It was during some year in the early '80's that I became aware--from
that close contact with public feeling resulting from editorial work in
daily journalism--that the Boston atmosphere was largely thrilled and
pervaded by a new and increasing interest in the dominance of mind over
matter, and that the central figure in all this agitation was Mrs. Eddy.
To a note which I wrote her, begging the favor of an interview for press
use, she most kindly replied, naming an evening on which she would
receive me. At the hour named I rang the bell at a spacious house on
Columbus avenue, and I was hardly more than seated before Mrs. Eddy
entered the room. She impressed me as singularly graceful and winning in
bearing and manner, and with great claim to personal beauty. Her figure
was tall, slender, and as flexible in movement as that of a Delsarte
disciple; her face, framed in dark hair and lighted by luminous blue
eyes, had the transparency and rose-flush of tint so often seen in New
England, and she was magnetic, earnest, impassioned. No photographs can
do the least justice to Mrs. Eddy, as her beautiful complexion and
changeful expression cannot thus be reproduced. At once one would
perceive that she had the temperament to dominate, to lead, to control,
not by any crude self-assertion, but a spiritual animus. Of course such
a personality, with the wonderful tumult in the air that her large and
enthusiastic following excited, fascinated the imagination. What had she
originated? I mentally questioned this modern St. Catherine who was
dominating her followers like any abbess of old. She told me the story
of her life, so far as outward events may translate those inner
experiences which alone are significant.
Mary Baker was the daughter of Mark and Abigail (Ambrose) Baker, and was
born in Concord, N.H., somewhere in the early decade of 1820-'30. At the
time I met her she must have been some sixty years of age, yet she had
the coloring and the elastic bearing of a woman of thirty, and this, she
told me, was due to the principles of Christian Science. On her father's
side Mrs. Eddy came from Scotch and English ancestry, and Hannah Moore
was a relative of her grandmother. Deacon Ambrose, her maternal
grandfather, was known as a "godly man," and her mother was a religious
enthusiast, a saintly and consecrated character. One of her brothers,
Albert Baker, graduated at Dartmouth and achieved eminence as a lawyer.