● ● ● George Sullivan Baker in his notebook when he was working with the inmates of the Connecticut State Prison:
Here, my own heart is my only associate, my only companion. . . . I have abandon’d reading novels and am reading Shakespeare! Not as good as Waverly or Bulwer, the moralist would say, but it takes me, so I am taken with it! For a knowledge of human nature, (the great study of my life) I think him preferable to any author. He shows it in all its naked deformity, as I daily see it practic’d with scarcely one redeeming quality!67
The Puritan has always been trained to see not only a naked deformity in others but bottomless sinfulness in himself. A passage in a letter to Augusta from a school friend at Meredith Bridge illustrates this attitude:
Dear A—, would that I could give you advice with regard to the religious state of your mind. But I feel that I wander far, very far from the path of duty, therefore I cannot say as much as I would to others. O, the sinfulness of my own heart! When I look within, and see the vileness existing there, and how exceedingly prone I am to wander from the Source of all good, I can but wonder at the forbearance and long-suffering of God towards me. Pray for me dearest Augusta, and be assured you are remembered by me.68
Impossible though it is to estimate the degree of sincerity in this schoolgirl effusion, it accurately reflects the religious atmosphere of the ● ● ●
67 George Sullivan Baker, entries for September and October 1836, journal, 1919.001.0040, LMC.
↑68 Mary Bean to Augusta Holmes Swasey, 6 April 1839, L02680, MBEL. This is one of three letters from “Mary” to Augusta, dated respectively January 6, 1839, April 6, 1839, and April 9, 1840, from Meredith Bridge, NH. They have always been assumed to be from Mary Baker and are quoted from extensively by Bates-Dittemore. [Ernest Sutherland Bates and John V. Dittemore, Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932).] On the basis of internal evidence and the refusal of a handwriting expert to make a positive identification of the copybook hand as being Mary Baker’s, though somewhat resembling hers, early [printings of the first edition] of the present book expressed strong doubts of this traditional attribution. New evidence has subsequently come to light which establishes conclusively that the letters were written to Augusta by her friend Mary Bean of Meredith Bridge. This fact requires a modification of several conclusions that have been drawn by Bates-Dittemore and others from the supposed authorship of the letters (see p. 72, note 80).
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