Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/342



HE modest appeal of The Christian Science Journal very early began to create results which were first apparent in the arrival of students from the West at the Metaphysical College in Boston. And no sooner had the first Western students returned to their homes than they began to insert their cards as practitioners in the Journal, and thereafter letters of inquiry poured in from Milwaukee and Chicago, and Mrs. Eddy’s morning mail began to assume bulky proportions. She published a notice in the magazine referring the inquirers to her Western students, but they were not to be satisfied with anything but information from headquarters.

In the spring of 1884 a pressing demand came from Chicago that a teacher of Christian Science be sent there — if Mrs. Eddy herself would not come. So manifold were the demands on Mrs. Eddy’s time that the idea of a Western trip seemed out of the question. Her correspondence, her classes, her Thursday evening lectures, and Sunday morning sermons, to say nothing of the editing of the Journal, left her no time for the slightest recreation and seemed too imperative to be laid down for a fraction of an hour. Conducting a class in Chicago would mean a month’s absence. In the emergency she