The fourth and final story-memory from Mary Baker Eddy's childhood, .....
Her mother had taught her to say, after she had been punished for any naughtiness, "I'm sorry and will not do so again." One day when sorely troubled by doubts, she asked her mother whether she thought that eternal punishment really was true. Her mother sighed deeply and answered, "Mary, I suppose it is." "What if we repent," said Mary, "and tell God 'we are sorry and will not do it again' -- Will God punish us? Then He is not as good as my mother and He will find me a hard case." (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.13)
As we have seen, in her old age, Mary Baker Eddy would remember her father's "iron will" and "tight harness," but perhaps by the time his last two children, Martha and Mary, had reached their teens, even Mark had softened a little. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.30-1)
Some of Mary Baker's early poems echo the sentiments Albert expresses in his letter, as in this simple stanza:
Weep Lay weep
There is joy in weeping
Christ hath all our tears
Within his own kind keeping
Those he loveth best
He Chastens till they love Him. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.50-1)
Mrs. Glover's school seems to have failed in a matter of months, for reasons that were probably more financial than pedagogic. ..... Eddy refused to use the ferule or whip to discipline the children, and this may have been a problem with some parents. Sarah Clement Kimball, who herself attended the school, confirmed this, saying that one day when she had been especially naughty, Mrs. Glover sent her out to choose her own switch, and when she returned with a tiny little twig, Mrs. Glover just smiled and sent her back to her desk. This kind of pedagogy seems right and normal to us today, but the typical nineteenth-century parent was more inclined to believe that sparing the rod was spoiling the child, and that iron discipline was the only way to get children to learn. Parents may not have appreciated Mary Baker Glover's methods in her kindergarten, but all the evidence we have is that her little pupils adored her. Throughout her life, Mary Baker Eddy would have a wonderful way with children, and small girls particularly would follow her around like shadows and seek her constant attention. ...... (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.75)
....The Nashua Gazette of March 15, 1860, ran the following story, under the heading "Female Bravery":
A North Groton (N.H.) correspondent of the Concord Patriot writes that on the 20th ult., Dr. Patterson, a dentist in that place, while employed in splitting wood before his door, was assaulted by two men, father and son, named Wheet. The elder Wheet rushed upon him with a shovel, which the doctor knocked from his hands with his axe, at the same time losing hold of the axe.
The elder assailant then attempted to get him by the throat, but the Doctor knocked him down, when young Wheet rushed upon the Doctor with the axe, and striking him on the head, stunned and felled him to the ground. The father then seized him by the neck, and called upon his son to strike. The son was about to comply with the murderous request, when the wife of Dr. Paterson, almost helpless by long disease, rushed from her bed to the rescue of her husband, and throwing herself before the intended victim, seized, with unwonted strength, the son who held the axe and prevented him from dealing the intended blow. Help soon came, the assailants fled, and the feeble but brave wife was carried back to her bed. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.106-7)
.... the first of these refers to treatments at a distance -- what Mrs. Mrs. Patterson in her letter to Quimby calls "angel treatments." This was an idea and a practice which Quimby himself undoubtedly took from the animal magnetism model set up by Anton Mesmer. Perhaps at this point I should make it plain that the expression "animal magnetism" has nothing to do with animals but refers to that magnetism exerted by the mind, or anima.
By Quimby's time, it was accepted in mesmeric theory that healing effects were or could be independent of the proximity of the mesmerist to the subject, and Phineas Quimby found important practical applications for this notion. Quimby firmly believed that he had clairvoyant powers and he could help others to recover their health, whether he was in the same room with them or separated by many miles. He went so far as to establish a special payment rate for those occasions when he would reach out, at a pre-specified time of day, to distant patients. In one incident detailed for our admiration in the Quimby Manuscripts, one gentleman wrote to Quimby begging the doctor's help in curing his long paralyzed wife. Quimby wrote that at a specific day and time he would administer and absent treatment, and the members of Quimby's entourage asserted that at the appointed time he got up and retired to another room alone to concentrate his thoughts on the absent woman. Also at or around the appointed time, the paralyzed woman began to feel tinglings and movements in her legs and was able to get up and walk that very evening, to her husband's deep gratitude. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.134-5)
Mr. Dresser,
Sir: I enclose some lines of mine in memory of our much-loved friend, which perhaps you will not think overwrought in meaning: others must of course.
I am constantly wishing that you would step forward into the place he has vacated. I believe you would do a vast amount of good, and are more capable of occupying his place than any other I know of.
Two weeks ago I fell on the sidewalk, and struck my back on the ice, and was taken up for dead, came to consciousness amid a storm of vapours from cologne, chloroform, ether, camphor, etc., but to find myself the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby.
The physician attending said I had taken the last step I ever should, but in two days I got out of my bed alone and will walk; but yet I confess I am frightened, and out of that nervous heat my friends are forming, spite of me, the terrible spinal affection from which I have suffered so long and hopelessly. . . . Now can't you help me? I believe you can. I write this with this feeling: I think that I could help another in my condition if they had not placed their intelligence in matter. This I have not done, and yet I am slowly failing.
Won't you write me if you will undertake for me if I can get to you?
Respectfully,
Mary M. Patterson.
Julius Dresser replied three weeks later. he was by this time working as a newspaperman in Yarmouth, Maine, and he made it plain that his enthusiasm for the work of Dr. Quimby had waned and that he had no ambition at all to take over the doctor's work:
I am sorry to hear of your misfortune, and hope that with courage and patience neither the prediction of the Dr. nor your own fear will prove true, and I think they won't. That is my prediction. ...... As to turning doctor myself, and undertaking to fill Dr. Quimby's place and carry on his work, it is not to be thought of for a minute. Can an infant do a strong man's work?" To be sure he did a great work, but what will avail in fifty years from now, if his theory does not come out, and if he and his ideas pass among the things that were, to be forgotten? He did work some change in the minds of the people, which will grow with the development and progress in the world. He helped to make them progress. They will progress faster for his having lived and done his work. So with Jesus. He had an effect that was lasting and still exists. He did not succeed nor has Dr. Quimby succeeded in establishing the science he aimed to do. The true way to establish it is, as I look at it, to lecture and by a paper and make that the means, rather more than the curing, to introduce the truth. To be sure faith without works is dead, but Dr. Quimby's work killed him, whereas if he had spared himself from his curing, and given himself partly and as considerately, to getting out his theory, he would then have, at least, come nearer success in this great aim than he did.
No, I wouldn't cure if I could, not to make a practice of it, as Dr. Q did. Yet Mrs. Patterson, I would be glad to help you in your trouble. But I am not able to do it. My attention has not been given that way and my occupation ... is of a nature such as to keep my mind from even the theory, much more the practice of it. I do not even help my wife out of her troubles, if she has serious ones, and of all the world I could help her quickest & easiest, owing to the greater interchange of mind. My wife has lately given birth to a son ... and I have a good opportunity to know whether I could easily become a Dr. or not. But I am not even Dr. for them. How then could I cure those to whose mind I have little or comparatively no access at all? (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.158-9) letter at Wikisource
Over the next thirty years or so, Mary Baker Eddy was to give various accounts of this self-healing and what it meant to her. Thus in 1871, in a letter to Mr. W.W. Wright, a prospective student, the then Mrs. Mary Glover wrote:
I have demonstrated upon myself in an injury occasioned by a fall, that it did for me what surgeons could not do. Dr. Cushing of this city pronounced my injury incurable and that I could not survive three days because of it, when on the third day I rose from my bed and to the utter confusion of all I commenced my usual avocations and notwithstanding displacements, etc., I regained the natural position and functions of the body. How far my students can demonstrate in such extreme cases depends on the progress they have made in this Science. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.162-3) letter at Wikisource Georgine Milmine "The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy" includes Dr. Cushing's affidavit denying that he claimed she was incurable
As Dr. Cushing recalled, Mrs. Patterson had indeed suffered some kind of concussion and was semi-hysterical, complaining of severe pain in her head and neck. But there ahd never been any suggestion on his part that her injury was so serious as to induce paralysis or death. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.163)
The only actual case I ever saw of my aunt's power was, I think, in 1867, when she was called to Tilton to see a niece, who was supposed to be at the point of death. My aunt Mary came from Lynn, and stopped to get dinner, much to the disgust of the sick girl's mother. she went in to see the patient, and looked at her, sniffed, and said, 'You are going back to Lynn with me tomorrow on the 2 o'clock train.' And she did, walking apparently well as ever.
The immediate reaction of the Sanborton Bridge relatives to Ellen's recovery was intense relief: Martha Rand Baker told a friend many years later that "such a change came over the household. we all felt ... 'the angel of the Lord appeared, and glory shone around.'" However, the relief and pleasure were short-lived, and this "healing" occasioned a further deterioration in Mrs. Glover's relations with her sisters and sister-in-law and their families. Abigail Tilton had not been at home when Ellen recovered, but in a letter to her sister Martha she expressed deep exasperation with Mary's behavior and told of her fear that "no real good will result from all the stir she has made about Ellen." (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.176-7)
While I was engaged in uncovering and exposing the falsity of so-called spiritualism, I was present in a group which included Mr. Colby of the Banner of Light, Lucy Larcom, and the poet, John Greenleaf Whittier. When I entered the room, those present said, "Now she will have testimony that must convince her." ...
To show them their error, I consented and the young woman said, "I see a bright company of angels about her head." She then proceeded to give a minute and exact account of the following touching incident in my early career: Upon my father's estate in Tilton, New Hampshire, was a small cottage house which my father gave rent free to an invalid widow and her daughter. They were saintly people, members of our church, and my godly father was glad to help them. At the time of which I speak, the window was very ill and mother and I called to sing and pray with them. ...
At the conclusion of the recital of this incident by the medium, there were tears in my eyes, so perfect was the representation of this memory of bygone years. Said Mr. Colby to the young woman, "Can you give me the name of the hymn which was sung?" She replied, "They sang 'Sweet Hour of Prayer.'" It was indeed the anthem we had sung.
The company was much moved and said, "Now, you must see that spiritualism is true." :No," I said, "I do not see it."
"Then," said Mr. Colby, "you shall have further proof." He said to the spiritualist, "Describe her mother." Instantly I pictured in thought the exact opposite of my mother. The medium described precisely what I held in though and the company beamed with satisfaction. "There," said they, "you have your proof."
"Yes," I remarked, "I have proof that spiritualism is no way connected with the departed, but is simple mind-reading. My mother was the exact opposite of that which has been described. she was short, stout, blue-eyed, and fair-haired. I formed in my though the exact opposite of my mother and she read my thought." (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.179-81)
the second letter to Sarah Bagley also makes quite plain that Kennedy had bough into the idea of absent treatment .... back to early days of mesmerism. Kennedy wrote:
It should not be necessary that we should be present in matter to be known and felt. I will try and call on you tonight at 9 o'clock tell me if you realize my presence when you write it is not necessary you should see me with your eyes. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.191)
One source of dissent from the beginning centered on the fees Mrs. Glover charged for her courses. for her very first class she seems to have asked $100, though it is far from clear that any student paid the full amount. For example, in his later court testimony, Charles Stanley said that he had parted, reluctantly, with $25 or $50. By 1870 or 1872 the fee had risen to $300, though again, each student's personal situation was taken into account, and fees were lowered or waived for those that were unable to pay in full. It is interesting to note, for example, that Dorcus Rawson, a single woman working in the shoe industry, paid in full, whereas her affluent married sister Miranda Rice entered the class for free, because she was unable to persuade her husband to put up the money.
For the shoe operatives and housekeepers .... astonishingly large sum. ..... Later in Retrospection and Introspection Mrs. Eddy acknowledged this fact:
When God impelled me to set a price on my instruction in Christian Science Mind-healing, I could think of no financial equivalent for an impartation of a knowledge of that divine power which heals; but I was led to name three hundred dollars as the price for each pupil in one course of lessons at my College,—a startling sum for tuition lasting barely three weeks. This amount greatly troubled me. I shrank from asking it, but was finally led, by a strange providence, to accept this fee. (Ret., p.50)
It is unclear to me whether it was Providence or some daringly accurate estimate of what the market would bear that determined Mrs. Glover's fee structure, but in the long run it served her well. Freud famously asserted that people value only the services they pay for,, and the history of Christian Science proves that, ultimately, all those who paid to take class with Mrs. Glover got at the very least their money's worth, even if they soon rebelled against their teacher and struck out on their own as mental healers.
.....
On Kennedy's recommendation she persuaded her husband and brother to sign up with Mrs. Glover for a twelve-week course of instruction. Stanley and Tuttle signed the following agreement:
Lynn, Aug. 15, 1870. we, the undersigned, do hereby agree in consideration of instruction and manuscripts received from Mrs. Mary Baker glover, to pay one hundred dollars in advance and ten per cent annually on the income that we receive from practicing or teaching the science. We also agree to pay her one thousand dolalrs in case we do not practice or teach the above-mentioned science that she has taught us.
Stanley and Tuttle proved to be disastrous students. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.194-5)
Wright's brilliant polemic has a four-pronged attack: (1) He returns to his initial accusation that Mrs. Glover was teaching mesmerism under a fancy new name, and he asserts that although mesmerism had its successes as a healing technique in certain types of cases (a probable bow in the direction of PP Quimby and his at times ally Richard Kennedy), its use must be acknowledged to the patient up front, since the subject submits to the control of the mesmerist. Wright points to certain medical conditions -- bullet wounds, cancerous growths, ....cannot respond to "rubbing," and which might have yielded to "recognized and tested therapies." "Someone might die under Christian Science care who might have lived under traditional medicine," writes Wright, expressing a criticism that would be repeated, .... If Mrs. Glover's manuscripts were, as she claimed, the product of revelation, why did they take so long to draft, and why did they change over time?
Wright's letter ended with a challenge ..... First. to restore the dead to life again, .... Second. To walk upon the water, ......
Mrs. Glover made no public response to Wright's final challenge ....
Oh, how I have worked, pondered and constantly imparted my discoveries to this wicked boy that I shall not name and all for what! .... I may as well jest over the absurd striplings that turn to rend me, to threaten me with disgrace and imprisonment for giving to them a discovery that money cannot pay for, but a little good breeding might at least have helped to reward the toil, and scorn, and obscurity, by which it was won for them.
To her old friend Fred Ellis she wrote in August of 1872 that "Dr. R K had called Wright to his rooms and has entered into conspiracy with him against me, and this is the meaning of that dreadful threat." She reports that Kennedy was spreading wicked rumors about her, "telling, no one can live near me without being defamed, quotes Dr Patterson as a Victim!" and asks for Ellis's help in defending her good name. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.200-3)
I received a letter today from George B[arry], giving me an account of a strange experience which my teacher passed through on Friday last, and which he was present to witness. It seems he called upon her with Mr. H[itchings], and, on rapping, heard a voice, hardly above a whisper, say "Come in." On entering, she arose to meet them, but fell back, lost consciousness, and, to their belief, was gathering herself on the other side. George went after Mrs. R[ice], who came, and immediately a change took place. George had called on her mentally to come back, but Mrs. R. called loudly, and for some afar off, and an answer came, faintly at first, but stronger and stronger, til she was able to sit up and have the Bible and her manuscripts read to her, and finally, recovered.
Bancroft comments on this incident:
Many times while writing her book Mrs. Eddy was obliged to call for assistance from the few students who had not deserted her. I have been present on such occasions. Mrs. Eddy, on her part, was always ready to respond to the call of these students, and was able to assist them.
There is much to this incident that I find puzzling, for example what exactly Bancroft understood by the key phrase "gathering herself on the other side." I assume he meant some form of deathlike unconsciousness, catatonia, or coma. But on the basis of Bancroft's account, it would seem that not only was Mrs. Glover subject to falling onto such states at this time in her life, but that her students were also, and that they established a technique for dealing with the condition that involved calling the sufferer back "to this side." ....
Sustaining her through all the hours of solitary labor and the external pressures was what we could call inspiration but what Mrs. Glover felt convinced was revelation. She later wrote of this period:
I had no time to borrow from Authors. Such a flood tide of truth was lifted upon me at times that it was overwhelming and I have drawn quick breath as my pen flew on, feeling as it were submerged in the transfiguration of spiritual ideas.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the earliest editions of Science And Health, put out before Mary Baker Eddy could afford the editorial assistance of educated gentlemen such as the Reverend Wiggin, were little more than illiterate ramblings. .....
When they highlight the major organizational revisions that Science and Health underwent, critics are not only complaining about the chronic disorganization of the writers ideas; they are also discrediting her claims that the book was the result of divine revelation. Revealed truth, according to the implied criteria .....
Marty Baker Eddy's main objections to Spiritualism are as follows:
1. Spiritualism makes personal sense, that is, material individuality even more important than does conventional religion, since it allows the person to continue unchanged after death.
2. Spiritualism never explains why the dead person would wish to return and retain contact with this earth -- why would the butterfly want to become a kind of caterpillar again, she remarks. "To admit the so-called dead and living commune together, is to decide the unfitness of both for their own separate positions. ... Any supposed mid-way between Life outside of matter, or in it, is a myth."Elsewhere she notes that to believe that we can communicate with immortality is like a man who knows only English claiming to read Greek ...
3. Spiritualism comes close to eliminating all individual responsibility and thus morality: .....
4. Most Spiritualist sessions are trickery and humbug and also immoral: ....
.... This is how Mary Baker Eddy summarizes this argument:
Because Jesus understood God better than did the Rabbis, he arrived at the conclusion in advance of them that he was Spirit and not matter, and that these never blend; also that there is but one Spirit, or Intelligence, therefore but one God, one Life, Love and Truth. All forms of belief deny this in the main, and contend that Intelligence is both God and man, that there are two separate entities or beings exercising antagonistic powers; also, that matter controls Spirit, that man is both matter and Spirit, and the Supreme being is God and man; also, that a third person named the devil, is another Intelligence and power, and that these three different personages, viz., God, man and the devil blend in one person. When we posses a true sense of our oneness with God, and learn we are Spirit alone, and not matter, we shall have no such opinions as these, but will triumph over all sickness, sin, and death, thus proving out God-being. That we are Spirit, and Spirit is God, is undeniably true, and judging by its fruits, (the rule our Master gave) we should say this is not only science, but Christianity; but the shocking audacity that calls itself God, and yet demonstrates only erring mortality, surprises us.! (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.214-21)
If the change called death dispossessed man of the belief of pleasure and pain in the body, universal happiness were secure at the moment of dissolution: "but this is not so; every sin and every error we possess at the moment of death remains after it the same as before, and our only redemption is in God, the Principle of man, that destroys the belief of intelligent bodies. When we gain the freedom of the Sons of God, we shall master sense with Soul. ... The false views entertained of pardoned sin, or universal and immediate happiness in the midst of sin, or, that we are changed in a moment from sin to holiness, are grave mistakes. To suddenly drop our earthly character, and become partakers of eternal life, without the pangs of a new birth, is morally impossible. ... as man goeth to sleep so shall he waken; when the belief of death closes our eyes on this phase of the dream of Life in matter, we shall waken, not to a final judgement or resurrection, not with a single change in character, but for the same judgement of Wisdom to go on in process of purification as before, until Truth finally destroyes error. When the final triumph of Soul over sense is achieved, the last trump has sounded, and not until then. (Science and Health, 1e, p.35-7)
Prayer was an area where Mrs. Eddy's radical ideas put her immediately at risk. As we shall see in the next chapter, during the suit brought against Stanley and Tuttle, Richard Kennedy introduced some very damaging testimony that Mrs. Glover had thrown Stanley out of her class because of his Baptist habit of prayer. The accusation that she discouraged prayer was to haunt her form many years, and she rebutted it over and over again, notably by choosing the heavily amended chapter on prayer as the open to the final revision of Science and Health. Yet given the persistence of this accusation, it is important to clarify what she says on this subject in the inflammatory 1875 text. Mrs. Eddy begins by taking a common sense, Jonathan Edwards approach to prayer, noting that given our definitions of God as an all-knowing being, living across the dimensions of time and seeking only our good, it is irrational to consider prayer as an opportunity to inform God of what is happening to us or ask him to give us what we desire. This is true even when we pray for good health: "Asking God to heal the sick has no effect to gain the ear of Love, beyond its ever-presence" (Science and Health, 1e, p.290)
Mrs. Eddy becomes more revolutionary -- or quite arguably, more in the original spirit of the Gospels -- when she notes critically how often prayer is used as a public display and substitute for action. "The danger of audible prayer, is that we fall into temptation through it, and become an involuntary hypocrite. First, by uttering what is not a real desire, and secondly, consoling ourself under sin with the recollection we have prayed over it. Hypocrisy is fatal to Christianity" (Science and Health, 1e, p.284) Or again: "Prayer is impressive; it gives momentary solemnity and elevation to thought, but does a state of ecstasy produce lasting benefit?" (Science and Health, 1e, p.285). Mrs. Eddy sees prayer as central and crucial to Christian life, since when we are praying we are consciously and intently seeking to reach out to God and uncover our essential spirituality. But the test of efficacy of our praying is its motive power: has praying changed our lives?
Prayer is sometimes employed, like a catholic confession, to cancel sin, and this impedes Christianity. Sin is not forgiven; we cannot escape its penalty. Being sorry for its committal is but one step towards reform, and the very smallest one; the next step that Wisdom requires is, the test of our sincerity, namely, a reformation. (Science and Health, 1e, p.284)
.....
Male and female cannot be in one person, but are in principle, and if God is a person his gender would be both male and female, these being the likeness of him, as the Scripture informs us. ... Gender is embraced in Spirit, else God could never have shadowed forth from out of Himself, the idea of male and female; this idea comes from Soul and not body, from Principle and not person. (Science and Health, 1e, p.236)
With even more daring she claims that woman is the higher of the two since she was the latter to be created: "We have not as much authority in science, for calling God masculine as feminine, the latter being the last, therefore the highest idea given of Him" (Science and Health, 1e, p.238)
.....
... She ends with an almost Roman Catholic reference for the Virgin Mary:
Those who were taught by him the science of being reached the glorious perception that God is the only author of man. The virgin mother first conceived this idea of God, and named it Jesus; the illumination of spiritual sense had put to silence personal sense with Mary, thus mastering material law and establishing through demonstration that God is the father of man. The science of being overshadowed the pure sense of the virgin mother with full recognition that Spirit is the basis of being. The idea we call substance, and Mary named Jesus, dwelt forever in the bosom of the father, in the principle of man, and woman perceived it because of her more spiritual nature. (Science and Health, 1e, p.303)
.... Mrs. Eddy was no political activist and no worker in the vineyards of female suffrage. Her role as she believed, was to provide with her science a new theoretical and spiritual advocacy for the primary equality of the sexes, and the mother -fatherhood of God. But she does make clear that she supports her politically and socially active sisters:
Law establishes a very unnatural difference between the rights of the two sexes; but science furnishes no precedent for such injustice, and civilization brings, in some measure, its mitigation, therefore it is a marvel that society should accord her less than either. Our laws are not impartial, to say the least, relative to the person, property, and parental claims of the two sexes; and if the elective enfranchisement of woman would remedy this evil without incurring difficulties of greater magnitude, we hope it will be effected. A very tenable means at present, is to improve society in general, and achieve a nobler manhood to frame our laws. If a dissolute husband deserts his wife, it should not follow that the wronged and perchance impoverished woman cannot collect her own wages, or enter into agreements, hold real estate, deposit funds, or surely claim her own offspring free from his right of interference. (Science and Health, 1e, p.321) (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.226-9) Excerpts of Mary Baker Eddy cited in "Mind Belief Principles: Training Guide For Willing Spiritual Powers" By Anna Watts, perhaps without attribution.
According to Mary Godfrey Parker, although Mrs. Glover ate her meals with the Nashes and shared the second floor with them, she was careful not to intrude into their lives. In particular, she made no attempt to interfere with the medical arrangements of the Nashes, who were committed to conventional treatment. Indeed, when Godfrey became concerned about the way the nurse was handling her baby grandniece, it was Mrs. Glover who calmed her down and recommended she not intervene. But Mrs. Glover did remark upon Mrs. Godfrey's finger; the latter had accidentally plunged a needle into her finger, it had become horribly swollen and painful and was wrapped in tar poultices. According to Mary Godfrey Parker, the day after Mrs. Glover noticed and touched the finger, her mother awoke after her first painless night and found the swelling vastly reduced. Mrs. Glover acknowledged the improvement and begged Mrs. Godfrey to take off the tar poutices and do nothing else to correct the problem but her confidence in healing. In eight days, the finger had healed completely; eventually even the deformation of the nail was corrected.
All this Mrs. Godfrey attributed to Mrs. Glover's healing powers, and so strong was her faith in her new friend that she called upon her in a real family emergency. Little Mary Godfrey was an extremely precious child since bother her brothers had died in infancy. Always delicate and subject to attacks of membranous croup, Mary became terribly ill one winter's night, a few months after her return home to Chelsea from the stay with the Nashes. In despair, Mrs. Godfrey wrapped the sick child up in blankets and took the train to Lynn, despite the vigorous protests of the child's aunt who regarded Mrs. Glover at that time as a disreputable quack. Upon tumbling without warning through the back door of the Board Street house, the Godfrey's were greeted calmly and warmly by Mrs. Glover, and immediately little Mary began to play as if nothing was wrong.
The Godfrey parents were both eternally grateful to Mrs. Glover for her help, and in turn Mrs. Glover deeply valued Mrs. Godfrey as a friend. Even though Mrs. Godfrey refused to become a Christian Science practitioner, she remained a loyal supporter and loaned copies of Science and Health to interested acquaintances. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.236-7)
The plaintiff humbly complains that the said Daniel H. Spofford of Newburyport, is a mesmerist, and practices the art of mesmerism, and that ...
This extraordinary suit was filed, above all place, in Salem, thus ensuring that everyone would make the connection between the crime Daniel Spofford was being accused of an witchcraft!
Not surprisingly, the Spofford suit in Salem caught the attention of the press, not just in Newburyport, Ipswich and Lynn, but in Boston too. Christian Science was begining to gain a reputation as a good story. The following report from the Newburyport Herald of May 16, 1878, captures the prevailing opinion well:
In the Supreme Judicial court at Salem, in Tuesday, a bill in equity was brought more befitting the new institution at Danvers [i.e., the nearby state hospital for the insane] than the highest tribunal of the Commonwealth. The bill was nominally ......
Mrs. Eddy's lawyer refused to plead the case, and Mrs. Brown herself refused to appear in court. Mrs. Eddy was given power of attorney, and Edward Arens was to argue the case before the judge. Mrs. Eddy is said not to have been in favor of Miss Brown bringing the suit. If this is true, it marks the beginning of some needed realism on her part. Yet since the bill in equity had been filed and scheduled, she was persuaded to give it her full support, and she attended the preliminary hearing with a crowd of twenty supporters, whom the Boston Globe reporter wittily dubbed a cloud of witnesses. .... Milmine summarizes the outcome of the suit thus:
On Friday morning the crowd which had assembled at the Salem Court House was disappointed. Mr. Spofford himself did not appear, but his attorney, Mr. Noyes, appeared for him and filed a demurrer, which Judge Gray sustained, declaring with a smile that it was not within the power of the Court to control Mr. Spofford's mind. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.254-5) complaint cited in God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church By Caroline Fraser
(Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.254-5) article also cited in God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church By Caroline Fraser
On November 7 the preliminary hearing was held in Boston Municipal Court. The press and the public had been primed, and there was an overwhelming presumption of guilt against the accused. Thus the Boston Globe of October 30 1878 featured an article entitled "That Conspiracy" which began:
If there is any foundation in the accusations which led to the arrest of Asa G. Eddy and Edward J. Arnes, by State detectives yesterday, the crime is one of the blackest that has come to light for some time, and its exact parallel has seldom, if ever, been seen. The officers engaged in the work have been very successful in cases of a like nature, and it is hardly possible that they have made a mistake in this instance; still the following allegations may be without foundation. It appears that a woman in Lynn, known as Mrs. "Dr." Eddy, pretends to have a power from some divine source to heal the sick, and has imparted this knowledge to others, among them Dr. Daniel H. Spofford of this city. It is claimed that Spofford was more successful in his treatment than Mrs. Eddy, and that last spring, in order to get rid of a dangerous rival, the Eddy woman and her friends induced an Ipswich woman to file a petition in the Supreme Court praying that Spofford be enjoined from practicing his art. The case is still pending. Finding that tehy could not dispose of their rival by any process of law, the Eddy combination next resorted to stronger measures, and thinking to find someone who, for money, would do their bidding, Dr. Eddy and one Edward J. Arnes visited Boston and bargained with a Portland street "bummer" to put Dr. Spofford out of the way, in other words, to
(According to Gillian Gill and other sources the proper spelling for Edward J. Arnes is actually Edward J. Arens)
....
Sargent openly admitted in court that he was trying to extort money from Arens and Eddy on false pretenses, but he claimed that he never intended to make an attempt on Daniel Spofford's life, and that his "purpose in acquiescing in the scheme against Dr. Spofford was to give him up to the authorities after making what money I could out of it." (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.260-1)
Story of this arrest also told in "The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy" by Georgine Milmine Chapter XIII although Gillian Gill considers her a biased source.
Story also told in "Mary Baker Eddy, Her Early Life and the Founding of Christian Science" by Lorraine Michaels a former follower of Elizabeth Clare Prophet who kept her religious faith and seems to be writing to expose those she considers false prophets.
.... In a 1907 interview he gave to James Slaght of the New York World, George Washington Glover II told one fascinating story about his experience in 1879: Within a week of my arrival in Boston I learned many strange things. The strangest of these was that the rebellious students were employing black arts to harass and destroy my mother. The longer I remained with my mother, .... mother made it all clear to me ....
It was Kennedy that mother talked of most. He was a master hand at the black arts, as mother pictured him daily to me, until at last I made a up my mind to cut him short of his evil work. But I kept my plan to myself. One morning I slipped my revolver into my overcoat pocket and left our boarding house. ...
I had never seen this man, but I knew where he had his offices, and I walked straight there. He was doing business as a healer, and his name, lettered on a brass plate, was on the door of his office.
The girl who admitted me asked if I was a patient, and I answered "Yes." ... The unsuspecting girl led me straight to Kennedy's office, on the second floor of the house, opened the door, bowed me into the room, and hurried away. Kennedy was before me, seated at his desk.
He looked up smilingly and asked, "Are you in need of some treatment?"
Pulling out my revolver I walked up to him, pressed the cold muzzle of the weapon against his head, and said, "I have made up my mind that you are in need of treatment."
Then while he shook like a jellyfish in terror, I gave him his one chance to live. I told him that my mother knew of his black art tricks to ruin her and that I had made up my mind to stop him or to kill him.
"You needn't tell me that you are not working your game of hypnotism to rob us of friends and to drive mother into madness," said I. "My one word to you is this: if we have to move from one other boarding house I will search you out and shoot you like a mad dog."
I shall never forget how that man pleaded for his life at the end of my weapon and swore that the black art accusation was false and that my mother deceived me.
But it did the business all right. We were not ordered out of another boarding house that winter. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.277-8) letter also cited in Current Opinion, Volume 42 By Frank Crane
We the undersigned, while we acknowledge and appreciate the understanding of Truth imparted to us by our teacher, Mrs. Mary B. G. Eddy, led by Divine Intelligence to perceive with sorrow that departure from the straight and narrow road (which alone leads to growth of Christ-like virtues) made manifest by frequent ebullitions of temper, love of money, and the appearance of hypocrisy, cannot longer submit to such Leadership; therefore, without aught of hatred, revenge or petty spite in our hearts, from a sense of duty alone, to her, the Cause, and ourselves, do most respectfully withdraw our names from the Christian Science Association and Church of Christ (Scientist).
S. Louise Durant,
Margaret J. Dunshee,
Dorcas B. Rawson,
Elizabeth G. Stuart,
Jane L. Straw,
Anna B. Newman,
James C. Howard,
Miranda R. Rice.
21st October, 1881. ... (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.282) letter also cited in "McClure's Magazine," Volume 29 and in "The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy" Georgine Milmine
..... Hearing what had happened, Julia Bartlett rushed to Lynn by the next train to offer comfort to her leader. she found Mrs. Eddy at home with her husband and two other students.
I quietly took a seat near them as did Dr. Eddy also, and listened to Mrs. Eddy who talked with a power such as I had never heard before. They were wonderful words she was speaking while we young students were receiving of the great spiritual illumination which had come through her glorious triumph over evil.
Just before I had entered the room she was sitting with the others and the burden was still heavy upon her, when all at once she rose from her chair, stepped out in the room, her face radiant and with a far-away look as if she was beholding things the eye could not see. She began to talk and prophesy of the blessing which would reward the faithful while the transgressor cannot escape the punishment which evil brings on itself. Her language was somewhat in the style of the Scriptures. When she began, the three with her, seeing how it was, caught up their pencils and paper and took down what she said, "Why I haven't any body," and as she came back to the thought of those about her, they were so moved by what they had seen and heard their eyes were filled with tears and one was kneeling by the couch sobbing. ... Those three days were wonderful. It was as if God was talking to her and she would come to us and tell us the wonderful relations that came. We were on the Mount. We felt that we must take the shoes from off our feet, that we were standing on holy ground. What came to me at the time will never leave me.
After the rebellion, Mary Baker Eddy was declared pastor of the church by the rump of the membership, and the rebels themselves were expelled from the Christian Scientist Association, rather than permitting them to withdraw. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.283-4)
That Mr Eddy suffered greatly, and that Mrs. Eddy suffered with him in her deep affection and sympathy is vouched for. a student who came and went ...
.... This was before daybreak on Saturday morning, June 3, 1882.
(Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.288) cited in The Life of Mary Baker Eddy By Sibyl Wilbur additional copy at Haiti Trust
.... She meant, quite specifically, that they had mentally poisoned him, as she explained in an interview in the Boston Globe on June 4:
Mr Eddy, her husband, had died that morning, and she appeared much overcome at the event, and could scarcely control herself enough to make the following statement: Her husband, she said, had died with every symptom of arsenical poisoning. Both he and she knew it to be the result of malicious mesmeric influence exerted upon his mind by certain parties here in Boston, who had sworn to injure them. She had formerly had the same symptoms of arsenical poison herself, and it was some time before she discovered it to be mesmeric work of an enemy. Soon after her marriage her husband began to manifest the same symptoms and had since shown them from time to time; but was, with her help, able to overcome them. A few weeks ago she observed that he did not look well, and when questioned he said that he was unable to get the idea of this arsenical poison out of his mind. He had been steadily growing worse ever since, but still had hoped to overcome the trouble until the last. After the death the body had turned black.
......
The death of Asa Gilbert Eddy should not be melodramatized. .... It is perhaps true that Eddy did not take the strychnine and digitalis that Dr. Noyes had prescribed for him, but these medications would have been palliative at best. ..... But it is as inaccurate to say that Christian Science killed Gilbert Eddy as it is to say that it could have healed him, given the right circumstances. .... (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.288-9)
By 1882 Christian Science had moved out of Lynn and penetrated the Greater Boston area, but it was still barely a blip on the cultural radar of the nation as a whole. Numbering its adherents in the dozens rather than the hundreds, the movement had defined itself as the new kind of Christianity, not just an alternative healing system, but it was still more noted for controversy, sensation, and schism than for faith, hope and charity. Its self-proclaimed leader and founder, Mary Baker Eddy, had perhaps managed to live down her reputation as the notorious divorced Dr./Mrs. Mary Glover (formerly Patterson), but she was still regarded by the press and the public as a quotable crackpot rather than a religious leader. Had Mrs. Eddy in 1882, like her husband, succumbed to physical illness or mental arsenic, she and Christian Science would have sunk into oblivion, meriting not so much as a footnote in the history of nineteenth-century American religious cults.
Yet a bare six years after Gilbert Eddy's death Christian Science had a membership numbering in the thousands and had moved through the Midwest and into California and Oregon, its startling progress signaled by the vigor with which it was being denounced by the clergy, the medical profession, and the press. By 1900 Christian Science churches had sprung up in most American cities, their size, elegance, and freedom from red ink proclaiming the promise of the new sect and the power of its leader. By 1905 Mrs. Eddy, whom respectable Lynn had once snubbed and thrown stones at, was regarded with reverence bordering on adoration by men and women all over the land and in several other countries and was widely hailed in the American press as the most powerful woman in the United States. Science and Health, of which Daniel Spofford had barely managed to sell one thousand copies by 1877, had become a best seller, guaranteeing a nice income for its author, publisher, and printer. .....
.....
.... Yet the fact of Mrs. Eddy's meteoric rise is indisputable, the whys and hows of it are hotly debated. This debate centers on religion, on the importance of religious faith to Mrs. Eddy personally, and on the value of her religious theory and practice.
Given that Mrs. Eddy is famous because she founded a new religious sect, it is interesting that non-Christian science commentators ... though divided on many issues, are united in insisting that God played no part in the Eddy phenomenon. These critics disagree about the existence and nature of God and what management strategies He may pursue with His human creation, but all agree that it is impossible to account for Mrs. Eddy's career in her own terms -- that is, to view her life as a special testimony to the eternal, unchanging, omnipresent power of God, as elucidated in Science and Health. The nonreligious refuse to see the hand of God in human affairs in general and in Christian Science in particular. The religious refuse specifically and indignantly to acknowledge even the possibility that God might have chosen Mary Baker Eddy as His instrument.
I confess that this religio-secular consensus on Mrs. Eddy had considerable appeal for me when I began this project. Like Edwin Dakin or Martin Gardner, I am generally loathe to invoke the hand of God whenever something surprising occurs in my biographical subject's life. I confess to sympathizing with those who ... consider Mrs. Eddy to be deluded. .... But by the time I had researched and written my account of Mrs. Eddy's first sixty years, I had become convinced that the emphasis on purely non-religious factors was self-defeating, and that Mrs. Eddy's critics were too blinded by their own prejudices to offer any useful or illuminating account of her. Not one of the non-religious explanations in itself (she was crazy, she cared only for power and money, she was a shameless huckster, she was bad) begins to account for the phenomenon of Mrs. Eddy. When applied all at once, as they commonly are, they form not the links in a strong chain of logic but a number of disparate objects perilously kept in the air by second rate jugglers.
According to our personal metaphysical systems, we may variously consider the visions and voices so consistently met with in religious history as messages from God, as delusions, or as manifestations of God through delusions, but we can agree that these "Tolle, Lege" experiences are dramatically effective motivators and instruments of change in human affairs. What matters, from both a historical and biographical viewpoint, is whether the vision changes the person's life and activates him or her to achieve piratical things which, on the scale of activity would be placed between difficult and impossible. ..... (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.295-7)
For a woman of her age and experience who had spent much of her prime lying exhausted and pain wracked in her bed, Mrs. Eddy was now a miracle of dynamism and resilience. But even she had limits to what she could accomplish in a day, and she was more aware than many around her that she would need to ration her personal resources for the task ahead. On aging woman, even if inspired by God, could not get a new religious movement off the ground alone, and finding good lieutenants and aides had by this point become essential. .....
As a leader of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy needed someone to help her ....
Surprisingly, Mrs. Eddy actually found someone who could and would perform this wide range of functions, in the person of Calvin A. Frye, a thirty-seven-year-old widower and recent student of Christian Science from Lawrence Massachusetts, then making his living as a machinist. ....
That a young and strong man like Frye was willing to drop everything and become Mrs. Eddy's lifelong factotum is indeed odd, and its clear that his choice was not made for monetary reasons. ....
Why then, did he stay, and why did she keep him? Why did he serve, disliked, mocked, plotted against by fellow members of the household, ignored, snubbed, and finally calumniated by the outside world? ....
The answer to .... lies, I feel, in the community of religious feelings they shared, .... (Few additional reasons given in the book, while more reasons why he might be unlikely to stay are provided.) .... (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.302-3)
.... Testimony to the power and effect of Mrs. Eddy's classes abounds in the reminiscences collected by the Mother Church, but I shall quote here two very different people who attended class with Mrs. Eddy at about the same time.
The first is from Lulu Blackman, ... and who after considerable struggles, first to accept her own potential as a healer and then to understand the doctrine of Malicious Animal Magnetism, embraced Christian Science:
When she entered the Class-room, I saw her for the first time. Intuitively, the members of the class rose at her entrance, and remained standing until she was seated. She made her way to a slightly raised platform, turned and faced us. She wore ....... Then, still standing, she faced her class as one who knew herslf to be a teacher by divine right. She turned to the student at the end of the first row of seats and took direct mental cognizance of this one, plainly knocked at the door of this individual consciousness. It was as if a question had been asked and answered and a benediction given. ...... No audible word voiced the purely mental contact. Experience has been the lightning flash, that has revealed to me something of the mass mentality she confronted.
A very different student was the reverend James Henry Wiggin, .....
From hearing Mrs. Eddy preach, from reading her book (however carefully), from talking with her, you do not get an adequate idea of her mental powers, unless you hear her also in her classes. Not only is she glowingly earnest in presenting her convictions, but her language and illustrations are remarkably well chosen. She is quick in repartee, and keenly turns a jest upon her questioner, but not offensively of unkindly. A brief exposition of the Book of Job, who one day entered incidentally into her statement of how God is to be found, would have done honor to any ecclesiastic. Critical ;listeners are often astonished at the strong hold she has upon her thought, and at the clearness of her statements, even when they cannot agree with her. While she is sharp to detect variations from her own view, and to expose the difference, she governs herself in the midst of discussion. In fact, Rev. M. B. G. Eddy is a natural class-leader, and three hours pass away in her lessons before you know it. (The Christian Science Journal, Vol. 4, May 1886, p. 39)
Wiggen makes it clear that Mrs. Eddy's enormous success with her classes rested on her ability not only to give inspiring lectures, but also to interact deeply and personally with each student, to ask and answer questions, and to move confidently onto topics as they came up, rather than just sticking strictly to a format or schedule. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.319-20) letter cited in God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church By Caroline Fraser
(Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.319-20) second letter cited in The Christian Science Standard Volume 6, Number 1 (January 1995)
Most apparent was her lack as a child of what she herself liked to call a "classical education," but she also had enjoyed few opportunities to explore high culture as an adult woman. ..... but never mastered, and, she never wholly got over more basic problems with spelling, punctuation, and paragraphing. ..... Yet none of this was sufficient preparation for the book length work of theological dissertation and Biblical exegesis which she began to struggle with as early as 1866.
.....
.... Surprisingly, given the difficult circumstances under which it was launched and given its founders limited journalistic experience, The Christian Science Journal was to achieve everything Mary Baker Eddy had hoped for, and it was to play a crucial role in spreading the new religion outside the boundaries of New England. After the first three or four issues, the journal was claiming a readership of some three thousand subscribers.
.....
Such standard marketing ploys can work only so far, and in the end people subscribed to the Journal because, from the outset, Mrs. Eddy had hit upon the kind of material that people liked to read. Perhaps the most effective of all the sections of the Journal was that devoted to firsthand testimonials from people who had been healed. Perhaps especially in the far reaches of the continent, where people did not have easy access to modern medical care, an enormous impact was made by the publishing of letters from average citizens, detailing how ill they had been and how well they now felt, thanks to Christian Science. As Penny Hansen has pointed out in her study, the Journal is a fascinating repository of information about sickness and health in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, and it gives the medical profession a resounding vote of no-confidence. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.324-5) Penny Hansen, "Woman's Hour: Feminist Implications of Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science Movement 1885-1910 (PhD. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1981)
In some forthright pieces Mrs. Eddy responds to some of the "Uncristian Rumors" and "Maliscious Reports" being spread about her. In "Falshood," written and published in 1885, she details the charges made against her, and denies them:
That I take opium; that I am an infidel, a mesmerist, a medium, a “pantheist;” or that my hourly life is prayerless, or not in strict obedience to the Mosaic Decalogue, — is not more true than that I am dead, as is oft reported. The St. Louis Democrat is alleged to have reported my demise, and to have said that I died of poison, and bequeathed my property to Susan Anthony.
The opium falsehood has only this to it: Many years ago my regular physician prescribed morphine, which I took, when he could do no more for me. Afterwards, the glorious revelations of Christian Science saved me from that necessity and made me well, since which time I have not taken drugs, with the following exception: When the mental malpractice of poisoning people was first undertaken by a mesmerist, to test that malpractice I experimented by taking some large doses of morphine, to see if Christian Science could not obviate its effect; and I say with tearful thanks, “The drug had no effect upon me whatever.” The hour has struck, — “If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”
The false report that I have appropriated other people's manuscripts in my works, has been met and answered legally. Both in private and public life, and especially through my teachings, it is well known that I am not a spiritualist, a pantheist, or prayerless. The most devout members of evangelical churches will say this, as well as my intimate acquaintances. None are permitted to remain in my College building whose morals are not unquestionable. I have neither purchased nor ordered a drug since my residence in Boston; and to my knowledge, not one has been sent to my house, unless it was something to remove stains or vermin. (Miscellaneous Writings/Chapter 08 pp.248-9)
It is fascinating to learn from the Journal that as early as 1885 rumors of Mrs. Eddy being dead were cropping up. ....
One issue featured in the pages of Christian Science Journal but not included by Mrs. Eddy in her Miscellaneous Writings was the tragedy of children who died under the care of Christian Science practitioners. The Christian Science Journal of March 1889 told of a young Christian Science mother in Pierre North Dakota, whose two small sons died under her treatment. The conclusion drawn by the mother herself, by her husband who wrote the piece for the Journal, and by the editors was that the children died because of the malicious mesmerism directed upon her and them by members of her community who were fiercely combating the recent conversions to Christian Science. In their biography of Mrs. Eddy, Milmine and Cather discuss the Journal piece at length and take a very different view. They attribute the children's deaths to their mothers obsession with Malicious Animal Magnetism and her consequent refusal to adopt standard medical procedures, and they conclude with this reasoned and moving statement which has been repeated in one form or another by many subsequent opponents of Christian Science:
This case is chosen for illustration for the reason that the parents of these children were not ignorant or colourless people; they were not mystics or dreamers or in any way "different." They were young, ambitious, warm-hearted, and affectionate; they loved each other and their children, and their home was full of cordiality and kindliness. Their children were fine children; one, now grown, has become a young scholar of promise. The woman was not a religious fanatic, but a young mother. She could combat "the last temptation" over her dead baby simply because she believed with all her heart and soul that it lay with her, as a test of her faith, whether her child lived or died. Logically there was nothing extravagant about her conduct. The martyrdoms of a thousand years have proved what men and women can do and endure under the tyranny of an idea. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy/Chapter 17 by Georgine Milmine
In their conclusion, Milmine and Cather strikingly use the word logically to characterize the young mother praying over her dead child, yet their presentation to the case in Pierre is itself, emotional, showing the logical problems inherent in first person testimony. What the Milmine presentation fails to deliver is any proof both that had the mother adopted other medical strategies her sons would have survived, and that their fatal illnesses were largely the result of her own fears about Malicious Animal Magnetism. In fact, as any memoir or biography of the period proves, in the 1880s children of intelligent, loving, and affluent parents, given the best available medical treatment still died in distressingly large numbers from common illnesses ..... (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.328-9)
As the following statements from an 1889 letter indicate, well before their professional relationship ended, Wiggin's private comments on Mrs. Eddy and her Science were in sharp disagreement with his public pronouncements:
Christian Science, on its theological side, is an ignorant revival of one form of ancient Gnosticism, that Jesus is to be distinguished from the Christ, and that his earthly appearance was phantasmal, not real and fleshly.
On its moral side, it involves what must follow from the doctrine that reality is a dream, and that if a thing is right in thought, why right it is, and that sin is non-existent, because God can behold no evil. Not that Christian Science believers generally see this, or practise evil, but the virus is within.
Religiously, Christian Science is a revolt from orthodoxy, but unphilosophically conducted, endeavouring to ride two horses.
Physically, it leads people to trust all to nature, the great healer, and so does some good. Great virtue in imagination! . . . Where there is disease which time will not reach, Christian Science is useless.
As for the High Priestess of it, . . . she is—well I could tell you, but not write. An awfully (I use the word advisedly) smart woman, acute, shrewd, but not well read, nor in any way learned. What she has, as documents clearly show, she got from P. P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, whom she eulogised after death as the great leader and her special teacher. . . . She tried to answer the charge of the adoption of Quimby's ideas, and called me in to counsel her about it; but her only answer (in print!) was that if she said such things twenty years ago, she must have been under the influence of animal magnetism, which is her devil. No church can long get on without a devil, you know. Much more I could say if you were here. . . .
People beset with this delusion are thoroughly irrational. Take an instance. Dr. R—— of Roxbury is not a believer. His wife is. One evening I met her at a friendly house. Knowing her belief, I ventured only a mild and wary dissent, saying that I saw too much of it to feel satisfied, etc. In fact, the Doctor said the same and told me more in private. Yet, later, I learned that this slight discussion made her ill, nervous, and had a bad effect.
One of Mrs. Eddy's followers went so far as to say that if she saw Mrs. Eddy commit a crime she should believe her own sight at fault, not Mrs. Eddy's conduct. An intelligent man told me in reference to lies he knew about, that the wrong was in us. "Was not Jesus accused of wrong-doing, yet guiltless?"
Only experience can teach these fanatics, i.e., the real believers, not the charlatans who go into it for money. . . . As for the book, if you have any edition since December, 1885, it had my supervision. Though now she is getting out an entirely new edition, with which I had nothing to do, and occasionally she has made changes whereof I did not know. The chapter B—— told you of is rather fanciful, though, to use Mrs. Eddy's language in her last note, her "friends think it a gem." It is the one called "Wayside Hints," and was added after the work was not only in type, but cast, because she wished to take out some twenty pages of diatribe on her dissenters. . . . I do not think it will greatly edify you, the chapter. As for clearness, many Christian Science people thought her early editions much better, because they sounded more like Mrs. Eddy. The truth is, she does not care to have her paragraphs clear, and delights in so expressing herself that her words may have various readings and meanings. Really, that is one of the tricks of the trade. You know sibyls have always been thus oracular, to "keep the word of promise to the ear, and break it to the hope."
There is nothing really to understand in "Science and Health" except that God is all, and yet there is no God in matter! What they fail to explain is, the origin of the idea of matter, or sin. They say it comes from mortal mind, and that mortal mind is not divinely created, in fact, has no existence; in fact, that nothing comes of nothing, and that matter and disease are like dreams, having no existence. Quimby had definite ideas, but Mrs. Eddy has not understood them.
When I first knew Christian Science, I wrote a defensive pamphlet called "Christian Science and the Bible" (though I did not believe the doctrine). . . . I found fair game in the assaults of orthodoxy upon Mrs. Eddy, and support in the supernaturalism of the Bible; but I did not pretend to give an exposition of Christian Science, and I did not know the old lady as well as I do now.
No, Swedenborg, and all other such writers, are sealed books to her. She cannot understand such utterances, and never could, but dollars and cents she understands thoroughly.
Wiggin's comments about Mrs. Eddy to his unidentified, but presumably male, friend deserve attention. A trained theologian, he deftly puts his finger on the most difficult and contested point in Christian Science -- the genesis of evil as illusion -- and as an intelligent man who had the opportunity to see Christian Scientist in action, he argues that the healing succeeds by allowing nature and time to do their work unhindered. (The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy by Georgine Milmine p. 337-8)
I have already argued in an earlier chapter that Science and Health is a flawed but fascinating and radical work. In its flaws and in its fascinations it bears the imprint of a single, unusual, unschooled but brilliant mind, Mary Baker Eddy's, and it should be judged by the same criteria as any other work of intelligence, for its intrinsic qualities and its historical importance. Mrs. Eddy was not an intellectual; she was not well read. ..... In her search to persuade the world of her great Truth, she was at times not always truthful, willing to take an idea from Wiggin, willing to recycle some of her old pre-Christian Science poems under new titles. But to equate such small inadequacies and minor deceits with plagiarism of major ideas is, I think, to miss the point about Mrs. Eddy.
I believe the reason Mary Baker Eddy reacted with uncharacteristic ineptitude to the first accusation of plagiarism launched against her by the Dressers in 1883 was that she could not credit them. They left her breathless with amazement, impotent with rage -- gobsmacked in the crude old Yorkshire expression. There was much in her life which she preferred to forget, large areas where she felt vulnerable to attack and as ready with with defense, but in her authorship of Science and Health she felt herself on higher, holy ground. Remembering all too well the years of trouble her book had cost her, knowing how little help of any kind she had received while writing, feeling that through all the toil her hand had been guided by God, she was simply unprepared to be accused of plagiarism. Non of the various defenses she prepared over the years could placate her critics. When stung by the charge that she owed everything to Quimby, she gave an unflattering portrait of the man she in fact revered, and she counterclaimed credit for some of his ideas and terminology, she was made to appear a liar and an ingrate. When she claimed that God had guided her hand as she wrote, that Science and Health was a work of divine revelation, she provoked outrage. In the end, she decided that the issue of the originality of her writings was one she could not win in the courts or the media or the academy, that it must be left up to God, who judges all hearts.
18
More Dissidents and New Rules
By the late 1880s Christian Science had established itself as a religious force to be reckoned with, not only in Boston but in Chicago, Detroit, Denver, San Francisco, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and smaller towns and villages throughout the continental United States. More than two hundred healers advertised regularly in the Christian Science Journal, which claimed ten thousand subscribers. By 1887, twenty-three, admittedly small, Christian Science institutes had grown up, and a church had been dedicated in Oconto Wisconsin, the first building to bear the historic name of "First Church of Christ, Scientist." (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.338-9)
When Mrs. Eddy travelled to New York ..... Mrs. Plunkett came forward after the adress and embraced Mrs. Eddy as her "dear teacher," causing something of a sensation. This demonstration only served to enrage Mrs. Eddy, who reportedly told Mrs. Plunkett that Mrs. Hopkins was so full of mesmerism that her eyes stuck out like a boiled codfis. .....
When Worthington turned out to be a bigamist and an embezzler, with wives in several states, even Mary Plunkett could no longer face down her enemies. As soon as the scandal broke, Emma Hopkins would no longer have anything to do with her former ally, whose business ventures collapsed. Refusing to give up the name Mary Bently Worthington which she had adopted with much publicity, Mary fled to New Zealand with Worthington and her two children. In Christchurch the Worthingtons established a religious healing movement first called Students of Truth, and later the Temple of Truth, which had some innitial sucess. A group of local clergymen, convinced that Bently Worthington was ahving a deleterious influence on public morals with his doctrines of free love, launched a cmapaign against the Temple of Truth and sought to have Worthington extradited back to the United States to answer charges of bigamy and embezzlement. In 1893 Worthington expelled his wife from the movement, and she set up a rival group, at first under the name Plunkett, and then as Sister Magdala. In early 1090 Mary married a dentist called Atkinson and became seriously ill of "mental desease." In June she was found dead in a shallow ornamental fountain, her legs bound by "an elastic garter." The death was declared a suicide. Mary was only fifty-three years old. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.342-3)
The immediate cause of the new insurgency in Boston was the Abby Corner case. Mrs. Corner was a Christian Science practitioner from West Medford, Mass., whose parturient daughter and grandchild had died under her care in the Spring of 1888. Mrs. Corner was consequently brought to trial for manslaughter. Claiming that she had always known Mrs. Corner would be declared innocent as charged, Mrs. Eddy distanced herself from her student, refused to allow Christian Science Association funds to be used for her legal defense, and went so far as to write to the press that Christian Science could not be implicated in the deaths of the child and its mother, since Mrs. Corner had never taken the Obstetrics course at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, and therefore she was not qualified to attend a child birth.
.....
While the coolness of her response cannot be denied, Mary Baker Eddy was essentially correct in her analysis of the case. Abby Corner was acquired of manslaughter and needed no special defense since the prosecutors in her case could not prove that a "real" doctor could have done any better for the unfortunate patients. Whereas Mrs. Corner could win an acquittal in a court of law, Mrs. Eddy saw that if she involved the Church in the case Christian Science would fare less well in the court of public opinion, and that the positive experience many women had with childbirth under Christian Science and which had brought women into the movement would be lost.
Miranda Rice was the first woman, I believe, to testify to the public that thanks to Mrs. Eddy, who was in attendance at her delivery, she had experienced a painless child birth, and the pages from the Christian Science Journal were later to be filled with similar testimonials. As we have seen, in the first years of the organized movement, Mrs. Eddy advertised herself as "Professor of Obstetrics," and during her successful visit to Washington in 1882 she emphasized the healing problems and conditions related to woman, children, and reproduction, presumably because this was the area where she felt most confident of success. Her new course on obstetrics in 1888 probably contained more traditional anatomy and physiology than her critics have claimed. But even as lived experience -- what Mrs. Eddy was calling "demonstration" -- was converting many to Christian Science obstetrics, the tide of professional opinion was running strongly in the other direction. Increasingly there were calls to equate a safe birth with doctor attended birth, to close down any institution that purported to offer nonconventional medical approaches to pregnancy and labor, and to get midwives and alternative healers out of the birthing process.
Mrs. Eddy was well aware of these trends and how they endangered lives, as well as her movement. I would surmise that perhaps the one critical piece of information she gave to students in the obstetrics courses she began running in the late 1880s was that at the first sign of any significant problem they should go immediately to the doctor. Mrs. Eddy knew that one tragic misfortune, such as the death of the Corner daughter and grandchild, counterbalanced hundreds of happy deliveries, provided much needed ammunition for opponents of the movement from all sides, and threatened one of the most effective and valuable services Christian Science was performing. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.346-7)
To begin construction of a large complex, and expensive building before all the funds necessary to complete the work are in hand is contrary to sound bussiness practice. And Mrs. Eddy compounded the risk and the difficulty of the enterprise by decreeing that the building should be completed and ready for service by the end of 1894. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.358-9)
The people who staffed Pleasant View often came at short notice, leaving families and work behind them. When in 1901 the young John Salchow, then living at his parental home in Junction City, Kansas, received a letter from his old friend Joseph Mann asking him to come to Pleasant View as groundsman and general handyman, he was aboard a train headed east within two hours. So abrupt was his departure, and so final, that Salchow left his personal affairs in disorder, and he subsequently lost property he could ill afford to lose. The Pleasant View workers earned very modest salaries. They were expected to be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and to observe the schedule set by Mrs. Eddy punctually and to the letter. some of the women who came, who had been working as practitioners and healers in their own communities, able perhaps to afford some domestic help for themselves, were shocked as they were expected to work at Pleasant View as parlor or even scullery maids, and they soon departed.
.....
The "watchers," or spiritual staff, worked in shifts, under daily instructions from Mrs. Eddy, to "meet" the challenges of each day and to combat Malicious Animal Magnetism whether it manifested as a misplaced document, and unsealed cold snap, an infectious cold, or a hostile newspaper article. There were at least two hour-long "watch" meetings every day at Pleasant View, and watchers were also supposed to work on their assigned topic individually during the day. Some were considered to have special capabilities for specific topics. Mrs. Sargent, for example, was usually detailed to tackle the weather, and one day, to John Salchow's amusement, she took great satisfaction in having averted an alleged electrical storm, which Salchow knew had in fact been no storm at all but the sparks raised by the new trolley in town.
Mrs. Eddy got the term watch from the New Testament narrative of the night in the gardens of Gethsemane, when Jesus chides his disciples for being unable to watch him even a little while. By using the term watching I think Mrs. Eddy was giving a name to a particularly vigilant and active form of prayer, a set period of time when specific people would put their thoughts toward God, review questions and problems of the day, and seek spiritual understanding. She envisaged this prayer as an invisible wall of positive mental activity protecting her household. In a definition she may well have received directly from Mrs. Eddy, Adelaide Still says the watchers were assigned to "work impersonally," and the adverb impersonally is key here. Mrs. Eddy was imperative in her instructions to the watch that there never be any attempt to reach out to specific individuals to influence their behavior. That would be mesmerism, the cardinal sin of Christian Science and the one against which Mary Baker Eddy inveighed constantly. Defending Mrs. Eddy's concept of Malicious Animal Magnetism was perhaps Gilbert Carpenter's most important aim in his reminiscences of Pleasant View, and he defines it as "anything that pulls thought down from its spiritual elevation." (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.396-7)
Death might not be sufficient excuse for not doing one's duty if you were as indispensable as Calvin Frye. Several members of the household recount in their memoirs how on several different occasions Mrs. Eddy brought Frye back from the dead. George Kinter, a secretary, gives the most detailed and dramatic account of the healing he witnessed in 1905. One night Mrs. Eddy rang repeatedly for Frye, and when other members of the staff came running to his room, they found Frye stiff, cold, and apparently lifeless in his chair:
By this time Mrs. Eddy had rung for Laura Sargent, who arrived to find her already out of bed and advancing in her nightdress toward Calvin's room, regardless of the icy cold of the house. Paying no slightest attention to Kinter's and Mrs. Sargent's protests, Mrs. Eddy bent over the sitting figure and began at once to make "loud audible declarations" of truth.
For more than an hour she continued to call on Frye in one way or another to "wake up and be the man God made!" Mrs. Sargent meanwhile had wrung the maid, who brought a double blanket in which they wrapped Mrs. Eddy, while Kinter with an aching back supported her in the half-stooping position in which she bent over Frye's inert form, completely oblivious to what they were doing for her or of anything except the need to rouse him. At last he moved slightly and began to murmur. They could pick out broken phrases: "Don't call me back ... Let me go. ... I am so tired." To which Mrs. Eddy replied that she would indeed continue to call him back from the dream-state in which he had been -- that he loved life and its activities too well to fall asleep, that he was freed from the thralldom of hypnotism and alive to God, his Saviour from sin and death.
The relationship between Mary Baker Eddy and Calvin Frye is strange and mysterious, but when we seek to understand it, these scenes of healing must be given great weight. The extraordinary lapses into a deathlike state that Calvin Frye was reportedly susceptible to were clearly related to the unremitting stresses of his life with Mrs. Eddy, and we may indeed wonder why on earth he put up with it all. On the other hand, for people who lived on such a pitch of religious intensity as Frye and Mrs. Eddy did, their occasional ability to enact two of the great gospel miracles -- the raising of Lazarus and of Jairus's daughter -- created a bond whose peculiar strength is hard to overestimate.
Even the most devoted of Mrs. Eddy's staff admitted freely and emotionally that what made their service to her hardest was her anger, the fury of her rebukes, the storm of criticism and reproach and invective that might fall upon their heads at any time, the unpredictability and suddenness of her determination that Malicious Animal Magnetism was ruling at Pleasant View. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.400-1)
Whether we grant Mary Baker Eddy her revelation or not is a matter of individual judgement. That she had her own demons is clear; that at times she cloaked her own failings in doctrine is probable. But the struggle against imperfection is the stuff of saintliness, and even Edward Dakin, whose portrait of Mrs. Eddy in her last years as a psychotic hypocrite has proved so influential, admits the evidence of struggle. Pleasant View begins to make much more sense if we see it as a religious community, a peculiar kind of ashram or monastery or lamasery, in which prayer and meditation are the main focus of activity, and to which the inhabitants commit themselves out of religious discipline and with the goal of reaching a higher spirituality.
For myself, I find that one of the people who understood what Mrs. Eddy was trying to achieve at Pleasant View and expressed it best was Adelaide Still, the young Englishwoman who served as Mrs. Eddy's personal maid for the last three years of her life. ...... father a God-fearing working class Methodist, ..... In 1900 Still was working for a Christian Science family and read Science and Health. This was a revelation, healing her body and her mind, and in 1906 she managed to gain passage to the United States and entered Mrs. Eddy's household a year later.
.....
In the preface to her memories of Mrs. Eddy, Still explains that recent, renewed attacks on Mrs. Eddy have convinced her that the facts must be set down. .... Yes, one day, Mary Baker Eddy had found herself, suddenly, gloriously, inexplicably transported upon "a mount of revelation," but that moment of revelation was brief, and upon finding herself back in the valley she had still to find the beginning of the way, climb laboriously each ever steeper step up, and also blaze the trail for others following after. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.404-5)
.... When, years later, the Woodbury crisis was at its height, Mrs. Eddy would at times severely chastise her watchers at Pleasant View for their inability to preserve her against the mental attacks of her enemy.
......
In 1899 Mrs. Woodbury coauthored with Horatio Dresser a two-part diatribe agaisnt Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science, published by the Arena, a Boston magazine temporiraly associated with New Thought. The article announcing "'Eddyism' Exposed" sent shock waves through all of Christian Science. .....
Faith in a leader being absolutely implicit, whether the leader be Joseph Smith, John Noyes, El Mahdi, or Mary Eddy, any departure from the dictator's demands .... Mrs. Eddy has no use for people who think. ...... although the treatment involve gross bodily injury.
Here Mrs. Woodbury denounces exactly the kind of hold which she herself had wielded for some years over her small group of followers in Maine and in Montreal. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.430-1)
In an essay called "Personal Contagion" which she contributed to the Sentinel, Mrs. Eddy once again adjured her followers not to cling to the personality of their leader if they wished the denomination to thrive in the future.
This state of mind is sickly; it is a contagion -- a mental malady, which must be met and overcome. Why? Because it would dethrone the First Commandment, thou shalt have one God.
......
I left Boston in the height of prosperity to retreat from the world, and to seek the one divine Person, whereby and wherein to show others the footsteps from sense to Soul. To give me this opportunity is all that I ask of mankind. (Miscellany pp. 116-7)
In this attempt to dampen a cult of personality among her following and to retreat to a more reflective life, Mrs. Eddy contrasts most favorably with those gurus and cult leaders who seek to bask in ever greater personal glory. ... (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.476)
Chandler outlined his strategy for the suit in a letter to Foster Eddy dated April 14, 1907. Chandler takes up what Foster Eddy had told him about Mrs. Eddy's preoccupation with Malicious Animal Magnetism and urges the adopted son to document the events of that time as closely as possible.
It is these delusions of hers that make every conveyance of hers away from Glover and away from you null and void, and also any will she executed .... We cannot in this proceeding test the validity of any will. But we can secure the annulment of any conveyance or agreement which she made; certainly those for which she received no value; certainly all her donations which are so situated that they can be recovered from their present possessors. ... Of Course we are not going to attack the religion or attack her as in any way insincere. But we must recognize her delusions and the effect of them upon her business contracts. To me she appears to be a person who from infancy has been in a state bordering on lunacy.
In order to make the charge of lunacy stronger, Chandler set out to find evidence that Mrs. Eddy had been mad .... in 1866 .... or in the 1830s, as a schoolgirl. .... Chandler ... became convinced that Mary Baker Eddy was legally incapable because she believed herself to be the messenger of God. In other words she was mad because she had founded Christian Science -- even though it was only through founding Christian Science that she acquired the properties ... which Chandler hoped to see his clients gain through inheritance. As he wrote in "Desultory 6," which was circulated to his legal colleagues,
Just think of it. Christ supposedly healed the sick, so did the apostles for 300m years. Then the art died away and remained dead till 1866 when Mary Baker Glover Patterson discovered it. God, Christ, Mrs. Eddy! It is all a delusion as the facts show. She thought she succeeded the Savior and discovered metaphysical Healing. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.505)
These chronic fears of succumbing to old age became critical only weeks later when Mrs. Eddy was beset by a new attack of renal calculi. The brief entries of Calvin Frye's diary are eloquent:
....
Sunday, Aug. 23, 1908. Mrs. Eddy woke with severe pain this morning and called for W.H.B. at 2.45 a.m. but she did not require his services the pain having been relieved by the students at home.
......
Mother heard an audible voice from God saying: Leave alone successor contention before it is meddled with.
......
[October 8] 1894. She requested me yesterday that if she should seem to die, not to bury her body for 3 1/2 days, and to keep perfectly quit about it during that time.
.....
[November 28] 1898. Mother gave me a cutting rebuke this eve, for waht I did about circulating article from Monitor, about 2 hours afterwards in talking pleasantly with me again, she said to me "This will go on for a little while and then I will be young and I won't be with you any more (or I won't need you any more)" I'm not sure which of these two she said. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.529-31)
On July 9, 1909, in anticipation of the semiannual Communion service, the practitioners at First Church in New York presented Mrs. Stetson with a gift of gold and a composite letter which included statements such as The voice of the Father-Mother God is ever speaking through you. .... Mrs. Stetson promptly dispatched both the gold and the letter to Mrs. Eddy, with an accompanying missive of her own, ..... I feel they belong to you, dearest, and are your fruit; for without your divine instruction and Christly guidance I should not have had them ..... Precious leader, my love for you is inexpressible. God grant my constant prayer that I may be worthy to be called Your faithful, obedient, loving child. letter cited in "Reminiscences, sermons and correspondence proving adherence to the principle ..." By Augusta Emma Stetson
.......
.... To Augusta herself, Mrs. Eddy replied via a letter, a copy of which she sent for publication to the Sentinel, aware, no doubt, that often in the past Stetson had used highly selected passages from Mrs. Eddy's letters to prove her privileged relationship with her leader.
I have just finished your interesting letter. I thank you for acknowledging me as your Leader, and I know that every true follower of Christian Science abides by the definite rules which demonstrate the true following of their leader; therefore, if you are sincere in your protestation, and are doing as you say you are, you will be blessed in your obedience. ....
..... Mr. Adam Dickey is my secretary, through whom all my business is transacted. Full letter in "Christian Science Sentinel, Volume 11"
On July 24 Mrs. Eddy authorized the Board of Directors to summon Mrs. Stetson to appear before them and answer charges that she and her students were influenced by mesmerism to deify human personality. .....
Mrs. Stetson ... returned from Boston at 7 o'clock this morning. ... At 12.30 went to the practitioners' meeting. took her accustomed seat and began to talk. ...... After a while she said, "We must deny that I ever said any of those things. I deny that I ever said them." I said, "Mrs. Stetson, but you did say them and you habitually took people up by name and treated them [i.e., deliberately sought to affect individual persons mentally, without their consent]." ..... (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.539-41)
In the course of 1909 it was obvious to all that Mrs. Eddy's strength and energy were declining steeply. There were still days when she would light up with the old fire and amaze her staff and directors with her incisive intelligence, swift wit, and command of doctrine. There were days when she would still challenge her staff, as an incident recalled by Adam Dickey, when she put them all on the spot by asking them point-blank whether a Christian Scientist could control the weather. At this time, one of the more picturesque and taxing of the daily charges laid upon the watchers was to protect Mrs. Eddy from bad weather, especially now; Mrs. Laura Sargent had for some years been detailed to concentrate on the weather. Hence the staff members were both confident and unanimous in replying to Mrs. Eddy's question that, indeed, a Christian Scientist could control the weather. To this, Mrs. Eddy remarked with scorn that only God governs the weather, and no other influence can be brought to bear on it. ......
......
Monday May 9, 1910. Mr. Adam Dickey last night told Mrs. Eddy that she shall not have any more morphine! She had for several days been suffering from renal calculi and had voided stones in the urine; but yesterday the water seemed normal and so having hypodermic injections twice within a few days, he believed she did not need it, but that it was the old morphine habit reasserting itself and would not allow her to have it. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.544-5)
41. In the May edition of the Floral Wreath and Ladies' Monthly Magazine just below a contribution signed by "Mrs. G. W. Glover" appeared "Female Talent," an essay by "Mrs. John Sanford." ......
Censorship is always severe on female talent, and not unfrequently is a woman prejudged a slattern because she refuted a genius. Slovenly attire, an ill-conducted household, and an ill-arranged table are, in the minds of many, identified with female accomplishment. Yet lighter accomplishments may be the more likely cause of such disorder; and she who has spent her life at her harp, or at her frame, will be less disposed to active duties than one to whom exertion is habitual. If a woman of mind bears with equanimity petty vexations, if she had lends a reluctant ear to family tales, if she is not always expatiating on her her economy, nor entertaining by a discussion of domestic annoyances; she is not the less capable of controlling her household, or of maintaining order in its several departments. Rather will she occupy her station with more dignity, and fulfill its duties with greater ease.
At the same time she should ever bear in mind, that knowledge is not to elevate her above her station, or to excuse her from the discharge of its most trifling duties. It is to correct vanity and repress pretension. It is to teach her to know her place and her functions; to make her content with the one, and willing to fulfill the other. It is to render her more useful, more humble, and more happy. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.603 FN41)
15 The document is .... In 1879, Edward Arens, on Mrs. Eddy's behalf, took Stanley and Tuttle to court for failure to pay her the monies stipulated in their contract of 1870 ... she gave an early account of her theology which did not sway Judge Choate but which is of some interest given her later career:
I can argue to myself that striking my hand upon the table will not produce pain—I don't think I could produce the effect that this knife would not produce a wound, but that I could argue myself out of the pain. I have not claimed to have gone as far as that. I have said that belongs to future time. I can alleviate—I cannot prevent a broken bone. I would send for a surgeon and set the bone—and after that I would alleviate the pain and inflammation. Can't do more in my present development. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy by Georgine Milmine p. 145
21. Richard Kennedy was also becoming interested in Quimby at this time. We know from a letter the then Mrs. Glover wrote to a friend .... Peel thinks that kennedy was seeking to quote the authority of Quimby in his arguments with his partner over the use of manipulation, and his argument is supported by a section of the 1875 edition of Science and Health in which Mrs. Eddy specifically notes that Quimby's example was being used as a justification for manipulation:
In defence of mesmerism is urged, that Dr. Quimby manipulated the sick. He never studied this science, but reached his own high standpoint and grew to it through his own, and not another's progress. He was a good man, a law to himself; when we knew him he was growing out of mesmerism; contrasted with a student that falls into it by forsaking the good rules of science for a malpractice that has the power and opportunity to do evil. Dr. Quimby had passed away years before ever there was a student of this science, and never, to our knowledge, informed any one of his method of healing. Science and Health 1875 p. 373-4
(Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.630-31 FN 15,21)
35. Appendix B of the Milmine biography attempts to establish the debt of Mrs. Eddy to the works of Andrew Jackson Davis who was born five years after Mrs. Eddy but became a nationally famous author and sage in his early twenties. The appendix ends with the information that Davis, after publishing his trance works, became a Spiritualist. The Milmine account of Davis is, to put it mildly, partial. There is no mention of his fall into disgrace and poverty after a scandalous affair with the wealthy married woman twenty years his senior who paid for his work to be published and also supplied him with a home in Waltham, Massachusetts. The Milmine account also fails to point out that Davis not only carefully chose his hypnotist, Mr. Lyon, but his amanuensis, a thirty-five-year-old Universalist Minister. The Reverend Fishbough, who supposedly took down the mystic and learned revelations spoken by the uneducated youth, was an experienced and fluent writer whose later works show considerable knowledge of religion, philosophy, and mysticism. I am willing to consider Davis to have had some kind of genius, but, as Lyon's and Fishbough's own testimony make clear, he was incapable of writing a correctly spelled and punctuated sentence -- one of the criticisms leveled against Mrs. Eddy by Milmine. A further example of double standards in Milmine's book is the author's attempts to make Mrs. Eddy guilty of appropriating Davis's ideas, but to whitewash P.P. Quimby of the same thing, even though Quimby and Davis were active in mesmeric circles at precisely the same time, and Quimby had every opportunity to read Davis's books. Robert Peel is surely right to argue that Quimby owed a huge and wholly unackowledged debt (Quimby acknowledges no debts!) to the "Seer of Poughkeepsie," as Davis was known in his heyday. (See Chapter 7 of Slater Brown, the Heyday of Spiritualism.)
36. All profits from Davis's most famous and popular book went to Lyon and Fishbough, who asserted that, while under trance and before witnesses, the young mystic had renounced all claims to copyright and proceeds from the sale of the book. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.637 FN 35, 36)
Books by Andrew Jackson Davis
Chapter 8: Visions and Predictions of the Poughkeepsie Seer Story of Andrew Jackson Davis - Nandor Fodor - A great American seer predicted the motor-car in technical details, and also the typewriter about eighty years ago. The world took no account of it, and failed to realize that a new scientific principle was divulged. It passed it by without comprehension.
The fundamental religious elements, immanent in man’s highest faculties, seem, at first glance, to be incompatible with deliberate investigation. There are few minds capable of reasoning while prejudiced. …… The Modern Church exerts a powerful stultifying influence upon the human conscience. p.153
Davis, Andrew Jackson, 1826-1910: The penetralia; being harmonial answers to important questions. (Boston, B. Marsh, 1856) (page images at HathiTrust) p.227-8
Yes; there is to be great improvement in motive forces; also a method for traveling upon dry land and through the air. There are persons mentally capable of receiving inspiration upon this subject from the Spiritual world. Such inspiration will bring a new motive force ; by which talented minds may increase the speed of travel and safety thereof. …….
Yes; in the almanac language, "Look out about these days" for carriages and travelling saloons on country roads - without horses, without steam, without any visible motive power - moving with greater speed and far more safety than at present. Carriages will be moved by a strange and beautiful and simple admixture of aqueous and atmospheric gases-so easily condensed, so simply ignited, and so imparted by a machine somewhat resembling fire engines as to be entirely concealed and manageable between the forward wheels. These vehicles will prevent many embarrassments now experienced by persons living in thinly-populated territories. The first requisite for these land-locomotives will be good roads, upon which, with your engine, without your horses, you may travel with great rapidity. These carriages seem to be of uncomplicated construction."
Davis, Andrew Jackson, 1826-1910: The principles of nature, her divine relations, and a voice to mankind. (New York, S.S. Lyon and W. Fishbough, 1847), ed. by William Fishbough (page images at HathiTrust)
5. C. Lulu Blackman reminiscences, as quoted by Powell, p. 154. Her full reminiscences appear in We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 53-62. Powell also notes the extraordinary concentration which Mrs. Eddy required of her students. The sessions were not usually long, but during them no fidgeting or even coughing was permitted. Miss Blackman reported that at the class she attended Mrs. Eddy absolutely forbade taking notes, and that, after three repetitions of this rule, all students complied. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.654 FN 5)
Arthur Bently Worthington left Christchurch and a pile of debts in December 1895, settled with his most recent wife Evelyn first in Hobart, Tasmania, then in Melbourne, Australia. There in 1902 he was jailed for defrauding a wealthy widow by claiming to be the reincarnated god Osiris. after his release ..... 17. Following is what Mrs. Eddy wrote to the Boston Newspaper: To the Editor of the Herald: The lamentable case reported from West Medford of the death of a mother and her infant at childbirth should forever put a stop to quackery. There has been but one side of this case presented by the newspapers. We wait to hear from the other side, trusting that attenuating circumstances will be brought to light. Mrs. Abby H. Corner never entered the obstetrics class at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. She was not fitted at this institute for an accoucheur, had attended but one term, and four terms, including three years of successful practice by the student, are required to complete the college course. (The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy by Georgine Milmine p. 355-6) (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.657 FN 9,17)
21. When I first read in Milmine about Mrs. Eddy's belief that she and her staff could affect the weather, I assumed this was a unique case. But more =recently I have learned from Garry Wills that claims to be able to affect the weather are standard in certain evangelical groups. Pat Robertson, it seems, works on weather issues regularly in his television program, and he claimed, most notably, to have changed the direction of a tropical storm to spare his denominations home base. Gilbert Carpenter devotes a chapter to the subject of the watch against the weather at Pleasant View, arguing that Mrs. Eddy never believed that by prayer or by willpower one could change the direction of a storm or stop the snow falling. This would be magnetism. What she claimed was that harmony is the divine reality, that weather, like all manifestations, is an illusion or error, and that with effort and practice one can regain contact with divine harmony and restore meteorological balance. See Carpenter, Her Spiritual Footsteps, Chapter 62.
25. Salchow was an .... tolerant man -- he says he was known in his family as a kind of doormat -- and he wrote his reminiscences .... Despite Salchow's unfailing commitment to Christian Science, he makes it clear that jelousy and rivalry were daily problems among the staff at Pleasant View, and that anyone that enjoyed an especially close relationship with Mrs. Eddy .... could expect sabotage attempts from co-workers. .... someone reported falsely, to Mrs. Eddy that Salchow had tuberculosis in his youth -- a condition that would have made him ineligible for service .... another tipped him off...
31. Both during Mrs. Eddy's lifetime and since, the Church has claimed that Mrs.Eddy's healing included several instances when she raised people from the dead. The chapter Tomlinson devotes to Mrs. Eddy's healings details some of these. The emblem that appears on many Christian Science authorized publications shows a cross embraced by a crown, the whole surrounded by the words "Heal the Sick * Raise the Dead * Cleans the Lepers * Cast Out Demons."
32. Peel summarizing a section from the unpublished reminiscences of George Kinter (Authority, pp. 245-46). Tomlinson in his published reminiscences and Ada Still in her unpublished reminiscences give accounts of Mrs. Eddy calling Frye back from the dead. I find the case of Calvin Frye's various resurections fascinating but am somewhat at a loss as to how to interpret them. There were a number of eyewitnesses to all the healings, and there is no reason to doubt their bona fides, but of course, no one present had any medical training, and their collective judgement that Frye was dead is unsubstantiable. Frye may have some form of epilepsy, or more probably, some kind of hysterical catatonia. As I have pointed out, for many years Mrs. Eddy had been refusing to see patients, and her Pleasant View household was carefully constructed to eliminate anyone with a chronic physical disorder. The healings of Calvin Frye thus take on an extraordinary significance because of the stage in Mrs. Eddy's life at which they occurred, and because they were witnessed and later attested to by so many people. In her view of Christian Scientists, they prove conclusively that, at the height of her powers, Mrs. Eddy could raise a person from the dead. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.667-9 FN 21,25,31,32)
2. Hearst's enthusiasm for Christian Science strengthened in 1908 when his infant son and heir, who had failed to respond to standard treatment for a blocked pyloric sphincter, recovered under Christian Science treatment. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.680 FN 2)
5. It was while Chandler was staying at the Parker House in Boston and meeting with various colleagues and clients that Miss Mary Tomlinson, the sister of one of Mrs. Eddy's closest associates, threw herself to her death from one of the hotel window. It appears that Chandler's room was one floor above Miss Tomlinson's, and that he heard her two brothers shouting at the door which she had locked as they tried in vain to get to her before she jumped. Both Tomlinson brothers were rumored to bear responsibility for their sister's death, and according to Peabody's published account, Vincent Tomlinson blamed both his brother Irving and Mrs. Eddy for preying on Mary's mind with their fears and strategies about Malicious Animal Magnetism that she lost her mind (Religio-Medical Masquerade, pp. 191 ff). There was also in the Chandler papers an April 22 letter in which Peobody gives his senior counsel a less dramatic account of the event. Whatever the exact circumstances, Mary Tomlinson's death surely reinforced Chandler's low opinion of Christian Science as a therapeutic system, and as an organization in which men like Irving Tomlinson could prosper. (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 p.688 FN5)
Mary Baker Eddy "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures"
Gutenberg text: Mary Baker Eddy "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures"
Mary Baker Eddy "Science and Health" 1875 edition
Mary Baker Eddy "Science and Health" 1881 edition includes chapter on Demonology
Mary Baker Eddy "Science and Health" 1898 edition
Mary Baker Eddy "Science and Health" 1889 edition
Those who were taught by him the science of being reached the glorious perception that God is the only author of man. The virgin mother first conceived this idea of God, and named it Jesus;
"Mind Belief Principles: Training Guide For Willing Spiritual Powers" By Anna Watts, perhaps without attribution.
The rights of woman are discussed on grounds that seem to us not the most important. Law establishes a very unnatural difference between the rights of the two sexes; but science furnishes no precedent for such injustice, and civilization brings, in some measure, its mitigation, therefore it is a marvel that society should accord her less than either. Our laws are not impartial, to say the least, relative to the person, property, and parental claims of the two sexes; and if the elective enfranchisement of woman would remedy this evil without incurring difficulties of greater magnitude, we hope it will be effected. A very tenable means at present, is to improve society in general, and achieve a nobler manhood to frame our laws. If a dissolute husband deserts his wife, it should not follow that the wronged and perchance impoverished woman cannot collect her own wages, or enter into agreements, hold real estate, deposit funds, or surely claim her own offspring free from his right of interference. A want of reciprocity in society is a great want that the selfishness of the world has occasioned.5 (Gillian Gill "Mary Baker Eddy" 1998 Excerpt cited at Mary Baker Eddy library; Women’s Suffrage and Matilda Hindman
Wikipedia: Christian Science Eddy first used mental healing on a patient in March 1864, when one of Quimby's patients in Portland, Mary Ann Jarvis, suffered a relapse when she returned home to Warren, Maine. Eddy stayed with her for two months, giving Jarvis mental healing to ease a breathing problem, and writing to Quimby six times for absent treatment for herself. She called the latter "angel visits"; in one of her letters to Quimby, she said that she had seen him in her room. In April she gave a public lecture in Warren, contrasting mental healing with Spiritualism, entitled: "P. P. Quimby's Spiritual Science healing disease, as opposed to Deism or Rochester Rapping Spiritualism."[112] [Cather and Milmine (McClure's), February 1907, pp. 349–351; for six letters, Gill 1998, p. 148.]
Mrs. Eddy’s Voices Gillian Gill, reply by Caroline Fraser 06/29/2000
"Retrospection and Introspection" by Mary Baker Eddy
Wikipedia: Banner of Light
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby resource center: C. Alan Anderson, "Healing Hypotheses: Horatio W. Dresser and the Philosophy of New Thought" 1993
Wikisource: Georgine Milmine "The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy" (1909)
Frank Podmore "Mesmerism and Christian Science" 1909
Facts about Christian Science 11/01/2013
A skeptic looks at Christian Science
Overwhelming evidence spiritual healings Mary Baker Eddy 1963/1976
Rev. R.C. Armstrong "Christian Science Exposed" 1910 PDF
Doris Grekel "The Discovery of the Science of Man" 1978/1995
There are many reports of young Mary's psychic powers. She cured the ills of friends. Her hand on a brother's leg wound caused it to heal rapidly. In games of hide-the-thimble she always went directly to the thimble. She claimed she could give orders to her dog Ben merely by thinking, and the dog would obey. Among the neighbors her clairvoyant powers were legendary. She was often asked to locate lost or stolen objects. She tried, but failed, to find the body of a drowned boy. She "saw" a spot near Lynn, Massachusetts, where she said Captain Kidd had buried a treasure. Efforts were made to dig for it, but no treasure was found. It was said that she once caused an hungry zoo lion to stop roaring and lie down so peacefully that Mary reached into the cage and patted its head. Her most peculiar physiological trait was a total lack of sense of smell. It explained why throughout her life she never used perfume.
As a child Mary heard voices. In her auto biography Retrospection and Introspection, in the chapter titled "Voices Not Our Own" she tells of one such episode:
Many peculiar circumstances and events connected with my childhood throng the chambers of memory. For some twelve months, when I was about eight years old, I repeatedly heard a voice, calling me distinctly by name, three times, in an ascending scale. I thought this was my mother's voice, and sometimes went to her, beseeching her to tell me what she wanted. Her answer was always, "Nothing, child! What do you mean?" Then I would say, "Mother, who did call me? I heard somebody call Mary, three times!" This continued until I grew discouraged, and my mother was perplexed and anxious.
One day, when my cousin, Mehitable Huntoon, was visiting us, and I sat in a little chair by her side, in the same room with grandmother,—the call again came, so loud that Mehitable heard it, though I had ceased to notice it. Greatly surprised, my cousin turned to me and said, "Your mother is calling you!" but I answered not, till again the same call was thrice repeated. Mehitable then said sharply, "Why don't you go? your mother is calling you!" I then left the room, went to my mother, and once more asked her if she had summoned me? She answered as always before. Then I earnestly declared my cousin had heard the voice, and said that mother wanted me. Accordingly she returned with me to grandmother's room, and led my cousin into an adjoining apartment. The door was ajar, and I listened with bated breath. Mother told Mehitable all about this mysterious voice, and asked if she really did hear Mary's name pronounced in audible tones. My cousin answered quickly, and emphasized her affirmation.
That night, before going to rest, my mother read to me the Scriptural narrative of little Samuel, and bade me, when the voice called again, to reply as he did, "Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth." The voice came; but I was afraid, and did not answer. Afterward I wept, and prayed that God would forgive me, resolving to do, next time, as my mother had bidden me. When the call came again I did answer, in the words of Samuel, but never again to the material senses was that mysterious call repeated. (Retrospection and Introspection p.16-8)
Adam Dickey, in Memoirs of Mary Baker Eddy (we shall have more to say about this suppressed book in a later chapter), recalls Mrs. Eddy telling him something about this incident she said she had never before revealed. After she answered the "voice" in the words of Samuel, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth," she said to Dickey:
... in a voice filled with awe, that when she made a reply a most unusual phenomenon took place. Her body was lifted entirely from the bed which she lay, to a height, it seemed to her, of about one foot. Then it was laid gently back on the bed. This was repeated three times. As a child she was afraid to tell the circumstances to anybody, but she pondered it deeply in her heart and thought of it for many years afterward when she was demonstrating in the nothingess of matter and that the claim of the human body was a myth. Springer p. 23) (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.16-7) Dickey excerpt also cited in "God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church" By Caroline Fraser
Metaphysics, as taught in Christian Science, is the next stately step beyond homoeopathy. In metaphysics, matter disappears from the remedy entirely, and Mind takes its rightful and supreme place. Homoeopathy takes mental symptoms largely into consideration in its diagnosis of disease. Christian Science deals wholly with the mental cause in judging and destroying disease. It succeeds where homoeopathy fails, solely because its one recognized Principle of healing is Mind, and the whole force of the mental element is employed through the Science of Mind, which never shares its rights with inanimate matter.
Christian Science exterminates the drug, and rests on Mind alone as the curative Principle, acknowledging that the divine Mind has all power. Homoeopathy mentalizes a drug with such repetition of thought-attenuations, that the drug becomes more like the human mind than the substratum of this so- called mind, which we call matter; and the drug's power of action is proportionately increased. ("Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" pp. 156-7)
Similar remarks occur elsewhere in Science and Health. Here is a passage from chapter 12:
Homoeopathy furnishes the evidence to the senses, that symptoms, which might be produced by a certain drug, 370:12 are removed by using the same drug which might cause the symptoms. This confirms my theory that faith in the drug is the sole factor in the 370:15 cure. The effect, which mortal mind produces through one belief, it removes through an opposite belief, but it uses the same medicine in both cases. (p.370)
....
That Mrs. Eddy both beleived in spiritualism and practiced mediumship there is no longer the slightest doubt. (Gillian Gill would disagree) During her seances rappings occured, and spirits of the departed came and went. While in a trance, Mrs. Eddy's voice would change to the voice of the person behind the veil. Mrs. Richard Hazeltine, a spiritualist who lived in Lynn, signed an affidavit in which she described one of Mrs. Eddy's seances in 1866:
My husband, Richard Hazeltine, and I went to the circle at Mrs. Clark's and saw Mrs. Glover[7] pass into the trance state, and heard her communicate by word of mouth messages received from the spirit world, or what she said and we believed were messages from the spirit world. I cannot forget certain peculiar features of these sittings of Mrs. Glover's. Mrs. Glover told us, as we were gathered there, that, because of her superior spiritual quality, and because of the purity of her life, she could only be controlled in the spirit world by one of the Apostles and by Jesus Christ. When she went into the trance state and gave her communications to members of the circle, these communications were said by Mrs. Glover to come, through her as a medium, from the spirit of one of the Apostles or of Jesus Christ.
When Mrs. Eddy began ....
Any person desiring to learn how to heal the sick can receive the undersigned instruction that will enable them to commence healing on a principle of science with a success far beyond any of the present modes. No medicine, electricity, physiology or hygiene required for unparalleled success in the most difficult cases. No pay is required unless this skill is obtained. Address, MRS. MARY B. GLOVER, Amesbury, Mass., Box 61. (Milmine p.118)
Mrs. Sarah Crosby, of Albion Maine, was for a time a good friend of Mrs. Eddy. She recalled an occassion when Mrs. Eddy suddenly closed her eyes, shivered, went into a trance, and began to jabber in a deep masculine voice. The voice claimed to come from Sarah's dead brother, Albert Baker. Amazingly, the voice warned Mrs. Crosby not to trust Mrs. Eddy because she might exploit Mrs. Crosby for her (Mrs. Eddy's) ambitions! There were other occassions when Baker's voice came through Mrs. Eddy's lips. Sometimes it would tell Mrs. Crosby to look under a certain cushion where she would find a message from her brother, written by Mrs. Eddy while her ahnd was under her brother's control. Here is one of the messages reproduced in The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy ....:
Sarah dear Be ye calm in reliance on self, amid all the changes of natural yearnings, of too keen a sense of earth joys, of too great a struggle between the material and spiritual. Be calm or you will rend your mortal and your experience which is needed for your spiritual progress lost, till taken up without the proper sphere and your spirit trials more severe.
This is why all things are working for good to those who suffer and they must look not upon the things which are seen but upon those which do not appear. P. Quimby of Portland has the spiritual truth of diseases. You must imbibe it to be healed. Go to him again and lean on no material or spiritual medium. In that path of truth I first found you. Dear one, I am at present no aid to you although you think I am, but your spirit will not at present bear this quickening or twill leave the body; hence I leave you till you ripen into a condition to meet me. You will miss me at first, but afterwards grow more tranquil because of it, which is important that you may live for yourself and children. Love and care for poor sister a great suffering lies before her.
Sibyl Wilbur, in her authorized hagiography of Mrs. Eddy, had the audacity to call these trances and automatic writings an "admirable though harmless hoax" designed by Mrs. Eddy to convince Mrs. Crosby that her belief in spiritualism was nonsense! Mrs. Crosby was furious when she read this. She fired off the following letter to the Waterville Morning Sentinel (Maine) (Feb. 16,1907):
At the time mentioned ... I knew nothing whatever of spiritualism, I had never seen, or sought to know anything about it; and I have no reason to believe that Mrs. Patterson had. When she commenced to go into those trances I did not in the least understand what it meant until the power that controlled her, explained the condition and purpose of it. Her messages to me were and are prima faci[e] evidence that they never came from her own consciousness.
However much she may since have acted the part charlatan ... I shall defend her from such aspersions at the time when her ambition for money and power had not been kindled; when she was a devoted and humble follower of Dr. P.P. Quimby ... aspiring only to follow in the footsteps of her teacher in humility of spirit. I am sure she was too honest then, too much of a lady to use the identity of an honored brother whose memory I think she revered, to attempt to practise a wicked fraud upon one who trusted her, for no purpose except to deceive.
My intimacy with her for years warrants this defense. That she was far from saintship no one know better than I. ( Fleta Springer, "According to the Flesh: A Biography of Mary Baker Eddy 1930 pp. 125-6) (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.22-5)
Quimby was far from the first to heal by touching and stroking. .... Here, ... a passage from Plato's dialogue Charmides .... Socrates began by recalling the words of a Thracian physician:
This Thracian told me that in these notions of theirs, which I was just now mentioning, the Greek physicians are quite right as far as they go; but Zamolxis, he added, our king, who is also a god, says further, that “as you ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul; and this,” he said, “is the reason why the cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas [Greece], because they are ignorant of the whole, which ought to be studied also; for the part can never be well unless the whole is well.” photo For all good and evil, whether in the body or in human nature, originates, as he declared, in the soul, and overflows from thence, as if from the head into the eyes.
And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first thing. And the cure, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them moderation is implanted in the soul, and where moderation is, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body. And he who taught me the cure and the charm at the same time added a special direction: “Let no one,” he said, “persuade you to cure the head, until he has first given you his soul to be cured by the charm. For this,” he said, “is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the soul from the body.” (The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1 pp. 6-7)
The Middle Ages and Renaissance swarmed with Christian faith healers. .... A typical and famous healer of seventeenth-century England was the Irish Anglican Valentine Greatrakes. We know from the gospels that Jesus, like the Jews of his time, believed that bodily ills, both physical and mental were not God-intended. They were caused by Satan and his devils. ..... Hundreds of eminent and learned people, including chemist Robert Boyle and philosopher Ralph Cudworth, were convinced of Greatrake's paranormal powers. Like all Christian faith healers, Greatrakes insisted it was not he, but the Holy Spirit, who did the healing.
America's first world-famous faith healer was Alexander Dowie, the evangelist who founded Zion City, Illinois, a religious community north of Chicago that was noted for its persuasion that the earth is flat. .... In recent decades Oral Roberts has carried this practice to its loftiest heights. Of course, when followers receive a healing item blessed by Oral or his son, or both, they are expected to send love donations to cover the expense of Oral's ministries.
......
Quimby was a small man with white hair and beard, and a kindly, charismatic personality. He was not a charlatan. He claimed success in banishing cancer, tuberculosis, smallpox, heart and lung diseases, diphtheria -- you name it, he could cure it. His seeming ability to heal without the aid of drugs or surgery became the basis for hundreds of mind healers and sects, with varied names, ..... Most were short lived. Christian Science was by far the most successful ... with Kansas City's Unity Christianity running a close second. (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.33-5)
Fleta Springer, in her unauthorized biography of Mrs. Eddy, According to the Flesh (1930), closes a chapter with these perceptive paragraphs:
It is this writer's belief that Mrs. Eddy's denial of Quimby delivered a wound to her emotional body from which she did not recover, and from which she suffered all the days of her life.
If this be thought fantastic, it should be remembered that Mrs. Eddy was the victim of fantasies. She had been truly grateful to Quimby, and now she must extend her doctrine of evil very far indeed to include the kindly figure of her benefactor. She believed in the law of retribution. She believed in demons. She had sat in spiritualistic seances and heard the voices of the dead. The ghost of Phineas P. Quimby haunted her all her life.
In a pamphlet published by the Christian Science Parent Church in 1929, there appears to be the following extract from the diary kept by Calvin Frye. It is dated April 14, 1897, and reads:
This morning she told me the mental threat urged upon her was "you have got to confess, that is, go tell that you got it from Quimby or you will be damned."
It is true that even Mrs. Eddy's enemies, in their effort to show the inferiority and the irrationality of her mental processes, have held that she really did progress by stages to the literal belief that she had received nothing of her theory from Quimby. But her healing at Quimby's hands and her adoption of his doctrines, were the turning point in her life. The details of that experience were part of her deeply emotional memory. She may have forgotten and rationalized away many other episodes and relationships of her life, but she never forgot or succeeded in rationalizing to herself the fact that she had repudiated the man from whom she had received the ideas and the impetus upon which she had built her sucess. (pp. 323-24) (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.48-9)
Mrs. Eddy firmly believed that Christian Science was not only a science, but it was as demonstrable as a valid syllogism or such mathematical statements as three times three is nine. She like to call the cures of Christian Science "demonstrations," like experimental demonstrations in scientific laboratories. "In fifty years," she wrote in a letter, "aye less, Christian Science will be the dominant religion of the world."
More than a century has gone by, and this has not happened, but Christian Science did become one of the three great organized religions to spring up in America from the minds of women. The other two were Shakerism, founded by Ann Lee, and the Seventh-day Adventist church of Mrs. Ellen G. White. That such faiths, winning the allegiances of millions of disciples, could spring from the minds of semi-literate women is one of the awesome marvels in the annals of American religions.
.... Mrs. Eddy was not the first to use the term. As early as 1854 a minister named William Adams titled his book The Elements of Christian Science. Quimby himself used the term in and 1863 paper, although he preferred to call his theology "Christ Science."
Mrs. Eddy always thought of the healing power of God as a form of genuine science, not as something supernatural. It was simply the application of divine laws as objective and real as the law of gravity. .... "Jesus of Nazereth," she wrote inScience and Health, "was the most scientific man that ever trod the globe" (p. 313). ....
.... Sin, sickness and death .... simply do not exist .... "sickness is a dream from which the patient needs to be awakened" she once wrote. Death too, is an illusion caused by humanity's false belief in matter .... (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.56-7)
Here's one of her funniest nonsuquiturs:
If drugs are part of God's creation, which (according to the narrative in Genesis) He pronounced/ good/, then drugs cannot be poisonous. If He could cre- ate drugs intrinsically bad, then they should never be used. If He creates drugs at all and designs them for medical use, why did Jesus not employ them and recommend them for the treatment of disease? Matter is not self-creative, for it is unintelligent. Erring mortal mind confers the power which the drug seems to possess. (Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures p.157)
.....
One of the most publicized cases of a tragic failure occured in 1888. It involved a Mrs. Abby Corner, of West Medford, Massachusetts, who practiced what was then called "metaphysical obstetrics," as taught by Mrs. Eddy herself. Mrs. Corner took it upon herself to handle, without medical help, the birth of her daughters child. Both mother and child died. Mrs. Corner was arrested for manslaughter, and the press had a field day with the story. Church officials insisted that Mrs. Corner had never attended Mrs. Eddy's "college." Charles Troube, then secretary of the Christian Science Association, resigned over what he said was an attempt by his superiors to alter Mrs. Corner's records. More than thirty other members of the association also resigned, leaving the Boston church with only about 160 members. Mrs. Corner was eventually acquitted on the grounds that the daughter and child died from causes that would ache been fatal even if experienced obstetricians had been present. (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.66-7)
In Science and Health there are hints that we may have existed before we were born: "If we live after death and are immortal, we must have lived before birth, for if Life ever had any beginning, it must also have an ending, even according to the calculations of natural science." (p.429). Exactly in what manner we existed before birth is not clear. At any rate, there is no suggestion of a previous life on earth, or a reincarnation in another earth body. Mrs. Eddy had a low opinion of theosophy and Eastern religions that assume reincarnation. This does not prevent a few Christian Science leaders from combining their faith with reincarnation. .....
.... Sue Harper Mims, in her essay "An Intimate Portrait of Our Leader's Final Class" (In We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Second Series, published by the church in 1950), recalls Mrs. Eddy telling a class that on three occasions she had raised the dead. "I could not help thinking of Jesus," Mims writes, "first raising the little maid, then the young man, then Lazarus."
Mrs. Eddy provided details of only one instance. After a child died and the doctor had left, the mother sent for Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Eddy asked to be alone with the corpse. She took the lifeless body in her arms. According to Mims, when the mother returned, the child ran across the floor to meet her. Irving C. Tomlinson repeats this story in Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy (1945, p. 57).
There are said to be other accounts of Mrs. Eddy reviving dead bodies -- accounts given in documents owned by Mother Church but not published for obvious reasons. Adam Dickey, in Memoirs of Mary Baker Eddy (1925), describes an occasion on which Mrs. Eddy seemed to bring back to life her loyal servant Calvin Frye. Frye had passed out from some sort of seizure, and appeared to be either dead or dying.
Never shall I forget the picture that was before us in that small bedroom, the light shining on the half-scared faces of the workers, and our Leader's intense determination to keep Mr. Frye with her. I had heard of similar occasions when rumors had reached the workers in the field that at different times our Leader had restored prominent students to life after experiences of this kind, but of this incident I was an eye-witness and from the very first my attention was not diverted for one second from what was going on, and I am simply relating the event exactly as it occurred. (p.40) (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.76-7)
Mr. Adam Dickey last night told Mrs. Eddy that she shall not have any more morphine! She had for several days been suffering from renal calculi and had voided stones in the urine; but yesterday the water seemed normal and so having hypodermic injections twice within a few days, he believed she did not need it, but that it was the old morphine habit reasserting itself and would not allow her to have it. (Fleta Springer According to the Flesh 1930 pp. 297-8)
Fleta Springer conjectures that Mrs. Eddy's lifelong dependence on morphine shots and tablets contributed to her frequent hysterical rages, her delusions, and her constant irrational accusations of MAM practiced by her friends. The habit has been amply confirmed by others. Springer quotes the following remarks by Mrs. Miranda Rice, which appeared in the New York World (October 30, 1906):
I was one of Mrs. Eddy's first converts and associates. I have treated her hundreds of times. Finally we could not support Mrs. Eddy's pretensions to evil powers. We resigned in a body. I was not able to subscribe to Mrs. Eddy’s practices. When she received my resignation she came to my house and pounded on all three of the doors with a stone. She was wild. She sent me word she intended to have me arrested for deserting her.
I know that Mrs. Eddy was addicted to morphine in the seventies. She begged me to get some for her. She sent her husband Mr. Eddy for some, and when he failed to get it went herself and got it. She locked herself in her room for two days excluded everyone. She was a slave to morphine. (p.299)
Mrs. Eddy’s adopted son, Ebenezer Foster, also spoke about his foster mother’s morphine addiction in an interview in the New York World (March 12, 1907). Mrs. Eddy had accused him of falsifying her account books. Here is how Springer summarizes what he told the World:
Foster-Eddy charged that his account books had been stolen one by one and secretly falsified; that the story about the woman in his office was deliberately circulated to effect his downfall. He heard the story in his Boston office and within an hour was on his way to Pleasant View. The one thought in his mind was "to see Mother and vindicate myself." "At Pleasant View I hurried into my Mother's room and found her seated at her desk. At the sight of me she sprang to her feet, shrieked for help and darted out of the room. Of course, I followed, thinking she had been seized by one of her mad attacks; but she fled before me, stumbling, falling, dragging herself along in terror. Through it all she never ceased to shriek 'Murder' at the top of her voice. Satisfied at last that I could not quit her I left the house dazed, and took the next train back to Boston. Three weeks later I learned the truth. The plotters had convinced Mrs. Eddy that I was going to Pleasant View to Kill her. In her weakness of mind, she believed the lie, and my arrival had terrified her."
The story tells how he "again defeated Frye," and managed to see his mother and convince her of his innocence. "She put her trembling hands in mine and begged me never to leave her, never to desert her. 'You know how things are here,' she said, 'and I want you to promise that when you receive an order from me to go away, to do something in another city, do not obey it. Remember, my boy, that I shall have been forced to make the order, that I shall not mean it. Promise me my son.'" He gave his promise, but it proved to be their last interview. the "conspirators" were too much for him. Foster-Eddy had other stories to tell. He told of "periods of frenzy" that seized Mrs. Eddy when she "rushed around the room filling the house with her cries." In these paroxysms, he said, she was uncontrollable. "At dead of night on one occasion I was aroused by Frye's knocking at my door. 'Come quick,' said he; 'your mother is mad, she thinks that a tumor has suddenly grown on her chest. she is calling for you.' I do no know what arts had been practiced upon the unfortunate woman that night, but I do know that I found poor Mrs. Eddy crouching under the bed clothes and clutching at her breast with both hands. In vain I made an examination and assured her that the tumor had vanished. 'No it is still there,' she would cry. 'I see it. It is there.,' she would cry, 'I see it. It is there -- there.' Morning dawned before I could quit her." He also told of a night when Calvin Frye obtained a morphine tablet from him ( he had been using the tablets for his own neuralgia!) and, his curiosity aroused, he followed Frye to Mrs. Eddy's room where she lay screaming and hysterical, and saw Frye "force the tablet into her moth and hold her firmly down among the pillows." (pp. 417-18) .... Mrs. Eddy indulged in violent personal attacks on Kennedy. Here is a sample of her wrath: Rubbing the head he keeps his cases constantly on hand. ... No enthusiasm or praise is as zealous or fullsome as this mal-practitioner can elicit, while nothing is more relentless and unyielding than the prejudice he can arouse. ... Manipulating the head, even to a thinness that would reveal the brains, can never heal the sick in science. .... This secret trespassor on human rights manipulates the head to carry out, on a small scale, a sort of popery that takes away voluntary action instead of encouraging the science of self-control, and sets himself up for a doctor who is a base quack. Science and Health p.383 (Springer, p. 210) In this same incredible chapter Mrs. eddy spoke of MAM as “Satan let loose,” proving that "the peril of Salem witchcraft" is still abroad in the land. It is "More subtle than all other beasts of the field, it coils itself about the sleeper, fastens its fang in innocence, and kills in the dark." It is a "weapon of revenge," a way to influence a juror, to convince patients they are getting well when they are in truth dying. It is a way of corrupting entire communities. (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.86-9) Gardner isn't always clear about which quotes are from Springer's book or which are also quoted in Science and Health.
Days passed before the desired information reached me. It came then, in the form of a telegram bearing mother's signature, and bidding me to hurry to her in Boston, and mother and I met for the first time in thirty years.
.....
Within a week of my arrival in Boston I learned many strange things. The strangest of these was that the rebellious students were employing black arts to harass and destroy my mother.
The longer I remained with my mother, the clearer this became. Pursued by the evil influence of the students, we moved from house to house never at rest and always apprehensive. It was a maddening puzzle to me. .... mother made it all clear to me ....
It was Kennedy that mother talked of most. He was a master hand at the black arts, as mother pictured him daily to me, until at last I made a up my mind to cut him short of his evil work. But I kept my plan to myself. One morning I slipped my revolver into my overcoat pocket and left our boarding house. ...
I had never seen this man, but I knew where he had his offices, and I walked straight there. He was doing business as a healer, and his name, lettered on a brass plate, was on the door of his office.
The girl who admitted me asked if I was a patient, and I answered "Yes." ... The unsuspecting girl led me straight to Kennedy's office, on the second floor of the house, opened the door, bowed me into the room, and hurried away. Kennedy was before me, seated at his desk.
He looked up smilingly and asked, "Are you in need of some treatment?"
Pulling out my revolver I walked up to him, pressed the cold muzzle of the weapon against his head, and said, "I have made up my mind that you are in need of treatment."
Then while he shook like a jellyfish in terror, I gave him his one chance to live. I told him that my mother knew of his black art tricks to ruin her and that I had made up my mind to stop him or to kill him.
"You needn't tell me that you are not working your game of hypnotism to rob us of friends and to drive mother into madness," said I. "My one word to you is this: if we have to move from one other boarding house I will search you out and shoot you like a mad dog."
I shall never forget how that man pleaded for his life at the end of my weapon and swore that the black art accusation was false and that my mother deceived me.
But it did the business all right. We were not ordered out of another boarding house that winter. (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.99-101)
Mrs. Eddy insisted it was not his heart that failed, but that he had been killed by MAM. In a long letter to the Boston Post (June 5, 1882) she explained his death as follows:
My husband's death was caused by malicious mesmerism. Dr. C. J. Eastman, who attended the case after it had taken an alarming turn, declares the symptoms to be the same as those of arsenical poisoning. On the other hand, Dr. Rufus K. Noyes, late of the City Hospital, who held an autopsy over the body to-day, affirms that the corpse is free from all material poison, although Dr. Eastman still holds to his original belief. I know it was poison that killed him, not material poison, but mesmeric poison. My husband was in uniform health, and but seldom complained of any kind of ailment. During his brief illness, just preceding his death, his continual cry was, "Only relieve me of this continual suggestion, through the mind, of poison, and I will recover." It is well known that by constantly dwelling upon any subject in thought finally comes the poison of belief through the whole system. . . . I never saw a more self-possessed man than dear Dr. Eddy was. He said to Dr. Eastman, when he was finally called to attend him: "My case is nothing that I cannot attend to myself, although to me it acts the same as poison and seems to pervade my whole system just as that would."
This is not the first case known of where death has occurred from what appeared to be poison, and was so declared by the attending physician, but in which the body, on being thoroughly examined by an autopsy, was shown to possess no signs of material poison. There was such a case in New York. Every one at first declared poison to have been the cause of death, as the symptoms were all there; but an autopsy contradicted the belief, and it was shown that the victim had had no opportunity for procuring poison. I afterwards learned that she had been very active in advocating the merits of our college. Oh, isn't it terrible, that this fiend of malpractice is in the land! The only remedy that is effectual in meeting this terrible power possessed by the evil-minded is to counteract it by the same method that I use in counteracting poison. They require the same remedy.
Circumstances debarred me from taking hold of my husband's case. He declared himself perfectly capable of carrying himself through, and I was so entirely absorbed in business that I permitted him to try, and when I awakened to the danger it was too late. I have cured worse cases before, but took hold of them in time. I don't think that Dr. Carpenter[5] had anything to do with my husband's death, but I do believe it was the rejected students[6]—students who were turned away from our college because of their unworthiness and immorality. To-day I sent for one of the students whom my husband had helped liberally, and given money, not knowing how unworthy he was. I wished him to come, that I might prove to him how, by metaphysics, I could show the cause of my husband's death. He was as pale as a ghost when he came to the door, and refused to enter, or to believe that I knew what caused his death. Within half an hour after he left, I felt the same attack that my husband felt—the same that caused his death. I instantly gave myself the same treatment that I would use in a case of arsenical poisoning, and so I recovered, just the same as I could have caused my husband to recover had I taken the case in time.
After a certain amount of mesmeric poison has been administered it cannot be averted. No power of mind can resist it. It must be met with resistive action of the mind at the start, which will counteract it. We all know that disease of any kind cannot reach the body except through the mind, and that if the mind is cured the disease is soon relieved. Only a few days ago I disposed of a tumour in twenty-four hours that the doctors had said must be removed by the knife. I changed the course of the mind to counteract the effect of the disease. This proves the myth of matter. Mesmerism will make an apple burn the hand so that the child will cry.
My husband never spoke of death as something we were to meet, but only as a phase of mortal belief. . . . I do believe in God's supremacy over error, and this gives me peace. I do believe, and have been told, that there is a price set upon my head. One of my students, a malpractitioner, has been heard to say that he would follow us to the grave. He has already reached my husband. While my husband and I were in Washington and Philadelphia last winter, we were obliged to guard against poison, the same symptoms apparent at my husband's death constantly attending us. And yet the one who was planning the evil against us was in Boston the whole time. To-day a lady, active in forwarding the good of our college, told me that she had been troubled almost constantly with arsenical poison symptoms, and is now treating them constantly as I directed her. Three days ago one of my patients died, and the doctor said he died from arsenic, and yet there were no material symptoms of poison. (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.103-6 Milmine p. 286-8)
Here are some typical extracts from Calvin Frye's diary, as quoted in Edwin Dakin's Mrs. Eddy (1930), that reveal all to starkly the depths of her agony:
.....
Mrs. Eddy has had a belief of difficulty of breathing for the last two days .... when we were together this morning at about 9:30 she discovered that the mesmerists were arguing to her inflammation and paralysis of spinal nerve to produce paralysis of muscles of lungs and heart so as to prevent breathing & heart desease with soreness (?) between the shoulder blades.
she experienced the greatest relief when she and I took up Kennedy & Arens to break their attempt to make her suffer from aforementioned beliefs, and she said "I have not breathed so easy for two days." (p. 527)
....
So great was the fame of Mrs. Eddy ...... One can only marvel at the fact that two, frail, uneducated women -- Ellen White (of Seventh-day Adventism) and Mary Baker Eddy -- could establish and during their life totally control new religions that would spread around the world and acquire millions of devoted followers. It would be interesting to know how many biographies of Mrs. Eddy .....
Rumors persisted among the faithful that Mrs. Eddy would rise from the dead. A myth arose that a telephone was placed in her coffin just in case. The evangelist Billy Sunday declared: "If old mother Eddy rises from the dead I'll eat polecat for breakfast and wash it down with booze."
Like Oral Roberts and so many of today's Bible pounding Petecostal evangelists, Mrs. Eddy was always hearing God tell her something. If it turned out to be wrong, she decided it was not God after all but the MAM of an enemy. Here is a typical instance. In 1889 she declared that God had "just told me who to recommend" for the editor of the Christian Science Journal. A few days later she changed her mind. "I regret having named the one I did for Editor," she wrote. "It is a mistake, he is not fit. It was not God evidently that suggested that though but the person who suggests many things mentally, but I have before been able to discriminate. I wrote to soon after it came to my thought" (Snowden, p. 54). Because Mrs. Eddy could not say that the inner voice came from Satan, who does not exist, she had to blame it on the MAM of a detractor! As Fleta Springer so perceptively puts it in her biography of Mrs. Eddy, "The Satan who had so terrified her childhood had reappeared" though no longer with a forked tail and cloven hoof.
Here is how James Snowden, in The Truth About Chrstian Science (1920), described the paranoia of Mrs. Eddy's later years:
This demon proved all its powers of ubiquitous presence and evil influence and malignant destructiveness in her household. It bedeviled her printers, froze ..... horror of this evil thing. (Snowden, in The Truth About Chrstian Science 1920 p.43)
.....
The greatest of all difficulties for any theist is how a good and all-powerful God can permit evil and suffering. Mrs. Eddy's answer was that God didn't permit it at all because sin, sickness, and death are illusions, false beliefs, errors of thought that have no reality. If all is God and all is good, and evil does not exist, then the question at once arises: Why does God permit so much false belief in evil? Mrs. Eddy never answered that question.
Adam Herbert dickey, ... was Mrs. Eddy's private secretary from 1908 until her death in 1910. ..... Memoirs of Mary Baker Eddy. .....
.... All copies of the book and its plates were destroyed. Copies of the original book are now as rare as ... In 1985 a paperback reprint was issued ...
She seemed rarely to weigh in her thought what the consequences of her action might be. Her sole desire was to get the Divine leading and follow unhesitatingly. often the reasons for which our Leader took action in certain directions were not clear to the workers about her. It would seem as if the reason advanced by her was a poor one and not worthy of the action she was taking. this, of course was mortal mind's analysis of her work, and if she were acting from a spiritual impulse, it is not at all surprising that her reasons would not appeal to the judgement of onlookers. It always turned out, however, that her action was right, regardless of the reason assigned, which convinced those who were familiar with her work that her judgment was unerring in every detail and that in following the direction of divine Wisdom, she never made a mistake. Often I heard her say with great impressiveness that in over forty years of church leadership, she had not made a mistake, a record that is most truly remarkable. (p. 42)
Mrs. eddy's ideas of church government differed greatly from those of the general run of mankind. She knew that her Church, established as it was under Divine direction, would incur the hatred and opposition of every known form of religion, which has evolved according to the wisdom of man. .......
.......
It is not easy to believe, but Mrs. Eddy became convinced that her mental workers could even control the weather!
The subjects covered by these "watches" were endless in their variety. One thing in particular that our Leader requested her workers to care for was the weather, and this was done in addition to the work of a committee in Boston appointed for that special purpose. During some of the severe New England winters when a greater amount of snow than usual was falling, our Leader would instruct her workers that they must put a stop to what seemed to be the steadily increasing fall of snow which she looked upon as a manifestation of error. she had an aversion to an excessive fall of snow. she considered it as an agent of destruction, and interference with the natural and normal trend of business. We are quick to recognize that an unusually heavy fall of snow in any community is a disastrous thing. It clogs the wheels of commerce, interferes with traffic, interrupts the regular routine of business affairs, and breaks in upon the harmony and continuity of man's peaceful existence. Millions of dollars are spent annually in many places to remove the effects of heavy snowfalls, and so this was one of the points that was covered by Mrs. Eddy's mental workers. One of the "watches" issued January 15, 1910, requested her mental workers to "Make a law that there shall be no more snow this season."
When our Leader first came to live at Chestnut Hill in the spring and summer of 1908, thunder storms and electric disturbances seemed to be unusually prevalent. this was another form of error which our Leader disliked very much. A gentle rainfall was a delight to her, but a destructive, electrical storm she abhorred. She evidently looked upon it as a manifestation of evil and a destructive agency of mortal mind. Mrs. Sargent was the one to whom was especially assigned the work of watching the weather and bringing it into accord with normal conditions. for the three years during our Leader's stay in Chestnut Hill, and for several years thereafter, the recollection of the writer is that there were fewer and fewer thunder storms until they almost ceased to be. (p. 18)
It was God, of course, who altered the weather, not the mental workers. Their duty, she said, was merely to "destroy the operations of mortal mind and leave the question of regulating the weather to God."
I have heard our Leader describe in a number of instances how she has dissipated a thunder cloud by simply looking upon it and bringing to bear upon mortal mind's concept of this manifestation of discord what God really has prepared for us, and she illustrated this by a wave of her hand indicating the total disappearance of the thunder cloud and its accompanying threat. (p. 19)
.....
... "Mr. Dickey, I want you to promise me something, will you?"
I said, "Yes, Mother, I certainly will."
"Well," she continued, "if I should ever leave here -- do you know what I mean by that?"
"Yes, Mother."
"If I should leave here," she repeated, "will you promise me that you will write a history of what ahs transpired in your experiences with me, and say that I was mentally murdered?"
In answered, "Yes, Mother, I will."
"Now, Mr. dickey, do not let anything .... will you swear to me before God .... "
......
..... Mrs. Sargent brought me a sealed envelope. In it was a penciled note reiterating the statement that she had made in our conversation a short time before. (p. xiv)
(Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.108-21)
Predictions by Mary Baker Eddy includes excerpt Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.114)
In 1971, when the renewed copyright on the first edition expired, the church was powerful enough to persuade Congress to pass a special law -- the only one of its kind -- extending the book's copyright another seventy-five years. The bill was strongly supported by President Richard Nixon's two top aides, H. R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, both Christian Scientists. Without White House support, this shameful bill would not have gone through. Happily, it was overturned as unconstitutional by a lower court of appeals, and in 1987 the US Court of Appeals upheld the decision. I am amazed that no publisher has had the courage to reprint the 1875 edition. (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.125-6)
Wiggen's sense of fun and his joking criticisms of Mrs. Eddy, who had only a marginal sense of humor, finally did him in. True to her paranoia, Mrs. Eddy eventually decided that he too, was secretly attacking her with MAM. She charged him with "shocking flippancy" in the notes he liked to scribble on galley proofs of her writings. "This is MAM," she wrote in a letter to the printers in 1890, and it governs Wiggen as it has done once before to prevent the publishing of my work. ... I will take the proof reading out of Wiggen's hands." This she did and we hear no more from Wiggen.
After being fired by Mrs. Eddy, Wiggen had this to say in a letter dated December 14, 1889, to a college friend that I take from Milmine's biography of Mrs. Eddy. She rightly calls it "probably the most trenchant and suggestive sketch of Mrs. Eddy that will ever be written."
Christian Science, on its theological side, is an ignorant revival of one form of ancient gnosticism, that Jesus is to be distinguished from the Christ, and that his earthly appearance was phantasmal, not real and fleshly.
On its moral side, it involves what must follow from the doctrine that reality is a dream, and that if a thing is right in thought, why right it is, and that sin is non-existent, because God can behold no evil. Not that Christian Science believers generally see this, or practise evil, but the virus is within.
Religiously, Christian Science is a revolt from orthodoxy, but unphilosophically conducted, endeavouring to ride two horses.
Physically, it leads people to trust all to nature, the great healer, and so does some good. Great virtue in imagination! . . . Where there is disease which time will not reach, Christian Science is useless.
As for the High Priestess of it, . . . she is—well I could tell you, but not write. An awfully (I use the word advisedly) smart woman, acute, shrewd, but not well read, nor in any way learned. What she has, as documents clearly show, she got from P. P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, whom she eulogised after death as the great leader and her special teacher. . . . She tried to answer the charge of the adoption of Quimby's ideas, and called me in to counsel her about it; but her only answer (in print!) was that if she said such things twenty years ago, she must have been under the influence of animal magnetism, which is her devil. No church can long get on without a devil, you know. Much more I could say if you were here. . . .
People beset with this delusion are thoroughly irrational. Take an instance. Dr. R—— of Roxbury is not a believer. His wife is. One evening I met her at a friendly house. Knowing her belief, I ventured only a mild and wary dissent, saying that I saw too much of it to feel satisfied, etc. In fact, the Doctor said the same and told me more in private. Yet, later, I learned that this slight discussion made her ill, nervous, and had a bad effect.
One of Mrs. Eddy's followers went so far as to say that if she saw Mrs. Eddy commit a crime she should believe her own sight at fault, not Mrs. Eddy's conduct. An intelligent man told me in reference to lies he knew about, that the wrong was in us. "Was not Jesus accused of wrong-doing, yet guiltless?"
Only experience can teach these fanatics, i.e., the real believers, not the charlatans who go into it for money. . . . As for the book, if you have any edition since December, 1885, it had my supervision. Though now she is getting out an entirely new edition, with which I had nothing to do, and occasionally she has made changes whereof I did not know. The chapter B—— told you of is rather fanciful, though, to use Mrs. Eddy's language in her last note, her "friends think it a gem." It is the one called "Wayside Hints," and was added after the work was not only in type, but cast, because she wished to take out some twenty pages of diatribe on her dissenters. . . . I do not think it will greatly edify you, the chapter. As for clearness, many Christian Science people thought her early editions much better, because they sounded more like Mrs. Eddy. The truth is, she does not care to have her paragraphs clear, and delights in so expressing herself that her words may have various readings and meanings. Really, that is one of the tricks of the trade. You know sibyls have always been thus oracular, to "keep the word of promise to the ear, and break it to the hope."
There is nothing really to understand in "Science and Health" except that God is all, and yet there is no God in matter! What they fail to explain is, the origin of the idea of matter, or sin. They say it comes from mortal mind, and that mortal mind is not divinely created, in fact, has no existence; in fact, that nothing comes of nothing, and that matter and disease are like dreams, having no existence. Quimby had definite ideas, but Mrs. Eddy has not understood them.
When I first knew Christian Science, I wrote a defensive pamphlet called "Christian Science and the Bible" (though I did not believe the doctrine). . . . I found fair game in the assaults of orthodoxy upon Mrs. Eddy, and support in the supernaturalism of the Bible; but I did not pretend to give an exposition of Christian Science, and I did not know the old lady as well as I do now.
No, Swedenborg, and all other such writers, are sealed books to her. She cannot understand such utterances, and never could, but dollars and cents she understands thoroughly.
Her influence is wonderful. Mrs. R——'s husband is anxious not to have her undeceived, though her tenth cancer is forming, lest she sink under the change of faith, and I can quite see that the loss of such a faith, like loss of faith in a physician, might be injurious. . . . In the summer of 1888, some thirty of her best people left Mrs. Eddy, including her leading people, too, her association and church officers. . . . They still believe nominally in Christian Science, yet several of them . . . are studying medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Boston; and she gave consent for at least one of them to study at this allopathic school. These students I often see, and they say the professors are coming over to their way of belief, which means simply that they hear the trustworthiness of the laws of nature proclaimed. As in her book, and in her class (which I went through), she says, "Call a surgeon in surgical cases."
"What if I find a breech presentation in childbirth?" asked a pupil.
"You will not, if you are in Christian Science," replied Mrs. Eddy.
"But if I do?"
"Then send for the nearest regular practitioner!"
You see, Mrs. Eddy is nobody's fool. (pp. 337-9)
After Wiggen died a manuscript about his relationship with Mrs. Eddy was found among his papers. It consisted of recollections that Wiggen had told to someone named Livingston Wright. ....... What follows is from Dakin's biography. ... Here is what Wiggen had to say
She was a person of great, stately mien, perfectly self-possessed and disposed to be somewhat overbearing and impressive in manner. She had a huge package of manuscript which I learned was designed to serve as the material for a forthcoming edition of Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures.
..... Some days later I opened the package and began a scrutiny of the manuscript. Well I was staggered!
Of all the dissertations a literary helper ever inspected, I do not believe one ever saw a treatise to surpass this. The misspelling, capitalization and punctuation were dreadful, but those were not things that feazed me. It was the though and general elemental arrangement of the work. There were passages that flatly and absolutely contradicted things that had preceded, and scattered through were incorrect references to historical and philosophical matters.
...... I was convinced that the only way in which I could undertake the requested revision would be to begin absolutely at the first page and re-write the whole thing!
..... But instead of any hesitation or hint of annoyance, Mrs. Eddy in a calm, easy thoroughly stately manner agreed to my declaration about the matter of a re-write, acceded to my terms of recompense, and it began to slowly dawn on me that perhaps this thing of a revision "from the ground up" as it were, was the very thing she had intended that I do in the first place.
In the course of our conversation, I reiterated to her that she must understand, of course, that I was not a Christian Scientist, did not hold views according to her own, and did not ever expect to become a Christian Scientist. ..... "Oh, we know that you are not a believer now, .... (Dakin pp. 225-6)
The evidence of lack of education and of ignorance concerning the writings teachings of the famous philosophers was so overwhelming that I could not trust her references, but had to look up everything for myself, to be sure, and to feel that I was doing work that was commendable to my own standard and just to her while I remained her literary aid and councel.
It ahs been many times claimed for Mrs. Eddy, and she has claimed it herself, that she knew something of the ancient languages and literature. I can positively assure you that Mrs. Eddy knew nothing whatever of the ancient languages. She could not translate a page of Latin, Greek, or Sankrit or give a synopsis of the teaching of the great philosophers of the ancients were it to save her life. ... ....
.....
..... "You'll be arrested and convicted for criminal libel as surely as you print that accusation against those doctors," I declared. Mrs. Eddy preplied that she "would think it over." I came to learn that was her way of preparing for assent to a point that she felt could not be safely carried. (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.134-41)
In her biography of Mrs. Eddy, Fleta Springer comments on this bylaw:
There are so many things for which a Christian Scientist may be excommunicated that it is surprising that the Church has any membership. Yet when all is said, the Manual demanded only unquestioning obedience and undivided allegiance to Mrs. Eddy and her cause. And these her followers freely granted her -- out of love, expediency, or fear. If so much as a suspicion of disloyalty fell upon a member, and no by-law could be made to cover his case, the suspect suffered dismissal from the church under the by-law providing for the excommunication of mesmerists or mental malpractitioners. The proof of the malpractice was Mrs. Eddy's word. "If the author of Science and Health shall bear witness to the offense of mental malpractice,it shall be considered sufficient evidence thereof."
.....
A Christian Scientist may read no books on metaphysics except Science and Health and the Bible. He may not write books on mental healing or metaphysics. He may not speak publicly upon the subject of Christian Science without permission of the Church. He ma, in short, neither think, read, speak, nor act in any way that could be construed as inimical to the Church. (pp. 365-6) (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.174-5)
(1929) When Dakin's book was published by Scribner's, Christian Scientists visited bookstores and libraries throughout the nation, urging them not to buy or sell the book, and threatening boycotts if they did. Thousands of angry letters were fired off to Scribner's and to stores and libraries. It is said that 70 percent of the nation's bookstores stopped selling Dakin's book.
Scribner's felt obliged to say in an advertisement:
The result is a situation almost incredible in a free country. You may find you bookseller either will regret his inability to sell you this biography, universally endorsed by the press of the country, or he may produce a copy hidden away under the counter. Some booksellers actually have the courage to display the book. We hope your bookseller is one of these. Throughout some eighty-five years of publishing, we have been able to say our books "on sale at all booksellers." We regret that in this one instance we must qualify that statement. advertisement & letter cited in God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church
When the enlarged second edition of Dakin's book was published, Scribner's added in front a not describing what it called a "virulent campaign of suppression":
The publication of this popular edition of Mrs. Eddy marks the failure of an organized Minority to accomplish the suppression of opinions not to its liking. We publish the book on its merits -- one of which was its presentation of a highly interesting and significant character, about whom people were entitled to know, in a conscientious and impartial manner. And since a publisher, whatever his personal views of the subject, is required by his profession to publish material of such interest and value, we could not properly have done otherwise.
.....
The enthusiastic reception accorded by non-partisans was accompanied by so virulent a campaign for suppression that if the issue ahd been only a commercial one, it might well have seemed the part of practical wisdom to withdraw the book.
But the issue now was that of freedom of speech: if this interested Minority could force the suppression of this book, so could any strongly organized minority force the suppression of any book of which its members did not approve. The situation required us to fight it out and take the consequences.
For many weeks it seemed as if the sale of Mrs. Eddy might actually be so reduced that the book could not be kept on the market. Many stores were forced by threats to renounce its sales, and many to conceal it. Others openly defied those who came to threaten boycott, and in all but a few cities the book could always be bought somewhere. The American book trade recognized the principle at issue, and the moment it gained public support -- as it did when the public became aware of the attempt at supression -- it so valiantly rallied agaisnt the tyranny that the sale of Mrs. Eddy rapidly increased.
Except for the indignant resistance of booksellers and public to the arrogant assumption of a Minority that it had the right to dictate the sources of information on a given subject, a presedent extremely dangerous to freedom of the mind would surely have been established. (p.vi)
Dakin's book, currently unavailable, was the strongest attack on Mrs. Eddy written since Mrs. Milmine's book, also long out of print. (Milmine's book is now available freely on the internet, but Dakin's is not, although it is available on Amazon) (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.179-81)
The storm of protest over Gilman's art, much of it coming from church members, was so great that Mrs. Eddy was forced to issue a disclaimer. In the Christian Science Journal (February 1894) she wrote:
The illustrations in Christ and Christmas refer not to my personality, but rather foretell the appearing of the womanhood, as well as the manhood of God, our divine Father and Mother. ... The illustrations were not intended for a golden calf, at which the sick may look and be healed. Christian Scientists should beware of unnatural snares, and adhere to the divine Principle and rules for demonstration. They must guard against deification of finite personality. Mrs. Eddy was not pleased to hear from mothers who said their children had been healed merely by looking at Gilman's pictures, especially at the last picture, which showed an ascending Jesus with cherubs in the clouds. After the book's second edition, Mrs. Eddy decided to kill its sales. In a letter to Ebenezer Foster in 1894 she wrote:
I have stopped my book Christ & Xmas being printed! The students made a golden calf of it and therefore I pull down this dagon. Don't ever speak of it as a healer. I did in my article for our Mag. but did not know the modus operandi abroad. The books heal scientifically. The poem is not made the healer but the pictures are ... and the picture-healing is made by misuse of Charm-healing such as pagans use, and mind-curers mesmerists and faith-curers adopt to save learning through growth out of error to Truth. (Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority, p. 63)
....
The last hullabaloo over the degree if Mrs. Eddy's divinity erupted in 1991 when the Boston headquarters published The Destiny of The Mother Church by Bliss Knapp. It is a work that elevates Mrs. Eddy's divinity to a level considered blasphemous by mainline Christians, and which even Christian Scientists consider heretical. Why then did the church publish such a book? It is a sordid tale.
Twice the church refused to accept Knapp's manuscript -- first in 1948, and again in 1956. Then, to the vast harassment of church officials, Knapp's widow and his sister-in-law, before they died, left a will offering the church now worth $98 million if it would print and distribute the book before May 1993. Otherwise, all the loot would go to Stanford University and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
In 1991 the church published the book. Like Mrs. Eddy, its leaders fibbed about their motives. It wasn't the money, they said. No, God forbid! They just wanted the faithful to have access to an alternate point of view about their leader!
Since 1991 the church has been doing its best not to promote or distribute Knapp's unwelcome book. (The book represents Mary Baker Eddy as the second coming; on p. 2019 Gardner explains that the court has ruled that they may not receive the money since it was on the assumption that they promote it, but at the time this book was printed in 1993 it may have been subject to appeal.) (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.207-9)
There remains, sadly, a remnant of true believers who refuse to see physicians. This has taken a grim toll. The Journal of the American Medical Association (September 22, 1989) reported on a study of 5,558 Christian Scientists as compared to a control group of 29,858 non-Scientists. The death rate among the Christian Scientists from cancer was double the national average, and 6 percent of them died from causes considered preventable by doctors. The non-Scientists, on the average, lived four years longer than Christian Scientists if they were women, and two years longer if they were men. Male Christian Scientists are more likely to seek medical help than female believers. Similar studies have shown that Seventh-day Adventists, on the average, live nine years longer than non-Adventists.
Ellen White, the Adventist prophetess who in some many ways resembled Mrs. Eddy, was originally opposed to mainline medicine. Over the decades, however, her followers, while retaining that church's emphasis on vegetarianism and opposition to alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, and spicy foods, have warmly embraced modern medicine. Some of the best hospitals in America are Adventist owned and operated. It is impossible to imagine the Christian Science church founding and operating a hospital. Even Pentecostal faith-healer Oral Roberts combined prayer with orthodox surgery and medicine in his Tulsa hospital. (Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.217-8)
Cancer patients who use homeopathy and alternative remedies as part of treatment twice as likely to die from disease, study finds 07/19/2018
Dickey, Adam Herbert, 1864-1925: Possession / (Boston : Christian Science Publishing Society, c1917)
A Philosophical Critique of Christian Science
Christian Apologetic's Research Ministry Forum: Mary Baker Eddy was addicted to morphine—a painkiller
Duane S Gunnison "The life of Mary Baker Eddy" 1961 PDF
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Wikipedia: Robert Peel (Christian Science) Peel is best known for his three-volume biography, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (1966), The Years of Trial (1971), and The Years of Authority (1977). Peel served in World War II in the South Pacific, working as a civilian intelligence officer.
(Martin Gardner "The Healing Revelations Of Mary Baker Eddy" 1993 p.)
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