Influence of the Journal Although her subscription-list was small, Mrs. Eddy knew what to do with her Journal. Copies found their way to remote villages in Missouri and Arkansas, to lonely places in Nebraska and Colorado, where people had much time for reflection, little excitement, and a great need to believe in miracles. The metaphor of the bread cast upon the waters is no adequate suggestion of the result. Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science began to be talked of far away in the mountains and in the prairie villages. Lonely and discouraged people brooded over these editorials which promised happiness to sorrow and success to failure. The desperately ill had no quarrel with the artificial rhetoric of these testimonials in which people declared that they had been snatched from the brink of the grave.
Soon after the Journal was started, Mrs. Emma Hopkins, an intelligent and sincere young woman, came to Boston to assume the assistant editorship of the magazine. Mrs. Hopkins had first met Mrs. Eddy at the house of one of her friends, where Mrs. Eddy had been engaged to give a parlor lecture on Christian Science. The young woman became deeply interested in this new doctrine, and, although after her first meeting with Mrs. Eddy she carried away an unfavorable impression, she soon fell completely under the spell of that remarkable personality; thought her handsome, stimulating, inspiring and very different from any woman she had ever known. She entered one of Mrs. Eddy's classes and went through the same experience that sensitive students of an earlier date describe: during the lectures she felt uplifted and carried beyond herself; and in describing the effect of Mrs. Eddy's words upon her hearers Mrs. Hopkins uses the same figure that we have heard before in Lynn - that of the wind stirring the wheatfield. When Mrs. Hopkins became assistant editor of the Journal, she went to live in Mrs. Eddy's house on Columbus Avenue, where the editorial work was done. She remained there for two years, until, worn our by Mrs. Eddy's tyranny and selfishness, and saddened by her own disillusionment, Mrs. Hopkins left the house and never communicated with Mrs. Eddy again. Mrs. Eddy afterward attacked her savagely in the Journal, and applied to her the old terms of opprobrium.
In the fall of 1885 Mrs. Sarah H. Crosse succeeded Mrs. Hopkins as assistant editor of the Journal, and she, in turn, was succeeded by Frank Mason, who became both editor and publisher about the end of 1888.
(continued on MBGE Page 3)