Preface to the First Edition

This book carries forward the story begun in The Years of Discovery. It is independent, however, of the earlier volume. I have written it from the point of view of one encountering Mrs. Eddy for the first time in 1876 when she was still Mrs. Glover of Lynn, the little-known author of a recently published book called Science and Health.

The story begins as a Victorian idyll, middle-aged in cast, provincial in setting, obscure in significance. Yet by force of the plain facts it plunges quickly into critical issues. One cannot examine seriously the fifteen years of Mrs. Eddy’s life that followed the publication of her first book without being brought up against the great existential questions of life and death, the self and the void—revelation, absurdity, purpose, commitment, pain.

It was a crucial period of trial and error for the Founder of Christian Science, barely hinted at in her own restrained statement in Science and Health: “We must have trials and self-denials, as well as joys and victories, until all error is destroyed.”¹ At the end of it, in 1891, she was seventy years old, ripe in experience and ready to begin what by most people’s reckoning would be a lifetime’s work. The story of those last twenty  ● ● ●