● ● ● at a third institution known confusingly as the Woodman Sanbornton Academy.81 Dyer H. Sanborn, author of a popular grammar of the day, was principal of this latter institution but later transferred to Sanbornton Academy. For a time Martha Baker was his assistant and then advanced to being “preceptress.”82
One of Mary’s school friends, Julia Sargent, who afterwards served as a bridesmaid at her wedding, stated in later life that Sanborn would often speak of “the high grade of scholarship attained by Mary Baker and the brilliant future in store for her.”83 While this reminiscence may be colored by what transpired later, it seems evident that, however irregular her schooling may have been, Mary stood out from the other girls in the village as a lively thinker with a knack for learning.
It has been pointed out already that the secular education she received came straight out of the Age of Reason—or that part of the Age of Reason which stayed on good terms with Christian piety. She was taught that truth must submit to the test of reason, that revelation and reason must be reconciled, that the universe was run on a system of invariable and ascertainable laws, and that science was the great glory of modern man. Some lines in her notebook asked:
Does gravitation change its given law
The rivers from the rocks their waters draw?
Do thorns yield grapes the barren thistle figs
81 The catalogues for the Woodman Sanbornton Academy for certain crucial years are missing. In any case their evidence might not be conclusive, for some students attended for special instruction without being listed. The researches of Jewel Spangler Smaus have brought to light the fact that Sarah Bodwell, who taught the district school in the summer of 1836 when Mary Baker attended it, also taught later at the Woodman Sanbornton Academy, and it is in this latter capacity that Mrs. Eddy seems to have referred to Miss Bodwell as her teacher.
↑82 The New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette on September 16 and December 2, 1841, made mention of Martha as an especially able preceptress at the academy.
↑83 Article by Julia Sargent’s daughter in Lake County Advocate. [Publisher’s note: The original source has not been located. This article was reprinted as “Justice to Mrs. Eddy,” in the Concord Patriot, 19 February 1907, and the Christian Science Sentinel, 2 March 1907, p. 474]. Mrs. Eddy’s sister-in-law, Martha Rand Baker, added that whenever Sanborn left the room for a few minutes he would ask Mary Baker to take charge of the class during his absence. Recorded in Ray H. Perkins, c. February 1932, Subject File, Ray H. Perkins, p. 3, MBEL.
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