● ● ●  of vision she saw all being as spiritual, divine, immortal, wholly good. There was no room for fear or pain or death, no room for the limits that men define as matter.

It was apparently a moment of indescribable wonder and joy. Half a lifetime later, when Mrs. Eddy’s companion Laura Sargent asked her what it was that she saw at the instant of healing, Mrs. Eddy did not answer, but the far-off gaze that came into her eyes and the light that filled her face caused Mrs. Sargent to draw back in sudden awe.¹⁹ At the end of her life Mrs. Eddy’s last written words were, “God is my life,” and that perhaps sums up the whole experience.²⁰

Its immediate fruit was healing; but more than that, it was the beginning of a new life.

The next day Mrs. Patterson sent for Dr. Cushing to show him that she was healed. His alarm at her being up and about caught her unaware. Always intensely responsive to the mental atmosphere about her, she felt his fears and doubts overshadow her buoyancy, and to her dismay she sank back in sudden weakness again. But after he left, the vision returned “with such a light and such a presence,” as she put it later, that she rose feeling she could never be conquered again.²¹

At that time she was unable to explain to Cushing or to anyone else how the healing had taken place, nor did she recognize at once that she was embarked on a new course. There had been healings before in moments of faith and exaltation, as when she had cured Miss Jarvis. There is an obvious continuity between her earliest and her latest religious experiences as they are reflected in her writing, and she herself felt that in one sense she was only seeing more deeply now into the Christian faith she had had since girlhood.²² Yet in the perspective of years she identified this healing as the decisive moment of discovery  ● ● ●