The Religio-Medical Masquerade: A Complete Exposure of Christian Science. Frederick William Peabody

well of English undefiled as it appears in her various immortal publications. Her private correspondence, it must be admitted, however, does not exhibit any considerable degree of excellence in the matter of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization; but an inspired person may be excused for a little carelessness in the use of words.

      Mrs. Eddy accounts for her amazing deficiency of education and entire lack of culture by an ingenious fairy tale. “After my discovery of Christian Science,” she says, “most of the knowledge I had gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined, that grammar was eclipsed.” If any scraps of knowledge were ever possessed by this peculiar creature, vanished, dreamlike or otherwise, they surely did; and without quite assenting to the illumination of learning hypothesis, I find no ground for dissenting from the view that, at some time or other, grammar underwent total eclipse.

      The first fifty years of her life were lived in great poverty and complete obscurity. Before her alleged discovery of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy at one time eked out a precarious existence in and about Boston as a Spiritualist medium, giving public seances for money. Sweet converse with the illustrious dead could be had of Mrs. Eddy at any time by any one who had the price. Her interest in the dead seems to have been strictly confined to the illustrious departed.

      In December, 1843, when twenty-two years of age, she married George W. Glover, a young bricklayer by trade, and with him, shortly after the marriage, went to Wilmington, North Carolina, where wages were somewhat higher than in New Hampshire. There Glover, three months after the marriage and six months before the birth of her only child, died of yellow fever. He was buried in Wilmington, but the spot is, to this day, unknown even to his widow.

      Mrs. Eddy has for many years been exceeding rich in this world’s goods. In her personal conversation, and in her published works, she has spoken in terms of the highest praise of this her first husband, “whose tender devotion to his young wife was remarked,” she says, “by all observers.” He was the father of her only child, yet all that is mortal of him has for nearly seventy years lain with the unclaimed, forgotten and abandoned dead at Wilmington, North Carolina.

      Some years ago, friends of Mrs. Eddy at Wilmington erected a stone to the memory of Mr. Glover over a grave supposed to be his; but a descendant of the person really buried there ruthlessly tore the stone from the place he believed it to desecrate, and poor Glover’s final resting place remains unknown and unnoticed.

      After reaching the dignity of leader of a great religious movement, Mrs. Eddy elevated the poor bricklayer husband to the proud position of Colonel of Volunteers, and she thus glorified him for approximately forty years. Sad to relate, however, he is “Colonel” no longer. In the recent litigation, instituted by Mrs. Eddy’s sons, one of the witnesses I was examining produced in evidence a letter from Mrs. Eddy in which she said, “I called my late husband” (she should have said late first husband, as a second, a third and perhaps a fourth had then intervened), “I called my late husband Colonel, because he was connected with the militia, and I had got mixed on his rank.” She might just as well have called him General for the same reason.

      As a matter of fact, if Glover ever belonged to the militia, he never arose beyond the dignity of high private and having been a man of simple life and honest purpose would, no doubt, if he could know of it, be a little uncomfortable in his narrow bed at the undreamed military distinction thrust upon him by his famous widow; but it would sadden him a little to know that, after having elevated him to the exalted rank of Colonel, she should in later years have reduced him to the less imposing position of Major, by which military title he now is distinguished in Mrs. Eddy’s conversation.

      As a second matrimonial venture, Mrs. Eddy in 1853 allied herself with one Daniel Patterson, who in her autobiographical sketches has been completely ignored, although he shared twenty years of connubial life with her. He does not seem to have left behind him the sweet aroma of the more chivalrous Glover, who survived the marriage only three months. Patterson was an itinerant dentist of little or no practice, and life with him does not appear to have been a pathway strewn with flowers.

      It profits not to dwell upon the Patterson episode. When he was not pursuing the elusive dollar that perpetually fled away, he appears to have been chasing the festive bullfrog whose dismal croak jarred upon his wife’s sensitive nerves. Suffice it to say that Daniel and Mary endured one another, with what serenity and fortitude they might, for twenty long, weary years, when, in 1873, a divorce was granted her for his desertion. Mrs. Eddy says the divorce was granted for a different cause, but the record contradicts her. The record always contradicts her. She has declared herself to be opposed to divorce for any but the single Biblical cause; but the record of the Superior Court at Salem shows her to have obtained a divorce from Patterson for desertion seven years after the time God, as she says, had revealed to her the final religion.

      Mrs. Eddy does not believe in marriage​—​for others. She was inspired of God to teach that it is not good​—​for others​—​to marry and she has inspired into the minds of her faithful followers the belief that marriage is of the earth very earthy indeed, and that life in the realm of spirit is impossible to those in the holy estate of matrimony. But so far as she herself was concerned, it cannot be denied that she seems to have had a distinct fancy for marriage, and I may go so far as to say something approaching fondness for variety in the marriage state.

      In any event, after the termination by operation of law of the second marriage, that is to say on January 1, 1877, Mrs. Eddy made another and third venture into marriage and conferred upon one Gilbert Asa Eddy the proud and happy distinction of successor to the deceased Glover and the departed Patterson. The record of this marriage (another record, be it noted) discloses the amusing fact that Mrs. Eddy’s age was given as forty years, the marriage having been celebrated fifty-six years from the date of her birth; so that instead of blossoming and blooming in garlands gay for a fair, young, winsome thing of forty summers, the roads were decked with garlands somewhat somber for the third glad nuptials of the blushing bride of fifty-six. But what is a little matter of sixteen years in the life of a person who is superior to time and of whose life here in the flesh there shall be no end?

      After years of toil and trouble, of conflict and disharmony, of stress and strain, in which some of Mrs. Eddy’s early friends strongly sympathized with Mr. Eddy, who complained that neither he nor God Almighty could please his exacting spouse, this husband, too, was gathered to his fathers and Mrs. Eddy was for a third time a widow.

      In her efforts to impose upon the credulity of simple-minded people, Mrs. Eddy has not hesitated to claim the power to triumph over death, and to have actually restored the dead to life. To her intimates she has claimed to have thus twice restored to life this lamented third husband, Asa G. Eddy.

      If Mrs. Eddy has, or had, this power, the mind of the incredulous will wonder why the poor man is now dead, why his potent helpmate did not restore him to life the third time he died. Presumably, Mrs. Eddy reasoned with herself that it was really expecting too much of a woman, even a woman Messiah, that she should recall from death the third husband three times, and as husbands had become, to some extent, a matter of habit with her, it is not, perhaps, remarkable that she consented finally to part with this one after such unmistakable evidence of his persistent desire to be separated from her even by death.

      Mrs. Eddy has in her book, “Miscellaneous Writings,” modestly given us this husband’s estimate of her in these words: “Perhaps the following words of her husband, the late Dr. Asa G. Eddy, afford the most concise, yet complete, summary of the matter, ‘Mrs. Eddy’s works are the outgrowth of her life. I never knew so unselfish an individual.’ ” So, perhaps, she let Eddy go, finally, out of pure unselfishness. Sweet as was his companionship, she could not keep him by her side when repeatedly assured of his unalterable wish to go hence.

      The first husband, Glover, survived the marriage but a few months; the second husband, Patterson, unappreciative wretch that he was, ran away, and, as Mrs. Eddy tells us, found consolation in the affection of the “wealthy lady” who ran away with him (although it must be said that no corroboration whatever of the “wealthy lady” feature of Mrs. Eddy’s story exists); and the third husband, Eddy, after having been twice recaptured, finally escaped by death’s