From that hour dated her conviction of the principle of divine healing,
and that it is as true to-day as it was in the days when Jesus of
Nazareth walked the earth. "I felt that the divine spirit had wrought a
miracle," she said, in reference to this experience. "How, I could not
tell, but later I found it to be in perfect scientific accord with the
divine law." From 1866-'69, Mrs. Eddy withdrew from the world to
meditate, to pray, to search the Scriptures.
"During this time," she said, in reply to my questions, "the Bible was
my only text-book. It answered my questions as to the process by which I
was restored to health; it came to me with a new meaning, and suddenly I
apprehended the spiritual meaning of the teaching of Jesus and the
principle and the law involved in spiritual science and metaphysical
healing--in a word--Christian science."
Mrs. Eddy came to perceive that Christ's healing was not miraculous, but
was simply a natural fulfilment of divine law--a law as operative in the
world to-day as it was nineteen hundred years ago. "Divine science is
begotten of spirituality," she says, "since only the 'pure in heart' can
see God."
In writing of this experience, Mrs. Eddy has said:
I had learned that thought must be spiritualized
in order to apprehend Spirit. It must become
honest unselfish, and pure, in order to have the
least understanding of God in Divine Science. The
first must become last. Our reliance upon material
things must be transferred to a perception of and
dependence on spiritual things. For spirit to be
supreme in demonstration, it must be supreme in
our affections, and we must be clad with divine
power. I had learned that mind reconstructed the
body and that nothing else could. All science is a
revelation.
Through homeopathy, too, Mrs. Eddy became convinced of the principle of
mind healing, discovering that the more attenuated the drug, the more
potent was its effects.
In 1877 Mrs. Glover married Dr. Asa Gilbert Eddy, of Londonderry,
Vermont, a physician who had come into sympathy with her own views, and
who was the first to place "Christian Scientist," on the sign at his
door. Dr. Eddy died in 1882, a year after her founding of the
"Metaphysical College" in Boston, in which he taught.
The work in the Metaphysical College lasted nine years, and it was
closed (in 1889) in the very zenith of its prosperity as Mrs. Eddy felt
it essential to the deeper foundation of her religious work to retire
from active contact with the world. To this college came hundreds and
hundreds of students, from Europe as well as this country. I was present
at the class lectures now and then by Mrs. Eddy's kind invitation, and
such earnestness of attention as was given to her morning talks by the
men and women present I never saw equalled.