But hope, as the eaglet that spurneth the sod,
May soar above matter, to fasten on God.106
The English historian H. A. L. Fisher has written of the discoverer of Christian Science:
Prayer, meditation, eager and puzzled interrogation of the Bible, had claimed from childhood much of her energy, so that those who met her in later times were conscious of a certain quiet exaltation, such as may come to a woman nursing a secret spiritual advantage. . . . The great ideas of God, of immortality, of the soul, of a life penetrated by Christianity, were never far from her mind.107
The evidence of the troubled years of her widowhood bears this out. In a poem entitled “Prayer” she wrote:
What is the Christian’s balm for grief,
When pain and wo invade?
A holy calm, a sweet relief,
In prayer to God.108
A revealing phrase occurs in a poem entitled “The Mother at the loss of her Drowned Son, whose body was not recovered,” written two years before George was taken from her:
Grant me submission to the God who gave me
A well-spring of deep gladness to my heart.109
The submissiveness did not always come easily, but her later experience shows that when she rebelled the rebellion came from that ● ● ●
106 Eddy, “The Country-Seat,” in Poems, p. 64. Cf. Mary Baker Glover, “The Country Seat,” poem, A09001, p. 13, MBEL.
↑107 H. A. L. Fisher, Our New Religion: An Examination of Christian Science (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930), pp. 41, 60.
↑109 Mary M. Glover, “The Mother at the loss of her Drowned Son, whose body was not recovered,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 1 June 1848, p. 4.
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