Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/275

Rh there. They made speeches indicative of their good feeling and generally betrayed a desire to make a rosy ring around their teacher and the man she had chosen to honor.

Mrs. Eddy replied to their good-will offering with an address which brought them out of the somewhat hectic sentimentalism which threatened to inundate her. She spoke of her marriage as a spiritual union and recalled them to their fidelity to truth and the noble purposes they had cherished. She then took the Bible and read from it, expounding certain passages until she brought the company into its usual sense of the spiritual work she wished her students to perform. They beheld their teacher and leader, the same Mary Baker, with hands as ever outstretched to them with the spiritual gift to be transferred through them to the whole human race and to the age; with growing solemnity they saw through her eyes the far horizon and the vision of the work they had to do. Mr. Eddy at this moment became simply one of them again, a student who stood a little closer, but still a student. He, like them, must carry out her directions that the spreading of Christian Science should not languish, but to him was the special duty given of guarding her against the onslaughts of the envious and ambitious who pressed too close with their human desires.

If for a time Mrs. Eddy’s influence lulled the storm, it suddenly broke forth again and now followed storm upon storm. George Barry was the first to move. He brought suit against her in the spring of 1877 to recover $2,700 which he said was