Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/303

Rh This latter place was a hall for public meetings which seated from three hundred to four hundred persons. At first her lectures drew but a few people, but very shortly the audiences grew larger and she was soon able to fill the hall.

The Boston audiences were a revelation to Mrs. Eddy. The listeners attracted to the new doctrine were distinctly of a cultivated world. While her long labors in Lynn had unfolded her own powers, they had attracted to her only disciples whose intellectual limitations caused them to be more or less disappointing. They had been able to follow her only a certain distance in philosophic speculation, whereupon a reaction of some sort of stubbornness would ensue, a stubbornness impossible to cope with. In Boston a new quality of mind responded to her. Those first Boston audiences revealed to her that the foundation of her church was to be laid in the city of liberal culture.

Though Lynn was stubborn, the founder of Christian Science was not yet done with her efforts there. From that base her future activity was to be projected. The last two years of her residence in Lynn were not without the compensation of blessedness and fruition. A few students who remained loyal to the work were taught in Broad street, and when she went forth they followed her to Boston and became her aids. She could not personally do everything that lay before her; she must direct them to tasks by the faithful performance of which the struggles of the early church might have been greatly minimized.