Why would a person want to share a book with the world, if doing so means losing one's high standing in society and possibly even being accused of being insane? Why would someone want to share the ideas in that book if it would mean having to accept transient accommodations and homelessness instead of a free, secure house provided by a wealthy sister? Choosing to ignore such dire predictions and to bear such unjust humiliation are just two examples of the difficult choices Mary Baker Eddy faced when she accepted her calling to be author of a book essential to the world's salvation. To friends and intellectual critics alike, the aspiration to write, publish, and distribute Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was a venture inevitably doomed to failure, and one that promised nothing but ridicule for its author.
Mrs. Eddy, though, saw this calling as a God-impelled duty, which didn't allow her the luxury of choosing between her own comfort and the demand to share the message of Truth. Loyally, lovingly—through hardship and triumph—Mrs. Eddy never wavered in her commitment to Science and Health. She continuously nurtured its maturing footsteps with the kind of mothering love that cannot be wrested away from its cherished child. As its author she listened for God's direction every step of the way. The book's title came to her in the middle of the night "when slumber had fled." See Message to The Mother Church for 1902, p. 15 In one instance she spent three days in prayerful effort, devoted to getting a single sentence of the book just right. She constantly revised its content through more than four hundred editions to bring its message out in the clearest possible way. From the book's inception to its final revision, it is impossible not to identify in Mrs. Eddy's authorship of Science and Health the most heroic persistence and consecrated care.
Mrs. Eddy labored just as persistently and cared just as deeply for the progress of her book's production and circulation. She maintained direct supervision of the publishing of her work for thirty-eight years. Publisher and writer William Dana Orcutt records the meticulous attention to practical demands and the unfailing vision for her book which he observed in Mrs. Eddy during his eighteen years of working closely with her. In his biography, Mary Baker Eddy and Her Books, he writes, "During those years I had a wonderful opportunity to see, firsthand, her consummate ability to assume and carry through the countless business details without permitting them to divert her from her concentration upon the unfolding of her message." Mary Baker Eddy and Her Books (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1978), p. 4
