Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/163

Rh were most intimately associated with her and was the occasion of the withdrawal of some half-proffered friendships. She spoke too much of religion was the complaint of the shallow worldlings. No one of them comprehended, save one family of true friends, the depth of her struggle at this period. Something bigger, greater, more portentous, more far-reaching than domestic trials of a tragic character, than even the sense of the struggles of her country for honor and perpetuity, — and to Mary Baker these struggles were real affairs of her own living interest, — yet something more far-reaching than home or national life was making war Titanic in the subjective regions of her soul.

So far the effort has been to portray Mary Baker’s spiritual life side by side with the account of the incidents of her worldly experiences. She has been shown as a docile little girl absorbed in books, a beautiful young woman marrying and leaving home, a bereaved widow in her parents’ house comforting the declining years of her mother, a heart-broken mother herself, a much tried wife in a second marriage, — but through all the various changes in her outward fortune her spiritual life had been developing consistently. This life, awakened in the days of her loving communion with a devout mother, was strengthened in her conscientious struggles with a dominating Calvinistic father; it was stimulated by the uplifting companionship with her clergyman teacher; it was confirmed in the subsequent personal seeking for God in the cloistered suffering in the mountain home. Going out from that cloister she