Here at last was recognition from the world beyond Lynn, the world where preoccupied hosts fought huge, ambiguous, shadowy battles. The time for thinkers had come, Science and Health announced.¹⁸¹ Well, let the thinkers come; this was the merest beginning. Alcott’s seraphic ideals would dissolve into mist before the onslaught of events in the coming century, but Science and Health proclaimed a vision that measured itself against disaster, a faith that undertook to stand or fall by its grasp of the concrete—by its healing of the irremediable, its deliverance from the unendurable. One might almost say it invited the twentieth century.