In September 1901, United States President William McKinley was assassinated, and, shortly thereafter, Mary Baker Eddy sent his wife a letter brimming over with love, hope, and a spiritual account of the events that had occurred. She wrote: “Thy tender husband, our nation’s chief magistrate, has passed earth’s shadow into Life’s substance. Through a momentary mist he beheld the dawn. He awaits to welcome you where no arrow wounds the eagle soaring, where no partings are for love, where the high and holy call you again to meet” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 290).
Mrs. McKinley must have derived great comfort from that letter. It describes the President as having passed through the mist—the belief that life is in matter and can end in death—and into the dawn, or substance of understanding that God is our Life, and therefore spiritual and eternal. The mist, which precipitates the material, allegorical account of creation in the Bible, is described in chapter two in the book of Genesis. From the mist arises a false account of creation, because clarity and definition are not found in a mist, only confusion and distortion. Whatever information comes from it is not of God, the divine intelligence and only creator, and so it cannot be real. Mrs. Eddy’s letter to Mrs. McKinley continued on by assuring her that she would see her husband someday, where no harmful element exists, and where there are no partings.
I found a substantial measure of peace in knowing that her true and only life is in God.
These thoughts helped me tremendously at a difficult period in my life. At the end of November 1989, my beloved wife of many years suddenly passed on, and I was devastated. We had both been students of Christian Science for several years, and I found a substantial measure of peace in knowing that her true and only life is in God. Her life—all life—is eternal. Still, I missed her very much.
