● ● ● the problem was to raise such small swimmers as Crafts to the plane of wisdom where they could entirely dispense with material means in their healing.
In 1902 Crafts wrote to Calvin Frye:
Mrs Eddy never instructed me to rub the head, or body, or manipulate in any form. But when I was a Spiritualist, I used to use water and rub the head, limbs and body. So, sometimes when I was studying with her I would try it, but I did not say anything to her about it. Be wise as a Serpent, and harmless as a Dove.72
She must have discovered as time went on that he was doing this and decided that she had best suffer it to be so now. She later wrote:
After I had discovered, in 1866, the proof, that God the divine Principle, of man’s being, does all the healing—My next step was to learn from experiment and experience the scientific rule for applying Truth to man’s physical need before the patient understood this Truth. Here I halted as to the use of either material means or mental for such a result and left the student to learn from experience. At length I saw the impractical attempt through material means.73
By April, 1867, Hiram Crafts had sufficiently progressed in his healing work to move from the hamlet of East Stoughton to nearby Taunton, a town of sixteen thousand, to set up there as a healer. Mrs. Patterson, as part of the Crafts household, moved with them into the new quarters overlooking the attractive church green, site of a now demolished 1647 meetinghouse. Significantly enough the city seal of Taunton bears the words Dux Femina Facti.
Mrs. Patterson had a large, pleasant room on the third floor, she announced in a letter to Martha Pilsbury. A further statement in the same letter shows that despite her straitened circumstances she maintained a normal feminine concern for good appearance—indeed ● ● ●
72 Hiram S. Crafts to Calvin A. Frye, 23 February 1902, Subject File, Hiram S. Crafts, MBEL.
73 Mary Baker Eddy, manuscript, c. 1900–1910, A10407, pp. 4–5, MBEL. [Publisher’s note: The first edition dates this manuscript to “about 1896.”]