What have I done for him who died
To save my guilty soul . . . ?75
The inherited guilt of the human race was never to be forgotten.
There is no record of what Mary taught her Sunday School class at the Congregational Church, including the little girl who thought that “with her curls she was just lovely.”76 A little more is known about her instruction of Lyman Durgin, the lonely, teen-age country lad who lived with the Bakers and helped with the chores. Distressed over his illiteracy and his lack of religious training, she undertook to teach him to read the New Testament, and her patience and interest won his ardent devotion. To the end of his life he cherished the New Testament she gave him. After she had married and moved away from Sanbornton, Martha wrote her: “Lyman loves you dearly, and wishes me to say so for him.”77
From this it is reasonable to assume that, whatever she taught him, she did not leave Lyman feeling that he was a miserable sinner, a worm in God’s sight. It was, after all, the story of Christ’s redemption rather than of Adam’s fall that she had used in teaching him to read.
In the year the Bakers moved to Sanbornton, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was founded by Mary Lyon in Massachusetts, a defiant assertion that women had minds. The following year four girls were admitted to Oberlin College in Ohio as candidates for the Bachelor of Arts degree. But to most Americans of that time the higher education of women would have seemed as unthinkable as it was unnecessary.78
76 Clifford P. Smith, Historical Sketches from the Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1941), p. 42.
↑78 The craving for education among many girls of limited means is illustrated by the Lowell mill girls, of whom Lucy Larcom wrote in A New England Girlhood:
Many of them were supporting themselves at schools like Bradford Academy or Ipswich Seminary half the year, by working in the mills the other half. Mount Holyoke Seminary broke upon the thoughts of many of them as a vision of hope . . . and Mary Lyon’s name was honored nowhere more than among the Lowell mill-girls. Meanwhile they were improving themselves and preparing for their future in every possible way, by purchasing and reading standard books, by attending lectures and evening classes of their own getting up, and by meeting each other for reading and conversation.
[Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), p. 223.]
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