♪♪ She was a New Hampshire native.

Her portrait hangs in the New Hampshire State House with the likes of Daniel Webster, Franklin Pierce and John Stark.

♪♪ A sickly child grew up in despair.

She would go on to create an American religion, and in the process, become one of the most powerful, influential and controversial women of the 19th century.

Her name was Mary Baker Eddy.

♪♪ [cars driving] Today, the roar of Interstate 93 fills the air in this field in Bow, New Hampshire.

But 175 years ago, only the occasional clatter of Concord stagecoaches traveling the Londonderry Turnpike would have broken the silence.

That, and the voices of a family.

♪♪ It was here that Mary Morse Baker was born.

The year was 1821.

James Monroe was president, and the state of Missouri had just been admitted to the Union.

Mary's father, Mark Baker, was a farmer.

He owned five horses, eight oxen, three cows, and nearly 200 acres of farm, woodlot, and pasture.

He was a real New Hampshire Yankee, a respected community leader with a somewhat quarrelsome disposition.

People who knew him spoke of his iron will and inflexible sense of righteousness.

Mark Baker was a true believer in the Calvinist tradition of theology.

For him, Christianity was warfare against sin, not a religion of human brotherhood.

Calvinism is best known as, a faith that believes, in faith alone.

As the determining feature.

In in in your religious makeup, it believes that we are all predestined, to either be saved or damned.

That we have no, actual ability to, we have no, no real ability among ourselves through good works to determine whether we’ll be among the saved or not.

♪♪ My father's relentless theology emphasized belief in a final judgment day, in the danger of endless punishment, and in a Jehovah merciless toward unbelievers.

Father kept us in the tightest harness I have ever known.

Mary Baker was the youngest of Mark's six children.

The baby of the family.

A fair but frail girl.

She had brilliant blue eyes and chestnut colored hair.

She liked to be the center of attention.

She had her father's quick temper and her mother's charm.

Mary was born when her mother was 37 years old.

Old age, by the standards of the day.

Abigail Ambrose Baker adored her youngest child, so much so that she professed to fear that she worshiped Mary instead of the great Jehovah.

And Mary returned that love.

One stream flows gently forth from childhood by my side, changeless as pure.

It's near receding tide, I see that stream whose fault is purity in tranquil course on to eternity.

To mingle with its ocean depths above.

It is a mother's deep, undying love.

At the age of 12, Mary Baker started writing.

Mostly she concentrated on verse.

It was a hobby suited to her ill health, and Mary was often ill. She was given to nervous tantrums, unaccountable fevers, and chronic spinal trouble.

She was kept out of school a good deal of the time.

Her brother Albert attended Dartmouth College and brought his college books home for his younger sister to study.

Her father was scandalized at the thought of this, her being exposed to the likes of Bacon, Lock, Voltaire, and Hume, and he issued an absolute interdict against them.

Mary and Albert did their best to ignore it.

♪♪ In 1836, the Bakers moved to Sanbornton Bridge, the town we now know of as Tilton, New Hampshire.

Mary seemed to enjoy the change.

Mary Baker was an absolute dazzling beauty.

This is the, the testimony of people who knew her when she was a girl.

That she was the belle of the town of Tilton.

She kept up her poetry, and several of her verses were locally published.

In 1838.

We know that she joined the Sanbornton Congregational Church Though not without first getting into an argument on the concept of predestination.

She was in and out of school, as her health permitted, attending both the district school and the Sanbornton Academy.

But there was also a sense of loneliness.

Her siblings had left home to pursue marriages or careers of their own.

And Albert, her favorite brother, died in 1841.

When Mary Baker was ten years old, she was introduced to a handsome stranger.

The gentleman took her on his knee and said that one day he would come back to marry her.

And he kept his word.

His name was George Washington Glover.

He was from New Hampshire, but had settled in the South, where he had become a successful builder.

I think that she was smitten with him.

I think he was a very handsome, macho individual.

He looked apparently very much like her brothers.

Her older brothers, whom she adored.

He too was tall and handsome and virile.

Unfortunately, he died.

Mrs. Eddy's life would not have been the same if George Washington Glover had continued in life.

♪♪ Mary Baker and George Glover were married on December 10th, 1843.

On Christmas Day, they set off for North Carolina.

They would not be there for long.

George Glover died of bilious fever in June of 1844.

Mary Glover returned as a widow to the house which she had left eight months before as a bride.

She also returned six months pregnant.

Her son was born September 12th, 1844.

He was named George Washington Jr for his late father.

Everyone called him Georgie.

The years after her husband's death were difficult.

Childbirth left her too ill to care for her child, and Georgie was left with a wet nurse.

She sinks further and further into despair.

Despair.

Frustration.

Powerlessness.

Ill health.

Those were all linked.

Why does pain come marring each pleasure?

Why does want come spoiling each treasure, making us doubtful and gloomy and sad?

Why does woe dim eyes full of brightness?

Why does time rob steps of their lightness?

Bowing the proud form with beauty once clad.

♪♪ The poems and fiction were now published in local magazines like The Covenant and the New Hampshire Patriot.

♪♪ In 1849, her mother, Abigail Baker, died.

♪♪ A year later, in 1850 her father remarried.

Mary and George Junior were not particularly welcome after her father's second marriage, and in 1851, Mary Baker Glover was living in the home of her sister, Abigail Tilton.

She has been living for ten years or more now as a widow.

She has no money.

Her family are getting very, very tired of supporting her.

She has nowhere to go.

And she has a son to, support.

Georgie was sent away to live with friends of the family in the town of North Groton.

Go, little voyager, o’er life's rough sea.

Born in a tempest.

Choose thy pilot God, the Bible.

Let thy chart forever be.

Anchor and helm its promises afford.

Despite the chaos and despair of her life.

Despite her favorite brother's death, her husband's death, her mother's death, and the estrangement of her child.

Mary Glover still had her Bible, but the religion she had grown up with, the religion of self-denial, sorrow, and suffering was not enough.

She was looking for something more.

She was looking for some relief to her toothache when she ran into her second husband.

♪♪ Daniel Patterson was an itinerant dentist.

He was, in truth, a figure to delight the feminine heart.

Tall and handsome, he was based in the nearby town of Franklin, three miles from Sanbornton Bridge.

But whenever dentistry was slow in Franklin, he sought his patients throughout the neighboring countryside.

The most interesting patient was the fragile, large eyed Mary Glover.

Their wedding occurred on June 21st, 1853.

It was not a match made in heaven.

Besides being a Baptist, which caused no small degree of scandal, Daniel Patterson was clearly Mary's intellectual inferior.

Worst of all, the marriage did not result in any improvement of Mary's health, either physical or mental.

So in 1855, the couple moved to North Groton so that Mary might be closer to her son.

North Groton, New Hampshire, in the mid-19th century was, as it is today, like the end of nowhere.

With the help of Mary's sister Abigail, the Pattersons purchased this house, which at the time included a neighboring sawmill.

Georgie was now 11 years old and attending the local school.

But he showed a disinclination to learn and was not much liked in the village.

Worse still, Daniel Patterson took such an aversion to the boy that he did everything possible to keep the lad away.

Within a year, Young George Glover was taken by his guardians to live in Minnesota, and Mary Patterson was left bedridden and unhappy in the mountains of New Hampshire.

I slept very little last night, in consequence of memory and wounded feelings.

My spine is so weak and inflammatory that the least mental emotion gives me suffering that language cannot depict.

Then the debility which follows seems nearly as distressing.

Oh, how long must I bear this burdened life?

The years in North Groton had been tough on Daniel Patterson, too.

His business was failing.

In 1859, Mary Patterson's own sister foreclosed on the mortgage of their home.

Doctor and Mrs. Patterson ended up here renting this house in Rumney, New Hampshire, where they took up life anew.

It was a turbulent time in American history.

The eve of the Civil War.

And Mary Patterson once again took up her pen.

O thou supreme, who reign’st o’er human power, God of our fathers still avert the hour when sin's repentance shall be sealed in blood.

Do stay in this nation blest or field and flood.

War came in July of 1861, and three months later news came that 16 year old George Glover had run away from home and enlisted in the 18th Wisconsin Infantry.

Was the first communication Mary had received from her son in five long years.

Doctor Patterson, meanwhile, had gone down to Washington.

He'd obtained a commission from Governor Berry of New Hampshire to take charge of the distribution of a fund being raised for northern sympathizers in the South.

Unfortunately, he decided to go sightseeing near the battlefield at Bull Run.

He wandered too close to the Confederate lines and found himself a prisoner of war.

Dear wife, I am now about 900 miles from home, and heaven only knows when I shall be any nearer.

I did expect McClellan would cut off the southern roads and take and release us in Richmond, as he easily could have done.

But his eternal tardiness has blasted that hope.

And we are fixed for the war beyond a possibility of an earlier release.

At June, Mary and her doctor William Vail's Water Cure Sanatorium in Hill, New Hampshire, the cure proved ineffective.

But while there, she heard about a successful healer in Portland, Maine.

♪♪ Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was a blacksmith's son born in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

By trade, he was an expert clockmaker.

By practice, he was a traveling, mesmerist.

Mesmerism was the forerunner of hypnotism.

It promoted the use of a trance like state to bring harmony to the mind and body.

Quimby had stumbled upon all this while looking for a solution to his own ill health.

What he discovered was a mental theory of disease, a science of health based on the mind.

In 1862, with her husband, a Confederate prisoner, and her son, a soldier, Mary Patterson went to Portland, Maine, to meet Phineas Quimby.

She was so frail that she had to be carried to her hotel room.

But after meeting Quimby, everything changed.

Three weeks since I quitted my nurse and sick room en route for Portland, the belief of my recovery had died out of the hearts of those who were most anxious for it.

With this mental and physical depression, I first visited P. P. Quimby, and in less than one week from that time, I ascended by a stairway of 180 steps to the dome of the City Hall and am improving ad infinitum.

She was a new person.

For two months she stayed on observing and talking with Quimby, studying his writings and praising him in the pages of the local newspapers.

As he speaks, as never man before speak, and heals as never man healed since Christ is he not identified with truth?

And is not this the Christ which is in him?

Quimby was a Ben Franklin of the mind.

His field was human psychology.

Most of the-of his comments on the clergy of his day were negative, and on religion in general, he felt that Calvinism, for instance, was the source of a lot of physical problems that, people had.

Quimby held that the cause and cure of disease was mental.

That disease was a false belief.

For the next four years, Mary Patterson would be his disciple.

Quimby had given her a joy in living and a sense of purpose, such as she had perhaps never known before.

But the joy would be short lived.

In November of 1862, Daniel Patterson managed to sneak out of the window of his Confederate prison.

For Mary, his return was a mixed blessing.

Patterson proved to be an itinerant husband as well as an itinerant dentist.

The couple settled near Lynn, Massachusetts, where Doctor Patterson again took up his practice, and Mary wrote occasionally for the local newspapers.

She even became an active member of the Good Templars, the local temperance society.

Her health often failed when she was away from Quimby, and she made many trips back to Maine to visit the healer.

♪♪ In 1865, the Civil War ended.

Lincoln was assassinated, and Mark Baker died at Sanbornton.

♪♪ The stern, rather lonely old man left his daughter Mary the sum of $1.

In January of 1866, Phineas P. Quimby died of an abdominal tumor.

He remained convinced to the end of the truth of his mind healing theory.

The two men who had been the most important people in her life, her father and Quimby, were now gone.

No answering tone, no gentle smile.

Life’s joys to share or griefs beguile, their sunshine or its shadows fling.

Those hours have fled with life's glad spring.

And left this heart a sea shell moan repeating ever.

All alone, o weary heart, o tired sigh, alone to live, alone to die.

[wind blows] Mrs. Mary Ann Patterson of Swampscott fell upon the ice near the corner of Market and Oxford streets on Thursday evening, and was severely injured.

She was taken up in an insensible condition and carried to the residence of S.M.

Boubiere Esquire nearby, where she was kindly cared for during the night.

Doctor Cushing, who was called, found her injuries to be internal and of a very serious nature, including spasms and intense suffering.

She was removed to her home in Swampscott yesterday afternoon, though in a very critical condition.

The Lynn Reporter.

The accident occurred while Mrs. Patterson and her friends were on their way to a meeting of the Good Templars.

They realized she was badly injured and carried her to the nearest house, partially unconscious, semi hysterical and complaining of severe pain in the back of her neck and head a homeopathic physician, was called.

The prognosis was not good.

Concussion and partial spinal dislocation.

The next day, she was given one eighth of a grain of morphine and carried home by sleigh.

On Sunday, a clergyman stopped by to prepare her for the worst.

She asked for her Bible.

♪♪ When the clergyman returned to check in on her.

That same evening, Mary Patterson met him at the door.

She had gotten up out of bed and dressed.

The clergyman was so startled that for a moment he thought he was seeing an apparition.

My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery of how to be well myself, and how to make others so, even to the homeopathic physician who attended me and rejoiced in my recovery.

I could not then explain the modus of my relief.

I could only assure him that the divine spirit had wrought the miracle, a miracle which later I found to be in perfect scientific accord with divine law.

She realized that the power of healing was not outside herself.

That's to say, she didn't need a Quimby to heal her.

She didn't have to have some person, specifically a male person.

I think, telling her that she was, well, that she could do it herself by.

Moving directly to God.

Years later, the homeopathic physician, Doctor Alvin Cushing, would issue an affidavit which called into question the severity of the accident.

But for Mary Patterson, this fall on the ice changed her life forever.

I think it's fair to say that, we're dealing with a society that is religious.

It's largely Christian.

It believes, in in Christ, it believes in, in an after world, but it isn't sure beyond that, just what religion and what prophet it will follow.

♪♪ In the summer of 1866, Daniel Patterson left his wife for good, and over the next three years, Mary Glover, as she once again called herself, moved from one boarding house to another.

She had become a bit of an eccentric by the standards of the day widowed and divorced, unusually attired and strangely mannered, but there were reports of healings wherever she went, and at the age of 45, she was a woman with a mission.

Any person desiring to learn how to heal the sick can receive of the undersigned instruction that will enable them to commence healing on a principle of science, with a success far beyond any of the present modes.

No medicine, electricity, physiology or hygiene required for unparalleled success in the most difficult cases.

No pay required unless this skill is obtained.

Address.

Mrs. Mary B Glover, Amesbury, Massachusetts.

Box 61.

Her first students were shoemakers and factory workers from the mill towns near Boston.

Many of them were interested in spiritualism and séance for $300, one third the average yearly salary of a factory worker, they would be taught her system of healing.

They called themselves Christian Scientists.

♪♪ Critics often say that it's neither Christian or Science.

The Christian is the easy part.

She clearly was a Christian and very much out of out of Christian tradition.

There's no problem there.

The science part, if you want to be narrow about what science is and you begin to place it in specific disciplines, it doesn't seem like science.

But if we're talking about an inquiry, if we're talking about a quest to solve problems, and to deal with with scientific problems, it does make sense.

For her earliest teachings, she relied on some of Quimby's writings.

But as time went on, she felt a need for a textbook that more fully developed her own ideas.

So Mary Glover took up her pen.

The manuscript she came up with would be published in 1875.

She called it Science and Health.

The absence of truth we name error, but whence cometh error from God?

No, the same fountain sendeth not forth sweet and bitter water.

Error is not an idea.

It had neither principle nor identity.

It is not definable as a person, place, or thing, as an agent or actor, and being without substance, life or intelligence, and neither principle nor identity.

We learn it came not, but is illusion.

It is tough going.

It's it's it's you're dealing with difficult concepts.

The idea of there being no material, world, outside of the mind of God for instance.

Over the next 35 years, science and health would undergo 418 revisions.

In each new edition, Mary Glover would refine and clarify her basic idea that the central fact of the Bible is the superiority of spiritual over physical power and that matter sin, pain, disease, even death are all mortal illusions.

She felt there had to be healing in human lives the overcoming of illness, the overcoming of of, suffering.

The book received, at best, a lukewarm response.

The Boston Daily Globe wrote, Science and Health by Mary Baker Glover is a book in which there is an evident desire to protect the intellectual and spiritual welfare of humanity against the encroachments of sensual appetites and passions.

The author, however, is too diffuse and at times mystical in her style to give her work the practical value which comes from a clear, sharp presentation of truth.

Even her own literary advisor didn't know what to make of it.

There is nothing really to understand in Science and Health except that God is all, and yet there is no God in matter.

What they fail to explain is the origin of the idea of matter or sin.

They say it comes from mortal mind, and that mortal mind is not divinely created, in fact, has no existence, in fact, that nothing comes of nothing, and that matter and disease are like dreams having no existence.

Reverend J.H.

Wigan, the book didn't sell well.

I mean, the book at first, first she couldn't get it printed.

She finally-it came out almost vanity press.

She got some, some people to back it, and then it didn't.

It didn't sell well, I mean, I think they literally had to go door to door for a while.

But as teacher, as teacher, she builds up a cadre, if you will, of followers of believers.

There is no life, truth, intelligence nor substance in matter.

All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation.

For God is all in all.

Spirit is immortal truth.

Matter is mortal error.

Spirit is the real and eternal matter is the unreal and temporal, spirit is God, and man is his image and likeness.

Therefore man is not material.

He is spiritual.

Though the initial sales were disappointing, by the time of her death, almost half a million copies of Science and Health had been sold.

Asa Gilbert Eddy was a salesman for the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

He had sought out Mary Glover for a healing of his heart troubles.

He was so impressed with his improved health that he joined her class.

Within a year, Asa Eddy and Mrs. Glover were joined in marriage.

The marriage ceremony was performed on New Year's Day 1877.

The bride was 55, the groom 44.

The ages of both were given in the marriage license as 40.

He's a regular guy.

He's a lot younger than her.

He's he's, as far as one can tell, willing to do pretty much what she says and does do exactly what she says, and she knows what she wants at this period.

Asa Eddy was a solid supporter and his business background was beneficial to his wife during their life together, Mary Baker Eddy formally established the Church of Christ Scientist, as she called it.

She moved the headquarters of her new organization to Boston, and she obtained a state charter with degree granting power for the Massachusetts Metaphysical College.

She had that little institute down there in Boston.

She probably taught over the course of the decade, not even a full decade.

She probably taught about 600 people, but she clearly had the ability to, on, on a personal basis with small groups of people to turn those people into disciples.

But as the church organization grew and began to take shape, the couple felt under increasing personal attack, both from detractors and supporters.

In 1882, Asa Gilbert Eddy died.

He was 51 years old.

For Mrs. Eddy, it was a stunning shock.

An autopsy concluded the death was due to heart disease.

She demanded to see for herself.

The doctor showed her the failed heart, she could not believe her eyes.

I know it was poison that killed him.

Not material poison, but mesmeric poison.

After a certain amount of the mesmeric poison has been administered, it cannot be averted.

No power of mind can resist it.

It must be met with resistive action of the mind at the start, which will counteract it.

I do believe in God supremacy over error, and this gives me peace.

She's lost three husbands, two to death and one to divorce.

She's gone through tremendous economic hardships.

She's been down and out essentially.

And, despite all these knocks of fate, all these terrible things that are hurled at her, she comes up and, prevails.

In 1883, Mary Baker Eddy began a monthly publication, the Christian Science Journal.

Within a decade, it had 10,000 subscribers, and the congregation was growing, especially among women.

She was doing something in her own sphere that was an important part of 19th century feminism, and I don't think she's been given nearly enough credit for that.

What if, Mrs. Eddy, no man ever obtained so large a following in so short a time.

For 1900 years since the dawn of Christianity, man has been much occupied establishing faiths and formulating creeds for woman to follow.

When woman does write her creed, it will be one of right actions, not theological theories.

Susan B Anthony.

Through Christian Science, women were able to become healers.

They were able to therefore achieve, a position of some authority, of some power.

They were able to make a living, they were able to be useful, and they were able to take control of their own lives.

250 of Mary Baker Eddy's former students were called practitioners and considered their practice of spiritual healing to be every bit as valid as the medical doctors.

You have to remember that at the time, our knowledge of medicine was far more limited than anything we have today.

And you also have to remember that, there was great uncertainty even as to who should administer the medicine.

There were herbal schools of medicine that were in some states, more powerful than a than, more traditional, doctors and medical practices.

There were things happening in hospitals that, hospitals today would just as soon forget at that time.

I mean, very often people thought of the hospital as a place we went to die.

And so when somebody comes up with something that seems to us today to be an unscientific approach to solving medical problems at the time, in the late 1870s, 1880s, when Christian Science takes off, it was probably about as good a sounding theory as, as, as that propounded by almost anybody else.

And there are documented cases where, where it seems to have worked.

Mary Baker Eddy's religion was now a national phenomenon, and George Glover Jr didn't know what to make of it all.

Mary's son had settled in South Dakota, where he had become a miner and prospector with a family of his own.

Although mother and son may have felt a certain affection for each other, they now had almost nothing in common.

They kept up a polite correspondence and occasionally she would send him money.

Sometimes he would come east for a visit.

It was at best a long distance relationship.

You are not what I had hoped to find you and I am wholly changed.

When I retire from business and into private life, then I can receive you if you are reformed but not otherwise.

I say this to you, not to anyone else.

I would not injure you any more than myself.

So at the age of 67, Mary Baker Eddy decided to adopt a son more to her liking.

His name was Ebenezer J.

Foster, a homeopathic physician who had come to Boston to study Christian Science.

On November 5th, 1888, he became officially Ebenezer Foster Eddy.

He was, by the way, 41 years old.

That same year, 1888, Mary Baker Eddy was burned in effigy on the town green in Lyman, New Hampshire.

She was now a conspicuous enough figure to be the subject of ridicule and attack.

She had become a household word.

She struggled out of Lynn.

Now she's established herself in Boston.

Things are going so well for her.

Students are crowding into her her college.

She doesn't know how to deal with the correspondence.

The movement is booming.

She has her journal going, what she strove for, through those long and difficult, difficult years, everything has come to fruition.

And you think that she would sit back in a Boston mansion and kind of enjoy it.

But that's not what she does.

In 1889, Mary Baker Eddy, at the height of her power, disorganized her church, closed her college and came home to New Hampshire.

Is she writing her history or completing her works on the scriptures?

She is doing neither, but is taking a vacation her first in 25 years.

She is taking no direction of her own or others, but her desire is that God may permit her to continue to live apart from the world, free from the turmoil in which her days have been passed for more than a quarter century.

She rented this house at 62 State Street in Concord.

She stopped dyeing her hair, she lost weight, and she started a new edition of Science and Health.

Her plan was to concentrate on her work without interruption.

But the interruption came in the form of many horses and carriages clattering along State Street outside her home, so she ended up here on the outskirts of Concord, in a farmhouse she called Pleasant View.

The view was in fact pleasant.

It looked out towards her birthplace in Bow.

The years at Pleasant View would be some of the most satisfying and productive of Mary Baker Eddy's life.

Away from the pressures of Boston, she went about the business of reorganizing her church.

Her goal was to create a lasting institution.

She formed the Mother Church, the First Church of Christ Scientist, which was built in Boston and dedicated in 1895.

She eliminated all pastors and clergy and replaced them with readers of the Bible and her book Science and Health.

She created board of directors to run her organization.

She wrote up a collection of bylaws to guide the religion, and Christian Science Services began overseas in England and Germany.

By the turn of the century, Mary Baker Eddy had become an international phenomenon.

I am alone in the world, more alone than a solitary star, although it is duly estimated by business characters and learned scholars that I lead and am obeyed by 300,000 people at this date, the most distinguished newspapers asked me to write on the most important subjects lords and ladies, earls, princes and marquees from abroad write to me in the most complimentary manner.

Our senators and members of Congress call on me for counsel.

But what of all this?

I am not made the least proud by it or particle happier for it.

I am working for a higher purpose.

In Concord Mary Baker Eddy attained an almost regal status.

My maternal grandfather, Benjamin C White of Concord, owned the White Farm on Clinton Street, and the land abutted Mrs. Eddy's Pleasant View property, which fronted on Pleasant Street.

So from time to time, also because he was a director of the National State Capital Bank, he would go to see Mrs. Eddy to transact some matter of banking business, or something to do with their abutting lands, and my grandparents told me when I was a teenager that one time he went over around the turn of the century to see her and as usual, was shown into a large room.

She was seated behind a desk, and the desk was catty, cornered across one corner.

So he came in.

She extended her hand and then he was sit down.

And they began to talk.

They transacted their business.

He stood up to take his leave, and she said, in her very deliberate tone of voice, I've been very glad to see you, Mr. White, and I want you to know that you're one of the few men in my life who has ever had me in a corner, and this was astonishing.

My grandfather told me that he went off and he couldn't help but chuckle as soon as he got out of the door of that large room.

I remember hearing him say, a very bright woman and no shrinking violet.

Each day she would take a drive out in her coach, and she even attended the Concord State Fair.

Her unannounced arrival on the afternoon of September 6th, 1900, created a sensation.

The races on the track were immediately suspended.

The band struck up a patriotic air and under the escort of mounted police, with patrolmen on either side, her Victoria, drawn by a pair of handsome days, passed before the grandstand, which was filled with 5000 people and surrounded by three times that number.

There was considerable clapping, cheering and waving of handkerchiefs.

She remained there half an hour, watched a horse race, and observed a daredevil perform a spectacular 80ft dive.

As the diver, in devil's costume, plunged through a flaming hoop into a six foot pool of water.

She was heard to exclaim, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.

Most of Concord saw Mary Baker Eddy simply as a distinguished local citizen who was, among other things, a financial asset to the city.

The JC Derby Company sold souvenirs.

Cuff buttons, rings, brooches, watches, pendants, all carrying Christian Science emblems.

Prices ranged from $2.50 to over $300.

Besides jewelry, there were souvenir photos, souvenir china, and souvenir spoons.

On each of these beautiful spoons is a motto that every person on earth needs to hold in thought by the request that Christian Scientists shall not ask to be informed what this motto is, but each scientist shall purchase at least one spoon, and those who can afford it, one dozen spoons that their families may read this motto at every meal, and their guests be made partakers of its simple truth.

The motto was, not matter but mind satisfieth.

She certainly understood how religion was a commodity in the 19th century.

She maybe didn't like that, but she had to accept it.

It was a fact.

It was a fact.

And coming out of nowhere, you have to merchandise.

You have to do that.

I don't see how else you can start a religion in the late 19th century.

We're not talking about, you know, 12th century Florence here.

Besides the commercial aspects of her residents, Mary Baker Eddy was known as a generous benefactor to New Hampshire charities.

She bought hundreds of shoes for deserving children.

She contributed to area churches, local civic organizations.

She even helped pave the streets of Concord.

Mrs. Eddy noticed that Concord had not paved its principal streets downtown, and as a carriage rider at least, and as a matter of the public welfare, she felt that it should be paved and that the city could afford it.

So she began to write letters to the Concord Monitor, and finally, in 1899, she petitioned the mayor to get going on the street pavement, because up to then it was a well rowed, dirt street.

A sprinkler waddled back and forth, horse drawn up and down Main Street, sprinkling the street to keep the dust down, as was the case in many communities.

But obviously it needed paving with the amount of traffic and the streetcars running down the middle and the like.

So with Mrs. Eddy's urging and a donation she made, Main Street was duly paved not long after 1899.

On various occasions, Mary Baker Eddy would invite the faithful to come up from Boston to see her at Pleasant View.

In 1903 10,000 members of her church came to see the discoverer and founder of Christian Science.

Trust in the Lord and do good.

So shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.

Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.

Commit thy way unto the Lord.

Trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass, and he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday.

She spoke from the balcony of her home, and those gathered joined together in a hymn.

How long do you think it will be before it is claimed that Mrs. Eddy is a redeemer, a Christ and Christ equal?

Already her army of disciples speak of her reverently as our mother.

How long will it be before they place her on the steps of the throne, and beside the Virgin, and later a step higher?

Mark Twain enjoyed ridiculing Eddy.

He had written a number of stinging essays, which he published in a book called Christian Science, but even Twain would admit, she is the most daring and masculine and masterful woman that has appeared on the earth in centuries.

Mary Baker Eddy had little to fear from the sarcastic pen of Mark Twain.

The real threat was much closer to home.

With power came tremendous conflict, tremendous anguish that, she didn't appreciate the kinds of press coverage that she was being given.

That she fought the attacks on her, but it ravaged her life.

William E. Chandler, former New Hampshire senator and owner of the Concord Monitor, thought Mary Baker Eddy an unmitigated fraud.

He wasn't alone.

Joseph Pulitzer's New York world had been trying for months to prove that Mary Baker Eddy was either dead or dying.

She had at times been ill. She suffered from kidney stones, sometimes so severe that a hypodermic of morphine was all that would quiet the pain.

The headlines in the New York world were, to say the least, sensational.

Mrs. Eddy looked more dead than alive.

She was a skeleton, her hollow cheeks thick with red paint, and the flesh less hairless bones above the sunken eyes pencil the jet black.

The features were thick with powder.

Above them was a big white wig.

The New York world was convinced that a dying Mary Baker Eddy was a prisoner in her own home, so they hired William Chandler to act as counsel for the heirs of Mary Baker Eddy.

The heirs, of course, were her son, George Glover and her adopted son, Ebenezer Foster Eddy.

These two joined forces to rescue Mary Baker Eddy from her own church, as well as to take control of a personal fortune estimated in the millions.

Newspaper reporters from all over the country descended on Concord, New Hampshire.

It was the muckraking story of the decade.

At issue was Mary Baker Eddy's sanity.

She was now 86 years old.

The New Hampshire Superior Court appointed a team of alienist.

Today we know them as psychiatrists to examine the case.

The defense, meanwhile, had hired one doctor, Allan McClain Hamilton, to examine Mary Baker Eddy in person.

When I entered her house, I was ushered very formally into her parlor, which was furnished in odious taste with onyx top tables and gilded furniture.

In one part of the room was a book of testimonials, while a picture of the owner was before me.

And if I remember rightly, one of Christ as well.

I found Mrs. Eddy seated at a small table, on which were a vase of flowers and a book or two.

She was an erect little old person, dressed in black silk.

At her throat was a small diamond coronet brooch.

The only jewelry of any kind.

Her white hair was worn in the style made familiar by her pictures.

Her face was thin, as was her body, and she appeared to be slightly deaf.

But when I spoke slowly and very distinctly, she had no difficulty in hearing.

She wore no glasses during my visit, although I understood she required them at other times for reading.

I was immediately impressed with the extraordinary intelligence shown in her eyes.

In aged persons these are likely to appear dimmed and lacking in expression with Mrs. Eddy however, they were dark and at times almost luminous.

It had been alleged in court that she believed in what was called malicious animal magnetism, and that this was, of course, an insane delusion.

When this was gone into, I found that all she meant was that when a person really hated or even disliked another, it was possible by keeping up a hostile attitude to do some harm to the victim, either passively or actively, by word or deed.

So there was nothing very extraordinary about all this.

When all the experts had finished their examinations, the lawsuit fell apart.

William Chandler himself was even heard to exclaim that she was smarter than a steel trap.

A settlement was drawn up, giving $245,000 to Glover and $45,000 to foster Eddy in return for an agreement not to contest her will.

A will that would leave everything else to her church.

On January 26th, 1908, Mary Baker Eddy left New Hampshire on a special train for Boston.

An extra engine preceded them to make sure the tracks were clear.

The train itself, by a special arrangement worked out with railroad officials, was deflected outside of Boston to Chestnut Hill.

When she saw the mansion that was to be her new home, Mary Baker Eddy wept.

I came here for quiet and not to build up a cause.

I only desire now to be friendly with all denominations, religious, and to drop quietly out of the arena of strife.

I was sorry to disappoint the good people in Concord, but I hope now only to have my giving and goodwill expressed in a home life, and to give up a public life as fast as possible.

Here in 1908, she would ask her church to start a daily newspaper.

It would be called the Christian Science Monitor.

Her mandate was to create a newspaper that would injure no man but bless all mankind.

In many ways, it was Mary Baker Eddy's response to Joseph Pulitzer's sensational attacks from the year before.

It is an interesting footnote that the Christian Science Monitor has, over the years, won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism five times.

On December 3rd, 1910, Mary Baker Eddy died of natural causes, probably pneumonia.

She was 89 years old.

Two days before her death, she wrote her last words.

God is my life.

Mary Baker Eddy never came back home to New Hampshire.

She was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Her life as she saw it, was a constant sacrifice to her mission, a radical mission of spiritual healing in a scientific age.

It was not her life that she wanted examined by the world, but her books, her teaching, and her church.

What I am remains to be proved by the good I do.