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Book Review: Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Trial

This is the second book of Robert Peel's three-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy



A life-long Bible reader, reared in Calvinist doctrine, Mary Baker Eddy spent most of her young life suffering from various physical ailments. Nineteenth-century New England was a hotbed of radical faith cures, including the use of homeopathy, transcendentalism, and mesmerism.   As a young woman Mary tried them all, and eventually found temporary relief from a clockmaker in Portland, Maine, named Phineas Quimby.  Quimby was famous for healing people through the use of mesmerism, and with laying of hands on patients.  Mary visited Quimby in his office for treatment and was healed.  However, some time later she relapsed with the same ailment.  Nevertheless, she was so impressed with this charismatic young man and his healing ideas, that she joined his practice, and began treating a number of patients.  Also, she would take dictation from Quimby on his healing methods, for possible future publication. As with her own experience, Quimby's methods would provide only temporary relief.  Eventually, Mary separated from Quimby, but continued her search throughout New England for a permanent cure.


Having made her home in Lynn, Massachusetts, one winter's evening, while walking with friends, she slipped and fell on the ice.  A doctor was called to examine her, and pronounced her injuries as internal and fatal, that she had only a few hours to live.  Aware of his diagnosis, she asked for her Bible, and, having been taken to her home, asked to be left alone.  While reading from the Gospel of Mathew, she discovered she was miraculously healed.  She arose, dressed herself, and appeared on the balcony above the parlor.  Her guests thought she was a ghost.


She joined them for dinner, but could not explain her sudden and miraculous healing.  She spent the next three years studying the Bible, in an effort to discover exactly how she was  healed.  Later, she would write:  "For three years after my discovery, I sought the solution of this problem of Mind-healing, searched the Scriptures and read little else; kept aloof from society, and devoted time and energies to discovering a positive rule.  The search was sweet, calm and buoyant with hope, not selfish nor depressing" (SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES, p.109).   Having discovered the answer, she put into action what she had learned by healing others.  Most of her patients were seriously ill, who had come to her out of desperation. Most did not have the money to pay her.  No matter, she had found her calling, and healed anyone who entered her parlor on 8 Columbus Avenue.  To advertise, she posted a sign over her door that read: "Mary Baker - Christian Healer".


Deeply encouraged by her healing success, she began teaching others how to heal. In time she used her Bible-study notes, and began holding classes, where she would share her notes with her students.  Many of her students would go on to have healing practices of their own. One of them was a business man named Donald Spofford, who would become the publisher of the book Mary was writing. This book would be revised many times, and eventually be entitled  SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES.   At first sales were meager, and believing the book had failed in the marketplace, her publisher-- Donald Spofford--promptly resigned his post as publisher.


Around this time Mary would meet Gilbert Eddy, who would become her most promising student. When it was announced that she and Eddy would be married, Spofford parted ways with Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science movement.  Spofford would be the first of many of her first students to turn on her.


While bitterly disappointed, Mary married Gilbert Eddy, which brought her much happiness. The two set up house-keeping in her apartment on 8 Columbus Avenue, where Gilbert and Mary continued their successful treatment of patients.

   

As her fame grew, medical doctors, and pastors of other Christian churches, began condemning her healing practice as a sham and a counterfeit.  This surprised her, as she believed her healing discovery would be welcomed by the medical profession, and by all Christian denominations.  It would be the first of many disappointments she would endure in the coming years. Now in her mid-forties and once divorced, she was outside the pale of New England acceptability


Her critics were relentless and accused her of being a "loose woman", teaching "free love" and practicing witchcraft, with being a despoiler of homes, a medium, and a fraud.


Eddy handled the personal attacks with grace and humor.  Responding to the claim of being an advocate of free love, she said laughingly, "Of course I believe in free love, why, I love everyone."  Despite the attacks, she proceeded with work on her book, and sought a publisher, and decided to name her religion, "Christian Science."


While rarely outspoken in public, Mrs. Eddy would occasionally respond to critics with a well-written reply to the newspaper that had published an attack on her.  Among the women fighting for equality, who did speak out in public, was Susan B. Anthony (who would take a Christian Science class from Laura Lathrop, one of Eddy's pupils). In a public speech, Anthony argued: "Women must be educated out of their unthinking acceptance of financial dependence on men into mental and economic independence. Whoever controls work controls morals."


Mrs. Eddy concurred.  At stake were the rights of women, as well as all mankind.  In SCIENCE AND HEALTH (p. 227) she wrote: "Discerning the rights of man, we cannot fail to foresee the doom of all oppression. Slavery is not the legitimate state of man.  God made man free. Paul said, 'I was born free.' All men should be free.  'Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.' Love and Truth make free, but evil and error lead into captivity."


Despite all the criticism, her critics could not stop the growth of her healing movement.  In July 1876, she formed her first Christian Science Association, a group that included her first two students to successfully launch their own healing practices--both women of Lynn, Massachusetts. In October of that same year, she published a newly updated version of  SCIENCE AND HEALTH.  Sales skyrocketed.  The book became so successful that several would-be healers wrote similar books that plagiarized her work, by changing a word here and there, or by rephrasing several key paragraphs.  Some even went so far as to claim Mary Baker was not the actual author.


This would lead to a number of court cases, that would prove conclusively that Mary Baker Eddy was the true author.  It didn't end there. Later, a newspaper reporter named Julius Dresser wrote an article that appeared in the BOSTON POST accusing Mary Baker Eddy of having plagiarized the writings of Phineas Quimby, and as proof Dresser promised to produce a copy of Quimby's book.  It turns out Dresser's accusations were based on hearsay, and that Dresser had never actually spoken with Quimby, who had died 18 years before Dresser's article was published.  Also he could not produce Quimby's book, as Quimby' children could not make sense of their father's convoluted writings.   All of this would come out in court.


In February 1887, the association meetings were moved to Fraternity Hall in the Parker Memorial Building on Berkley Street.  The newspapers carried weekly notices and sometimes accounts of the sermons, and on April 6 a letter to the BOSTON GLOBE from Benjamin Atkinson (recently elected to the Massachusetts legislature), paid public tribute to Mrs. Eddy as "a lady of pleasing address, high character, conscientious, charitable and humane."


Two months later, on April 12, 1887, Mrs. Eddy and fifteen members of the Christian Science Association met and voted to organize a church called Church of Christ.  Further consideration at later meetings led to the name being changed to Church of Christ (Scientist) and to its description as "a church designed to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing."  On August 6, a state charter was applied for, and on August 23, it was granted.  Boston was given as the seat of the church and Mrs. Eddy as its president.  At the time there were 26 church members.


Around this time, Mrs. Eddy faced yet another trial in the long-anticipated reunion with her son, George Glover.  Almost thirty years earlier, when she was a young widow without health or means to take care of him, young George, then age six, had been put into the care of a foster family at the insistence of her own family.  Six years later his foster parents had moved with him out to Minnesota, leaving his mother desolate but helpless to recover him.


Over the years the two had made various unsuccessful attempts to meet again.  For some years Mrs. Eddy had not been able to trace the boy's whereabouts, but since the Civil War they had corresponded--though intermittently, for George's foster parents had left him virtually illiterate and he depended always on someone else to write for him.  He carried his mother's picture with him in a locket wherever he went, but as he moved from Minnesota to the Dakota Territory, married, had children, became a farmer and then a prospector for gold in the Black Hills, his life seemed to grow steadily away from her.


After her marriage to Gilbert Eddy, Glover's letters were addressed to "My dear Mother and Father."  On August 12, 1879, he had written them of his moving to Deadwood, two or three years before.  Mrs. Eddy wrote him of the trials she was going through, and it was finally agreed that they should meet in Cincinnati.  When she failed to turn up there, he came on to Boston, and for the first time in twenty-two years they were reunited.


Despite the strong affection Mrs. Eddy and her son felt for each other, they found little in common during the few months of his stay.  On November 22 the Christian Science Association extended an invitation to him to become a member.  He expressed thanks, but declined the honor, "home being so great a distance."


Meanwhile his family in the West were clamoring for his return.  While in Boston he had mentioned to Mrs. Eddy that his three-year-old daughter was cross-eyed, and Mrs. Eddy's response had been, "You must be mistaken, George, her eyes are all right."  On his return home, to his delight he found that his daughter's eyes were indeed all right. As an adult, she would launch out into the public practice of Christian Science.


After George Glover's departure, Mrs. Eddy was faced with yet another crisis, as eight of her earliest and most trusted students announced in writing that they were withdrawing their names from the Christian Science Association and Church of Christ (Scientists).


On top of that, on Eddy's return from one her trips to Vermont, she passed through a town square, and saw a straw image of herself hung from a tree.


Deeply confused and hurt, it was at this point that Mrs. Eddy realized the enemy of her religion was not those students who had betrayed her, or the pastors of rival Christian churches, or medical doctors, or various newspapers.  Through Bible study and through her prayers, she came to realize the enemy was not a person, place or thing, but impersonalized error or evil, the same evil that had confronted Jesus at the beginning of his three-year mission, when he said to evil, "Get thee behind me, Satan" (KJV, Mathew 16:23).  This thought freed her from much of the grief that had been destroying her happiness.   


From this point on, she began looking past her supposed enemies as powerless to stop her work and by forgiving them. The antidote was the "Golden Rule." It was a huge turning point for her and the Christian Science movement.  But there would be new opposition that would try to derail her church.


Still, the outlook for her young church was not promising, however, the membership was united and determined to be a real church.  They ordained Mrs. Eddy as pastor. That spring a Christian Science Sunday School was started with only one pupil.  Then, in accordance with the established custom of all the most noteworthy preachers, an especially successful sermon by Mrs. Eddy was published in booklet form.  This was CHRISTIAN HEALING, the first of her works besides SCIENCE AND HEALTH to be printed for general circulation.


The year 1881 would prove to be an eventful one in Mrs. Eddy's life.  In January, her Massachusetts's Metaphysical College was chartered by the state of Boston. In August, a Third Edition of SCIENCE AND HEALTH was published.  On May 23, Mrs. Eddy preached what was announced as her farewell sermon.  She had only postponed, not abandoned, her idea of moving somewhere else to make a fresh start.  Dismayed, the membership asked her to stay, and she consented to remain and preach throughout the month of June.


The fact was that Mrs. Eddy was now at work on another major revision of SCIENCE AND HEALTH, and the book had to come before all else.


Meanwhile, in Chicago a group of Christian Scientist practitioners were finding it difficult to meet Mrs. Eddy's strict healing demands in managing their own metaphysical practices. Many of them Mrs. Eddy had urged to return to Boston for further study and training.  In time, they would learn to follow the rules of Christian Science metaphysical treatment as taught by Mrs. Eddy and establish successful Christian Science healing practices.


Satisfied with the growth of Christian Science in Chicago, Mrs. Eddy traveled to the midwest and delivered a lecture to a couple hundred people in Chicago's Central Music Hall on the text, "Whom do men say that I am?"


She returned to Boston with the vision of a great preparatory work still to be done.  Indeed, outside of Boston, Christian Science would soon thrive in the midwest, so much so that Chicago Christian Scientists would establish a branch church in their city.


The following year tragedy struck with the sudden death of her husband, Gilbert Eddy.  At the time Mrs. Eddy and several of her students were living at 571 Columbus Avenue, in Lynn, where she conducted classes. These students also carried on their healing practice, and the back parlor was set aside as an office where each of them could see patients at assigned hours.


In April of 1883, the Christian Science publishing society published the first issue of the JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE, a bi-monthly magazine with the subtitle, "An Independent Family Paper, to promote Health and Morals."  Mrs. Eddy herself was editor, and most of the material in the first issue was  written by her (note: from the start, the Journal carried advertisements of recognized Christian Science practitioners.  The first issue listed fourteen; a year later there were twenty-eight; ten years later later there were three-hundred and twenty-eight). In time the magazine would be published monthly, and be renamed THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE JOURNAL, and Mrs. Eddy would step down as editor, but continue to submit articles. The Journal would also publish verified accounts of healings from the field.


In September of 1883, the sixth edition of SCIENCE AND HEALTH was published. This latest edition had KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES added to the text and title. (note: this was the major revision that Mrs. Eddy had been working on, based on her many years of Bible study.  As Mrs. Eddy saw it, the starting point of metaphysical healing was found in the first chapter of Genesis, where creation is purely spiritual: "God created man in his own image; male and female created he them . . .  And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:27, 31 KJV).  In the chapter entitled, "The Apocalypse" she gave her spiritual interpretation of the book of "Revelation".  It should be added that Mrs Eddy quotes the Bible extensively throughout SCIENCE AND HEALTH.  Indeed, she counseled her students to follow her only as far as she followed Christ Jesus.  Among her favorite verses was a quote from First John: "God is Love."  Elsewhere she quotes John's other words for Diety: "God is Spirit and must be worshipped in Spirit and in Truth" (John 4:24);  "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all" (First John 1:5)


On February 15, 1889, Mrs. Eddy gave an address in Steinway Hall, New York City, which evoked some of the enthusiasm as her Chicago speech nine months earlier.  The address was in response to the urging of some of Mrs. Eddy's more ardent students that she would provide spiritual underpinnings for Christian Science work there.  The problem for Christian Science in New York, was petty jealousy among Christian Science practitioners, some claiming that they were superior healers than others, and one being so bold as to say she was superior to Mary Baker Eddy herself.


As Eddy saw it, such claims were outward displays of the human ego, and were rife with the error that there was life and intelligence in matter, which is anathema to healing.  In SCIENCE AND HEALTH, she corrected this erroneous claim with the spiritual definition of God, the Great I Am, as "the only Ego."


Clearly, more prayerful work was needed in New York City, if Christian Science was to survive and thrive.  Having gained some peace through prayer, she traveled to New York City to give her speech.  It was to be her last public lecture of that kind.  Ten days later, back in Boston, she opened a class of seven students, the largest number she had yet to teach at one time. To her surprise it turned out to be one her most successful classes, but it was also the last at the College.


At this point in her religious movement, having faced so much opposition, Mrs. Eddy was seeking a new and more conducive way to advance her movement.  Over the next few years, she would dissolve the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, the Christian Science Association, remove herself from the pastorate, and formally disorganize her Church.


A number of her students said she was working too hard and insisted that she take time to rest.  Mrs. Eddy did so, but spent much of her time in prayer and contemplation.  She believed that Christian Science healing work was not performed by individuals, but by God alone.  The human ego didn't figure in the equation, and must be denied, in order to let the divine ego do the healing work.


The next three years were to be pivotal ones in the history of Christian Science.  They would bring Mrs. Eddy at the age of seventy to the brink of her greatest decision since 1866, to a new beginning for herself and her church.  She realized that strongly worded rules must be written and enforced if Christian Science were to grow.  This would lead her to write the CHURCH MANUAL OF THE MOTHER CHURCH, a concise rule book that would govern her church into the twentieth century and beyond.  The rules are pointed and clear, in a slim volume of a mere 132 pages.


Many years later, the son of one of her dedicated students wrote: "No previous upheaval in her Church and Association had brought forth such efforts as she made to save the remnants of her work in Boston, and one who had lived close to her at that time and knew the conditions could realize in any large measure the change that took place in her attitude toward her adherents.  She had previously been Teacher, but in the latter part of 1888 she became the General-in-chief, and the Leader."


There was a good deal of growth to take place in both her own and her student's thinking before the militant little church which had fought its stormy way through the 1880s would be superseded by the institution of which she would write:


"The First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston, Mass., is designed to be built on the Rock, Christ, even the understanding and demonstration of the divine Truth, Life, and Love, healing and saving the world from sin and death; thus to reflect in some degree the Church Universal and Triumphant."


For years periodic rumors had been set afloat that Mrs. Eddy was ill, dying or even dead.  As long ago as 1883, she had denied so in the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE JOURNAL, specifically a report in the ST. LOUIS DEMOCRAT, that she had died of poison and left her property to Susan B. Anthony.  With the relative seclusion of her life in her new home in Concord, New Hampshire, the rumors increased.  Actually she had quite a number of visitors, went driving through the city daily, visited shops, had dinner from time to time with her cousins, chatted with the children (she positivity adored children) who played around her as she sat on a bench outside for long hours writing.


Even as she "disorganized" her old church, Mrs. Eddy took decisive steps to build on a new basis.  Specifically, she acquired a parcel of land in Boston's Back Bay. The church itself would be built in 1894.


In the interim, she focused her attention on the growth of her students. The battle for higher ground than either Mrs. Eddy or her students had occupied in the 1880s, opened the way for her to advance to the prodigious tasks of the next two decades.  Again and again she wrote to students, "You are growing" --but herself was growing most of all. While a well-known public figure, Eddy was preparing her church for the day she would no longer be around to lead the membership; in that sense, she was preparing her church members to accept the Bible and SCIENCE AND HEALTH, as their "impersonal pastor".


The author writes: "To the members of the Christian Science Association of the Massachusetts Metaphysical Association, who continued to meet periodically despite the formal dissolution of the parent organization, she sent a message in June 1891:


"You may be looking to see me in my accustomed place with you, but this you must no longer expect.  When I retired from the field of labor, it was a departure, socially, publicly, and finally, from the routine of such material modes as society and our societies demand.  Rumors are rumors--nothing more. I am still with you on the field of battle, taking forward marches, broader and higher views, and with the hope that you will follow."


The author continues: "The problem that demanded her utmost thought was how to substitute government by law for government by persons.  Her church must be built on Principle--her own or another's--if it was to survive the shocks of the coming century.  The centrifugal forces which already had sent the mind-cure cults spinning off toward oblivion would certainly tear Christian Science apart and scatter it to the winds if it were held together only by her personal presence.


"She realized personal adulation of her could be a subtle form of self-exaltation which would lead to the ruination of her church.  She needed spiritual guidance to avoid such a trap. As always, she found her chief inspiration in the Bible.


Though the years she had kept up her habit of opening it at random in moments of need, coupled with a prayer for guidance.  She continued also to make notes afterward, in many cases, of the verse or passage that leaped to her eyes with the answer to her problem.  The notations reveal an interesting fact.  In the more embattled earlier days she turned almost always to the Old Testament; now it was almost always to the New.  it was as if the Thunder of Sinai was being superseded by the Sermon on the Mount."


To her students she wrote: "We must love our enemies in all the manifestations wherein and whereby we love our friends; must even try not to expose their faults, but to do them good whenever opportunity occurs. . . .


"The falsehood, ingratitude, misjudgment, and sharp return of evil for good--yea the real wrong (if wrong can be real!) which I have long endured at the hands of others--have most happily wrought out for me the law of loving mine enemies.  This law I now urge upon the solemn consideration of all Christian Scientists."


In other words, there would be no Christian Science without humility and forgiveness.


Summing up, Mrs Eddy wrote:


"In this receding year of religious jubilee, 1894, I as an individual would cordially invite all persons who have left our fold, together with those who never have been in it, — all who love God and keep His commandments, — to come and unite with The Mother Church in Boston. The true Christian Scientists will be welcomed, greeted as brethren endeavoring to walk with us hand in hand, as we journey to the celestial city.


"Also, I would extend a tender invitation to Christian Scientists’ students, those who are ready for the table of our Lord: so, should we follow Christ’s teachings; so, bury the dead past; so, loving one another, go forth to the full vintage-time, exemplifying what we profess. But some of the older members are not quite ready to take this advanced step in the full spirit of that charity which thinketh no evil; and if it be not taken thus, it is impractIcal, unfruitful, Soul-less.


"My deepest desires and daily labors go to prove that I love my enemies and would help all to gain the abiding consciousness of health, happiness, and heaven.


"I hate no one; and love others more than they can love me. As I now understand Christian Science, I would as soon harm myself as another; since by breaking Christ’s command, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” I should lose my hope of heaven.


"The works I have written on Christian Science contain absolute Truth, and my necessity was to tell it; therefore I did this even as a surgeon who wounds to heal. I was a scribe under orders; and who can refrain from transcribing what God indites, and ought not that one take the cup, drink all of it, and give thanks?


"Being often reported as saying what never escaped from my lips, when rehearsing facts concerning others who were reporting false charges, I have been sorry that I spoke at all, and wished I were wise enough to guard against that temptation. Oh, may the love that is talked, be felt! and so lived, that when weighed in the scale of God we be not found wanting. Love is consistent, uniform, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, unutterably kind; even that which lays all upon the altar, and, speechless and alone, bears all burdens, suffers all inflictions, endures all piercing for the sake of others, and for the kingdom of heaven’s sake" (Miscellaneous Writings p. 310-312).


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