“For the world to understand me in my true light, and life, would do more for our Cause than aught else could” (Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority, p. 60).
Mary Baker Eddy’s statement quoted above caught my eye some years ago, when I had the privilege of working on a committee devoted to the prayerful support of our Christian Science branch church. So much of the prayerful work led back to the fundamental importance of fully appreciating just who our Leader is.
While working on the committee, I read the book Christian Science in Germany by Frances Thurber Seal, which recounts Mrs. Seal’s pioneer Christian Science work in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century. She had been a student of Christian Science less than one year, yet was asked by a student of Mrs. Eddy’s, Laura Lathrop, to undertake this important mission. And her mission was by any measure spectacularly successful, with patients in line out the door of her apartment, waiting to receive Christian Science treatment. I was both humbled and awed by Seal’s experience. In spite of being new to Christian Science, she was enormously successful against very aggressive opposition, including government interference with her work, not to mention intrepidly carrying out her mission in spite of being a woman alone in a foreign country and overcoming a language barrier. Was there something she knew that I didn’t?
