Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/110

72 written in “Science and Health” how in childhood she often listened with joy to these words falling from the lips of her sainted mother, “God is able to raise you up from sickness.” She also declares how she dwelt upon the meaning of this passage of Scripture which her mother so often quoted, “And these signs shall follow them that believe; they shall lay hands upon the sick and they shall recover.” Some of her early experiences now came back to her. She recalled how through her mother’s advice to rest in God’s love she had been able to recover from the fever brought on by religious argument with her father and pastor. She also recalled how she had subdued the insane man in Tilton when she was a schoolgirl and brought him into a state of calmness and tranquillity when every one else had fled from him in terror. She remembered her exalted religious state at the period of both these cures and endeavored to determine whether such cures depended upon extreme intensity of faith or whether a calm sense of assurance might not as surely reach God’s attention. While studying and meditating on these apparent miracles of faith in her own experience and striving to connect them with the manner and method of the New Testament cures, a singular event befell which gives verity to Mrs. Eddy’s assertion that for years before the discovery of Christian Science she had been searching for spiritual causation for disease and a spiritual method of cure.

Aside from the calls of her aristocratic neighbors, she was not entirely forgotten by the village. The