon the driver’s seat of her carriage when she goeth forth for
her daily drives. He is also her private secretary, who handles
her mail, and, at his pleasure, permits her to peruse, or throws
into the waste-paper basket, communications addressed to Mrs.
Eddy. He is her major-domo, master of ceremonies in her
pretentious establishment and director of her large retinue of
assistant secretaries, literary experts, personal healers, mental
protectors and domestic servants. These positions Mr. Frye has
adorned, as a resident member of Mrs. Eddy’s family, occupying an
adjoining room, for upwards of thirty years. But not only is Mr.
Frye Mrs. Eddy’s servant, her footman, her secretary, her
man-of-all work, he, strangely it would seem, has for years at a
time held the legal title to the capacious residence in which she
has lived at Concord, New Hampshire, and to all the highly
cultivated grounds about it, and to all the personal property
upon the place. And not only has Mr. Frye been Mrs. Eddy’s
servant and secretary, her footman and the owner of her lands and
houses, her horses and carriages, the furniture within the
houses, and the crops upon the extensive acres, he was for years
the legal owner of her costly jewels, of the diamond cross which
she wore at her throat. Her footman, owner of the house in which
she lived, of the carriage in which he took her to drive and of
the jewels she wore! This condition of affairs was not changed
until I called attention to it a few years ago, when Mr. Frye
reconveyed to, shall I say Mrs. Frye? all the property standing
in his name.
All of these circumstances, taken with the confident opinion of
one long a member of her household that, if Mrs. Eddy isn’t the
wife of Frye, she ought to be, are to my mind strong indication
that Mrs. Eddy ought to be called Mrs. Frye and her credulous
followers not Eddyites, but Fryeites or Frytes; and I predict
that, if Frye survive Mrs. Eddy and be not amply provided for by
her will or settled with by her executors, he will go into the
Probate Court and proclaim himself to be her surviving husband,
entitled to one-third of her estate.
I do not state this fourth marriage as a fact, but offer it as
the only possible and creditable explanation of the facts.
As has been said, Mrs. Eddy has one son born to her who was
totally and unfeelingly abandoned by her in his early infancy,
who lives in a western State, and seldom or never visits his
famous mother. No member of her family ever believed in her, ever
placed the slightest credence in her preposterous pretentions.
Mrs. Eddy also has an adopted son. Some years ago she legally
adopted a male child, a medical man named Foster, then forty
years old, who, to acquire a mother by adoption, took the name of
E. J. Foster-Eddy, and became a member of Mrs. Eddy’s family;
but, after a too brief period of harmonious cohabitation, the
sweet domestic relation was, for reasons not made public,
interrupted, and now he also finds it agreeable to live elsewhere
than with his adopted mother and is heard of no more in
Christian-Science-dom.
From a humble position of dependence, Mrs. Eddy has arisen to a
proud position of great opulence, and from complete obscurity,
devoid of influence and power, has placed herself at the head of
the most phenomenal “religious” movement of this or any other
time, and made herself believed to be the God-anointed successor
to Jesus Christ, and His equal in attributes and power; and this
she has accomplished through a _lie_, a deliberate, wilful,
wicked lie.