# The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Introduction

INTRODUCTION
NO mystery to-day surrounds the life story of Mary Baker Eddy. Her birth, her ancestry for two hundred years, her education, her social development, and her individual service to the world have been scrutinized with the strong search-lights of both love and criticism. Every event of her long career has been established by unimpeachable records and testimony. It is no longer possible to invent fiction concerning the environment in which she was born and reared or the acts which made up her life.
It is possible, however, to minds careless of verity or those dominated by prejudice, to distort facts by exaggerated statement, to deduce erroneous conclusions from improper handling of data, to make wilful and far-fetched conjectures, and to suppress illuminative information in relating incidents, — information which would reveal the true inwardness of a situation otherwise left dark and sinister. Such coloring and molding of evidence is a modern method used for deducing a readable story from statistical documents.
A story told dramatically, with high lights of speculation and deep shadows of conjecture, with all the fascinating and engaging charm of the narrator's personal fancy woven into the texture, does make racy and entertaining reading. It requires a strong mind to hold fast to simple truth under such ​guidance. Because of the pleasure taken in a good story, whole pages of history are mistold and some of the noblest characters in the world's annals have been misrepresented.
The average modern, rationalistic and sophisticated, would far rather read Renan's “Life of Jesus,” with its vivid coloring, its subtle suggestion, its bold deduction, and human sympathy, than the simple gospel of St. Mark. Renan flatters his intellect and panders to his sensuality; he is made to feel himself superior in intelligence to the Lord of this earth, and his sensual nature is elevated in importance by the argument that it was the illusion of an impassioned woman which gave to the world the idea of a Deity resurrected from the grave.
What an interpretation of Christ's agony and victory and its proclamation by the purified and sanctified Mary Magdalene, — she who gave Christendom that immortal phrase, “He is risen!” To be dominated by such interpretation is no less than a moral catastrophe occurring in the region of consciousness; for not only does Renan's “Life of Jesus” entertain, flatter, and excite the intellect as an adventure in the realm of ideas, but, as in the case of most intellectual audacities, it leaves the adventurer in disastrous confusion. Renan, indeed, professes a delicate and reverent appreciation for the divine character he so ruthlessly handles and at the close of his drama you behold him a dejected chorus with tear-bedimmed eyes, inviting you to sigh with him over the monstrous blunder of Gethsemane. But the reader finds no tears to shed. ​Renan has skilfully unpacked his heart of its treasure, and, by lure and wile, stolen its birthright, its title to divine heritage.
Immensely destructive is the usual commendation of this “Life.” Destructive to what? Can imagination and diction destroy reality, or, rather, can they destroy that faith by which the world lives, the faith in the reality of spiritual experience?
Now the simple gospel narrative tells a straight story of Jesus' life. It is not concerned to compare the subject of its text to other men of the times in order to prove his reality. It declares his acts as they were, whether raising Jairus' daughter, walking upon the Sea of Galilee, or feeding the multitude; it reveals him scourged, spat upon, and crucified, without comment, and without comment relates his resurrection and ascension. The gospel is there for all time. It was in no haste to win attention and therefore did not need coloring or tricking out in fancy. Yes, the gospel stands after all documentary investigation, after the best modern documentary and comparative criticism can do, even after Renan and Strauss.
I have a life story to relate and I plant myself unreservedly on the methods of St. Mark. St. Mark, I believe, was a scribe who related what he had been able to gather from witnesses in a direct and unvarnished way. Now I shall endeavor to do simply that. It is not for me to explain or to expound. The facts of this life shall be left to elucidate themselves when set in an orderly and unembellished array before the world; the import must carry to ​that consciousness able to receive it. I shall concern myself only to report the truth.
In gathering the facts from the past I have often encountered the disappointments of imperfect memories of a small, a very small, group of men and women of advanced years who knew Mrs. Eddy in her youth; but the records in town books have yielded sufficient information to trace accurately Mrs. Eddy's residence from year to year. This data refutes certain unfounded assertions which float about as loose rumors, such as that related by an aged woman in Malden and printed in the form of an interview in the Boston Herald. This story was that a Mary Baker told fortunes by reading cards in a mean street in Boston before the Civil War, and had told this woman's fortune and she believed the fortune-teller to be Mrs. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. In the late fifties Mrs. Eddy was no longer Mary Baker, but had been twice married. She was then Mrs. Patterson, an almost helpless invalid, living in North Groton, a village in Northern New Hampshire. She had not visited Boston for a long period of years and did not visit it for many years to come. Another rumor there was that a certain Mrs. Glover, who was a spiritualistic medium, in and around Boston during the sixties, could be identified with Mary Baker Eddy as one and the same individual. It is not necessary to discover who that Mary Baker was or who that Mrs. Glover, or to establish that they were individuals in nowise related to Mrs. Eddy. It is only necessary to tell minutely the facts of Mrs. Eddy's ​life which are exclusive of all practices of charlatanism, and are at all times stainless and honorable.
All statements of facts made in this narrative are founded on reliable evidence, town registers, church books, and court records. As to the memories of a few old people interviewed by the author, who associated with Mary Baker in her youth, it must be said that they were not always all that could be desired, and it is fortunate that public records can usually be depended upon to rectify careless assertion. Compared together these memories sometimes contradicted each other; referred back to themselves, they frequently shifted and showed instability; and a deplorable thing was that they betrayed evidence of having been tampered with by suggestion, the imagination having been incited by vanity or cupidity.
To remember a thing suggested, with a gift in full view, is a natural enough performance to children and to those in second childhood. But what should be said of the bribers in such a case? It is to the honor of human nature that both men and women have resisted the offer of large sums of money to remember that which would have been convenient to the theories of malicious-minded critics who preceded me in their investigations.
So if the intelligence was sometimes staggered in the search for the truth about this illustrious woman by encounter with malicious inventions, clearly discernible because of the known facts, the provable facts, which correct them, it was also frequently cheered and uplifted by touching the store of thought emanating from persons “whose spirits and ​cleanliness and freshness of mind and body make old age lovely and desirable.” The writer has nowhere interfered with these memories, neither in interview nor in transcription; and at the risk of seeming unkind to lonely and impoverished old men and women, whom a slight kindness by way of gift might have enlivened, has refrained from any such act, lest it might be said, to the detriment of this history, that the writer, too, had set forth an invention, instead of the truth.
But it is a task which I have imposed upon myself to take the wheat of memory and leave the chaff. I have refused ignoble deductions volunteered as information. I have refrained from handling the relics of rural jealousy strong enough to endure for eighty years, babbling what it merely conjectured almost a century ago concerning a nature it could not then and cannot now comprehend.
I ask the reader to refuse to accept as biography such gossip which the ephemeral press has detailed. For truth's sake, divest your mind of all speculation and conjecture by which the true story of this life has been so ruthlessly caricatured; divest it at least for the time, and approach without prejudice for an acquaintance with this truly great and singular character. We as human beings owe something to the consciousness of the age, the great highway of souls to come after us. We should make the path straight by rejecting wilful scandal, however amusing and diverting, and by choosing to know the simple gospel truth.