Scientists

In 1906 the Church of Christ, Scientist had 635 churches and 85,717 members. Last week the results of a new census were published; they showed that the Church of Christ, Scientist, during what has been a period of decline or passivity for many other Christian denominations, has now increased its membership to 202,098 and the number of its churches to 1,912.

Coincident with the reports of the success enjoyed by this enterprising faith, were reports of a book which has been written about its founder, Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy. The name of the book is Memoirs of Mary Baker Eddy; its author was Adam H. Dickey, who during the closing years of Mrs. Eddy's life, had been her private secretary.

In Mr. Dickey's book there are astonishing stories about Mrs. Eddy. He explains how she was "fond of dress," how she manicured her nails every morning, how her house, in the sedate Boston suburb of Chestnut Hill, was fitted with an elaborate system of bells by which her "watchers" could be summoned. Mr. Dickey relates how Mrs. Eddy requested her disciples to care for the weather. "During some severe New England winters our leader would instruct her workers they must put a stop to the snow which she regarded as a manifestation of error. . . ."

He tells the extraordinary tale of the resurrection of Mrs. Eddy's footman and disciple, Calvin Frye. Frye was found one evening, "unconscious, speechless, eyes closed, apparently breathless, with no pulse and no indication of life. . . ." Frye was placed in a rocking chair. Mrs. Eddy stood over him, in the stuffy room, and said loudly: "Calvin, this cause needs you. Mother needs you and you must not leave. . . ." Frye at this supplication, wriggled and whispered: "I don't want to stay, I want to go." The next morning Frye was about his "mother's" business in the household.

Mary Baker Eddy, as she lingered on after 80, became more and more conscious of the malignance of her "enemies," against whom her disciples kept single watch around her bed, when she felt pain in the night. These enemies were the "mortal minds" most energetic in attacking her beliefs; they hung like a pack of phantoms around her neat house in Chestnut Hill and she could hear their painful voices screaming in the dark. Once she went for a drive with Mr. Dickey and said this to him on their return:

"The enemy have made a law that it hurts me to go on these drives. . . . I do not take these drives for recreation but because I want to establish dominion over mortal minds antagonistic to belief." In the evenings, after dinner, Mrs. Eddy would sit in the window of her house, staring out at the people who went by. There was tremendous enchantment for her in the tragic and anonymous parade that passes forever in front of all the windows in the world.

There came at last the night when she summoned Mr. Dickey to a lonely council ". . . and asked, in a deep earnest voice, 'Mr. Dickey, I want you to promise me something, will you?'

"I said, 'Yes, Mother, I certainly will.'

"'If I should ever leave here . . . will you promise me that you will write a history of what has transpired in your experience with me?'

"I answered, 'Yes, Mother, I will. . . . I swear before God. . . .' "

Mr. Dickey waited, for reasons of church policy, seventeen years after Mrs. Eddy's death, at the hands of her "enemies" in 1910, to keep his promise. He, like his leader, died before he had finished his work, so his wife finished the book for him and saw it through the press in 1927. Five hundred copies were printed. When Clifford P. Smith, chairman of the Church committee on publication, requested Mrs. Dickey to suppress the book, she did so, even recalling the copies which she had sent to Mr. Dickey's former pupils. Two copies recently arrived in the rare book department of the Congressional Library in Washington. When their presence became known, newsgatherers noted their contents and asked Mr. Smith whether these were reliable or false. Mr. Smith said that the incidents reported in the book had occurred as described; but that the work as a whole presented a "distorted picture."