Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/189

Rh And Mrs. Winslow did walk, walked along the ocean beach with Mary Baker and around her own garden in the beautiful autumn of that year. She who had not taken a step for sixteen years arose and walked, not once but many times. Though a wonderful thing had been accomplished, the woman’s pride kept her from acknowledging a cure. The method seemed to her so ridiculously inadequate. To accept it was like convicting her of never having been ill. So she returned to her former beliefs.

Such were some of the first results of Mary Baker’s efforts to prove that she had grasped a great truth and was not asserting an imaginary doctrine of fanciful or fanatical origin. She began to see in the wilful pride of one patient, the scornful rejection of her services by the parents of another, and the kindly indifference of still another, who guessed things just happened so when you were not watching, that this could not be her field of activity. But she had at her very door abundant opportunity among the humbler shoe workers. The Phillipses were satisfied with their religion and culture; the Winslows were wealthy and secure in their own well-being. They meant to be her friends and told her that the world would say she was mad if she continued to preach divine healing. “It is better not to talk of it,” they said. It seemed to them an unnatural doctrine, something that might become an awkward topic in their drawing-room, something that this interesting woman should be persuaded to forget.