Chapter II The Detached Heart Mary Baker Glover Eddy was born in the town of Bow, New Hampshire, on July 16, 1821, of good New England parentage; but never received anything but the most rudimentary education. The stories of her higher education are all fables. She pretends to have studied the classic languages, and to have been familiar with Hebrew. She has never known anything of any of these languages, and any one who has been compelled, as I have, to peruse her unedited personal correspondence knows that she has never been on any, but the most distant of speaking terms, with her mother tongue. She was graduated, she says, from Dyer H. Sanborn’s Academy at Tilton, New Hampshire; but her old schoolmates, still living, say there was no such academy, although Sanborn did teach a few children each year in a room over the district school. There was no regular course of study and were no graduations. According to these same schoolmates, Mary Baker completed her education upon reaching long division in arithmetic, and her culture, in advanced years, may be somewhat gauged by her written attribution in her seventieth year, when, if ever, one’s education may be assumed to have made some little progress, of the authorship of Irving to the Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens. “The language is decaying as fast,” she says, “as that of Irving’s Pickwick Papers.” One may be moved, by this reflection upon our poor speech, to something like commiseration for the language that has been so useful to us for centuries past. But it is consoling to reflect that the race may have access, throughout coming ages, to Mrs. Eddy’s exhaustless well of English undefiled as it appears in her various immortal publications. Her private correspondence, it must be admitted, however, does not exhibit any considerable degree of excellence in the matter of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization; but an inspired person may be excused for a little carelessness in the use of words. Mrs. Eddy accounts for her amazing deficiency of education and entire lack of culture by an ingenious fairy tale. “After my discovery of Christian Science,” she says, “most of the knowledge I had gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined, that grammar was eclipsed.” If any scraps of knowledge were ever possessed by this peculiar creature, vanished, dreamlike or otherwise, they surely did; and without quite assenting to the illumination of learning hypothesis, I find no ground for dissenting from the view that, at some time or other, grammar underwent total eclipse.