Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/254

212 higher usefulness, to purity, and the higher development of all his latent noble qualities of head and heart."

In spite of the frequent jars and occasional lawsuits between Mrs. Eddy and her students, new candidates for instruction were constantly attracted by the Science taught at Number 8 Broad Street, where the large sign, "Mary B. Glover's Christian Scientists' Home" still aroused the curiosity of the stranger.

The Christian Science faith has, from the beginning, owed its growth to its radical principle that sickness of soul and body are delusions which can be dispelled at will, and that the natural state of the human creature is characterised by health, happiness, and goodness. The message which Mrs. Eddy brought to Lynn was substantially that God is not only all-good, all-powerful, and all-present, but that there is nothing but God in all the Universe; that evil is a non-existent thing, a sinister legend which has been handed down from generation to generation until it has become a fixed belief. Mrs. Eddy's mission was to uproot this implanted belief and to emancipate the race from the terrors which had imprisoned it for so many thousands of years. "Ye shall know the Truth," she said, "and the Truth shall make you free."

Yet Mrs. Eddy herself was not always well, was not always happy. She used at first to account for this seeming inconsistency by explaining that she bore in her own person the ills from which she released others. When sick or distraught, Mrs. Eddy frequently reminded her students that Jesus Christ was bruised for our transgressions and bore upon His shoulders the sin and weakness of the world He came to save. She