● ● ● glad enough to be healed, the actual impartation of the basis of her healing was bound to stir up opposition.
Her own explanation of the situation is hinted at in a passage in Science and Health: “If the Master had not taken a student and taught the unseen verities of God, he would not have been crucified. The determination to hold Spirit in the grasp of matter is the persecutor of Truth and Love.”83
Crafts remained friendly and grateful to her throughout his life, though he returned to his shoemaking and showed only the most rudimentary grasp of her later teachings. A year after they parted she wrote him to inquire tentatively whether he would be willing to take up the work again, and he replied:
I should be willing to do all you ask if I was in different circumstances. you know how things stand with me. after all the trouble that we have had I feel the same interest in the developement of Truth and its principles. I know that I am not perfect, and am willing to acknowledge that fact. But it would be impossible for me to come over there to help you at present. I should have no peace at home if I did. I have been through one hell and don’t want to go through another. . . . Your letter was opened and read before I got it[,] if you send another have it delivered to me.84
Several years after he died Sibyl Wilbur interviewed Mrs. Crafts, then a rather feeble old lady, who detailed her list of grievances against Mrs. Patterson, including the fact that the latter found fault with the way she ironed her cuffs. Her words are revealing:
She found fault with me about things and said I done ’em a puppus, and she carried herself above folks. . . . I wrote her to ask her to help us when Hiram died, and she didn’t pay no attention to the letter. She has always lived for show and never for helping poor folks.85
83 [Eddy, Science and Health, p. 28.]
84 Hiram S. Crafts to Mary Baker Patterson, 27 November 1868, IC056.16.001, MBEL.
85 Sibyl Wilbur, “The Story of the Real Mrs. Eddy,” Human Life, May 1907, p. 16.