Foreword to the Second Edition

Few biographies have a shelf life of more than a half-century. Robert Peel’s trilogy on the life of Mary Baker Eddy is one of the few that should. As some reviewers recognized, during the two decades in which the biography was being written, Peel’s portrayal of Eddy’s role as a religious leader had an unusual dimension of timeliness. It not only interested religious scholars, but a much wider range of readers fascinated with the richness and depth of a unique spiritual life.

The spiritual issues Eddy grappled with remain surprisingly contem­porary and relevant. In a time of increasing religious disillusionment, her unreserved affirmation of the realism of spiritual values may speak even more urgently now than fifty years ago to humanity’s search for meaning. As Peel’s narrative makes clear, his subject was not merely a “nineteenth-century figure” of limited interest for the twenty-first-century world.

The American Historical Review described the initial volume in 1967, as “a compelling story of a deeply religious nature wrestling with the issues of life and death” that are at the center of all serious spiritual life.¹

Robert Peel first broached the idea of a serious study on Eddy while a graduate student at Harvard. A devoted Christian Scientist,  ● ● ●