“At that date I was a spiritualist,” Crafts declared in an affidavit in 1901, “but her teachings changed my views on that subject and I gave up spiritualism. . . . She taught me from the Scriptures and from manuscripts that she wrote when she taught me.”68 However, she apparently did not use the notes on Genesis (and this accords with her practice in teaching through the next few years), for in 1902 he wrote, “We used nothing outside of the New testament, she had no manuscripts of any kind until after I had been studying six months,” rather inaccurately dating the six months from August, 1866, when he first met her.69
The only manuscript she is known definitely to have written during her stay at the Crafts home is a verse-by-verse exegesis of Matthew, chapters 14 to 17. While it illustrates her later statement that “these compositions were crude,—the first steps of a child in the newly discovered world of Spirit,” it contains a “spiritual interpretation” of the feeding of the four thousand in chapter 15 that might serve as a parable of her own situation.70
In this interpretation, which illustrates the Alexandrian elaboration of allegory that marked these first “crude” compositions, the seven loaves and a few small fishes are defined as “seven ideas and a few small swim[m]ers after more”;71 and lifted to the plane of Wisdom, these are said to have their meaning multiplied in boundless measure. Crafts, like most of the “small swimmers” who followed her at first, was far more interested in the practical business of healing than in the metaphysical dimensions of the Christian gospel. And she herself stressed that healing was the test of the accuracy of what she was teaching. So ● ● ●
68 Hiram S. Crafts, affidavit, 19 December 1901, L18627, MBEL.
69 Hiram S. Crafts to Calvin A. Frye, 23 February 1902, Subject File, Hiram S. Crafts, MBEL.
70 Eddy, Science and Health, p. viii; Mary Baker Patterson, manuscript, 1867, A10062 (cf. A10062B), MBEL. Mrs. Eddy retrieved this manuscript from Crafts in February 1902, paying him $4.50 for the expenses he incurred in having it photostated and in swearing out an affidavit. (This involved two or three trips from his home in Hebron, New Hampshire, to the neighboring town of Bristol. [Hiram S. Crafts to Mary Baker Eddy, 24 February 1902, Subject File, Hiram S. Crafts, MBEL.]) This is apparently the basis for the Milmine charge that Mrs. Eddy paid his expenses to deliver a mysterious manuscript into her hands at her home in Pleasant View, Concord. [Milmine, Life, p. 114.] The correspondence between them shows that he did not come to Concord, while the manuscript itself is eminently devoid of mystery. [Hiram S. Crafts to Mary Baker Eddy, 1 January 1905, Subject File, Hiram S. Crafts, MBEL.]
71 [Mary Baker Patterson, manuscript, 1902, A10062B, MBEL.]