Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/430

376 had bidden him remember death and be mindful of his unworthiness and insecurity. It contributed to the general sense of self-satisfaction and well-being which already characterised a new and thrifty society.

Probably Mrs. Eddy herself was not aware of the headway which her sect had made until she attended the third annual convention of the National Christian Scientists' Association, held at Chicago in June, 1888. Mrs. Eddy went on from Boston, personally attended by Mr. Frye and Ebenezer J. Foster, who was soon to become her son by adoption. Croud, of Mrs. Eddy's Western followers here for the first time beheld her, as they put it, "face to face," and she achieved a most gratifying personal triumph.

This was the first and last annual convention Mrs. Eddy ever attended, and a coup de théâtre could scarcely have been better planned. On the morning of June 13, Mrs. Eddy delivered an address to an audience of more than three thousand people, eight hundred of whom were Christian Science delegates. When she stepped upon the platform the entire audience rose and cheered her.

Her address, which is said to have thrilled every listener and which was termed "pentecostal," seems, at this distance, rather below Mrs. Eddy's average. She closed with the following tribute to her church militant:

Christian Science and Christian Scientists will, must, have a history; and if I could write the history in poor parody on Tennyson's grand verse, it would read thus: