The nineteenth century in America produced two extraordinary women —world characters and time conquerors — Frances E. Willard and Mary Baker Eddy. Frances E. Willard, the apostle of temperance, stands in shining white marble among the soldiers, inventors, discoverers, and statesmen in Statuary Hall, the American Pantheon in the capitol at Washington. Strangely significant is that single female figure, with uplifted shining brow, symbol of purity and peace, among the stalwart figures of the continent's foremost fighting men.
Not less but more significant is the position achieved, in her own lifetime, by Mary Baker Eddy, for she, the Founder of one of the world's great religions, has proven herself to be the greatest woman alive and one of the greatest that ever lived. The mother of the Christian Science church seems certain, surviving the wrath and wrack of time as the slow centuries recede, to become one of the gigantic figures in the world's Pantheon.
The deepest cry of the human heart is uttered in the question, "If a man die, shall he live again?" Brief span of conscious life we have—and then the mystery of the darkness. What lies beyond? Beside this awful issue all others fade into utter insignificance. So it is that humanity elevates its religious leaders to a height no other mortal being can attain. . . . Armed conquerors and philosophers rise and fall and are forgotten; the sweetest songs of the most happy singers sink slowly but surely in the dust of crumbling ages; statesmen go into the dark with their works, and all that they were and all that they did is in time's night forgotten. Only the givers of immortal hope are themselves immortal. To each of these immortals some part of the vast eternal truth has been revealed, and to each something new. Humanity's life is a pilgrimage, onward and upward, out of darkness into light. If we could not believe that, if we believed man to be, like the beasts of the field, born but to die, incapable of progression, the race would die of swift despair. It is the hope divine that keeps us living, the lamp God lights in minds divinely selected and inspired that guides us onward.
