Among the Bibles used by Mary Baker Eddy, a bound copy of the Book of Psalms is heavily marked. This points to Eddy’s love of the Psalter, an affection she might have inherited from her Puritan forbearers. Her childhood religious teachers emphasized the Scriptures, and she remembered, “Such churchmen and the Bible, especially the First Commandment of the Decalogue, and Ninety-first Psalm, the Sermon on the Mount, and St. John’s Revelation, educated my thought many years, yea, all the way up to its preparation for and reception of the Science of Christianity” (Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 32).
The Ninety-first Psalm was important to Eddy. Although she quotes it only once in Science and Health, its words appear more frequently in her Prose Works. She wrote this about it in an 1898 manuscript (A10125) [This is actually from an address she gave at Christian Science Hall in Concord, on February 27, 1898]:
This Psalm of the royal Hebrew bard hath no peer in psalmody. It is the pearl of the psalter….To the God attuned apprehension the spiritual import of this Psalm as a holy diagnostic whose diagnosis casts out evils and heals all manner of diseases, is a balm in Gilead and a physician there….
This Psalm contains more practical theological and pathological truth than any other collection of the same number of words in human language except the Sermon on the Mount of the great Galilean and hillside Teacher.
