Baker was expressing here the common faith of the Enlightenment; intellectual young America grew up in the conviction that truth must be reasonable and that God operates with perfect and unvarying consistency through universal laws. But the curious fact was that most people did not really believe this when it came to Christianity. They might reject the idea of an inscrutable Providence when they were dealing with everyday affairs, but in effect they believed that God had set aside His own laws in the case of the Christian revelation. Something more than unaided reason was necessary to resolve this anomaly.

Mary Baker never appears to have shared her brother’s faith that reason alone was a sufficient guide to truth.⁸⁶ That immediate perception of truth which in theology is termed revelation and in philosophy intuition must furnish the starting point for reason; logic, after all, was a process, not a position. She could find this implied in one of her favorite textbooks, Whately’s Elements of Logic, for the author’s religious orthodoxy saved him from Albert Baker’s extreme espousal of eighteenth-century rationalism. But Whately, like most of the authors whom Mary studied in school, asserted that reason confirmed the Christian revelation, without ever really coming to grips with the problem.⁸⁷

Another of the books that influenced Mary in her early years was Watts on the Mind, or, to give it its proper title, The Improvement of the Mind by Isaac Watts, D.D.⁸⁸ “Deeply possess your mind,” wrote that worthy Lockeian, “with the vast importance of a good judgment, and the rich and inestimable advantage of right reasoning.” What gave an attractive élan to his otherwise grave disquisition was his sense of new possibilities ahead for the rational mind: