● ● ● was indeed “sitting up in the next room.” She had got up, dressed, and walked in unaided. The clergyman, calling back, had been met by her at the door, and was so startled that for a moment he thought he was seeing an apparition.15
At this late date it is impossible to know the exact nature of the injuries from which Mrs. Patterson recovered, but her recovery seemed to those about her a miracle. Christian Scientists, disbelieving in the miraculous in the ordinary sense of the word, have held that whatever happened on that occasion was natural—the natural working of God’s law. The miracle lay primarily in what happened to her thinking. Other people had had remarkable recoveries through prayer, but other people did not find in the experience something on which to found a new church.
At some point during that Sunday afternoon when she lay helpless in bed, Mrs. Patterson had asked to be given her Bible and to be left alone. Turning to one of the healings of Jesus, she began to read. In later years she found it difficult to remember the exact passage,16 but as she read it the words of Jesus flooded into her thought, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” and quite suddenly she was filled with the conviction that her life was in God—that God was the only Life, the only i am.17 At that moment she was healed.
Writing of the incident in later years she declared, “That short experience included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence.”18 It was as simple as that. In a moment ● ● ●
15 Henry Robinson, “Memorandum of Interview with Mrs. Doctor Eddy,” 1903, 1925.032.0002, pp. 2–3, LMC.
↑16 Mary Baker Eddy, manuscript, n.d., A11029, p. 4, MBEL: “The shadows of the dark valley gathered around me but I could barely see enough to trace a scriptural passage which I regret to say I cannot recall but it changed the scene.” In several early editions of Science and Health she wrote of turning to Mark 3 but in her article “One Cause and Effect” she tells of opening up to Matthew 9:2, and this is the passage which stands as her final recollection of the incident. Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896 (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1924), p. 24.
↑17 Interview with Lilian Whiting, “Boston Life,” Cleveland Leader and Morning Herald, 5 July 1885, p. 10. Reprinted in The Christian Science Journal, August 1885, pp. 86–88.
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