Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/312

270 jealousy brought themselves to believe, her work would have died in Lynn, and the greatest religious movement of modern times would never have been known. But instead of receiving its death blow from the carefully worded epistle of apology, it was re-baptized and confirmed, and the young church was in reality purged of the worst elements of opposition and encumbrances of ineffectuality which had hampered its growth.

The apology was read at a meeting at the home of Mrs. F. A. Daman of Lynn, in whose parlor the Christian Science church convened in the summer and fall of 1880. Mrs. Eddy, who had attended the meeting unaware of the agitation brewing secession, was entirely unprepared for the epistle. Grieved and astounded, she addressed the meeting in reply. She declared that these deluded students were the victims of that worldly influence which perverted the sense of spiritual things, an influence which the teaching of Christian Science almost invariably aroused in its first encounter with worldly desires, but not to be expected from those who had resisted flippancy and ridicule for years. She pleaded with them to rid themselves of such thoughts, to rise above personal rivalries, jealousies, and ambitions, to purge their minds of the critical spirit which led them to misconceive her own life and work, and to reaffirm the high purpose to which they had been called, namely the founding of the church.

Finding that her appeal did not meet with the response which would have shown the rebellious students merely the victims of a temporary delusion,