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The Years of Discovery
Emergence: 1870 | page 394

● ● ●  the point represented by the first edition of Science and Health, and in one place she wrote:

From 1866 to 1875, I myself was learning Christian Science step by step—gradually developing the wonderful germ I had discovered as an honest investigator. It was practical evolution. I was reaching by experience and demonstration the scientific proof, and scientific statement, of what I had already discovered. My later teachings and writings show the steady growth of my spiritual ideal during those pregnant years.173

Finally, on October 30, the book was published, and Mrs. Glover’s discovery for the first time stood out for the general public to see.174 Years later when Christian Science had become a worldwide movement, she spoke of the notable and noble men and women she could call as witnesses to it but added that she preferred to call attention instead to “my best witness, my babe! the new-born of Truth, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures—that will forever testify of itself, and its mother.”175

Then, as now, the book seemed a farrago of contradictions to many casual readers. Others felt like her nephew George W. Baker, who wrote on the flyleaf of a presentation copy that “not being quite up to the standard of goodness, and belief, he couldn’t make head or tail of it, and so did not derive any advantage, physically, from an honest, desperate, and futile endeavor to read it through”—though various marked passages in the book show that he was struck by some of its concrete moral teachings.176 Then there was the cousin who wrote her  ● ● ● 

173 Mary Baker Eddy, “Footprints Fadeless,” c. 1902, A10402, p. 31, MBEL.

174 By this date seven hundred dollars had been paid to the printers—five hundred on February 9, 1875, and two hundred on August 14—by Barry and (apparently) Edward Hitchings. Another student, Elisabeth Newhall, also advanced a sum to pay for the printing costs, she and Barry between them contributing a total of fifteen hundred dollars. On November 12 Spofford, probably acting as agent, paid five hundred more. The book bore the imprint “Christian Scientist Publishing Company.”

175 Mary Baker Eddy, “Footprints Fadeless,” c. 1902, A10402, p. 81, MBEL.

176 [Publisher’s note: The first edition cites the church archives. George W. Baker’s copy of Science and Health has not been located.] Mrs. Glover also sent a copy of the book to her old friend, Richard S. Rust, now corresponding secretary of the Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, and received a friendly but vague reply from him. [Richard S. Rust to Mary Baker Glover, 24 November 1875, IC131.23.003, MBEL.]