, she heard mysterious
voices, and her mother, who was of Scottish origin and subject to
"attacks of religion," remembered the story of the Infant Samuel and
encouraged her to speak with the Lord. But Mary was alarmed by the
voices, and wept and trembled, instead of replying to them like a good
child.

About her forty-fifth year, however, being in the grip of a serious
illness, she did hold converse with the Lord, who told her how she
might be cured. She listened and obeyed, and was cured. This was her
"great initiation." She then retired from the world, and spent several
years engaged in meditation and prayer, while her study of the Bible
revealed to her the key to all mysteries, human and divine.

The deductions of her philosophy are often characterised by an
astonishing naivete. "God being All-in-all, He made medicine," she
tells us; "but that medicine was Mind. . . . It is plain that God does
not employ drugs or hygiene, nor provide them for human use; else Jesus
would have recommended and employed them in His healing."

She frequently makes use of ingenious statements whose very candour is
disarming, but she had considerable dialectical gifts, and can argue
persuasively, especially against spiritualism. In _Science and Health_
she violently denies the authenticity of spiritualistic phenomena, "As
readily can you mingle fire and frost as spirit and matter. . . . The
belief that material bodies return to dust, hereafter to rise up as
spiritual bodies with material sensations and desires, is
incorrect. . . . The caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful insect,
is no longer a worm, nor does the insect return to fraternise with or
control the worm. . . . There is no bridge across the gulf which
divides two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incorporeal,
and the physical, or corporeal."

In the confusion of precepts and principles championed by Mrs. Eddy
there are sometimes to be found thoughts worthy of a great
metaphysician. Her teaching, when purified from admixture, does at any
rate break away energetically from all materialistic doctrines.

Her literary output was considerable, for in addition to her gospel,
_Science and Health_, she wrote _The Concordance of Science and
Health_, _Rudimentary Divine Science_, _Christian Science versus
Paganism_, and other works, including some verse.

The Christian Science churches, with their adherents, who number more
than a million, are spread all o