● ● ●  he brought to his work the insights of this dual perspective, concerned not only with representing the theology of Christian Science correctly but also committed to addressing fully the skeptical questions raised by thoughtful outsiders.

Earlier biographies of the Christian Science founder generally fell into two categories, sometimes described as “rose-colored” and “black.” On one hand, depictions by adherents and advocates were appreciated by her followers but considered by others too adulatory to be credible. On the other hand, a string of debunking accounts essentially reduced the Christian Science leader to a charlatan. Peel’s narrative, meticulously documented for the first time with some 250 pages of notes, challenged both perspectives. “At last,” as the renowned religion scholar Martin Marty wrote in a New York Times review, “insider Robert Peel has begun to break the barriers between apologists and critics.”²

Peel’s three volumes were originally published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1966, 1971, and 1977. The books were the first scholarly sources based on the full historical record of Eddy’s life, including her letters and papers in the archives of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, the “Mother Church” of the religious denomination she founded. More crucially, Peel’s was the first genuine scholarly study of Eddy’s life, and is still the most thorough, balanced, historically grounded portrayal not only of Eddy’s public role as a religious leader, but also of her inner life and spiritual development.

For many readers outside Eddy’s church, the most surprising reve­lation was simply that she was a deeply religious leader and wrestler with serious issues. Whatever might be thought of her non-traditional Christian teaching, she was self-evidently no charlatan. The hundreds of personal letters and private papers brought to the surface in the trilogy attested unquestionably to profound commitment and biblical orientation. Since the publication of the trilogy, the opening of the entire body of her papers in the Mary Baker Eddy Collection in Boston has strongly confirmed the trilogy’s depiction of a complex woman who could describe herself at once humbly as “the weakest of mortals” and,  ● ● ●