A Letter to Mrs. Eddy SAMUEL P. BANCROFT          My Dear Teacher: — Of the many thousands who attended the dedicatory services at the Christian Science church last Sunday it is doubtful if there was one so deeply impressed with the grandeur and magnitude of your work as was the writer, whom you will recall as a member of your first class in Lynn, Mass., nearly forty years ago. When you told us that the truth you expounded was the little leaven that should leaven the whole lump, we thought this might be true in some far distant day beyond our mortal vision. It was above conception that in less than forty years a new system of faith and worship, as well as of healing, should number its adherents by the hundreds of thousands and its tenets be accepted wholly or in part by nearly every religious and scientific body in the civilized world.          Seated in the gallery of that magnificent temple, which has been reared by you, gazing across that sea of heads, listening again to your words explaining the Scriptures, my mind was carried back to that first public meeting in the little hall on Market Street, Lynn, where you preached to a handful of people that would scarce fill a couple of pews in this grand amphitheatre; and as I heard the sonorous tones of the powerful organ and the mighty chorus of five thousand voices, I thought of the little melodeon on which my wife played, and of my own feeble attempts to lead the singing.          In years gone by I have been asked, "Did Mrs. Eddy really write Science and Health? Some say she did not." My answer has invariably been, "Send those who say she did not to me. I heard her talk it before it was ever written. I read it in manuscript before it was ever printed." Now my testimony is not needed. No human being in this generation has accomplished such a work or been so thoroughly endorsed or so completely vindicated. It is marvellous beyond all imagining to one who knew of your early struggles. I have been solicited by many of your followers to say something about the early history of Christian Science. I have replied that if Mrs. Eddy thought it wise to instruct them on the subject she would doubtless do so.          Possibly you may remember the words of my uncle, the good old deacon of the First Congregational Church of Lynn, when told that I had studied with you. "My boy, you will be ruined for life; it is the work of the devil." He only expressed the thought of all the Christian (?) people at that time. What a change in the Christian world! "The stone which the builders rejected" has become the corner-stone of this wonderful temple of "wisdom, Truth, and Love." (Science and Health, p. 495.) I have yet the little Bible which you gave me as a reward for the best paper on the spiritual significance of the first chapter of Genesis. It has this inscription on the fly-leaf in your handwriting, "With all thy getting get understanding." Respectfully and faithfully yours, S. P. Bancroft Cambridge, Mass., June 12, 1906   A Letter to Mrs. Eddy by Samuel P. Bancroft The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, pp. 58 - 60

 

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