Even more revealing is the letter asking for “help” which Mrs. Eddy never answered. It was written on February 2, 1907, at Brockton, Massachusetts, where Mrs. Crafts was then living with her brother:
Dear Mrs. Eddy
Now Hiram has gone the people want me to tell them your history while you lived with us the one that will pay me the most money if you will pay me the most I will keep still keep my mouth closed you can have your first chois I want you to be quick about it, not to delay for I dont want to be teased to death
With regards
Mary W. Crafts86
When she received no reply, Mrs. Crafts—or rather, the brother with whom she then lived—did talk, and the talk was duly gathered up in an affidavit which spelled out her grievances and added the charge that Mrs. Patterson had tried to separate Hiram and Mary Crafts from each other.87
Nor was that the end of the Crafts episode. Sibyl Wilbur’s description of Mrs. Patterson’s first student as “a Yankee workman transcendentalized” was to be used decades later to support an elaborate charge that Christian Science is based on an obscure Hegelian document entrusted to Crafts by the great German-American scholar, Francis Lieber.88 No one would have been more astonished than the simple East Stoughton cobbler to find himself portrayed as the intimate friend of Lieber and the noted Harvard professor Charles Follen. If he once touched greatness in his life, it was in quite another way.
In 1868 he had written Mrs. Patterson: “as to Doctoring again I do not think now that I ever shall do any more of it[.] If I was alone, ● ● ●
86 Mary W. Crafts to Mary Baker Eddy, 2 February 1907, IC056.16.003, MBEL. This was written at the time that reporters for McClure’s were scouring the countryside for additional ammunition for the Milmine series.
87 Among the Farlow papers in MBEL is a statement by Charles Wentworth that he did not believe this charge, for it would have been impossible to keep such a domestic situation out of the neighborhood gossip of so small a community. [Charles O. Wentworth, recorded in Alfred Farlow, “Facts and Incidents Relating to Mrs. Eddy,” c. 1909, Subject File, Alfred Farlow - Manuscript - Facts and Incidents Relating to Mrs. Eddy (2 of 2), p. 99, MBEL.]
88 See Appendix C (p. 407).