● ● ●  time and place, with its morbid excitement of the sense of guilt. This is not an attitude to be found in any of Mary Baker’s own letters, but her mature writings furnish evidence that early familiarity with such states of thought sharpened her insight into the psychology of religious crisis. Fifty-four years later she would write:

Again, in her copy of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis Mrs. Eddy marked the sentence: “The more spiritual a man desires to be, the more bitter does this present life become to him; because he sees more clearly and perceives more sensibly the defects of human corruption.” In comment on this intensely realistic judgment, she laconically wrote one word: “Spirituality.”⁷⁰

Sin, in biblical terms, brought death, and human corruption involved not only perverted will but inevitable death. At every turn one was confronted with mortality. A heaven beyond the grave, where all the saved would meet again, was the traditional consolation of religion; but it was coupled inevitably with the threat of hell, and little assurance that all one’s family and friends would go to the more blessed place. The promise of heaven and the threat of hell seemed as inexorably yoked as Abigail and Mark Baker. Although Mary might opt for her mother’s God of love rather than her father’s God of wrath, human life appeared to justify and even necessitate both views.

It has often been wondered whether she was acquainted with the theology of the Shakers who lived in the nearby village of Canterbury and who were familiar figures in Sanbornton as they peddled the  ● ● ●