Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/260

218 own another person’s book, and wearing as her own property laurels rightfully belonging to that person — the real author of ‘Science and Health.

Who is this real author who was first, absurd; second, unoriginal; third, an inspired messenger? The real author of every word of the first edition, and every word, phrase, paragraph, and chapter of the very last edition is the one who wrote the limping verses of girlhood, the so-called “Quimby” manuscripts with their confusion of ideas, the statement of the Science of Man, Genesis and Apocalypse, and finally “Science and Health.” She was the precocious and nervous girl educated for the most part at home; she was the suffering invalid whose pure religion was tampered with by the mesmeric influence of a hypnotist; she was the poor and devoted Christian, healing without price and distributing her manuscripts to whomsoever would read them; she was the absorbed student and devotee, maligned by unfaithful students.

Who else was it that the scoffing Horace Wentworth declared he did not dislike but thought ridiculous when she sat in his mother’s parlor and said she had a mission from God to complete the work of Jesus Christ on earth? Who else was it that wrote the manuscript which Mrs. Catherine I. Clapp, the Wentworth’s cousin Kate, was employed to copy and which this amanuensis has herself said contained the first form of the ideas subsequently given to the world in “Science and Health,” certain paragraphs of which she used to scoff at and make fun of to her intimates? Who else was it who