● ● ● leave by the city of Lynn on December 26 to withdraw the petition she had presented six months before when everything seemed to have turned against her.31
At that earlier period she had gone for temporary refuge to her Quaker friends, Thomas and Hannah Phillips, on Buffum Street. Thomas Phillips, a shoe manufacturer who had both the peaceful Quaker temperament and the Quaker flair for success, in his desire to help her was probably responsible for her petition to the city. Although they thought her ideas beyond them, both the elder Phillipses loved and admired Mrs. Patterson. To their skeptical married daughter, Susan Oliver, Thomas remarked: “Mary is a wonderful woman, Susie. You will find it out some day. I may not live to see it, but you will.” Later Susan Oliver became a Christian Scientist, and in 1907 she recalled to Sibyl Wilbur her father’s prophecy.32
The practice of silent prayer before meals at the Phillipses greatly impressed Mrs. Patterson, and it was to become the characteristic form of prayer in her own Church. She in turn gave her friends a practical illustration of the power of prayer when overnight she healed a painful felon on the finger of young Dorr Phillips, Susie’s brother.33
For even as she walked through some very deep valleys, the upper heights were springing into light. We catch a sudden glimpse of this in an incident recounted by a Mrs. James Norton of Lynn. On one summer day in 1866 Mrs. Norton took her seven-year-old son George to Lynn Beach and left him there while she hitched the horse and went for water. The child had club feet and had never walked. When she returned she was stunned to find him walking hand in hand with a stranger. The mother and the strange woman looked in each other’s eyes, then both of them wept and joined in thanks to God. The woman was of course ● ● ●
31 The Court Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, show that on February 1, 1867, David [sic] Patterson and his wife, Mary M. Patterson, brought suit against the city of Lynn for damages sustained by Mrs. Patterson through a fall on Market Street. Possibly it was Patterson who this time took the initiative. Separated from his wife and confronted with the difficulty of giving her even a modest annual sum to keep her going, he at least joined forces with her in this renewed attempt to obtain financial compensation for the accident. The suit was settled at the March Term, 1868, by an entry of “Neither Party.” Bates and Dittemore, Truth and Tradition, p. 116.
32 Wilbur, Life of Mary Baker Eddy, p. 140.
33 Wilbur, Life of Mary Baker Eddy, p. 140.