● ● ● self-evidently ridiculous—but his attitude toward Mrs. Patterson was compounded of awe, patronizing incomprehension, and genuine liking.
His account started off:
In the beginning, yes! to that true point of departure we must come, as this now stupendous fallacy, certainly had a beginning. . . .
She. She alone, this woman, Mary Baker, Glover, Patterson, Eddy, is the author of the Christian Science idea.
But the beginning, was a very humble part, only an idea, only a verse that she happened to read, in St. Luke, that, rivetted her attention . . . .
Little indeed, did I ever imagine, that I, a dashing earnest sailor lad, would ever see, Mrs Eddy occupying her elegant mansion on Commonwealth avenue, in Boston, when only a few years previous, she was glad to be at our humble table, in that little old-fashioned home of my mother’s, at No 35 Summer st, in Lynn
One afternoon, she called me into her apartment, and after I had become seated, she said, “I want to tell you Georgie, that I have had a reavalation, or a revealing of a mystery, that will give health, instead of sickness, and eternal life, to us, instead of death.”
What power, or method? has revealed it to you, was my calm inquiry.
“Why! here it is, in St Luke only a few verses, that points out a renewed life for me . . . .”
And she read it again and again. But it possessed to me, no more importance, than any other part of the Gospel, accorded to St Luke.62
The incident probably occurred during her stay there in August. Clark’s memory as to whether the passage was actually from Luke or one of the other gospels is hardly to be relied on. Mrs. Patterson may have been referring back to her revelatory experience in February or, more likely, to some new flash of inspiration which caused her on an impulse to call the young man in. Unpromising metaphysician though he was, he may well have reminded her of her own young George, now ● ● ●
62 George E. Clark, “Christian Science. is it not? A gigantic delusion,” 1 May 1888, Subject File, George E. Clark, MBEL.