“Mother’s Evening Prayer” (1893)

In February 1914 The Christian Science Journal referred to this work as “perhaps the most complete poetic expression alike of Mrs. Eddy’s religious teachings and of her own human experience and hope.” Here we find a mother possibly offering a prayer for her long-absent son George, or her adopted son Ebenezer J. Foster Eddy—but most certainly for her church. The Journal went on to observe that “asking for protection for her fledgling idea, and in affirming her assurance of protection, she says: ‘His arm encircles me, and mine, and all.’”¹

In 1889 Eddy took several bold steps, moving to reshape her church. She departed Boston in May and eventually settled in Concord, New Hampshire. Over the next few months she dissolved both the Christian Scientist Association and the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Then on December 2 the Church of Christ (Scientist) abandoned its congregational organization and continued to hold services as a voluntary association. Over the next three years, Eddy undertook an extensive revision of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. She formally reorganized The Mother Church in September 1892.² Soon after, the first edition of the Hymnal was published (see Chapters 2 and 3).

Not long after this, Eddy was also writing “The Mother’s Evening Prayer.” Its first verse appeared in the June 1893 Journal, as part of her article “Things and Thoughts,” with this introduction:

When the white-winged dove fed her callow brood, nestled them under her wings, and with tremulous tenderness called them to her breast, did you thank God for that redemptive strain from lips which taught you the Lord’s Prayer? and for that mother’s silent orison breathing thus:—³

Eddy finalized “The Mother’s Evening Prayer” over the next two months, and it was published in its entirety in the August 1893 Journal. Interestingly, this is the only one of those seven poems written in a familiar meter, iambic pentameter—a line of verse with five metrical feet, each consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable, followed by one long (or stressed) syllable:

Oh gentle presence, peace and joy and power;
Oh Life divine, that owns each waiting hour,
Thou Love that guards the nestling’s faltering flight!
Keep Thou my child on upward wing to-night.

Love is our refuge, only with mine eye
Can I behold the snare, the pit, the fall;
His habitation high is here, and nigh,
His arm encircles me, and mine, and all.

Oh make me glad for every scalding tear,
For hope deferred, ingratitude, disdain!
Wait, and love more for every hate, and fear
No ill–since God is good, and loss is gain.

Beneath the shadow of His mighty wing;
In that sweet secret of the narrow way,
Seeking and finding, with the angels, sing:
“Lo! I am with you alway,”–watch and pray.

No snare, no fowler, pestilence or pain;
No night drops down upon the troubled breast,
When heaven’s aftersmile, earth’s teardrops gain,
And mother finds her home and far-off rest.⁴

In 1898, years before this poem became a hymn, William Lyman Johnson composed a solo version and sent it to Eddy. The final version appeared as Hymn 197 in the 1910 edition of the Hymnal.

The substance of this poem reflects Eddy’s deep reliance on the ninety-first Psalm. In a 1898 address, she cited what she called “this Psalm of the royal Hebrew bard,” which has “no peer in psalmody” but “is the pearl of the psalter.”⁵ The second verse of the poem references the psalm’s second and third verses:

Love is our refuge; only with mine eye
Can I behold the snare, the pit, the fall:
His habitation high is here, and nigh,
His arm encircles me, and mine, and all.

The final stanza also alludes to the third verse. Eddy’s resolve to provide her church—her child—with an increasingly solid foundation was tested again and again. The “ingratitude” of her son George, the “disdain” of friends as well as strangers, the departure and treachery of once-loyal workers, the “scalding tears” and “deferred hopes,” all challenged her to “wait, and love more for every hate” and to keep her vision on the larger prize—the gift to the world of a religion that explained and promoted Jesus’ example of spiritual healing.

“At this point there is a definite division of the poem,” Johnson observed in a letter. “The first, second and third stanzas have dealt with things spiritual and mortal…but the next two stanzas contain nothing but the spiritual.” These are the verses he was referring to:

Beneath the shadow of His mighty wing;
In that sweet secret of the narrow way,
Seeking and finding, with the angels sing:
“Lo, I am with you alway,”—watch and pray.

No snare, no fowler, pestilence or pain;
No night drops down upon the troubled breast,
When heaven’s aftersmile earth’s tear-drops gain,
And mother finds her home and heav’nly rest.

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Mary Baker Eddy in her study, c. 1892–1908. Calvin A. Frye. P00036. © The First Church of Christ, Scientist.

“Love” (1896)

Between 1893 and 1896, Eddy continued to shepherd her church, holding steadfastly to a guiding principle that God is Love. In June 1896 she published a poem titled “Love” in the Journal, which included the statement “Love alone is Life.” Between the publication of “The Mother’s Evening Prayer” and “Love,” three significant events had occurred. On December 30, 1894, the first service was held in the Original Edifice of The Mother Church, just days after the Bible and Science and Health had been ordained as pastor of the church. Then in September 1895 the first edition of the Manual of The Mother Church was published.

It was perhaps inevitable that Eddy was inspired to write a poem on the topic of love, given the central place this quality held in her thought. In her books she capitalized the word Love (as a synonym for God) on 943 occasions, and employed it as love 642 times, including these examples:

What a word! I am in awe before it. Over what worlds on worlds it hath range and is sovereign! the underived, the incomparable, the infinite All of good, the alone God, is Love….¹¹

The vital part, the heart and soul of Christian Science, is Love….¹²

… Remember that the first and last lesson of Christian Science is love, perfect love, and love made perfect through the cross….¹³

As the movement grew, Eddy worked constantly for harmony to prevail among Christian Scientists, consistently writing letters to her students, urging them to show more of the spirit of love and unity that she saw as the very heart of Christian Science. Around January 1890 she wrote this in a letter to her student Laura Lathrop:

… Love, love alone, will found, upbuild, and establish forever both the Christian Scientist and our Cause. But envy, jealousy, or rivalry, will kill the spirit of this Science in the person who possesses it and will thwart the establishment of it in this age….¹⁴

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Sue Harper Mims, undated. P01344.

We see this thought expressed in the last two lines of verse one and in verse two, which specifically points to Jesus’ example of love to all humanity:

Brood o’er us with Thy shelt’ring wing,
’Neath which our spirits blend
Like brother birds that soar and sing,
And on the same branch bend.
The arrow that doth wound the dove
Darts not from those who watch and love.

If thou the bending reed wouldst break
By thought or word unkind,
Pray that his spirit you partake,
Who loved and healed mankind:
Seek holy thoughts and heavenly strain,
That make men one in love remain.

“Wisdom’s rod” in verse three could be seen as a poetic version of this statement in Science and Health: “Through the wholesome chastisements of Love, we are helped onward in the march towards righteousness, peace, and purity, which are the landmarks of Science.”¹⁶ Elsewhere she wrote in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, “Love atones for sin through love that destroys sin. His rod is love.”¹⁷

Learn, too, that wisdom’s rod is given
For faith to kiss, and know;
That greetings glorious from high heaven,
Whence joys supernal flow,
Come from that Love, divinely near,
Which chastens pride and earth-born fear,

Verse four gives a sense of Eddy’s concept of the universe as spiritual, as she expressed it in Science and Health: “Eternal Truth is changing the universe…. ‘Let there be light,’ is the perpetual demand of Truth and Love, changing chaos into order and discord into the music of the spheres.”¹⁸

Through God, who gave that word of might
Which swelled creation’s lay:
“Let there be light, and there was light.”
What chased the clouds away?
’Twas Love whose finger traced aloud
A bow of promise on the cloud.

What exactly was the “bow of promise”? A statement from Eddy’s book The People’s Idea of God suggests a possibility: “Let us rejoice that the bow of omnipotence already spans the moral heavens with light, and that the more spiritual idea of good and Truth meets the old material thought like a promise upon the cloud, while it inscribes on the thoughts of men at this period a more metaphysical religion founded upon Christian Science.”¹⁹

In the final verse of this poem, Eddy returns to the central “Love alone” theme, as stated in the Church Manual, which she had published just the year before: “In Science, divine Love alone governs man; and a Christian Scientist reflects the sweet amenities of Love, in rebuking sin, in true brotherliness, charitableness, and forgiveness.”²⁰

Thou to whose power our hope we give,
Free us from human strife.
Fed by Thy love divine we live,
For Love alone is Life;
And life most sweet, as heart to heart
Speaks kindly when we meet and part.

Eddy’s increasingly clear expression of the metaphysical concepts in her poems is seen in the fact that she changed only one word in this poem over the course of time; in the second verse, the words “you partake” replaced “all partake.” She also made two capitalization changes. First, “His spirit” became “his spirit” in verse two, to indicate that she was referring to Jesus. And in verse three, “high Heaven” became “high heaven.” The only other changes made concerned punctuation.

“Christmas Morn” (1898)

Eddy loved Christmas, and over her lifetime she wrote repeatedly about that special season. “The basis of Christmas is the rock, Christ Jesus …,” she told the New York World. “The basis of Christmas is love loving its enemies, returning good for evil, love that ‘suffereth long, and is kind.’”²² And in a 1907 Ladies’ Home Journal article titled “What Christmas Means to Me,” she began:

To me Christmas involves an open secret, understood by few — or by none — and unutterable except in Christian Science. Christ was not born of the flesh. Christ is the Truth and Life born of God — born of Spirit and not of matter. Jesus, the Galilean Prophet, was born of the Virgin Mary’s spiritual thoughts of Life and its manifestation….²³

The year 1898 was another one of significant activity. Eddy founded the Christian Science Board of Lectureship and the Committee on Publication. She organized The Christian Science Publishing Society, developed 26 subjects for the Bible-Lessons, and published the first issue of The Christian Science Weekly.²⁴ That March, the first Christian Science church in Germany was organized in the city of Hannover. And, that December, the Journal published her poem “Christmas Morn,” under the title “Christmas Hymn.”²⁵ This work synthesizes many of Eddy’s reflections on Christmas.

According to historian Stephen Gottschalk, “Christmas Hymn” was clearly expressive of the sense of a spiritual breakthrough associated with the year 1898:

Unlike most of [Eddy’s] other religious poetry, this poem, revised as “Christmas Morn,” did not reflect a deep need of the movement as Eddy felt it. Rather, it celebrated, as its first stanza illustrates, the newness and spiritual light that had been breaking through in various ways during the course of the year ….²⁶

Unlike the previous two poems, Eddy made multiple, significant changes to “Christmas Morn” before it appeared in its final form in the 1903 Hymnal.

Original Version
“Blest Christmas Morn”

Blest Christmas morn, could murky clouds
Pursue thy way
Or light be born? no storm enshrouds
Thy dawn or day!

Dear Christ, forever here and near,
No cradle song,
Nor natal hour and mother’s tear,
To thee belong.

Thou God-idea, Life-encrowned,
The Bethlehem babe
Beloved, adored, replete, renowned,
Was but thy shade.

Thou living gleam of deathless Love,
little Life!
So infinite – so far above
All mortal strife,

Or creed, or earth-born taint,
Fill us to-day
With all thou art-be thou our saint-
Our stay, alway.

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Mary Baker Eddy in her garden, c. 1900. Clara S. Shannon. P00217. © The First Church of Christ, Scientist.

“Satisfied” (1900)

The end of the nineteenth century saw the growth of Christian Science, as well as ongoing hostile reaction to its influence from some sectors of the press and clergy. Eddy faced this constant antagonism with grace and confidence. In January 1900 she greeted the new year with a poem titled “Satisfied” (including the phrase “the centuries break”).³⁰ The opening lines—“It matters not / What be thy lot, / So Love doth guide”—convey an absolute certainty in the power of Love to lift one above what Science and Health calls “the dark recesses of mortal thought.”³¹ “Satisfied” was quickly published in the Sentinel on January 18, as well as in the February Journal.³² Of Eddy’s seven poems that became hymns, this one is unique. It is the singular example of a poem for which she saw no need to revise the text, aside from making minor punctuation edits.

Again, we see the ideas Eddy focused on in this poem already well-developed in her earlier writings.

As with the previous six poems that she composed between 1868 and 1900, which were eventually set to music as hymns, “Satisfied” is in essence a prayer. It also shows a traceable relation to the needs and struggles she faced in founding Christian Science. Perhaps in no instance is her sense of abandonment to God more pronounced than in this poem. But unlike the other poems, which address God directly, “Satisfied” builds on a sense of the immediate divine presence, while directly addressing the evil that seems so threatening: “Aye, darkling sense, arise, go hence!” The next stanza conveys in the line “Ayont [beyond] hate’s thrall” the specific nature of that “darkling sense,” as well as our ability to move beyond its range.

The real point of the poem, however, is not the magnification of human hatred. Rather, it is the capacity of God as Love to offset and defeat worldly hatred—the recognition that “Love looseth thee, and lifteth me, ayont hate’s thrall.”³³

The legacy of seven hymns

According to the 1914 Journal article “Mrs. Eddy’s Hymns,” each of Eddy’s poems was “written in the midst of an enormous activity, during the years when she was declaring, teaching, and establishing Christian Science and its world-wide organization.” As such, “her poems and hymns were interludes, as it were, in these long labors…. They express herself, – aspiration, abnegation, struggle, victory, unselfish love; the sorrowing and triumphing Leader, the friend of humanity, the mother of her flock.”³⁴

1868…1876…1887…1893…1896…1898…1900. The seven poems Eddy wrote in these years helped chronicle her life, as she moved—at times with her own “bleeding footsteps”³⁵—to a basis more firmly grounded in Spirit. In her own words, Eddy embodied “the sturdy pioneer” who “hew[ed] the tall oak” and “cut the rough granite,” knowing that “future ages” would record and understand what she accomplished in establishing a religion based on healing.³⁶

Through the years of solitude, enduring family and professional hostility and dealing with students whose faith was shallow, Eddy continued to yield to God’s direction in guiding her movement. In the words of “‘Feed My Sheep,’” asking the Shepherd “how to go,” she moved steadily in her passage toward what she called “this Soul-sense” that “comes to the human mind when the latter yields to the divine Mind.”³⁷ Her poems provide others with a lens through which to view her struggles, as they follow her “passage from sense to Soul, from a material sense of existence to the spiritual, up to the glory prepared for them who love God.”³⁸ In the words of “Christmas Morn,” she yearned for Christ to “fill us today/ With all thou art” and tried to convince a spiritually hungry world that the Christ-spirit was a living, healing presence.

Eddy enveloped humanity with sincerity, gentleness, compassion and love. In the words of “Christ My Refuge,” embracing the challenges she faced on a daily basis, she discerned in the teachings of Jesus “a world more bright”—a world in which all could understand how to break through adversity, purify and elevate character, and move with confidence to higher spiritual ground.