Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/443

Rh at Chestnut Hill, they having come East to visit her on her eighty-ninth birthday.

It seems proper to state here that Mrs. Eddy throughout her life yearned with the natural solicitation of a mother over her son and grandchildren; she made various and repeated efforts to guide and direct them, to see that they were comfortably situated, and that her grandchildren were being properly educated and reared. She did not believe, however, that they required vast sums of money or great luxury to ensure their happiness, for she herself lived simply, never indulging in luxury. But she had given nearly fifty years of arduous labor to promulgate the doctrine of Christian Science and to establish the Christian Science church as the guardian in the world of this truth. She had accumulated a fortune which has been conservatively estimated at $2,000,000 at the time of her leaving this world. This had been largely the result of the sale of her writings, though some of it had been earned by the investment of the money from her books in securities. It is proper to say that the church which grew up on the basis of her doctrine, the church which so widely bought and read her books, had contributed largely to this fund. It was therefore eminently just, and revealed Mrs. Eddy's sincerity of motive and dearest purpose, that she should have left in her last will this sum to the Mother Church of Boston for the carrying out of a specific plan, to advance the cause of Christian Science.

After the demise of Mrs. Eddy the details of