Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/205

Rh she had healed others by this discovery; nor was she ready when she had fitted her first student to heal disease. How she was prepared for this work cannot be explained by the usual methods of the biographer, by rehearsing the facts of her residence in various places, her associates, or her occupations. A process of germination and unfoldment took place in her which must have had its apocryphal hours as well as apocalyptic moments, its seasons of doubt and fog as its times of certainty and sun. The work laid upon her was that of renaming, actually re-christening, the verities.

In her autobiography Mrs. Eddy has endeavored to explain how she approached this great work. He who runs may not read here. Loose conceptions arise from a careless use of terms, and, as in a trial where life depends on exact and technical phrasing, so in knowing the real Mary Baker Eddy one must apply himself to comprehend her terminology and how she came to adopt it in order to realize what business she was about.

“I had learned that thought must be spiritualized, in order to apprehend Spirit,” she has written. “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. Purity, self-renunciation, faith, and understanding must reduce all things real to their