MARY BAKER EDDY'S love for children and her devotion to God were constants in her life. They came together when, as a young woman in the Congregational Church, she taught Sunday School. No specific record of what she taught exists, but one former pupil, Martha Philbrick Weeks, long afterward wrote, "I would learn a few verses from the Bible, and after repeating them to her, she would explain them to me." Clifford P. Smith, Historical Sketches From the Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1992), p. 42 .
This method must also have helped Mrs. Eddy to reach Lyman Durgin, a lonely teenager who lived with and worked for Mrs. Eddy's parents. One Mary Baker Eddy biographer explains: "Distressed over his illiteracy and his lack of religious training, she undertook to teach him to read the New Testament, and her patience and interest won his ardent devotion. To the end of his life he cherished the New Testament she gave him. . . .
"[I]t is reasonable to assume that . . . she did not leave Lyman feeling that he was a miserable sinner, a worm in God's sight. It was,after all, the story of Christ's redemption rather than of Adam's fall that she had used in teaching him to read." Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1972), pp. 53-54 .
