I grew up in Latin America, in a traditional religion where many issues that aroused my curiosity were shrouded in mystery. When I read Science and Health for the first time and discovered the answers there to all the questions I’d had for years, I felt I had found something very special, where logic prevailed. So I thought I should know something more about its author, Mary Baker Eddy, and I started to read her biographies.
It took me a while to gain a clear sense of the importance of this woman, born in the nineteenth century, whose revolutionary ideas reached beyond the borders of her own country, the United States of America, and spread throughout the world. And I came to the conclusion that only the truth, the discovery that she made regarding God’s laws, could have touched the lives of so many people and transformed them.
Reading the biographies of Mrs. Eddy was like tracking her footsteps and witnessing the battles she fought against disease since her childhood. Once she discovered Christian Science, all the knowledge she gained from her schoolbooks would vanish “like a dream” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 10) when confronted with this divine revelation of the laws of God that seemed astounding to human sense. Only someone very pure of heart—someone who had said, “From my very childhood I was impelled, by a hunger and thirst after divine things . . .” (ibid, p. 31)—could have received this revelation of God, of the Comforter promised by Jesus, and given it to the world without the slightest hint of selfishness and with the most complete self-surrender.
