● ● ● believed in foreordination, and I told him I would not be saved and my brothers and sisters have no chance. I was made sick by it, because I could not believe in it, and I stood out and would not join the church, and the old man gave in and took me in.”62
The bare statement tells us little of the urgent spiritual and intellectual wrestlings involved. Foreordination may seem no more than an academic question now, but for a Congregationalist in 1838 it went right to the heart of man’s relation to God. The Methodists and most of the Baptists had dropped or softened this doctrine, that God predestines all but a chosen few to damnation, substituting for it a looser concept which made hell the punishment for particular sins committed by the individual of his own free will. But if they thereby lost a little of the ferocity of Calvin’s God, they also lost the fierce logic of his theology.63
The struggle between Mary and her pastor must have been severe, given the character of the two, but it ended with the young girl’s being admitted to membership—“and my protest along with me,” as she later wrote. In her published account of the experience she tells of one other incident which occurred at the time she was being examined for membership:
The minister then wished me to tell him when I had experienced a change of heart; but tearfully I had to respond that I could not designate any precise time. Nevertheless he persisted in the assertion that I had been truly regenerated, and asked me to say how I felt when the new light dawned within me. I replied that I could only answer him in the words of the Psalmist: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”64
62 Henry Robinson, “Memorandum of Interview with Mrs. Doctor Eddy,” 1903, 1925.032.0002, p. 1, LMC.
63 This phrase [“the ferocity of Calvin’s God”] may be objectionable in so far as Calvin’s God was the God of Augustine and of other thinkers in the Augustinian tradition—and because New England Puritanism departed in important respects from pure Calvinism. Nevertheless the peculiar logical rigor of Calvinism did set it off from other developments of Augustinian theology, and this characteristic remained an essential feature of Edwardsian and post-Edwardsian thought.
64 Mary Baker Eddy, Retrospection and Introspection (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1920), pp. 14–15. It is possible that this incident belongs to a different experience. If she gave a “confession of faith” at a “protracted meeting” in a revival when she was twelve (see p. 35, note 80), she may very well have been questioned at that time at the “anxious seat.” The two experiences may have merged in her memory, which would account for the confusion about whether she was twelve or seventeen at the time. She adds in her account that many of the church members wept at her answer, and congregational weeping was a very common occurrence in revival meetings roused to a high emotional pitch by the questioning of those at the anxious seat. See Calvin Colton, History and Character of American Revivals of Religion (London: Frederick Westley, and A. H. Davis, 1832), p. 91ff.; and Orville Dewey, Letters of an English Traveller to His Friend in England, on the “Revivals of Religion,” in America (Boston: Bowles and Dearborn, 1828), p. 109.