Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/198

160 concerning her relation to this family. Hiram Crafts was Mrs. Eddy’s first pupil. She taught him to return to his Bible, to seek in primitive Christianity the religion which he had lost through liberalism, and to become a mental practitioner to the sick and the sinning. In fact she gave him a profession by which he not only was able to live a religious life, but to earn his living. For a long period he did so earn his living and made some unusual cures.

Crafts had gone to Lynn to work in the factories for the winter, but becoming absorbed with this topic of Mind-science, he decided to return to Stoughton to practise it. He invited Mrs. Patterson to go with him and his wife as he was not satisfied with what he had learned, and wanted further information, instruction, and advice in practise.

In leaving Lynn with these humble people, Mary Baker took a radical step. She had tried for months to persuade those who were more akin to her in social and intellectual heritage to accept the truth she had to impart. Of these some, as the Phillips family, loved her, but were impervious to her doctrine. The Winslows had begged her not to talk of it, the Unitarian clergyman of Lynn and his wife were friendly, but they feared for their faith when she spoke to them of God as Principle. The Ellises of Swampscott, mother and son, the latter a teacher, listened with grave interest and amiable social spirit to her arguments for a higher religion when she was a lodger at their house; but they were not moved to accept her tenets. Her doctrine seemed to have the effect of provoking discussion. It aroused in