Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/230

190 tion, embraced in later editions of “Science and Health.” It contains the fundamental principles of Christian Science and its simplest comprehensive tenet, the scientific statement of being. With this manuscript completed she knew that she could teach the science and extend her work, that the time was ripe for harvest.

Through four successive years she had labored carefully, patiently, earnestly, writing and rewriting, while the truth grew in her understanding. It is no refutation of her sublime discovery in 1866 or of her divine guidance in preparing and presenting its principles that the work was a growth and did not spring full blown into her mind. Mary Baker Eddy could never have made her discovery in 1866 had she not been prepared for it by long application to spiritual inquiry. Nor would she have written “Science and Health” had she not labored long and with perfect submission to imperative spiritual guidance. The preparation for the discovery is shown by the fact of her childhood and young womanhood and, as this narrative reveals, her statement of long preparation is sustained by the fact of her life. She says: “From my very childhood I was impelled by a hunger and thirst after divine things, — a desire for something higher and better than matter — to seek diligently for the knowledge of God, as the one great and ever-present relief from human woe.”

With regard to important dates in her memory concerning the portents of what was to be revealed