Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/542

482 What Mrs. Eddy has accomplished has been due solely to her own compelling personality. She has never been a dreamer of dreams or a seer of visions, and she has not the mind for deep and searching investigation into any problem. Her genius has been of the eminently practical kind, which can meet and overcome unfavourable conditions by sheer force of energy, and in Mrs. Eddy's case this potency has been accompanied by a remarkable shrewdness, which has had its part in determining her career. Her problem has been, not to work out the theory of mental healing, but to popularise it, and having popularised it, to maintain a personal monopoly of its principle; and the history of Christian Science shows how near she has come to doing this.

Not until Mrs. Eddy met Quimby had she ever known any serious purpose, and although she was superbly equipped by nature to blaze the way for new and bizarre ideas, and was always the first to take up with such irregular and passing notions as mesmerism, clairvoyance, writing-mediumship, etc., she had never produced an original idea on her own account. With Quimby came her opportunity, and once given an actual purpose, Mrs. Eddy, with her unequalled zeal for not letting go of a thing, was at once upon the highroad to success.

For herself, she has won what has always seemed to her most valuable, and what has been from the beginning a crying necessity of her nature: personal ease, an exalted position, and the right to exact homage from the multitude.

For Quimby, she has, and mainly by reason of her ingratitude toward her old benefactor, secured public attention to his theory