Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/238

198 It is not possible to draw a picture of those first classes in Mind Science that will appeal to a sense of the beautiful. The students who were drawn together were workers; their hands were stained with the leather and tools of the day’s occupation; their narrow lives had been cramped mentally and physically. Their thoughts were often no more elevated than their bodies were beautiful. They could not come to Mrs. Glover in the daytime, for their days were full of toil. At night, then, these first classes met, and it was in the heat of July and August. In the barely furnished upper chamber a lamp was burning which added somewhat to the heat and threw weird shadows over the faces gathered round a plain deal table. Insects buzzed at the windows, and from the common over the way the hum of the careless and free, loosed from the shops into the park, invaded the quiet of the room. Yet that quiet was permeated by the voice of a teacher at whose words the hearts of those workmen burned within them. “The light which never was on land or sea” was made to shine there in that humble upper chamber.

I have said this picture was not beautiful, yet it appeals to the deepest and highest sense of beauty, that sense through which the heart receives impression. Mary Baker laid her finger upon the central motive of life those summer evenings on Lynn Common, and the response was a realization of divine consciousness which reached throughout the world, not immediately, but gradually, persistently as the years passed. And that moment of exquisite