THE LIFE OF
\RY BAKER G'EDDY
AND
THE HISTORY OF
HRISTIAN SCIENCE
GEORGINE MILMINE
LIBRARY
TORONTO
Shelf No.
Register No.... J
i
THE LIFE OF
MARY BAKER G. EDDY
AND THE
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
MARY BAKER G. EDDY
From a photograph taken in Concord, N. H., in 1892
THE LIFE OF
MARY BAKER G. EDDY
AND THE
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
BY
GEORGINE MILMINE
ILLUSTRATED
YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1909
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908, BY THE S. S. MCCLURE COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED, NOVEMBER, 1909 '
NOTE
The following history was first published in serial form
in McClure's Magazine, 1907-1908. It has since been revised
and new material has been added.
G. M.
CONTENTS
I. Mrs. Eddy's American Ancestors Mark Baker, and
Life on the Bow Farm Schooldays in Til-
ton Early Influences Her First Marriage 3
II. Mrs. Glover as a Widow in Tilton Her Interest
in Mesmerism and Clairvoyance The Disposal
of Her Son Marriage to Daniel Patterson 26
III. Mrs. Patterson First Hears of Dr. Quimby
Her Arrival in Portland Quimby and His
"Science" 42
IV. Mrs. Patterson Becomes Quimby's Patient and
Pupil Her Defence of Quimby and His The
ory Her Grief at His Death She Asks Mr.
Dresser to Take up Quimby's Work . . 56
V. The Quimby Controversy Mrs. Eddy's Claim that
Christian Science Was a Divine Revelation to
Her The Story of Her Fall on the Ice in
Lynn and Her Miraculous Recovery . . 71
VI. The Quimby Controversy Continued Mrs. Eddy's
Attempts to Discredit Quimby Her Charge
that He Was Always a Mesmerist Quimby's
Adherents Defend Him 88
vii
Vlll
CONTENTS
CHAPTEB
VII. Dr. and Mrs. Patterson in Lynn Their Sep
aration Mrs. Patterson as a Professional Vis
itor She Teaches Hiram Crafts the Quimby
" Science " Mrs. Patterson in Amesbury . 105
VIII. Two Years with the Wentworths in Stoughton
Mrs. Patterson Instructs Mrs. Wentworth
from the Quimby Manuscripts and Prepares
Her First Book for the Press . . .
IX. Mrs. Glover Goes into Partnership with Richard
Kennedy Their Establishment in Lynn
Mrs. Glover's First Disciples Disagreements
and Lawsuits ....... 134
X. Mrs. Glover's Influence over Her Students
Quimby Discredited Daniel Harrison Spof-
ford Mrs. Glover's Marriage to Asa Gilbert
Eddy ........ 155
XI. The First Appearance of Science and Health
Christian Science as a System of Metaphysics
As a Religion As a Curative Agent . . 176
XII. Mrs. Eddy's Belief that She Suffered for the
Sins of Others Letters to Students The
Origin and Development of Malicious Animal
Magnetism A Revival of Witchcraft . . 211
XIII. The " Conspiracy to Murder " Case Arrest of
Eddy and Arens on a Sensational Charge
Hearing in Court Discharge of the De
fendants ..... 245
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
XIV. Mrs. Eddy Addresses Boston Audiences She is
Tortured by Her Fear of Mesmerism Or
ganisation of " The Church of Christ, Scien
tist " Withdrawal of Eight Leading Mem
bers Mrs. Eddy's Retreat from Lynn
XV. The Massachusetts Metaphysical College Organ
ised Death of Asa Gilbert Eddy Mrs.
Eddy's Belief that He Was Mentally As
sassinated Entrance of Calvin A. Frye . 281
XVI. Mrs. Eddy's Boston Household A Daily War
fare Against Mesmerism The P. M. Soci
ety An Action Against Arens for In
fringement of Copyright .... 298
XVII. Literary Activities Mrs. Eddy as an Editor
The Rev. Mr. Wiggin Becomes Her Liter
ary Assistant His Private Estimate of
Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science . . 312
XVIII. The Material Prosperity of Church and College
Mrs. Eddy Goes to Live in Commonwealth
Avenue Discontent of the Students A
Rival School of Mental Healing The
Schism of 1888 .... 340
XIX. Mrs. Eddy Rallies Her Forces Growth of
Christian Science in the West The Mak
ing of a Healer The Apotheosis of Mrs.
Eddy
x CONTENTS
CHAPTER
XX. The Adoption of a Son Mrs. Eddy's House
hold and the New Favourite A Crisis in
Christian Science Mrs. Eddy is Driven
from Boston by " M.A.M." .... 379
XXI. The New Policy Mrs. Eddy Resigns from
Pulpit and Journal and Closes Her College
Disorganisation of the Church and Asso
ciation Reconstruction on a New Basis
Mrs. Eddy in Absolute Control and Posses
sion 391
XXII. Life at Pleasant View Mrs. Eddy Produces
More Christian Science Literature Fos
ter Eddy Is Made Publisher of the Text-
Book The Story of His Fall from Favour
Rule of Service . . . . . 411
XXIII. Josephine Curtis Woodbury and the Romantic
School Birth of the Prince of Peace Mrs.
Eddy Withdraws Her Support " War in
Heaven" 428
XXIV. Mrs. Eddy Adopts the Title of Mother "
Beginning of the Concord Pilgrimages
Mrs. Eddy Hints at Her Political Influence
The Building of the Mother Church Ex
tension ........ 441
XXV. George Washington Glover Mrs. Eddy's Son
Brings an Action Against Leading Christian
Scientists Withdrawal of the Suit Mrs.
Eddy Moves from Concord, N, H., to New
ton, Mass 453
CONTENTS yi
CHAPTER PAOH
XXVI. Training the Vine How Mrs. Eddy Has Organ
ised Her Church Her Management and
Discipline The Church Manual Recent
Modifications in Christian Science Practice
Membership of the Church Practical
Results of Mrs. Eddy's Life-Work . . 460
Appendix A 486
Appendix B ......... 489
Appendix C . . . . ... ..... 494
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mary Baker G. Eddy. From a photograph taken in
Concord, N. H., in 1892 .... Frontispiece
FACING
PAGE
Mark Baker, Mrs. Eddy's father 10
Daniel Patterson, Mrs. Eddy's second husband . . 34
The house in North Groton, N. H., where Mrs. Eddy,
then Mrs. Daniel Patterson, lived for seven years . 38
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby 48
Mary Baker G. Eddy. From a tintype given to Mrs.
Sarah G. Crosby in 1864 62
Facsimile of the second sheet of the first " spirit " letter
from Albert Baker, Mrs. Eddy's brother, to Mrs.
Sarah Crosby 66
Mary Baker G. Eddy. From a photograph taken in
Amesbury, Mass., in 1870 114
Mary Baker G. Eddy. Helping an Amesbury photogra
pher to get a successful picture of a baby . .114
Title page and part of the first page of the manuscript
from which Mrs. Glover taught Mrs. Wentworth
the system of mental healing which she ascribed to
P. P. Quimby 128
Richard Kennedy. From a photograph taken in Lynn,
Mass., in 1871 152
Asa Gilbert Eddy, Mrs. Eddy's third husband . . .168
Daniel H. Spofford 252
Edward J. Arens 252
xiii
xiv ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Mary Baker G. Eddy. From a tintype given to Lucy
Wentworth in Stoughton, Mass., in 1870 . . 270
Mary Baker G. Eddy. From a photograph taken in
Boston in the early eighties 270
Calvin A. Frye. From a photograph taken about 1882 294
Mary Baker G. Eddy. Taken about the year 1886,
while at the head of her college in Boston . . 308
Mary Baker G. Eddy. As she looked in 1870 when she
first taught Christian Science in Lynn, Mass. . 308
The Reverend James Henry Wiggin, who was for four
years Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser . . . 328
Christian Scientists' Picnic at Point of Pines, July 16,
1885 348
Ebenezer J. Foster Eddy, the adopted son of Mrs. Eddy 384
George Washington Glover, Mrs. Eddy's only child . . 384
Pleasant View, Mrs. Eddy's home in Concord, N. H. . 414
The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston. The
Mother Church 450
THE LIFE OF
MARY BAKER G. EDDY
AND THE
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
THE LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
CHAPTER I
MES. EDDY'S AMERICAN ANCESTORS MARK BAKER, AND LIFE ON
THE BOW FARM SCHOOLDAYS IN TILTON EARLY INFLU
ENCES HER FIRST MARRIAGE
MARY A. MORSE BAKER, 1 the future leader of the
Christian Science Church, was the sixth and youngest
child of Mark and Abigail Baker. She was born July 16, 1821,
at the Baker homestead in the township of Bow, near the present
city of Concord in New Hampshire. As a family the Bakers were
of the rugged farmer type of the period to which they belonged.
From the days of John Baker, their earliest American ancestor,
who came from East Anglia and obtained a freehold in Charles-
town, Mass., in 1634, throughout five generations 2 to Mark
Baker, they had worked the unwilling soil of their New England
farms, and brought up large families to labour after them.
One of their number had engaged in the pre-Revolutionary
wars, and in 1758 received a captain's commission from
Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire. This was
1 Mrs. Eddy was named iu part for her grandmother, Mary Ann Moore (or
O'Moor) Baker. She wrote her name as above, using only the initial of her
second name.
2 The five generations were (1) John, (2) Thomas, (3) Thomas, (4) Joseph,
(5) Joseph, who was the father of Mark Baker and the grandfather of Mrs.
Eddy.
3
4 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Joseph Baker, the grandfather of Mark who married Hannah,
the daughter of Captain John Lovewell, hero of " LovelPs
Fight," and through her came into possession of the homestead
in Bow. According to family tradition this farm, which was
given to Hannah Lovewell by her father, was originally a part
of " Lovell's Grant," a tract deeded to Captain Lovewell by
the government for " gallant military service."
As far back as the memory of any of the present generation
of Bakers goes, however, the farm was first occupied by Joseph
Baker 2d, and his wife, whose name is recorded by the Baker
family both as Mary Ann O'Moor and Marion Moore. 3 Of
their large family of children, Mark, born May 2, 1785, was
the youngest, 4 and at the death of his father in 1816, he, with
an elder brother, James, inherited the farm. Mark's share
of the estate, included the farmhouse and barns, with the obliga
tion to support his mother. The farm was hill land, rising
from the valley of the Merrimac River, and not especially
fertile, but as his fathers before him had done, he managed,
by toiling early and late, to wring from it a living for himself
and his large family. In May, 1807, he had married the
daughter of Nathaniel and Phebe Ambrose, neighbours across
the Merrimac, in Pembroke, and brought her home to his
father's house. Like the Bakers, the Ambrose family were
severe Congregationalists, and farmers of the familiar New
England type. Deacon Ambrose and his wife were staunch
Mrs. Eddy and at least one other descendant gives the name as Marlon
Moore, but from statistics copied from the family Bible of this Joseph Baker,
and now in possession of his great grand-daughter, it is recorded that Joseph
Baker was born November 9, 1741. and died in February, 1816. It gives the
ame of his wife as Mary Ann O'MoT, who was born December 11, 1743
and died January 26, 1835, and names ten children born to them See
Appendix A.
4 JL ne T Joseph S? ker recor <i names ten children, as follows : John, James,
David, Jesse, William, Hannah, Joseph, Mary Ann, Philip, and Mark.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 5
supporters of their church, and they had brought up their
daughter, Abigail, to be both pious and thrifty. As the wife
of Mark Baker she is remembered for her patience and industry.
She devoted all her energies to the care of her family, and was
faithful in attendance at church. And this simple record, like
that of many another heroic New England housewife, is all
that is known of Mrs. Eddy's mother.
The dominating influence in the Baker home was Mark, and
he made his presence felt in the community as well. His char
acter was naturally strong, and as narrow as his experience
and opportunity had been. Born ten years after the American
Revolution, he grew up in the atmosphere of sharply-defined
opinions and declared principles, peculiar to the times. The
country was still comparatively undeveloped and scantily popu
lated, and without the broadening influences made possible by
later inventions. His house, in the middle of an isolated farm,
was remote from its neighbours ; the nearest town was Concord,
then a place of two or three thousand inhabitants, and where,
except on market days and church days, he almost never went.
The hard daily labour of the farm, and the equally hard work
which he made of his politics and religion, comprised all his
interests. To conquer the resisting land, to drive a good bar
gain, to order his conduct within the letter of his church law,
to hate his enemies and to hold in contempt all who disagreed
with him these were the rules by which he shaped his life.
High-tempered, dominating, and narrow, he was not content
merely to adhere to his own principles, letting other men live
as they would, but sought to impress his convictions upon his
neighbours. There are instances of life-long quarrels between
6 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Mark Baker and those who differed from him in business, poli
tics, and religion. A quarrel over a question of business with
his brother James resulted in a complete separation of the
two families (although they lived as neighbours for years)
from 1816 almost to the present time. 5 A charge which he
brought against a church brother was arbitrated for several
years before church committees ; and his local political quarrels
during abolition days were frequent and bitter. He lived on
the Bow farm from 1785 to 1836, and in Sanbornton Bridge
(now Tilton) from 1836 until his death in 1865, and to those
who knew him in these two communities he is still a vivid memory.
In appearance he was tall and lean, his muscles hardened by
labour. His iron jaw and tense gray eye bespoke determina
tion and resistance. The very tap of his stick, as he tramped
along the country roads, conveyed a challenge. His voice
was terrific in power and volume. The Baker voice is a tradi
tion in New Hampshire, and stories are told in Bow of the
Baker brothers at work in distant fields upon their farms,
thundering like gods to each other across the hills.
Mark's neighbours called him " Squire " Baker, and the
younger folk called him " Uncle." They found him sharp at
a bargain, but honest in his dealings, and while he paid his
workers the smallest wages, he always sacredly kept his word,
and in his narrow way he was a good citizen. He tried his
friends by his fierce temper and his intense prejudices, which
kept him, in one way and another, in a continual ferment. " A
'Only a few years ago Mrs. Eddy renewed this family connection by
sending for Representative Henry Moore Baker of Concord, a grandson of
Tames Baker, to call upon her at Pleasant View, her home in the same city.
Mr. Baker was, until October, 1909, one of the three trustees appointed by
Mrs. Eddy in 1907 to take charge of her property interests.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 7
tiger for temper, and always in a row." " You could no more
move him than you can move old Kearsarge " (a local moun
tain). "An ugly disposition, but faithful to his church, and
immovable in his politics." These are the comments of his
old neighbours in Tilton to-day.
Inevitably, he carried his religion and politics to extremes.
In the Congregational church he was an active figure, faithful
and punctilious in performing all its requirements. Not only
did he fulfil his own church obligations, but he saw that his
brethren and sisters fulfilled theirs. He brought charges of
backsliding against fellow-members when they failed to attend
public worship or communion, and was willingly appointed to
visit and " labour " with the delinquents. It seems probable
that Mark enjoyed this duty and performed it thoroughly.
He had his own church troubles, too. The yellowed books of
the Tilton Congregational Church record many a disputation
between him and the brethren. A quarrel between Mark Baker
and William Hayes was aired before the congregation year
after year, but the two were never reconciled. The church
did not follow Mark's wishes in the settlement of the differences,
and after bringing up the old charges again and again, and
receiving no satisfaction, he applied for a letter of dismissal,
because he " could not walk in covenant with this church."
When his request was refused, he placed himself on record as
" feeling aggrieved at the doings of the church on this subject."
A story which has passed into neighbourhood tradition illu
minates the man and shows the strength and quality of his
religious feeling. One Sunday in his later years he mistook
the day and worked as usual about his place. On Monday
8 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
morning he started for church, but was disturbed at seeing
his neighbours at work. As usual he took them to task. " Sis
ter Lang," he said, frowning at a neighbour who was placing
out her tubs for washing, " what is the meaning of this on the
Lord's Day? " The woman replied that as the day was Monday
she was preparing to do the family washing, but Mark com
manded her to prepare for church instead, and went on his way.
Farther along he stopped again. " Brother Davis," he cried,
" what is this commotion in the streets ? Why are not the
church bells ringing for public worship ? " He was again
assured that it was Monday; but he was not convinced until
he arrived at the church and found the doors closed. He
hurried to Elder Curtice, who confirmed his fears. " Is it
possible that I have broken the Lord's Day? " exclaimed Uncle
Baker in alarm, and he knelt with his pastor and prayed for
forgiveness. Back to his home went the old man, the godly
part of him purged. But the old Adam remained, and as he
strode up the hill he trembled with excitement. A tame crow,
a pet of the children of the neighbourhood, hopped on a bush
in front of him, cawing loudly. In his perturbed condition,
the sight of the bird made Mark angrier than ever, and raising
his stick, he struck the crow dead. " Take that," he said in
a passion, " for hoppin' about on the Sabbath," and he stormed
on up the hill. At home he kept the day strictly as Sunday to
atone for his worldliness of the previous day.
In politics he was no less intense. He was a pro-slavery
advocate before the war, and an unbending Copperhead during
it. He hated Abraham Lincoln above all men. Two luckless
young women, selling pictures of Lincoln, once entered his
HISTORY OP CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 9
house to induce him to buy, but saved themselves from ejection
only by a hasty flight. " I'll never forget what he said about
Lincoln," said one of his old neighbours now living. " When
the news of Lincoln's assassination reached Sanbornton Bridge,
I stopped at Mark Baker's to tell him of it. ' What ! ' he cried,
and throwing down his hoe, he shouted at the top of his voice,
'I'm glad on't!'"
When his politics and religion clashed as they did during the
Civil War, the old man was sorely torn. His pastor, Elder Cor-
ban Curtice, was a Republican who believed in the righteousness
of the war, and Mark, with others of a different political faith,
attempted to have the minister removed for " political preach
ing." Failing in this, some of the oldest members left the
church. But Mark Baker remained. He went to church as
regularly as ever, and abided by all its rulings as before, but
his protest was expressed in a manner altogether characteristic.
He sat doggedly through the sermon, his eyes fixed on the
elder. The moment the word " rebellion " left the preacher's
lips whether he referred to the rebellion of the States or
the rebellion of the angels Mark Baker sprang to his feet,
and, with flashing eyes and clenched fists, strode indignantly
out of the church.
These incidents show the calibre of the man who was Mrs.
Eddy's father. There is no doubt that he possessed qualities
out of the ordinary. With his natural force and strong con
victions, and with his rectitude of character, he might have
been more than a local figure, but for the insurmountable
obstacles of a childishly passionate temper and a deep per
versity of mind. He was without imagination and without
10 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
sympathy. From fighting for a principle he invariably passed
to fighting for his own way, and he was unable to see that the
one cause was not as righteous as the other. His portrait-
a daguerreotype shows hardness and endurance and immova
bility. There is no humility in the heavy lip and square-set
mouth, no aspiration in the shrewd eyes; the high forehead
is merely forbidding. 5 3
All Mark Baker's children were born in the little farmhouse
in Bow, between 1808 and 1821. There were three sons-
Samuel, Albert, and George Sullivan and three daughters-
Abigail, Martha, and Mary. 6 The family also included Mark
Baker's mother. According to pioneer custom the early Bakers
had built their house on top of the hill upon which their farm
lay, fully half a mile from the public road, which at that point
follows the course of the Merrimac River in the valley. However
inconvenient and impractical this choice of a site may have been,
it left nothing to be desired in the view. Across the green
valley of woods and fields, through which flows the white-banked
river, one can see from the Baker hill-top the long blue ranges
of the White Mountains. Nearer at hand there are glimpses
of clean white villages, and at the left is the city of Concord.
The nearest house is out of sight at the foot of the hill. In
Mark Baker's day it was occupied by his brother James, with
whom Mark was not in friendly relation.
The house itself is of wood, unpainted, and extremely small
51 - 2 In his last years he was afflicted with a palsy of the head and hands, and
suffered from facial cancer although it did not cause his death. Of his family,
nearly all have died of cancer in some form. His two eldest daughters and
their three children, and two of his sons, Samuel and George, all died of the
dread disease.
Samuel Dow, born July 8, 1808 ; Albert, born February 5, 1810 ; George
Sullivan, born August 7, 1812; Abigail Barnard, born January 15, 1816;
Martha Smith, born January 19, 1819; Mary A. Morse, born July 16, 1821.
Frcm a tintype. Courtesy of Mrs. H. S. Philbrook
MARK BAKER
Mrs. Eddy'3 father
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 11
and plain. A narrow door in the centre opens directly upon
the stairway. On the left hand is a little parlour, lighted by
two small-paned windows, and containing a corner fireplace. A
larger room at the right, used as a granary by the present
owner, was once the kitchen and living-room. Overhead there
were three or four small sleeping-rooms. One wonders where
the family of nine bestowed themselves when they were all in
the house at once. The house has not been occupied for many
years. The windows are boarded up, and it is desolate and
forsaken. Yet it is not forgotten, for every summer Christian
Scientists come to visit the spot where their leader was born.
It is a shrine to the devout, who carry away stones and handf uls
of soil and little shrubs, as souvenirs.
The Baker children were brought up like other farmers' fami
lies of that time and place. The older ones worked about the
farm and in the house, and in the winter when farm work was
" slack " they attended the district school. Lonely and unstimu-
lating enough the life seems from this distance, but as a matter
of fact it was useful and not uninteresting. It was before the
days of steam railroads and the thousand modern aids to living,
when every farmer's family was an industrial community in
itself. All the supplies of the household, as well as food and
clothes, were produced at home. Each man and woman and girl
and boy of the farms was a craftsman, their daily work re
quiring physical strength and mental ingenuity and a kind of
moral heroism. The school supplied their intellectual interests,
the church satisfied their religious emotions, and for social
diversion there were corn-huskings and barn-raisings and quilt-
ing-bees. The rest was hard labour.
12 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
The qualities of Mark Baker were transmitted to his children.
They were all high-tempered and headstrong and self-assertive,
and they did not lack confidence in themselves in any particular.
At home, however, they were trained to obedience and up to
the time at least of the birth of his youngest daughter, Mark
Baker was master in his own house. But from the beginning
it was evident that special concessions must be made to Mary.
She was named for her grandmother, who made a pet of her
from the first, and no doubt helped to spoil her as a baby.
Mrs. Baker, the mother, often told her friends that Mary,
of all her children, was the most difficult to care for, and they
were all at their wits' ends to know how to keep her quiet and
amused. As Mary grew older she was sent to district school
with her sisters, but only for a few days at a time, for she was
subject from infancy to convulsive attacks of a hysterical nature.
Because of this affliction she was at last allowed to omit school
altogether and to throw off all restraint at home. The family
rules were relaxed where she was concerned, and the chief prob
lem in the Baker house was how to pacify Mary and avoid her
nervous " fits." Even Mark Baker, heretofore invincible, was
obliged to give way before the dominance of his infant daughter.
His time-honoured observance of the Sabbath, which was a fixed
institution at the Baker farm, was abandoned because Mary
could not, after a long morning in church, sit still all day in
the house with folded hands, listening to th? reading of the
Bible. Sundays became a day of torture not only to the hys
terical child, but to all the family, for she invariably had one
of her bad attacks, and the day ended in excitement and anxiety.
These evidences of an abnormal condition of the nerves are im-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 13
portant to any study of Mrs. Eddy and her career. As child
and woman she suffered from this condition, and its existence
explains some phases of her nature and certain of her acts,
which otherwise might be difficult to understand and impossible
to estimate.
Until Mary's fifteenth year the routine of life at the farm
was unbroken except for the departure from home of her two
eldest brothers to start life for themselves, and the death of
her grandmother Baker. In choosing their occupations, Mark
Baker's sons turned away from the farm, new opportunities
having been opened by the expanding industrial and commercial
life of the country. Samuel, the eldest, went to Boston, in
company with a neighbour's son, George Washington Glover,
to learn the trade of a stone mason, as the quarries of New
Hampshire had then been recently opened. Albert, the second
son, had a higher ambition. He prepared himself for college
and entered Dartmouth. He was graduated in 1834, and
immediately went to Hillsborough Center, N. H., to study law
in the office of Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the
United States. Under the influence of Pierce young Baker
entered politics. He served one term as Assemblyman in the
State Legislature, and received the nomination for Representa
tive in Congress; but he died in 1841 before the election. He
was then only thirty-one years old, and his character and
ability seemed to justify the high opinion of his friends, who
regarded him as a coming man.
The death of the elder Mrs. Baker occurred in January, 1835,
and early the following year Mark Baker sold the homestead
and moved his family to a farm near the village of Sanbornton
14 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Bridge (now called Tilton), eighteen miles north of Concord.
Sanbornton Bridge was, in 1836, growing into a lively manu
facturing village. It already contained public-spirited citizens,
and had considerable social life. Altogether it afforded larger
opportunities than the Bow farm ; and here the interests of the
Baker family now centred. Abigail, the eldest daughter, soon
married Alexander Hamilton Tilton, 7 the rich man of the
village, and settled there. Her husband owndd the woollen
mill, and accumulated a considerable fortune from the manu
facture of the " Tilton tweed," which he put on the market.
Mrs. Tilton was extremely handsome and dignified, and her
strong character, in which the Baker traits were tempered
by a kindliness of spirit and a keen sense of responsibility,
made her a leading figure in that little community. She was
also capable and adaptable. When her husband died she took
charge of his business, and was even more successful in its
management than he had been. George Sullivan Baker formed
a partnership with his brother-in-law. Martha, the second
daughter, married Luther C. Pillsbury, deputy warden of the
New Hampshire penitentiary in Concord, but after the death
of her husband she returned to live in Sanbornton Bridge.
Here, too, Mark Baker and his wife lived out their days, and
here Mary Baker passed her girlhood, married, returned as a
widow, married again, and once more returned as a deserted wife.
As soon as they were settled on the new farm, Mary was
sent to the district school at the Bridge. The schoolhouse
stood on the site of the present Tilton Seminary. It was a
7 At the request of Charles Tilton, who gave the village a town hall, San
bornton Bridge was renamed Tilton in 1869. Charles Tilton was a nephew of
Alexander Hamilton Tilton.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 15
two-story wooden building, painted red. The district school
occupied the lower floor, while the upper room was used for
a small private school, where the higher English branches were
taught. After a time these upper classes came to be known
as the " academy," and it was here that Dyer H. Sanborn, the
author of Sanborn's Grammar, taught for five years at a later
date. Mary was then nearing her fifteenth birthday, and as
she had received almost no instruction at Bow, the family hoped
that another attempt at school might be more successful.
It is one proof of Mary's remarkable personality that her old
associates remember her, even as a child, so clearly. The Baker
family was not one to be readily forgotten in any community,
and Mary had all the Baker characteristics, besides a few im
pressive ones on her own account. The writer has talked with
scores of Mary Baker's contemporaries in the New Hampshire
villages where she lived, and in their descriptions of her, their
recollections of her conduct, and their estimates of her character,
there is a remarkable consistency. Allowance must always be
made, in dealing with the early life of a famous person, for
the dishonour of a prophet in his own country. Such allow
ance has been made here, and nothing is set down which is not
supported by the testimony of many witnesses among her
neighbours and relatives and associates.
When Mary attended the district school in Tilton, she is
remembered as a pretty and graceful girl, delicately formed,
and with extremely small hands and feet. Her face was too
long and her forehead too high to answer the requirements of
perfect beauty, but her complexion was clear and of a delicate
colour, and her waving brown hair was abundant and always
16 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
becomingly arranged. Her eyes were large and gray, and
when overcharged with expression, as was often the case, they
deepened in colour until they seemed to be black. She was
always daintily dressed, and even at fifteen succeeded in keeping
closer to the fashions than was common in the community or
in her own home. But in spite of these advantages Mary was
not altogether attractive. Her manners and speech were marred
by a peculiar affectation. Her unusual nervous organisation
may have accounted for her self-consciousness and her sus
ceptibility to the presence of others, but whatever the cause,
Mary always seemed to be " showing off " for the benefit of those
about her, and her extremely languishing manners were un
kindly commented upon even at a time when languishing man
ners were fashionable. In speaking she used many words, the
longer and more unusual the better, and her pronunciation and
application of them were original.
Sarah Jane Bodwell, a daughter of the Congregational min
ister at Sanbornton Square, " kept " the school then, and find
ing Mary very backward in her studies in spite of her age
and precociousness, she placed her in a class with small children.
Mary seemed indifferent about getting into a more advanced
class and did not apply herself. Her old schoolmates say that
she was indolent and spent her time lolling in her seat or
scribbling on her slate, and apparently was incapable of con
centrated or continuous thought.
" I remember Mary Baker very well," said one of her class
mates now living in Tilton. " She began to come to district
school in the early summer of 1836. I recollect her very dis
tinctly because she sat just in front of me, and because she
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 17
was such a big girl to be in our class. I was only nine, but
I helped her with her arithmetic when she needed help. We
studied Smith's Grammar and ciphered by ourselves in Adams's
New Arithmetic, and when she left school in three or four weeks
we had both reached long division. She left on account of
sickness.
" I remember what a pretty girl she was, and how nicely
she wore her hair. She usually let it hang in ringlets, but one
day she appeared at school with her hair ' done up ' like a
young lady. She told us that style of doing it was called a
' French Twist,' a new fashion which we had never seen before.
In spite of her backwardness at books she assumed a very
superior air, and by her sentimental posturing she managed
to attract the attention of the whole school. She loved to
impress us with fine stories about herself and her family. The
schoolgirls did not like her, and they made fun of her as school
girls will. I knew her for a long time afterward, as we grew
up in the same village, but I can't say that Mary changed much
with her years."
Mrs. Eddy's own story of her early education should also
be considered. In her autobiography, Retrospection and In
trospection, she says that she was kept out of school much of
the time because her father " was taught to believe " that her
brain was too large for her body; that her brother Albert
taught her Greek, Latin, and Hebrew ; and her favourite child
hood studies were Natural Philosophy, Logic, and Moral Sci
ence. From childhood, too, Mrs. Eddy recalls, she was a
verse-maker, and " at ten years of age I was as familiar with
Lindley Murray's Grammar as with the Westminster Catechism ;
18 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
and the latter I had to repeat every Sunday." Mrs. Eddy
has also said that she " graduated from Dyer H. Sanborn's
Academy at Tilton." But at present she makes no pretension
to such scholarly attainments. " After my discovery of Chris
tian Science," she says, " most of the knowledge I had gleaned
from schoolbooks vanished like a dream." Only Lindley Murray
remained, and he in an apotheosized state. "Learning was so
illumined," she writes, " that grammar was eclipsed. Etymology
was divine history, voicing the idea of God in man's origin and
signification. Syntax was spiritual order and unity. Prosody,
the song of angels, and no earthly or inglorious theme."
Mrs. Eddy's schoolmates are not able to reconcile her story
with their own recollections. They declare frankly that they
do not believe Albert Baker taught her Hebrew, Greek, and
Latin. He entered college when Mary was nine, and left home
when she was thirteen. There were, they say, no graduations
from Dyer H. Sanborn's Academy, for the girls and boys left
school when they were old enough to go to work or to marry.
They insist that Mary's education was finished when she reached
long division in the district school.
At church, too, Mary made a vivid impression. Like the
rest of Mark Baker's family, she attended service regularly;
and she took pains with her costume, and the timing of her
arrival, so that members of the congregation have retained a
distinct picture of Mary Baker as she appeared at church.
She always made a ceremonious entrance, coming up the aisle
after the rest of the congregation were seated, and attracting
the general attention by her pretty clothes and ostentatious
manner. No trace of early piety can be found in a first-hand
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 19
study of Mrs. Eddy's life, yet in her autobiography she con
stantly refers to deep religious experiences of her childhood.
As her chief recollection of Bow farm days, she relates a
peculiar experience, intended to show that, like little Samuel,
she received ghostly visitations in early youth. She writes :
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 con
tinued until I grew discouraged, and my mother was perplexed and
anxious.
At another time her cousin, Mehitable Huntoon, heard the
voice and told Mary's mother about it. " That night," con
tinues Mrs. Eddy's narrative, " 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 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."
Mrs. Eddy tells the story of her admission to church member
ship and of her discussions with the elders, and Christian
Scientists draw a parallel between this incident and that of
Christ debating at the age of twelve with the wise men in the
temple. " At the age of twelve," writes Mrs. Eddy, " I was
admitted to the Congregationalist (Trinitarian) Church." She
describes her horror of the doctrine of predestination, while she
20 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
was preparing to enter the church, and how she wept over the
necessity of believing that her unregenerate sisters and brothers
would be damned. Peace, however, followed a season of prayer,
and when she finally appeared at church for examination on
doctrinal points, she flatly refused to accept that of predes
tination. She says:
Distinctly do I recall what followed. I stoutly maintained that I was
willing to trust God, and take my chance of spirituaj safety with my
brothers and sisters, not one of whom had then made any profession
of religion, even if my credal doubts left me outside the doors. . . .
Nevertheless, he (the minister) persisted in the assertion that I had been
truly regenerated, and asked me to say how I felt when the new light
dawned within me. I replied that I could only answer him in the words
of the Psalmist : " Search me, O God, and know my heart ; try me, and
know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead
me in the way everlasting."
This was so earnestly said, that even the oldest church-members wept.
After the meeting was over they came and kissed me. To the astonish
ment of many, the good clergyman's heart also melted, and he received
me into their communion, and my protest along with me.
The official record bearing on this point, taken from the
clerk's book of the Tilton Congregational Church, is as follows :
1838, July 26, Received into this church, Stephen Grant, Esq., John
Gilly and his wife Hannah, Mrs. Susan French, wife of William French,
Miss Mary A. M. Baker, by profession, the two former receiving the
ordinance of baptism. Greenaugh McQuestion, Scribe.
As Mary Baker was born on July 16, 1821, and as this
record is dated " 1838, July 26," she was evidently seventeen,
and not twelve, when the event described above took place.
At home Mary was still allowed to have her own way as
completely as in her baby days. Indeed, by this time she, as
well as her family, had come to consider this privilege a
natural right, and she grew constantly more insistent in her
demands upon her parents and brother and sisters, who had
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 21
found by long experience that the only way to live at all with
Mary was to give in to all her whims. In a household where
personal labour was exacted from each member, Mary spent
her days in idleness. Where her sisters dressed plainly, she
went clad in fine and dainty raiment, and where implicit obedi
ence was required of the others, Mary ignored, and more often
opposed, the wishes of her father ; and in the clashes between
them, her mother and sisters usually at least in her younger
years ranged themselves on her side, and against her father.
Mary's hysteria was, of course, her most effective argument
in securing her way. Like the sword of Damocles, it hung
perilously over the household, which constantly surrendered and
conceded and made shift with Mary to avert the inevitable
climax. Confusion and excitement and agony of mind lest
Mary should die was the invariable consequence of her hysterical
outbreaks, and the business of the house and farm was at a
standstill until the tragedy had passed.
These attacks, which continued until very late in Mrs. Eddy's
life, have been described to the writer by many eye-witnesses,
some of whom have watched by her bedside and treated her
in Christian Science for her affliction. At times the attack
resembled convulsions. Mary fell headlong to the floor, writh
ing and screaming in apparent agony. Again she dropped as
if lifeless, and lay limp and motionless, until restored. At
other times she became rigid like a cataleptic, and continued
for a time in a state of suspended animation. At home the
family worked over her, and the doctor was sent for, and Mary
invariably recovered rapidly after a few hours; but year after
year her relatives fully expected that she would die in one
22 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
of these spasms. Nothing had the power of exciting Mark
Baker like one of Mary's " fits," as they were called. His
neighbours in Tilton remember him as he went to fetch Dr.
Ladd, 8 how he lashed his horses down the hill, standing upright
in his wagon and shouting in his tremendous voice, " Mary
is dying ! "
Outside the family, Mary's spells did not inspire the same
anxiety. The unsympathetic called them " tantrums," after a
better acquaintance with her, and declared that she used her
nerves to get her own way. In later years Mark Baker came
to share this neighbourhood opinion, and on one occasion, after
Mary had grown to womanhood, he tested her power of self-
control by allowing her to remain on the floor, where she had
thrown herself when her will was crossed, and leaving her to
herself. An hour later when he opened the door, the room
was deserted. Mary had gone upstairs to her room, and noth
ing was heard from her until she appeared at supper, fully
recovered. After that Mary's nerves lost their power over
her father to a great extent, and when hard put to it, he
sometimes complained to his friends. A neighbour, passing
the house one morning, stopped at Mark's gate and inquired
why Mary, who was at that moment rushing wildly up and
down the second-story piazza, was so excited; to which Mark
replied bitterly : " The Bible says Mary Magdalen had seven
devils, but our Mary has got ten ! "
Unquestionably, Mary's attacks represented, to a great de
gree, a genuine affliction. Although Dr. Ladd sometimes impa
tiently diagnosed them as " hysteria mingled with bad temper,"
8 Dr. Nathaniel G. Ladd, the village physician.
HISTORY OP CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 23
he was, without doubt, deeply interested in her case. He
dabbled a little in mesmerism and sometimes experimented on
Mary, whom he found a sensitive subject. He discovered that he
could partly control her movements by mental suggestion. " I
can make that girl stop in the street any time merely by willing
it," he used to tell his friends, and he often demonstrated that
he could do it.
Mesmerism was a new subject in New England in those days,
and there was much experimenting and excitement over it.
There is no doubt that it formed one of the early influences
in Mrs. Eddy's life, and that it left an indelible impression
upon her supersensitive organisation. Charles Poyen, a French
disciple of Mesmer, had travelled through New England, lectur
ing and performing marvels of mesmeric power in the same
towns in which Mrs. Eddy then lived. In his book, Animal
Magnetism in New England, which was published in 1837,
he gives an account of his experiences there and says : " Animal
magnetism indisputably constituted in several parts of New
England the most stirring topic of conversation among all
classes of society." He called it a "great Truth," "The
Power of Mind Over Matter," a " demonstration," a " discovery
given by God," and a " science." Whether or not Mary Baker
saw or heard Poyen, or read his book, she must have heard
of his theories, and must have been familiar with the phrases
he used, as they were matter of common household discussion
and would appeal strongly to a girl of Mary's temperament.
In Christian Science she has given an important place to
" Animal Magnetism," and there is a chapter devoted to it
in her book, Science and Health.
U LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Andrew Jackson Davis, 9 afterward the celebrated Spiritual
ist, had already begun to astound the public by his remarkable
theories of the universe and disease, and by his extraordinary
literary feats. The healing of disease by means outside regu
lar channels was commonly reported, and new religious ideas
were developing. It was a more prolific period than usual for
all sorts of mystery and quackery in New England.
Another influence of these early years, whiqh had an effect
upon her later career, may be traced to the sect known as
Shakers, which had sprung up in that section of New Hamp
shire. Their main community was at East Canterbury, N. H.,
five miles from Tilton, and Mary Baker was familiar with their
appearance, their peculiar costume, and their community life.
She knew their religious doctrines and spiritual exaltations, and
was acquainted with their habits of industry and thrift. In
her girlhood there were still living in the neighbourhood people
who remembered Ann Lee, 10 the founder of the sect. All
through Mary's youth the Shakers were much in the courts
because of the scandalous charges brought against them, and
on one occasion they were defended by Franklin Pierce, in whose
office Albert Baker studied law. Laws directed against their
community were constantly presented to the Legislature, and
complaints against them were frequently heard. A famous
" exposure " of Shaker methods, written by Mary Dyer, who
had been a member of the Canterbury community, was published
in Concord in 1847 ; and the Shakers and their doings formed
one of the exciting topics of the times.
io^ th - or ot . The <% eat Harmonia, etc. See Appendix B.
Fleeing from England in 1774, Ann Lee spent her first few years in
America at Concord and the neighbouring towns.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 25
That these happenings made a profound impression on Mary
Baker and became irrevocably a part of her susceptible nature
is evident; for we find her reverting to and making use of
certain phases of Shakerism when, later, she had established
a religious system of her own. 11
When Mary was twenty-two years old she married George
Washington Glover, a son of John and Nancy Glover, who
were neighbours of the Bakers at Bow. " Wash " Glover, as
he was called, was a big, kind-hearted young fellow, who had
learned the mason's trade with Mary's brother, Samuel, and
he was an expert workman. The families were already con
nected through the marriage of Samuel Baker to Glover's
sister, Eliza. After learning his trade, Glover had gone South,
where there was a demand for Northern labour, and it was on
one of his visits home that he fell in love with Mary Baker.
They were married at Mark Baker's house December 12, 1843,
and Glover took his bride back with him to Charleston, S. C.
Six months later he was stricken with yellow fever and died
in June, 1844, at Wilmington, N. C., where he had gone on
business.
His young wife was left in a miserable plight, being far from
home, among strangers and without money. Mr. Glover, how
ever, had been a Freemason, and his brothers of that order
came to his wife's relief. They buried her husband and paid
her railroad fare to New York, where she was met by her
brother George and taken back to her father's house. Here,
the following September, her son was born, and she named him
George Washington, after his father.
n See Appendix C.
CHAPTER II
MRS. GLOVER AS A WIDOW IN TILTON HER INTEREST IN MESMER
ISM AND CLAIRVOYANCE THE DISPOSAL OF HER SON
MARRIAGE TO DANIEL PATTERSON
MRS. GLOVER had now to face a hard situation. Her brief
married life had ended in adversity, and returning a widow to
her father's house, she was without means of support for
herself or her child, and she had neither the training nor
the disposition to take up an occupation, or to make herself
useful at home. Her sisters and brothers were married and
gone from home, and her parents were growing old and less
able to cope with her turbulent moods. Embarrassing as this
position would have been to most women, Mrs. Glover did not
apparently find it so. She took it for granted that she was
to receive not only the sympathy of her relatives but their
support and constant service, and that they should assume the
care of her child. She divided her time between her father's
house and that of her sister Abby, and her baby was left to her
mother and sister or sent up the valley to a Mrs. Varney, whose
son, John Varney, worked for the Tiltons. Frequently, too,
the child stayed with Mahala Sanborn, a neighbour who had
attended Mrs. Glover at his birth. But wherever he was, it was
not with his mother, who had shown a curious aversion to him
from the beginning. " Mary," said her father, " acts like an
26
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 27
old ewe that won't own its lamb. She won't have the boy
near her."
It must be said to the credit of the Baker family that they
met Mrs. Glover's demands with a patience and faithfulness
that seems remarkable from a family of such impatient and
dominating character. They gave her the best room in each
house and regulated their domestic affairs with a view to her
comfort. When her nerves were in such a state of irritation
that the slightest sound annoyed her, Mark Baker spread the
road in front of his house with straw and tan bark to deaden
the sound of passing waggons. The noise of children disturbed
her, so the baby was sent to Mahala Sanborn or to Mrs.
Tilton. At her sister's house they tiptoed about the rooms
and placed covered bricks against every sill that the doors
might close softly. At both houses she was rocked to sleep
like a child in the arms of her father or her sister, and then
gently carried to bed. Sometimes, at the Tiltons', this task
fell to John Varney, the hired man, who like the members of her
own family, rocked her to sleep and carried her to bed. To
put an end to this practice, Mrs. Tilton ordered a large cradle
made for Mrs. Glover. It was built with a balustrade and an
extension seat at one end upon which Varney could sit, and by
rocking himself as in a chair, also rock the cradle. Another
symptom of her pathological condition was her intense desire
for swinging. A large swing was hung from hooks in the
ceiling of her room at Mrs. Tilton's, and here she was swung
hours at a time by her young nephew, Albert Tilton. When
Albert tired of the exercise he sometimes hired a substitute,
so that " swinging Mrs. Glover " became a popular way of
28 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
earning an honest penny among the village boys. One of these
" boys " has described his experience to the writer. " Some
days," he said, " Mrs. Glover was so nervous she couldn't have
anybody in the room with her, and then I used to tie a string
to the seat and swing her from outside her bedroom door."
Mark Baker and John Varney were obliged often to carry her
in their arms and walk the floor with her at night to soothe
her excitable nerves, and when everything else failed, Mark
used to send for old " Boston John " Clark to come and quiet
Mrs. Glover by mesmerism. Clark was a bridge-builder from
one of the villages up the valley who had acquired some reputa
tion as a mesmerist, practising, like Dr. Ladd, upon any sub
ject who was willing, and particularly happy when he dis
covered a " sensitive " like Mrs. Glover. He never failed to
soothe her, and after one of his visits, the Baker family enjoyed
a space of quiet from the incessant turmoil of Mary's nerves.
Yet Mrs. Glover was neither helpless nor incapacitated. She did
not keep to her bed and she was able to go about the village and
to attend to whatever she was interested in. Her neighbours
remember her at church gatherings and at the sewing circle,
where she went regularly although she did not sew. It was
one of Mrs. Glover's notions, after her six months in Charles
ton, to imitate the Southern women in little matters of dress
and manner, and at the sewing circle she sat and gave voluble
descriptions of her life in the South and the favourable im
pression she had made there, deploring the loss of the daily
horseback ride she had been accustomed to take in South
Carolina.
Twice Mrs. Glover made an effort at self-support. While
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 29
living with Mrs. Tilton she taught a class of children, holding
the sessions in a small building, once used as a shop, on the
Tilton place. After a few weeks' trial she gave it up. A little
later she repeated the experiment, but with the same result.
Although Mrs. Glover was later to have a " college " of her
own, and to be its president and sole instructor, teaching was
assuredly not her vocation in these early Tilton days. Perhaps
a dozen of her Tilton pupils are still living, and they are fond
of relating anecdotes of the days when they went to school
to Mrs. Glover. They all remember that the teacher required
the class to march around the room singing the following
refrain :
" We will tell Mrs. Glover
How much we love her;
By the light of the moon
We will come to her." 1
Mrs. Glover began now to enjoy considerable local fame on
account of her susceptibility to mesmeric influence, and her
clairvoyant powers. She had developed a habit of falling into
trances. Often, in the course of a social call, she would close
her eyes and sink into a state of apparent unconsciousness, dur
ing which she could describe scenes and events. The curious
and superstitious began to seek her advice while she was in
1 This song was evidently an adaptation of a popular " round " of that period,
which ran :
" Go to Jane Glover
And tell her I love her
And by the light of the moon
I will come to her."
A correspondent gives the information that in Crieff, Perthshire, Scotland,
a similar " round " was in popular use previous to the year 1840, the words
of which were :
"Go to .Tonn Glover
And tell her I love her
And by the light of the moon
I will come to her."
30 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
this trance state. " Boston John " Clark experimented with
her, putting her into the mesmeric sleep and attempting to
trace lost or stolen articles by means of her clairvoyance.
Once she tried to locate a drowned body. These efforts were
not attended with any great success, but interest in mesmerism
and clairvoyance ran high, and any one who could fall into
a trance and describe things was sure to be an object of wonder.
John Varney conceived the notion of turning this talent of
Mrs. Glover's to practical account. " Boston John " was sent
for, and Mrs. Glover, at Varney's suggestion, described the
hiding-place of Captain Kidd's treasure, which was then a
topic of exciting speculation. She indicated a spot near the
city of Lynn, Mass. Varney and his cronies set out for the
place and spent several days digging for the treasure, but
without success.
A few years later when spiritualism swept over the country,
Mrs. Glover took on the symptoms of a " medium." Like
the Fox sisters, she heard mysterious rappings at night, she
saw " spirits " of the departed standing by her bedside, and
she received messages in writing from the dead. There are
people living who remember very distinctly the spiritism craze
in Tilton, and who witnessed Mrs. Glover's manifestations of
mediumship. One elderly woman recalls a night spent with
Mrs. Glover when her rest was constantly disturbed by the
strange rappings and by Mary's frequent announcements of
the " appearance " of different spirits as they came and went.
Mark Baker's house was one of those where spirit seances
were held. The whole community was more or less interested
and a few went to extremes. One of this number became
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 31
so excited over the wonderful phenomena of Mrs. Glover's
writing mediumship that his mind was temporarily unbalanced.
A former Tilton woman, who remembers these events, writes
of Mrs. Glover's ability as a writing medium : " This was by
no means looked upon as anything discreditable, but only as
a matter of great astonishment."
During these years, too, Mrs. Glover tried her hand at
writing. She spent many hours in her room " composing
poetry," which sometimes appeared in the poet's corners of
local newspapers, and there is a tradition that she wrote a love
story for Godey's Lady's Booh. This literary tendency was
a valuable asset, which Mrs. Glover made the most of. It
gave her a certain prestige in the community, and she was not
loth to pose as an " authoress." Perhaps it was this early
habit of looking upon herself as a literary authority which
led her to take those curious liberties with English which have
always been characteristic of her. She drew largely upon the
credit of the language, sometimes producing a word or evolving
a pronunciation which completely floored her hearers. Some
of these words and phrases have passed into local bywords.
" When I vociferate so loudly, why do you not respond with
greater alacrity ? " she sometimes seriously demanded of her
attendants. She referred to plain John Varney as " Mr.
Ve-owney," and few ordinary words were left unadorned. She
sought also to improve upon nature in the matter of her own
good looks. Although she had a beautiful complexion, she
rouged and powdered, and although she had excellent teeth, she
had some of them replaced by false ones, " made entirely of
platinum," as Mrs. Glover described them.
32 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
On the whole, it is no wonder that Mrs. Glover was not taken
seriously in her own town. Artificiality spread over all her
acts, and in no relation in life did she impress even her nearest
friends or her own family with genuine feeling or sincerity.
Indeed, she was bitterly censured in those years for the more
active faults of selfish and unfilial conduct and a strange lack
of the sense of maternal duty. In 1851 Mrs. Glover had given
her son, George, to Mahala Sanborn. The boy, having reached
the age of seven, was growing too large to be sent about
from one house to another to be looked after. Mrs. Glover's
mother had died of typhoid fever in November, 1849, and
Mrs. Tilton was growing each year more impatient and weary
of Mrs. Glover's conduct. So when Mahala Sanborn married
Russell Cheney and was preparing to move away from Tilton,
Mrs. Glover begged her to take George to live with her perma
nently. Mrs. Cheney, who was attached to the boy, at last
consented to do so, and George accompanied her and her hus
band to their new home in North Groton, and was called by
their name.
Mark Baker, in the fall of 1850, had married Mrs. Elizabeth
Patterson Duncan, a widow of Londonderry, N. H., and moved
into the village of Tilton. Mrs. Glover continued to live at
home, spending most of her time there now, for her step
mother was of a pliable nature and gentle disposition, and
had taken up the task of attending to Mary's wants with a
patience equal to that of Mrs. Glover's own mother.
Notwithstanding Mrs. Glover's shortcomings of temper, she
could be amiable and attractive enough when she chose. To
men she always showed her most winning side, and she had
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 33
never lacked admirers. One of her suitors at this time was
Dr. Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist practising in Tilton
and the villages thereabouts. Dr. Patterson was large, hand
some, and genial. He wore a full beard, dressed in a frock
coat and silk hat, and was popular among his patrons. Al
though he was industrious enough at his business and made a
living sufficient for himself, he was not a genius at money-
making, and he was not inclined to exert himself much more
than was necessary. From his first acquaintance with Mrs.
Glover he was determined to marry her. Conscientious Mark
Baker, when he heard of Dr. Patterson's intention, visited the
dentist and told him of Mary's ill-health and nervous afflictions,
but interference only strengthened the doctor's determination,
and on June 21, 1853, the wedding took place at Mark Baker's
house, although Dr. Patterson was obliged to carry his bride
downstairs from her room for the ceremony, and back again
when it was over. Mrs. Glover had been very ill and weak
that spring and was not yet recovered. After her marriage
she spent the days of her convalescence in Tilton with her
husband, and then they went to Franklin, a neighbouring
village where Dr. Patterson was practising. But Mrs. Patter
son's invalidism, from being intermittent, soon became a settled
condition. She sent for her cradle while they were living
in Franklin, and the older residents still recall the day that
Patterson drove into town with a large waggon containing his
wife's cradle.
From Franklin they went, in a short time, to North Groton,
where the Cheneys and young George Glover were living.
North Groton, in the southern fringe of the White Mountains,
34 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
was very remote and could be reached only by stage. Like all
the White Mountain region, it was beautiful in the summer
season, but in the winter it was rugged and desolate. The
farmhouses were far apart, and the roads were sometimes im
passable. Often one would not see a neighbour or a passerby
for weeks at a time when the snow was deep; and the winters
there were very long. In a lane off the main road, the Patter
sons lived in a small frame house, which faced a deep wood.
At the right rose the mountains. Back of the house there was
a swift mountain brook, and there the dentist had built a small
sawmill, which he operated when there was not much dentist
work to do, or when his wife's ill-health made it necessary for
him to stay closely at home. He also practised homoeopathy
intermittently, but in the main he worked at his dentistry,
driving to the nearby towns to practise, and leaving his wife
alone or in the care of their occasional servant. There was
only one near neighbour. It is not strange that, under these
circumstances, Mrs. Patterson fell into a state of chronic illness
and developed ways that were considered peculiar by her
friends.
Her neighbours in North Groton tell the old story of her
illnesses, her hysteria, her high temper, and her unreasonable
demands on her husband. She required him to keep the wooden
bridge over the brook covered with sawdust to deaden the
sound of footsteps or vehicles, and, according to local tradi
tion, he spent many evenings killing discordant frogs, whose
noise disturbed Mrs. Patterson. Other stories sink further
toward burlesque. Old inhabitants of North Groton still re
member the long drive which a neighbour made for Mrs. Patter-
Photograph by Wm. W. Weller
DANIEL PATTERSON
Mrs. Eddy's second husband
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 35
son one stormy winter night. While the doctor was away
in Franklin, attending to his practice, Mrs. Patterson fell into
a state of depression which ended in hysterics. A neighbour
was sent for, and Mrs. Patterson declared she was dying, and
that her husband must be brought home at once. To her own
family this situation would not have seemed the desperate
affair it was to Mrs. Patterson's neighbour. Moved by the
entreaties of the dying wife, he set out at night on the thirty-
mile drive to Franklin, over roads that were almost impassable
from heavy snowdrifts. His horses became exhausted and he
stopped at Bristol only long enough to change them for a
fresh pair. Arriving at Franklin the next morning he made
haste to inform Dr. Patterson of his wife's dying condition.
To his astonishment the dentist looked up and remarked, " I
think she will live until I finish this job at least," and went
on with his work. When they reached North Groton late that
day, they found Mrs. Patterson sitting in her chair, serene
and cheerful, having apparently forgotten her indisposition
of the night before.
Gradually the sympathy of her neighbours was withdrawn
from Mrs. Patterson, and in North Groton, as in Tilton, she
came to be harshly criticised. Many years afterward, upon
the occasion of the dedication of the Christian Science Church
in Concord, N. H., July 16, 1904, a North Groton corre
spondent, under the head, " Time Makes Changes," wrote in
the Plymouth Record :
With the announcement of the dedication of the Christian Science
Church at Concord, the gift of Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy, the
thoughts of many of the older residents have turned back to the time when
Mrs. Eddy, as the wife of Daniel Patterson, lived in this place. These
36 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
people remember the woman at that time as one who carried herself above
her fellows. With no stretch of the imagination they remember her un
governable temper and hysterical ways, and particularly well do they
remember the night ride of one of the citizens who went for her husband
to calm her in one of her unreasonable moods. The Mrs. Eddy of to-day
is not the Mrs. Patterson of then, for this is a sort of Mr. Hyde and Dr.
Jekyll case, and the woman is now credited with many charitable and
kindly acts.
Although Mrs. Patterson now lived near her boy, George,
she did not see a great deal of him. He had started to go
to school, and used sometimes to stop at his mother's house
on his way home, but she never cared to have him with her.
Instead, and by some perverse law of her nature, she showed
a deep affection for the infant son of her neighbour, naming
him Mark after her father, and making plans for his education
and future. In 1857 Russell Cheney and his wife went West
to live, taking George Glover with them. George was now
thirteen. He was excited at the prospect of the trip, and
after bidding his mother good-bye, he was taken to Tilton a
day before the time set for their departure, to say farewell
to his Grandfather Baker and his Aunt Tilton.
In Retrospection and Introspection Mrs. Eddy gives the fol
lowing account of her separation from her son :
After returning to the paternal roof, I lost all my husband's property,
except what money I had brought with me; and remained with my parents
until after my mother's decease.
A few months before my father's second marriage to Mrs. Elizabeth
Patterson Duncan, sister of Lieutenant-Governor George W. Patterson,
of New York my little son, about four years of age, was sent away
from me, and put under the care of our family nurse, who had married,
and resided in the northern part of New Hampshire. I had no training
for self-support, and my home I regarded as very precious. The night
before my child was taken from me, I knelt by his side throughout the
dark hours, hoping for a vision of relief from this trial. The following
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 37
lines are taken from my poem, " Mother's Darling," written after this
separation :
" Thy smile through tears, as sunshine o'er the sea,
Awoke new beauty in the surge's roll!
Oh, life is dead, bereft of all, with thee,
Star of my earthly hope, babe of my soul."
My dominant thought in marrying again was to get back my child,
but after our marriage his stepfather was not willing he should have a
home with me. A plot was consummated for keeping us apart. The
family to whose care he was committed, very soon removed to what was
then regarded as the Far West.
After his removal a letter was read to my little son informing him
that his mother was dead and buried. Without my knowledge he was
appointed a guardian, and I was then informed that my son was lost.
Every means within my power was employed to find him, but without
success. We never met again until he had reached the age of thirty- four,
had a wife and two children, and by a strange providence had learned
that his mother still lived, and came to see me in Massachusetts.
From Enterprise, Minn., where the Cheneys settled, Mrs.
Patterson often had news of her son. Mrs. Cheney and her
husband wrote frequently to their relatives and friends in North
Groton and Tilton, giving details of their life and of George's
progress. Mr. Cyrus Blood of North Groton, one of George
Glover's early chums, remembers a visit he paid to Dr. Patter
son, during which Mrs. Patterson read a letter from George,
in which he told her of leaving the Cheneys and enlisting in
the Civil War. This was in 1861 when George was seventeen.
" She seemed as well pleased, and as proud," writes Mr. Blood,
" as any mother with a boy in the army." The present writer
has also read a letter from Mrs. Patterson to P. P. Quimby of
Portland, Me., dated July 29, 1865, in which she describes
her son as " mortally ill at Enterprise, Minn.," and declares
that unless he is better at once she will start for the West
" on Monday."
38 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
George Glover made an excellent record as a soldier; was
wounded at Shiloh and honourably discharged; was appointed
United States Marshal of the Dakotas; knocked about the
Western states as a prospector and miner, and finally settled
at Lead, S. D., where he now carries on his mining enterprises.
He has a wife and four children, the eldest of whom is a
daughter named Mary Baker Glover, for her grandmother.
Mrs. Eddy and her son met for the first time 'after their long
separation, in 1879, Mrs. Eddy having sent a mysterious tele
gram begging him to come to her immediately. She was then
living in Lynn. The Glovers live in a handsome house in Lead
which Mrs. Eddy built for her son in 1902. None of the
family is a Christian Scientist. Several years ago when Glover's
eldest daughter died his neighbours expressed amazement that
he had not called upon Mrs. Eddy to cure her. " Why, do you
know," replied George, " I never thought of mother ! "
In March, 1860, three years after George had gone West
with the Cheneys, Dr. and Mrs. Patterson became involved in
a dispute with a neighbour and moved away, this time trying
Rumney, the next village. At first they boarded with Mrs.
John Herbert, a widow at Rumney Station, and later they lived
by themselves in a house belonging to John Dearborn in Rumney
Village, a mile from the Station. Mrs. Patterson's reputation
had preceded her and she was at once a topic of discussion.
She went out but seldom, and then propped up with pillows
in a carriage. It was said that she suffered from a spinal
disease. From the Herbert family and from her husband she
required the utmost attention. Dr. Patterson waited upon her
constantly when he was at home, carrying her downstairs to
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 39
her meals and back again to her room. When he was not at
home, she was able to walk about and attend to most of her
wants unassisted; but when he returned she relapsed into a
state of helplessness.
From the traditions which abound in these villages it is
evident that the Pattersons' marriage was an unfortunate one.
Dr. Patterson's bluff and rather coarse geniality must greatly
have irritated his high-strung and self-centred wife, and there
is no doubt that, on his part, he came quickly to see the force
of Mark Baker's advice against the marriage. He seems to
have responded faithfully to his wife's demands, and to have
endured her irascibility with patience. It was probably a
relief to both when Dr. Patterson went South, after the Civil
War began, in the hope of securing more profitable employ
ment as an army surgeon. He visited the early battlefields, and,
straying into the enemies' lines, was taken captive and sent
to a Southern prison. In his absence Mrs. Patterson showed
that she was capable of a gentler sentiment toward her husband.
During his confinement in prison she published (June 20, 1862)
the following poem, the last stanza of which is slightly reminis
cent of certain lines in Lord Byron's poem to the more celebrated
patriot, Bonnivard:
TO A BIRD FLYING SOUTHWARD
By MABY A. PATTERSON
Alas ! sweet bird, of fond ones reft,
Alone in Northern climes thus left,
To seek in vain through airy space
Some fellow-warbler's resting place;
And find upon the hoarse wind's song
No welcome note is borne along.
40 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Then wildly through the skies of blue,
To spread thy wings of dappled hue,
As if forsooth this frozen zone
Could yield one joy for bliss that's floWrt}
While sunward as thine eager flight,
That glance is fixed on visions bright.
And grief may nestle in that breast,
Some vulture may have robbed its rest,
But guileless as thou art, sweet thing,
With melting melody thou'lt sing;
The vulture's scream your nerves unstrung,
But, birdie, 'twas a woman's tongue.
I, too, would join thy sky-bound flight,
To orange groves and mellow light,
And soar from earth to loftier doom>,
And light on flowers with sweet perfumey
And wake a genial, happy lay-
Where hearts are kind, and earth so gay.
Oh! to the captive^s cell I'd sing
A song of hope and freedom bring
An olive leaf I'd quick let fall,
And lift our country's blackened pall;
Then homeward seek my frigid zone,
More chilling to the heart alone.
Lone as a solitary star, 2
Lone as a vacant sepulchre,
Yet not alone ! my Father's call
Who marks the sparrow in her fall .
Attunes my ear to joys elate,
The joys I'll sing at Heaven's
Rumney, June 20, 1862.
2 Byron's " Prisoner of Chillon," when relating how the bird perched and
sang upon the grating of his donjon, exclaims :.
" I sometimes deem'd that tt might be
My brother's soul come down to me ;
But then at last away it flew,
And then 'twas mortal well I knew,
For he would never thus have flown,
And left me twice so doubly lone,
Lone as the corse within its shroud^.
Lone as a solitary cloud, " etc..
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 41
Left alone, and once more penniless, after her husband's im
prisonment, Mrs. Patterson again fell back upon her relatives.
She wrote to Mrs. Tilton for assistance. Mrs. Tilton went to
Rumney, settled Mrs. Patterson's affairs there, and took her
back to Tilton.
It is this part of her career that Mrs. Eddy has sought to
blot out of existence. She makes no reference to it in her
autobiography, and in another place has said that no special
account is to be made of the years between 1844 and 1866.
These twenty-two lost years between her twenty-third and
forty-sixth birthdays were, as has been shown, spent in fretful
ill-health and discontent. It was a hard life, sordid in many of
its experiences, petty in its details, and narrow in its limitations.
Yet there is nothing to show that Mrs. Eddy made an effort
to improve her hard situation, or to make herself useful to
others ; and at forty she was known only for her eccentricities.
CHAPTER III
MRS. PATTERSON FIRST HEARS OF DR. QUIMBY HER ARRIVAL IN
PORTLAND QUIMBY AND HIS " SCIENCE "
WHILE Dr. and Mrs. Patterson were living in Rumney, it
was announced in the village that a new healer, Phineas Park-
hurst Quimby of Portland, Me., would visit Concord, N. H.,
to treat all the sick who would come to him. Stories of the
marvellous cures he was said to perform had spread throughout
New England. Stubborn diseases, which had resisted the skill
of regular physicians, were reported as yielding promptly to
the magic of the Quimby method. This new doctor, so the
story ran, used no medicines, and never failed to heal ; and upon
hearing these tales the sick and the suffering particularly those
who were the victims of long-standing and chronic diseases
took heart and tried to reach him. Among these was Mrs.
Patterson. Her husband wrote to Dr. Quimby from Rumney
on October 14, 1861, that Mrs. Patterson had been an invalid
from a spinal disease for many years. She had heard of
Quimby's " wonderful cures," and desired him to visit her. If
Dr. Quimby intended to come to Concord, as they had heard,
Dr. Patterson would " carry " his wife to see him. If not,
he would try to get her to Portland.
Dr. Quimby did not visit Concord, and Dr. Patterson
soon went South, but in the following spring (May 9, 1862)
Mrs. Patterson herself wrote to Quimby from Rumney, appeal-
42
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 43
ing to him to help her, and setting forth her truly pathetic
situation. She had been better, the letter said, but the shock
of hearing that her husband had " been captured by the
Southrons " and again prostrated her. She had, she wrote,
" full confidence " in Dr. Quiraby's " philosophy, as explained
in your circular," and she begged him to come to Rumney.
She had been ill for six years, she said, and " only you can
save me." Hard as the journey to Portland would be, she
thought she was sufficiently " excitable," even in her feeble
condition, to undertake it. 1
Although Quimby could not go to Rumney as she requested,
Mrs. Patterson clung to the idea of seeing him. After she
had returned to her sister's home in Tilton, she talked of
Quimby constantly, and begged Mrs. Tilton to send her to
Portland for treatment. But Mrs. Tilton would not consent,
nor provide money for the trip, as she considered Dr. Quimby
a quack and thought the reports of his cures were greatly ex
aggerated. Instead, she sent Mrs. Patterson to a water cure
Dr. Tail's Hydropathic Institute at Hill, N. H. At the Hill
institution Dr. Quimby was just then a topic of eager interest
among the patients, and Mrs. Patterson finally resolved to reach
Portland. She wrote again to Dr. Quimby from Hill, telling
him that although she had been at Dr. Vail's cure for several
months, she had not been benefited and would die unless he,
Quimby, could help her. " I can sit up but a few minutes
at a time," she wrote. " Do you think I can reach you without
sinking from the effects of the journey? "
Mrs. Patterson knew that it was useless to appeal again to
1 This letter, with others from Mrs. Patterson to Dr. Quimby, is in the
possession of Quimby's son, George A. Quimby of Belfast, Me.
44 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
her sister, and as there was no one else, she used her wits.
From time to time she applied to Mrs. Tilton for small sums
of money for extra expenses. By hoarding these she soon had
enough to pay her fare to Portland, and she, therefore, set out.
Mrs. Patterson arrived at the International Hotel in October,
1862, and with scores of others, who went flocking to Quimby,
she was helped up the stairs to his office.
Dr. Quimby now becomes such a potent influence in Mrs.
Patterson's life that some understanding of the man and his
theories is necessary for any complete comprehension of her
subsequent career.
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was " Doctor " only by courtesy :
he had taken no university degree and had studied in no regular
school of medicine. He was regarded by the educated public
as an amiable humbug or a fanatic, but by hundreds of his
patients he was looked upon as a worker of miracles. His
methods resembled those of no regular physician then in practice,
nor did he imitate the spiritualistic and clairvoyant healers
who at that time flourished in New England. He gave no
drugs, went into no trances, used no incantations, and did
not heal by mesmerism after he had discovered his " science."
He professed to make his patients well and happy purely by
the benevolent power of mind.
Fantastic as this idea then seemed, Quimby was no ordinary
quack. He did not practise on the credulous for money, and
his theories represented at least independent thought and pa"
tient, life-long study. He was born in New Lebanon, N. H.,
February 16, 1802, but spent the larger part of his life in
Belfast, Me. He was one of seven children, and his father was
HISTORY OP CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 45
a poor, Hardworking blacksmith. Quimby, therefore, had prac
tically no educational advantages ; indeed, he spent actually
only six weeks in school. Apprenticed as a boy to a clock-
maker, he became an adept at his trade. The Quimby clock
is still a domestic institution in New England; hundreds made
by Quimby's own hands are still keeping excellent time. Quimby
had an ingenious mind and a natural aptitude for mechanics.
lie invented, among other things, a band-saw much like one in
use at the present time, and he was one of the first makers of
daguerreotypes. From the first he disclosed one rare mental
quality: his keen power of observation and originality of
thought forbade his taking anything for granted. He recog
nised no such thing as accepted knowledge. He developed into
a mild-mannered New England Socrates, constantly looking
into his own mind, and subjecting to proof all the commonplace
beliefs of his friends. He read deeply in philosophy and
science, and loved nothing better than to discuss these subjects
at length.
In those days a man of Quimby's intellectual type did not
lack subjects of interest. In the '30's the first wave of mental
science, animal magnetism, and clairvoyance swept over New
England. The atmosphere was charged with the occult, the
movement ranging all the way from phrenology and mind-
reading to German transcendentalism. Quimby's interest was
directly stimulated by the visit of Charles Poyen, the well-
known French mesmerist, who came to lecture in Belfast. The
inquiring clock-maker became absorbed in Poyen's theories,
formed his acquaintance, and followed him from town to town.
Inevitably, Quimby began experimenting in the subject which
46 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
so interested him. Discovering that he had mesmeric power,
he exercised it upon many of his friends and easily repeated
the performance of Poyen and other exhibitors. From becom
ing their imitator he became their rival, and abandoning his
workshop, started out as a professional mesmerist. Among the
wonder-workers of the early '40's, " Park " Quimby, as he was
popularly called, became pre-eminent. Always considered an
original character in his native village, he was now regarded as
an outright crank, and was the subject of much amiable jocu
larity.
In the course of his experiments, Quimby discovered that his
most sensitive subject was Lucius Burkmar, a boy about seven
teen years old, over whom he had acquired almost unlimited
hypnotic control. The two travelled all over New England,
performing mesmerics feats that have hardly been duplicated
since, everywhere arousing great popular interest, and, in certain
quarters, great hostility. Psychic phenomena were then incom
pletely understood ; clergymen preached against mesmerism,
or animal magnetism, as the work of the devil, a revival of
ancient witchcraft; while the practical man regarded it as
pure fraud. The newspapers frequently vilified Quimby and
Burkmar, and they were more than once threatened by mobs.
Then, as now, the public mind associated the occult sciences
with the cure of physical disease. Clairvoyants, magnetisers,
and mind-readers treated all imaginable ills. When blind
folded, they had the power according to their advertisements
of looking into the bodies of their patients, examining their
inmost organs, indicating the affected parts, and prescribing
remedies. Hundreds of men, women, and children, whose cases
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 47
" the doctors had given up as hopeless," fervently testified to
their power. Thus Quimby and Burkmar inevitably received
numerous appeals from the sick. After a few trials, Quimby
became convinced that in a mesmeric state Burkmar could
diagnose and treat disease. Though absolutely ignorant of
medicine and anatomy, Burkmar described minutely the ailments
of numerous patients, and prescribed medicines, which, although
absurd to a physician, apparently produced favourable results.
For three or four years Quimby and Burkmar practised with
considerable success. Consumptives, according to popular re
port, began to get well, the blind saw, and the halt walked.
Quimby then made an important discovery. After careful
observation, he concluded that neither Burkmar nor his remedies,
in themselves, had the slightest power. Burkmar, he believed,
did not himself diagnose the case. He merely reported what
the patient, or some one else present in the room, imagined the
disease to be. He had, Quimby thought, a clairvoyant or mind-
reading faculty, by which he simply reproduced the opinion
which the sick had themselves formed. Quimby also discovered
that, in instances where improvement actually took place, the
drug prescribed had nothing to do with it. Once Burkmar, in
the mesmeric state, ordered a concoction too expensive for the
patient's purse. Quimby mesmerised him again ; and this time
he prescribed a cheaper remedy which served the purpose
quite as well. After a few experiences of this kind, Quimby
concluded that Burkmar's prescriptions did not produce the
cures, but that the patients cured themselves. Burkmar's only
service was that he implanted in the sick man's mind an un
shakable faith that he would get well. Any other person, or
48 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
any drug, Quimby declared, which could put the patient in
this attitude of mental receptivity and give his own mind a
chance to work upon the disease, would accomplish the same
result. He made this discovery the basis of an elaborate and
original system of mind cure; he dropped mesmerism, dis
missed Burkmar, and began to work out his theory. He ex
perimented for several years in Belfast, and, in 1859, opened
an office in Portland.
Quimby had the necessary mental and moral qualifications
for his work. His personality inspired love and confidence,
and his patients even now affectionately recall his kind-hearted
ness, his benevolence, and his keen perception. Even his oppo
nents in the controversy which has raged over his work and that
of Mrs. Eddy, speak well of him. " On his rare humanity and
sympathy," says Mrs. Eddy, " one could write a sonnet."
He was a small man, both in stature and in build, quick,
sensitive, and nervous in his movements. His large, well-
formed head stood straight on erect, energetic shoulders. He
had a high, broad forehead, and silken white hair and beard.
His eyes, arched with heavy brows, black, deep-set, and pene
trating, seemed, as one of his patients has written, " to see all
through the falsities of life and far into the depths and into
the spirit of things." At times his eyes flashed with good
nature and wit, for Quimby by no means lacked the jovial
virtues. If his countenance suggested one quality more than
another, it was honesty; whatever the public thought of his
ideas, no one who ever saw him face to face doubted the man's
absolute sincerity. He demanded the same sympathy which
he himself gave. He dealt kindly with honest doubters, but
Courtesy of George A. Quitnby
PHIXEAS PARKHURST QUIMBY
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 49
would have nothing to do with the scornful. Unless one really
wished to be cured, he said, his methods had no virtue. On
one occasion, instead of taking his place beside a certain patient,
he turned his chair directly around and sat back to back.
" That's the way you feel toward me," he declared. His offices
were constantly filled with patients, and his mail was enormous.
People came to consult him from all over New England and
the Far West. He treated " absently " thousands who could
not visit him in person.
Mrs. Julius A. Dresser, one of his early patients and con
verts, thus describes her first meeting with Mr. Quimby :
I found a kindly gentleman who met me with such sympathy and
gentleness that I immediately felt at ease. He seemed to know at once
the attitude of mind of those who applied to him for help, and adapted
himself to them accordingly. His years of study of the human mind, of
sickness in all its forms, and of the prevailing religious beliefs, gave him
the ability to see through the opinions, doubts, and fears of those who
sought his aid, and put him in instant sympathy with their mental
attitudes. He seemed to know that I had come to him feeling that he was
a last resort, and with little faith in him and his mode of treatment.
But, instead of telling me that I was not sick, he sat beside me and
explained to me what my sickness was, how I got into the condition, and
the way I could have been taken out of it through the right understanding.
He seemed to see through the situation from the beginning, and explained
the cause and effect so clearly that I could see a little of what he meant.
My case was so serious, however, that he did not at first tell me I could
be made well. But there was such an effect produced by his explanation,
that I felt a new hope within me, and began to get well from that day.
He continued to explain my case from day to day, giving me some
idea of his theory and its relation to what I had been taught to believe,
and sometimes sat silently with me for a short time. I did not understand
much that he said, but I felt the spirit and the life that came with his
words; and I found myself gaining steadily. Some of these pithy sayings
of his remained constantly in mind, and were very helpful in preparing
the way for a better understanding of his thought, such, for instance, as
his remark that, " Whatever we believe, that we create," or, " Whatever
opinion we put into a thing, that we take out of it."
50 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
In all the relations of life, Quimby seems to have been loyal
and upright. Outside of his theory he lived only for his family
and was the constant playmate of his children. His only inter
est in his patients was to make them well. He treated all who
came, whether they could pay or not. For several years
Quimby kept no accounts and made no definite charges. The
patients, when they saw fit, sent him such remuneration as they
wished. Inevitably, he drew his followers largely from the
poor and the desperately ill. " People," he would say, " send
for me and the undertaker at the same time; and the one who
gets there first gets the case."
Quimby was thoroughly convinced that he had solved the
riddle of life, and that ultimately the whole world would accept
his ideas. His subject possessed him. He wearied his family
almost to desperation with it, and wore out all his friends. He
discussed it at length with any one who would listen. To put
it in writing, to teach it, to transmit it to posterity, that
was his consuming idea. His only fear was lest he should
die before the " Truth " had made a lasting impress. He
wrote about it in the newspapers, not, however, as extensively
as he desired, for the editors seldom printed his articles, re
garding them as the veriest rubbish. He selected, here and
there, especially appreciative and intelligent patients, discussed
his doctrine with them exhaustively, and enjoined them to teach
unbelievers. His following was not wholly among the ignorant
and humble. Edwin Reed, ex-mayor of Bath, Me., declares
that Quimby cured him of total blindness. He visited him as
a young graduate of Bowdoin, had his sight completely restored,
spent several months studying the theory, and left with the
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 51
conviction, which he has never lost, that Quimby was a strong
and original thinker. Julius A. Dresser, whose name figures
largely in the history of mental healing, early became absorbed
in Quimby. For several years he was associated with him,
receiving patients and explaining, as a preliminary to their
meeting with the doctor, his ideas and methods. In 1863 Dr.
Warren F. Evans, a Swedenborgian clergyman, visited Quimby
twice professionally. He became a convert, and, in several
books well known among students of mental healing, developed
the Quimby doctrine. " Quimby," he said, " seemed to repro
duce the wonders of Gospel history."
About 1859 Quimby began to put his ideas into permanent
form. George A. Quimby thus describes his father's literary
methods : 2
Among his earlier patients in Portland were the Misses Ware, daughters
of the late Judge Ashur Ware, of the United States Admiralty Court;
and they became much interested in " the Truth," as he called it. But
the ideas were so new, and his reasoning was so divergent from the
popular conceptions, that they found it difficult to follow him or remember
all he said; and they suggested to him the propriety of putting into writing
the body of his thoughts.
From that time he began to write out his ideas, which practice he con
tinued until his death, the articles now being in the possession of the
writer of this sketch. The original copy he would give to the Misses
Ware; and it would be read to him by them, and, if he suggested any
alteration, it would be made, after which it would be copied either by the
Misses Ware or the writer of this, and then re-read to him, that he
might see that all was just as he intended it. Not even the most trivial
word or the construction of a sentence would be changed without con
sulting him. He was given to repetition; and it was with difficulty that
he could be induced to have a repeated sentence or phrase stricken out,
as he would say, "If that idea is a good one, and true, it will do no
harm to have it in two or three times." He believed in the hammering
process, and in throwing an idea or truth at the reader till it would be
firmly fixed in his mind.
3 Article in the New England Magazine, March, 1888,
52 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
In six years Quimby produced ten volumes of manuscripts.
In them he discussed a variety of subjects, all from the stand
point of his theory. He wrote copiously on Religion, Disease,
Spiritualism, " Scientific Interpretations of Various Parts of the
Scriptures," Clairvoyance, " The Process of Sickness," " Re
lation of God to Man," Music, Science, Error, Truth, Happi
ness, Wisdom, " The Other World," " Curing the Sick," and
dozens of other topics. He gave all his patients access to
these manuscripts, and permitted all who wished to make copies,
overjoyed whenever he found one interested enough to do this.
He also encouraged his followers to write, themselves, frequently
correcting their essays and bringing them into harmony with
his own ideas. Quimby's writings, as a whole, have never been
published ; but the present writer has had free and continuous
use of them.
From these manuscripts can be deduced a complete and de
tailed philosophy of life and disease. They refute the asser
tion sometimes made, that Quimby was a spiritualist, or that
he made the slightest claim to divine revelation. Certain ad
mirers sometimes compared him with Christ ; but he himself
wrote a long dissertation called A Defence Against Making
Myself Equal with Christ. He usually calls his discovery the
" Science of Health," and " The Science of Health and Happi
ness " ; once or twice he describes it as " Christian Science."
Scores of times he refers to it as the " Science of Christ." He
also repeatedly calls it "The Principle," "The Truth," and
" Wisdom."
Though he never identified his doctrine with religion, and
never dreamed of founding an ecclesiastical organisation upon
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 53
it, his impulse at the bottom was religious. He believed that
Christ's mission was largely to the sick; that He and His
apostles performed cures in a natural manner ; and that he had
himself rediscovered their method. Jesus Christ, indeed, was
Quimby's great inspiration. He distinguished, however, be
tween the Principle Christ and the Man Jesus. This duality,
he said, manifested itself likewise in man.
In every individual, according to Quimby, there were two
persons. The first was the Truth, Goodness, and Wisdom into
which he had been naturally born. In this condition he was
the child of God, the embodiment of Divine Love and Divine
Principle. This man had no flesh, no bones, and no blood;
he did not breathe, eat, or sleep. He could never sin, never
become sick, never die. He knew nothing of matter, or of
the physical senses ; he was simply Spirit, Wisdom, Principle,
Truth, Mind, Science. Quimby, above all, loved to call him
the " Scientific Man." This first person was, so to speak, en
crusted in another man, formed of matter, sense, and all the
accumulated " errors " of time. This man had what Quimby
called " Knowledge " that is, the ideas heaped up by the
human mind. According to Quimby, this second man held the
first, or truly Scientific man, in bondage. The bonds consisted
of false human beliefs. The idea, above all, which held him
enthralled, was that of Disease. The man of Science knew
nothing of sickness. The man of Ignorance, however, con
sciously and unconsciously, had been impregnated for centuries
with this belief. His whole life, from earliest infancy, was
encompassed with suggestions of this kind. Parents constantly
suggest illness to their children ; doctors preach it twenty-four
54 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
hours a day; the clergy, the newspapers, books, ordinary con
versation, the whole modern world, thought Quimby, had en
gaged in a huge conspiracy to familiarise the human mind
with this false concept. This process had been going on for
thousands of years, until finally unhealthy ideas had triumphed
over healthy; beliefs had got the upper hand of truth; knowl
edge had supplanted wisdom ; ignorance had taken the place of
science; matter had superseded mind; Jesus had dethroned
Christ.
Quimby regarded his mission in the world as the reestablish-
ment of the original and natural harmony. Though his philos
ophy embraces the whole of life, he used all his energies in
eradicating one of man's many false " beliefs," or " errors,"
that of Disease. His method was simplicity itself. The med
ical profession constantly harped on the idea of sickness ;
Quimby constantly harped on the idea of health. The doctor
told the patient that disease was inevitable, man's natural in
heritance ; Quimby told him that disease was merely an " error,"
that it was created, " not by God, but by man," and that health
was the true and scientific state. " The idea that a beneficent
God had anything to do with disease," said Quimby, " is super
stition." " Disease," reads another of his manuscripts, " is
false reasoning. True scientific wisdom is health and happi
ness. False reasoning is sickness and death." Again he says:
" This is my theory : to put man in possession of a science that
will destroy the ideas of the sick, and teach man one living
profession of his own identity, with life free from error and
disease. As man passes through these combinations, they differ
one from another. . . . He is dying and living all the time to
HISTORY OP CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 55
error, till he dies the death of all his opinions and beliefs.
Therefore, to be free from death is to be alive in truth; for
sin, or error, is death, and science, or wisdom, is eternal life,
and this is the Christ." " My philosophy," he says at another
time, " will make man free and independent of all creeds and
laws of man, and subject him to his own agreement, he being
free from the laws of sin, sickness, and death."
Quimby, after dismissing Burkmar in 1845, never used mes
merism or manipulated his patients. Occasionally, after talk
ing for a time, he would dip his hands in water and rub the
patient's head. He always asserted that this was not an
essential part of the cure. His ideas were so startling, he said,
that the average mind could not grasp them, but required some
outward indication to bolster up its faith. The cure itself,
Quimby always insisted, was purely mental. 3
8 As far back as 1857, a writer in the Bangor Jeffersonian contradicts the
statement that Quimby cured mesmerically. " He sits down with his patient,"
the letter says, " and puts himself en rapport with him, which he does with
out producing the mesmeric sleep. The mind is used to overcome disease.
. . . There is no danger from disease when the mind is armed against it.
. . . He dissipates from the mind the idea of disease and induces in its
place an idea of health. . . . The mind is what it thinks it is and, if it
contends against the thought of disease and creates for itself an ideal form
of health, that form impresses itself upon the animal spirit and through that
upon the body."
CHAPTER IV
MRS. PATTERSON BECOMES QUIMBY's PATIENT AND PUPIL, HER
DEFENCE OF QUIMBY AND HIS THEORY HER GRIEF AT HIS
DEATH SHE ASKS MR. DRESSER TO TAKE UP QUIMBY's WORK
UPON reaching the hotel in Portland where Dr. Quimby had
his offices, Mrs. Patterson was received by Julius A. Dresser
and introduced to Dr. Quimby. George A. Quimby, Mrs. Julius
A. Dresser, and the Hon. Edwin Reed all remember Mrs. Pat
terson's appearance at this time. She was so feeble that she
had to be assisted up the stairs and into the waiting-room. She
had lost the beauty of her earlier years. Her figure was
emaciated, her face pale and worn, and her eyes were sunken.
After the fashion of the time, her hair hung about her shoulders
in loose ringlets, and her shabby dress suggested the hardness
and poverty of her life. Yet Mrs. Patterson, as she was intro
duced to other patients sitting about the waiting-room, made
something of an impression.
" Mrs. Patterson was presented to Dr. Quimby," says one of
the patients who was present, " as * the authoress,' and her man
ner was extremely polite and ingratiating. She wore a poke
bonnet and an old-fashioned dress, but my impression was that
her costume was intended to be a little odd, as in keeping with
her ' literary ' character. She seemed very weak, and we
thought she was a consumptive."
56
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 57
Mrs. Patterson almost immediately informed Quimby that
she was very poor, and asked his assistance in getting an in
expensive boarding-place. Quimby, by personal intercession,
obtained a room for her at reduced rates in Chestnut Street.
According to George A. Quimby, Quimby's son and secretary,
Mrs. Patterson's first stay in Portland lasted about three weeks.
As far as her health was concerned the visit seemed a complete
success. Under Quimby's treatment the spinal trouble dis
appeared and Mrs. Patterson left his office a well woman. But
this hardly-achieved visit to Portland meant much more to her
than that. For the first time in her life she felt an absorbing
interest. Her contact with Quimby and her inquiry into his
philosophy seem to have been her first great experience, the
first powerful stimulus in a life of unrestraint, disappointment,
and failure. Her girlhood had been a fruitless, hysterical re-
Volt against order and discipline. The dulness and meagreness
of her life had driven her to strange extravagances in conduct.
Neither of her marriages had been happy. Maternity had not
softened her nor brought her consolations. Up to this time
her masterful will and great force of personality had served
to no happy end. Her mind was turned in upon itself; she
had been absorbed in ills which seem to have been largely the
result of her own violent nature lacking any adequate outlet,
and, like disordered machinery, beating itself to pieces.
Quimby's idea gave her her opportunity, and the vehemence
with which she seized upon it attests the emptiness and hunger
of her earlier years. All during her stay in Portland she
haunted the old man's rooms, asking questions, reading manu
scripts, observing his treatment of his patients. Quimby at
58 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
first took a decided liking to her. " She's a devilish bright
woman," he frequently said. Always delighted to explain his
theories, in Mrs. Patterson he found a most appreciative listener.
Both on this and subsequent visits he permitted her to copy
certain of his manuscripts. Undoubtedly he saw in Mrs. Pat
terson, in her capacity as an " authoress," a woman who could
assist him in the matter dearest to his heart, the popularisa
tion of his doctrines.
Her devotion to her teacher was that of a long-imprisoned
nature toward its deliverer. Her greatest desire seems to have
been to teach Quimby's philosophy and to exalt him in the eyes
of men. Soon after her recovery she wrote the following letter
to the Portland Courier: *
When our Shakespeare decided that <; there were more things in this
world than were dreamed of in your philosophy," I cannot say of a verity
that he had a foreknowledge of P. P. Quimby. And when the school
Platonic anatomised the soul and divided it into halves to be reunited
by elementary attractions, and heathen philosophers averred that old Chaos
in sullen silence brooded o'er the earth until her inimitable form was
hatched from the egg of night, I would not at present decide whether
the fallacy was found in their premises or conclusions, never having
dated my existence before the flood. When the startled alchemist dis
covered, as he supposed, an universal solvent, or the philosopher's stone,
and the more daring Archimedes invented a lever wherewithal to pry up
the universe, I cannot say that in either the principle obtained in nature
or in art, or that it worked well, having never tried it. But, when by a
falling apple, an immutable law was discovered, we gave it the crown of
science, which is incontrovertible and capable of demonstration; hence that
was wisdom and truth. When from the evidence of the senses, my reason
takes cognizance of truth, although it may appear in quite a miraculous
view, I must acknowledge that as science which is truth uninvestigated.
Hence the following demonstration:
Three weeks since I quitted my nurse and sick room en route for
Portland. The belief of my recovery had died out of the hearts of those
1 Letter by Mrs. M. M. Patterson (now Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy) in the
Portland Courier, November 7, 1862.
HISTORY OP CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 59
who were most anxious for it. With this mental and physical depression
I first visited P. P. Quimby; and in less than one week from that time
I ascended by a stairway of one hundred and eighty-two steps to the
dome of the City Hall, and am improving ad infinitum. To the most subtle
reasoning, such a proof, coupled too, as it is with numberless similar
ones, demonstrates his power to heal. Now for a brief analysis of this
power.
Is it spiritualism ? Listen to the words of wisdom. " Believe in God,
believe also in me; or believe me for the very work's sake." Now, then,
his works are but the result of superior wisdom, which can demonstrate
a science not understood; hence it were a doubtful proceeding not to believe
him for the work's sake. Well, then, he denies that his power to heal
the sick is borrowed from the spirits of this or another world; and let
us take the Scriptures for proof. " A kingdom divided against itself
cannot stand." How, then, can he receive the friendly aid of the dis
enthralled spirit, while he rejects the faith of the solemn mystic who
crosses the threshold of the dark unknown to conjure up from the vasty
deep the awestruck spirit of some invisible squaw?
Again, is it by animal magnetism that he heals the sick? Let us
examine. I have employed electro-magnetism and animal magnetism, and
for a brief interval have felt relief, from the equilibrium which I fancied
was restored to an exhausted system or by a diffusion of concentrated
action. But in no instance did I get rid of a return of all my ailments,
because I had not been helped out of the error in which opinions involved
us. My operator believed in disease, independent of the mind; hence
I could not be wiser than my master. But now I can see dimly at first,
and only as trees walking, the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's
faith and works; and just in proportion to my right perception of truth
is my recovery. This truth which he opposes to the error of giving in
telligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if
received understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their
normal action; and the mechanism of the body goes on undisturbed. That
this is a science capable of demonstration, becomes clear to the minds of
those patients who reason upon the process of their cure. The truth which
he establishes in the patient cures him (although he may be wholly un
conscious thereof) ; and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in
disease. At present I am too much in error to elucidate the truth, and
can touch only the keynote for the master hand to wake the harmony.
May it be in essays, instead of notes ! say I. After all, this is a very
spiritual doctrine; but the eternal years of God are with it, and it
must stand firm as the rock of ages. And to many a poor sufferer
may it be found, as by me, " the shadow of a great rock in a weary
land."
60 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Her extravagance brought general ridicule upon Quimby
and herself. " P. P. Quimby compared to Jesus Christ ? " ex
claimed the Portland Advertiser, in commenting on her letter,
" What next? " Mrs. Patterson again took up the cudgels.
She wrote in the Portland Courier:
Noticing a paragraph in the Advertiser, commenting upon some sen
tences of mine clipped from the Courier, relative to the science of P. P.
Quimby, concluding, "What next?" we would reply in due deference
to the courtesy with which they define their position. P. P. Quimby stands
upon the plane of wisdom with his truth. Christ healed the sick, but
not by jugglery or with drugs. As the former speaks as never man
before spake, and heals as never man healed since Christ, is he not
identified with truth? And is not this the Christ which is in him? We
know that in wisdom is life, " and the life was the light of man." P. P.
Quimby rolls away the stone from the sepulchre of error, and health
is the resurrection. But we also know that " light shineth in darkness and
the darkness comprehendeth it not."
Mrs. Patterson expressed her admiration of Quimby in verse
also:
SONNET
Suggested by Reading the Remarkable Cure of
Captain J. W. Deering
To DR. P. P. QUIMBY
'Mid light of science sits the sage profound,
Awing with classics and his starry lore,
Climbing to Venus, chasing Saturn round,
Turning his mystic pages o'er and o'er,
Till, from empyrean space, his wearied sight
Turns to the oasis on which to gaze,
More bright than glitters on the brow of night
The self-taught man walking in wisdom's ways.
Then paused the captive gaze with peace entwined,
And sight was satisfied with thee to dwell;
But not in classics could the book-worm find
That law of excellence whence came the spell
Potent o'er all, the captive to unbind,
To heal the sick and faint, the halt and blind.
For the Courier. MARY M ' PATTERSON.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 61
Mrs. Patterson returned in good health, as she thought, to
Sanbornton Bridge. Quimby became the great possession of
her life. She talked incessantly of him to all her friends, and
sought to persuade the sick to visit him. In 1863 she wrote
many times to Quimby. Her letters, now in the possession of
George A. Quimby, describe, in the most reverential terms, her
indebtedness.
The following extracts illustrate the tone of these communi
cations :
SANBORNTON BRIDGE, January 12, 1863.
. . . I am to all who see me a living wonder, and a living monument
of your power. ... I eat, drink, and am merry, have no laws to
fetter my spirit. Am as much an escaped prisoner, as my dear husband
was. . . . My explanation of your curative principle surprises people,
especially those whose minds are all matter. ... I mean not again
to look mournfully into the past, but wisely to improve the present.
In a letter dated Sanbornton Bridge, January 31, 1863, she
asks for " absent treatment." " Please come to me and remove
this pain." In this letter she says that her sister, Mrs. Tilton,
and her son, Albert Tilton, are going to visit Mr. Quimby.
She says that Albert smokes and drinks to excess, and begs
Quimby to treat him for these habits, " even when Albert is not
there." She explains that she herself has treated Albert to
help him overcome the habit of smoking and, while doing so,
felt " a constant desire to smoke ! " She asks Quimby to treat
her for this desire. In other letters Mrs. Patterson repeatedly
asks for absent treatments, and occasionally incloses a dollar
to pay for them.
In a letter from Saco, Me., September 14, 1863, Mrs. Patter
son says that Quimby 's "Angel Visits" (absent treatments)
are helping her, " I would like to have you in your omni-
62 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
presence visit me at eight o'clock this evening." On this occa
sion she specifies that she wishes to be treated for " small be
liefs," namely, " stomach trouble, backache, and constipation."
In the early part of 1864, Mrs. Patterson again spent two
or three months in Portland. She found congenial companions
in one Mrs. Sarah Crosby, who was likewise a patient of
Quimby's, and Miss Anna Mary Jarvis, who had brought her
consumptive sister to Quimby for treatment. ' Mrs. Crosby and
Mrs. Patterson became warm friends. They occupied adjoin
ing rooms in the same boarding-house and spent much time
together. Mrs. Patterson told Mrs. Crosby that she intended
to assist Quimby in his work. The latter, says Mrs. Crosby,
frequently expressed his pleasure at Mrs. Patterson's enthu
siasm. " He told me many times," she adds, " that I was not
so quick to perceive the Truth as Mrs. Patterson." Quimby
now gave Mrs. Patterson much of his time. He was practising
then mainly in the morning, and allowed Mrs. Patterson to
spend nearly every afternoon at his office. " She would work
with Dr. Quimby all afternoon," says Mrs. Crosby, " and then
she would come home and sit up late at night writing down
what she had learned during the day."
This second visit to Quimby seems to have been even more
stimulating to Mrs. Patterson than the first. She gave all her
time and strength to the study of this esoteric theory. It was
during this visit that she first manifested a desire to become
herself an active force in the teaching and practising of this
" Science." The desire became actually a purpose, perhaps an
ambition the only definite one she had ever known. She was
groping for a vocation. She must even then have seen before
MARY BAKER G. EDDY
Tintype by Prebie
From a tintype given to Mrs. Sarah G. Crosby in 1864. Mrs. Eddy was then
Mrs. Patterson
63
her new possibilities ; an opportunity for personal growth and
personal achievement very different from the petty occupations
of her old life. In one of her letters to Quimby, written some
months after she left Portland, there is this new note of aspira
tion and resolve:
Who is wise but you? . . . Doctor, I have a strong feeling of late
that I ought to be perfect after the command of science. ... I can
love only a good, honourable, and brave career; no other can suit me.
Upon leaving Portland, after this second visit, Mrs. Patter
son went to Warren, Me., to visit Miss Jarvis. Here she
seems to have tried Quimby's treatment upon Miss Jarvis,
putting into practice what she had learned from Quimby him
self during the last three months. " At the mere mention of
my going," writes Mrs. Patterson, " Miss Jarvis has a relapse
and is in despair."
She confidently believes that she has benefited the sick woman.
Once, after receiving an " absent treatment " from Quimby,
she successfully transmitted its blessings to Miss Jarvis. She
became so " cheerful and uplifted " that Miss Jarvis " was gay
and not at all sad." She also writes that she has been asked
to take outside cases at Warren, but that she feels herself not
yet ready, being still in her " pupilage."
In a letter from Warren, March 31, 1864, she says:
I wish you would come to my aid and help me to sleep. Dear Doctor
what could I do without you?
In a letter dated Warren, April 5, 1864:
. I met the former editor of the Banner of Light, and he heard for once
the truth about you. He thought you a defunct Spiritualist, before I
quitted him at Brunswick, he had endorsed your science and acknowledged
himself as greatly interested in it.
64 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
In another letter from Warren, under date of April 24,
1864, she says:
Jesus taught as man does not, who then is wise but you? Posted at the
public marts of this city is this notice, Mrs. M. M. Patterson will lecture
at the Town Hall on P. P. Quimby's Spiritual Science healing disease,
as opposed to Deism or Rochester Rapping Spiritualism.
In a letter dated Warren, May, 1864, she writes that she
has been ill, but,
I am up and about to-day, i.e., by the help of the Lord (Quimby).
Again,
Dear doctor, what could I do without you? ... I will not bow to
wealth for I cannot honour it as I do wisdom. . . . May the peace
of wisdom which passeth all understanding be and abide with you. Ever
the same in gratitude.
In one letter she describes the sudden appearance of Quimby's
wraith in her room. She spoke to it, she adds, " and then you
turned and walked away." " That," she says, " I call dodging
the issue." She repeatedly calls his treatment his " Science " ;
her illnesses, her " beliefs " or " errors " ; and her recoveries,
her " restorations."
In May, 1864, Mrs. Patterson left Miss Jarvis and went
to visit another friend, her fellow-patient, Mrs. Sarah G.
Crosby, at Albion, Me. Mrs. Crosby, 2 who is now living at
Waterville, Me., gives an interesting account of .this visit, which
lasted several months. Mrs. Patterson, she says, although in
a state of almost absolute destitution, retained the air of a
2 Mrs. Crosby is well and creditably known in Maine. When she was a
woman of forty and the mother of five children, financial reverses came to
her family. She learned stenography at night without a teacher and became
a court stenographer at a time when it was most unusual for a woman to
hold such a position. For fifteen years she was stenographer in the highest
courts of Maine, during which time she paid off her husband's debts, and
reared and educated her children.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 65
grand lady which had so characterised her in her youth.
Although visiting at a farmhouse where every one had a part
in the household duties, Mrs. Patterson was always the guest
of honour, nor did it occur to any one to suggest her sharing
the daily routine. Mrs. Crosby's servants waited upon the
guest, and even her room was cared for by others. Mrs. Patter
son talked incessantly of Quimby, and often urged Mrs. Crosby
to leave her home and go out into the world with her to teach
Quimby's " Science." Mrs. Crosby admits that she was com
pletely under Mrs. Patterson's spell, and says that even after
years of estrangement and complete disillusionment, she still
feels that Mrs. Patterson was the most stimulating and in
vigorating influence she has ever known. Like all of Mrs.
Eddy's old intimates, she speaks of their days of companionship
with a certain shade of regret as if life in the society of this
woman was more intense and keen than it ever was afterward.
Mrs. Crosby says that, during this visit, both she and Mrs.
Patterson became somewhat interested in spiritualism through
communications from Mrs. Patterson's dead brother. Mrs.
Crosby is authority for the following account : 3
Mr. Crosby's farm was rather isolated, and the two women
found relief from the tedium of country life in spirit communi
cations from Mrs. Patterson's dead brother, Albert Baker.
Mrs. Patterson had been much attached to this brother, and
described his talents and personality at great length to Mrs.
Crosby, making such an attractive picture that he became a
very real person to the young woman. Albert, Mrs. Patterson
3 This account is a condensed version of Mrs. Crosby's affidavit, which takes
up the Wstory of he entire acquaintance .with Mrs Eddy, beginning when
Bho was a patient at Quimby's in 1864. This document is now in the writer s
possession.
66 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
told her, was Mrs. Crosby's guardian spirit; he had long been
trying to communicate with he*r, but had never been able to
do so until his sister came to visit her, as Mary was his " only
earthly medium." Mrs. Crosby says that she implicitly be
lieved in Albert's care and guardianship over her, that she
derived constant strength and comfort from it, and that this
spirit friendship was one of the most real she has ever known.
Albert's first communication to Mrs. Crosby occurred as
follows : 4
One day Mrs. Patterson and Mrs. Crosby sat together at
opposite sides of the same table. Suddenly Mrs. Patterson
leaned backward, shivered, closed her eyes, and began to talk
in a sepulchral, mannish voice. The voice said that " he "
was Albert Baker, Mrs. Patterson's brother. " He " had been
trying, the voice continued, to get control of Mrs. Patterson
for many days. " He " wished to warn Mrs. Crosby against
putting such entire confidence in Mrs. Patterson. " He in
formed me," Mrs. Crosby continues, " through her own lips,
that while his sister loved me as much as she was capable of
loving any one, life had been a severe experiment with her, and
she might use my sacred confidence to further any ambitious
purposes of her own." .
Mrs. Crosby was naturally amazed at this injunction. That
4 Mrs. Crosby does not assert or even imply that Mrs. Eddy was ever, in
any regular or professional sense, a " medium." Mrs. Eddy herself states that
she has been able to perform the signs and wonders of spiritualism, though
explaining them by another cause. In the second edition of Science and
Health, 1878, page 166, she says : " We are aware that the Spiritualists claim
whomsoever they would catch and regard even Christ as an elder brother.
But we never were a Spiritualist ; and never were, and never could be. and
never admitted we were a medium. We have explained to the class calling
themselves Spiritualists how their signs and wonders were wrought, and have
illustrated by doing them ; but at the same time have said, This is not the
work of spirits and I am not a medium ; and they have passed from our
presence and said, behold the proof that she is a medium !
l-acsimile of the second sheet of the first "spirit" letter from Albert Baker,
Mrs. Eddv's brother, to Mrs. Sarah Crosby
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 67
Albert should select his own sister as the medium through which
to warn Mrs. Crosby against her, seemed remarkable. Again,
if Mrs. Patterson consciously shammed, Mrs. Crosby could not
understand why she should deliver a message so uncompli
mentary to herself unless, indeed, to make the message seem
more genuine. Several times, in the course of this visit, Mrs.
Patterson went into trances. In one of these, Albert Baker's
spirit told Mrs. Crosby that if, from time to time, she would
look under the cushion of a particular chair, she would find
important written communications from him. Mrs. Crosby,
following the injunction, discovered now and then a letter.
One of these is interesting chiefly as containing Albert Baker's
spiritistic endorsement of P. P. Quimby. The text is as follows :
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.
After leaving Albion, Mrs. Patterson continued to receive
messages from Albert. On one occasion Mrs. Patterson sent
Mrs. Crosby the following communication from her brother:
68 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Child of earth! heir to immortality! love hath made intercession with
wisdom for you your request is answered.
Let not the letter leave your hand nor destroy it.
Love each other, your spirits are affined. My dear Sarah is innocent,
and will rejoice for every tear.
The gates of paradise are opening at the tread of time; glory and the
crown shall shall be the diadem of your earthly pilgrimage if you patiently
persevere in virtue, justice, and love. You twain are my care. I speak
through no other earthly medium but you.
Mr. Quimby died January 16, 1866. As in the case of many
mental healers, his own experience apparently belied his doc
trines. He had for years suffered from an abdominal tumour.
He had never had it treated medically, but asserted that he
had always been able, mentally, to prevent it from getting the
upper hand. The last few years of his life he worked inces
santly. His practice increased enormously, and at last broke
him down. In the summer of 1865 he was compelled to stop
work. He closed his Portland office and went home to Belfast
to devote the rest of his life to revising his manuscripts and
preparing them for publication. His physical condition, how
ever, prevented this; he became feebler every day. He now
acknowledged his inability to cure himself. As long as he had
his usual mental strength, he said, he could stop the disease;
but, as he felt this slipping from him, his " error " rapidly made
inroads. Finally, Quimby's wife, with his acquiescence, sum
moned a homoeopathic physician. Quimby consented to this,
he said, not because he had the slightest idea that the doctor
could help him, but merely to comfort his family. His wife
had never accepted the " theory " ; his children, for the most
part, had no enthusiasm for it. They all, however, loved the
old man dearly and could not patiently witness his suffering
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 69
without seeking all means to allay it. Quimby followed im
plicitly all the doctor's instructions. His son, George A.
Quimby, says : 5
An hour before he breathed his last, he said to the writer: "I am more
than ever convinced of the truth of my theory. I am perfectly willing
for the change myself, but I know you will all feel badly; but / know
that I shall be right here with you, just the same as I have always been.
I do not dread the change any more than if I were going on a trip to
Philadelphia."
His death occurred January 16, 1866, at his residence in Belfast, at the
age of sixty-four years, and was the result of too close application to his
profession and of overwork. A more fitting epitaph could not be accorded
him than in these words:
" Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for
his friends." For, if ever a man did lay down his life for others, that
man was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.
Many mourned Quimby's death. No one felt greater grief
or expressed it more emphatically and sincerely than Mary M.
Patterson. She wrote at once to Julius Dresser, asking him
to take up the master's work. Her letter follows:
MR. DRESSER: LYNX, February 14, 1866.
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 yov help me? I
e New England Magazine, March, 1888.
70 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
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.
The verses referred to had already been published in a Lynn
newspaper.
Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby," Who Healed with the Truth
that Christ Taught in Contradistinction to All Isms.
Did sackcloth clothe the sun and day grow night,
All matter mourn the hour with dewy eyes,
When Truth, receding from our mortal sight,
Had paid to error her last sacrifice?
Can we forget the power that gave us life?
Shall we forget the wisdom of its way?
Then ask me not amid this mortal strife
This keenest pang of animated clay
To mourn him less; to mourn him more were just
If to his memory 'twere a tribute given
For every solemn, sacred, earnest trust
Delivered to us ere he rose to heaven.
Heaven but the happiness of that calm soul,
Growing in stature to the throne of God;
Rest should reward him who hath made us whole,
Seeking, though tremblers, where his footsteps trod.
MART M. PATTERSON.
Lynn, January 22, 1866.
6 In a copy of these verses sent to Mrs. Sarah G. Crosby the title is worded
somewhat differently and several slight variations occur in the text.
CHAPTER V
THE QUIMBY CONTROVERSY MRS. EDDY 5 S CLAIM THAT CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE WAS A DIVINE REVELATION TO HER THE STORY OF
HER FALL ON THE ICE IN LYNN AND HER MIRACULOUS
RECOVERY
NINE years after the death of Phineas P. Quimby, Mrs. Eddy
published a book entitled Science and Health, in which she
developed a system of curing disease by the mind. In this
work she mentions Quimby only incidentally, and acknowledges
no indebtedness to him for the idea upon which her system is
based. Upon this foundation Mrs. Eddy has since established
the Christian Science Church, the sect which regards her as
the real discoverer and only accredited teacher of metaphysical
healing. Quimby himself, though he founded no religious or
ganisation, to-day has thousands of followers ; the several schools
of Mental Scientists are convinced that he was the discoverer
and founder of mental healing in this country. Mrs. Eddy's
partisans maintain that she received her inspiration from God,
while Quimby's adherents maintain that she obtained her ideas
very largely from Quimby. Interrupting, for the present, the
narrative of Mrs. Eddy's life, this chapter will attempt to
present the arguments of both sides in this controversy.
Quimby's followers do not assert that Quimby wrote Science
and Health, or that he is the responsible author of all the
ideas now formulated in the Christian Science creed. In brief,
71
72 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
their position is this: that Mrs. Eddy obtained the radical
principle of her Science, the cure of disease by the power of
Divine mind, from Quimby ; that she left Portland with manu
scripts which formed the basis of her book, Science and Health;
that she publicly figured for several years after Quimby's death
as the teacher and practitioner of his system; that she had,
herself, before 1875, repeatedly acknowledged her obligations
to him; and that since the publication of the first edition of
Science and Health, in her determined efforts to disprove this
obligation, she has not hesitated to bring discredit upon her
former teacher. They do not maintain that Quimby is, in any
sense, the founder of the present Christian Science organisa
tion ; they do declare, however, that had Mrs. Eddy never visited
Quimby, never listened to his ideas or studied his writings,
such an organisation would probably not now exist. On the
other hand, Christian Scientists repudiate any suggestion that
Mrs. Eddy, or their ecclesiastical establishment, is in the slight
est degree indebted to the Portland healer.
Christian Scientists believe that Mrs. Eddy received the truths
of Christian Science as a direct revelation from God. She came
to fulfil and to complete the mission of Jesus Christ. Jesus,
that is, possessed only partial wisdom. " Our Master healed
the sick," she writes in Science and Health, (l . . . and taught
the generalities of its divine Principle to his students ; but
he left no definite rule for demonstrating his Principle of healing
and preventing disease. This remained to be discovered through
Christian Science." " Jesus' wisdom ofttimes was shown by
His forbearing to speak," she writes, " as well as by His speak-
1 Science and Health (1898), p. 41.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 73
ing, the whole truth. . . . Had wisdom characterised all His 2
sayings, He would not have prophesied His own death and
thereby hastened it or caused it." 3 In other words, Jesus,
by foretelling His crucifixion, created that thought, and the
thought ultimately hastened His death. In a letter written
about 1877, Mrs. Eddy again suggests that her mission com
pletes that of the New Testament :
LYNN, March llth.
MY DEAR STUDENT:
I did not write the day your letter came, a belief was clouding the
sunshine of Truth and it is not fair weather yet. But Harry, be of
good cheer " behind the clouds the sun is still shining." / know the
crucifixion of the one who presents Truth in its higher aspect will be this
time through a bigger error, through mortal mind instead of its lower
strata or matter, showing that the idea given of God this time is higher,
clearer, and more permanent than before. 4 My dear companion and fellow-
labourer in the Lord 5 is grappling stronger than did Peter with the
enemy, he would cut off their hands and " ears " ; you dear student, are
doubtless praying for me and so the Modern Law giver is upheld for a
time. I shall go to work for the book as soon as I can think clearly for
agony, or outside of the belief.
May the All Love hold and help you ever,
Your Teacher
M B GE.
In Retrospection and Introspection, Mrs. Eddy writes :
No person can take the individual place of the Virgin Mary. No person
can compass or fulfil the individual mission of Jesus of Nazareth. No
person can take the place of the author of Science and Health, the dis-
2 Both this and other quotations in this article have heen modified in later
editions of Mrs. Eddy's hooks. The phrase above now stands : " This wisdom,
which characterised his sayings did not prophesy his death and thereby hasten
or permit it." The author thinks it hardly necessary, in what follows, to
Indicate the various readings of the same quotation, but will content herself
with naming the particular editions in which the phrases, as quoted, appear.
When no edition is mentioned, the latest edition is to be understood.
3 Miscellaneous Writings (1897), pp. 83 and 84.
The italics are not Mrs. Eddy's.
6 This is apparently a reference to Asa G. Eddy, her husband.
74 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
coverer and founder of Christian Science. Each individual must fill his
own niche in time and eternity.
The second appearing of Jesus is unquestionably, the spiritual advent
of the advancing idea of God as in Christian Science. 6
Mrs. Eddy believes that Christian Science is foretold in the
Book of Revelation. In Science and Health she writes :
John the Baptist prophesied the coming of the Immaculate Jesus and
declared that this spiritual idea was the Messiah who would baptise with
the Holy Ghost Divine Science. The son of the Blessed represents the
fatherhood of God; and the Revelator completes this figure with the
Woman, or type of God's motherhood. 7
Again
Saint John writes, in the tenth chapter of his Book of Revelation:
" And I saw another mighty angel come down from Heaven, clothed with a
cloud; and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the
sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. And he had in his hand a little book
open; and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot upon the
earth." Is this angel, or message from God, Divine Science that comes
in a cloud? To mortals obscure, abstract, and dark; but a bright promise
crowns its brow. When understood, it is Truth's prism and praise; when
you look it fairly in the face, you can heal by its means, and it hath for
you a light above the sun, for God " is the light thereof." . . . This
angel had in his hand a " little book," open for all to read and understand.
Did this same book contain the revelation of Divine Science, whose " right
foot " or dominant power was upon the sea, upon elementary, latent
error, the source of all error's visible forms? . . . Then will a voice
from harmony cry : " Go and take the little book. Take it and eat it up,
and it shall make thy belly bitter; but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as
honey." Mortal, obey the heavenly evangel. Take up Divine Science.
Study it, ponder it. It will be indeed sweet at its first taste, when it heals
you; but murmur not over Truth, if you find its digestion bitter. . . .
In the opening of the Sixth Seal, typical of six thousand years since
Adam, there is one distinctive feature which has special reference to the
present age. 8
* Retrospection and Introspection, pp. 95 and 96.
''Science and Health (1888), p. 513.
8 The italics in this paragraph are not Mrs. Eddy's.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 75
Rev. -xii. 1. " And there appeared a great wonder in Heaven, a
woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her
head a crown of twelve stars." . . . Rev. xii. 5. " And she brought
forth a man-child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron; and
her child was caught up unto God, and to his Throne." Led on by
the grossest element of mortal mind, Herod decreed the death of every
male child, in order that the man Jesus (the masculine representative of the
spiritual idea) might never hold sway, and so deprive Herod of his
crown. The impersonation of the spiritual idea had a brief history in
the earthly life of our Master; but "of his kingdom there shall be no end,"
for Christ, God's idea, will eventually rule all nations and peoples im
peratively, absolutely, finally with Divine Science. This immaculate idea,
represented first by man and last by woman, will baptise with fire; and
the fiery baptism will burn up the chaff of error with the fervent heat
of Truth and Love, melting and purifying even the gold of human
character. 9
The following extracts from Mrs. Eddy's writings indicate
the magnitude of her claims, and her conception of her own
exalted mission:
She says in Science and Health:
In the year 1866, I discovered the Science of Metaphysical Healing,
and named it Christian Science. God had been graciously fitting me, during
many years, for the reception of a final revelation of the absolute Principle
of Scientific Mind-healing. . . . No human pen or tongue taught me
the Science contained in this book . . . and neither tongue nor pen
can ever overthrow it. 10
Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy says, continues the teach
ings of St. Paul.
On our subject, St. Paul first reasons upon the basis of what is seen,
the effects of Truth on the material senses; thence, up to the Unseen, the
testimony of spiritual sense; and right there he leaves the subject.
Just there, in the intermediate line of thought, is where the present
writer found it, when she discovered Christian Science. And she has not
left it, but continues the explanation of the power of Spirit up to its
infinite meaning, its Allness. 11
Science and Health (1898), pp. 550, 551, 552, and 557.
10 Science and Health (1898), pp. 1 and 4.
11 Miscellaneous Writings (1897), p. 188.
76 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Mrs. Eddy's followers believe that her discovery, in a manner,
has repeated the day of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy
Ghost to man. She says :
This understanding is what is meant by the descent of the Holy Ghost,
that influx of divine Science which so illuminated the Pentecostal Day,
and is now repeating its ancient history. . . .
In the words of St. John: "He shall give you another Comforter, that
he may abide with you forever." This Comforter I understand to be
Divine Science."
In Miscellaneous Writings, Mrs. Eddy further says of her
Science and her ministry:
Above the fogs of sense and storms of passion, Christian Science and
its Art will rise triumphant; ignorance, envy, and hatred earth's harm
less thunder pluck not their heaven-born wings. Angels, with overtures,
hold charge over both, and announce their principle and idea. . . .
No works similar to mine on Christian Science existed, prior to my
discovery of this Science. Before the publication of my first work on this
subject, a few manuscripts of mine were in circulation. The discovery
and founding of Christian Science has cost more than thirty years of
unremitting toil and unrest; but, comparing those with the joy of knowing
that the sinner and the sick are helped upward, that time and eternity
bear witness to this gift of God to the race, I am the debtor.
In 1895, I ordained the BIBLE, and SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH KEY TO
THE SCRIPTURES, the Christian Science Text-book, as the Pastor, on this
planet, of all the churches of the Christian Science Denomination. This
ordinance took effect the same year, and met with the universal approval
and support of Christian Scientists. Whenever and wherever a church of
Christian Science is established, its Pastor is the Bible and My Book.
In 1896, it goes without saying, preeminent over ignorance or envy,
that Christian Science is founded by its discoverer, and built upon the
Rock of Christ. The elements of earth beat in vain against the immortal
parapets of this Science. Erect and eternal, it will go on with the ages,
go down the dim posterns of time unharmed, and on every battlefield
rise higher in the estimation of thinkers, and in the hearts of Christians. 1 *
To Christian Scientists, therefore, Mrs. Eddy's discovery
or revelation was a great turning-point in the history of the
12 Science and Health (1906). pp. 43 and 55.
13 Miscellaneous Writings (1897), pp. 374, 382, and 383.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 77
human race, and the manner in which it came about is of the
highest importance.
It is difficult to ascertain definitely just when Mrs. Eddy
arrived at the conclusion that mortal mind, not matter, causes
sin, sickness, and death, as her own recollection of her initial
revelation seems to be somewhat blurred. " As long ago as
1844," she writes in the Christian Science Journal, in June,
1887, " I was convinced that mortal mind produced all disease,
and that the various medical systems were, in no proper sense,
scientific. In 1862, when I first visited Mr. Quimby, I was
proclaiming to druggists, Spiritualists, and mesmerists that
science must govern all healing."
To her discovery of the principle of mental healing, she has
assigned no less than three different dates :
In a letter to the Boston Post, March 7, 1883, she says:
We made our first experiments in mental healing about 1853, when we
were convinced that mind had a science, which, if understood, would heal
all disease.
Again, in the first edition of Science and Health (1875), she
says:
We made our first discovery that science mentally applied would heal
the sick, in 1864, and since then have tested it on ourselves and hundreds
of others and never found it fail to prove the statement herein made of it.
In Retrospection and Introspection, she says:
It was in Massachusetts, in February, 1866, . . . that I discovered the
Science of Divine Metaphysical Healing, which I afterwards named Chris
tian Science. 14
In later editions of Science and Health, and in numerous
other places, Mrs. Eddy definitely fixes 1866 as the year of her
"Retrospection and Introspection, p. 38.
78 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
discovery. This is now the generally accepted date. Her
enemies have naturally made much of the seeming inconsistency
of these statements. To disprove her claim that she had a
knowledge of mind healing as far back as 1844 or 1853, they
quote Mrs. Eddy's own words in the Christian Science Journal
of June, 1887. She there says that before her visit to Quimby
in 1862, " I knew nothing of the Science of Mind-healing. . . .
Mind Science was unknown to me."
It is scarcely necessary to remark that each of these dates
might be intrinsically correct, as each might mark an important
advance in Mrs. Eddy's mastery of her science. It would be
extremely difficult for any discoverer to date exactly the in
ception of an idea which eventually absorbed him completely.
Doubtless these seeming inaccuracies on Mrs. Eddy's part would
have been passed over as due to mere inexactness of expression,
had not each date been given to meet some specific charge as
to her indebtedness to Quimby and given, as it would seem,
mainly for the purpose of extricating herself from the difficulty
of the moment.
As shown above, in the first edition of Science and Health
(1875), she said that it was in 1864 that she first discovered
that " science mentally applied would heal the sick."
Eight years after Mrs. Eddy had announced 1864 as the
correct and authentic date of her discovery, Julius A. Dresser, 15
"Julius A. Dresser was born in Portland, Me., February 12, 1838. He
was in college in Waterville, Me., when bis health failed. He had a
strongly emotional religious nature and intended to become a minister in the
Calvinistic Baptist Church. When he went to Mr. Quimby in the summer of
1860, he apparently had only a shcrt time to live. Quimby told him his
" religion was killing him." Quimby treated him successfully for typhoid
pneumonia, according to Mr. Dresser's son. Horatio W. Dresser of Cambridge,
and " gave him the understanding which enabled my father to live thirty-three
years after his restoration to health."
Mr. Dresser became an enthusiastic convert to the Quimby faith and for
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 79
in a letter to the Boston Post (February 24, 1883), advanced
Quimby's claim. It was in a reply to this letter, written March
7, 1883, published in the same paper, that Mrs. Eddy first
asserted : " We made our first experiments in mental healing
about 1853."
Four years later (February 6, 1887), Mr. Dresser delivered
an address upon " The True History of Mental Science," at
the Church of Divine Unity, in Boston, in which he declared
that Quimby was the originator of the present science of mental
healing, and that Mrs. Eddy did not understand disease as a
state of mind until she was his patient and pupil. This address
caused such comment and discussion, that four months later
(June, 1887) Mrs. Eddy answered it through the Christian
Science Journal by asserting: "As long ago as 1844, I was
convinced that mortal mind produced all disease. ... In 1862
. . . I was proclaiming . . . that science must govern all
healing."
some years devoted himself to explaining Quimby's principle of mental healing
to new patients. In this way he met Miss Annetta G. Seabury, whom he
married in September, 1863, and Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Patterson.
After his marriage Mr. Dresser took up newspaper work in Portland and In
1866 moved to Webster, Mass., where he edited and published the Webster
Times.
The death of Quimby was a great shock to Mr. and Mrs. Dresser. It was
generally expected by Quimby's followers that Mr. Dresser would take up the
work as Quimby's successor. Mrs. Dresser hesitated to attempt it publicly,
knowing her own and her husband's sensitiveness, and after consideration they
decided not to undertake it at that time. " This," says Mr. Horatio W.
Dresser, " was a fundamentally decisive action, and much stress should be
placed upon it. For Mrs. Eddy naturally looked to father as the probable
successor, and when she learned from father that he had no thought of taking
up the public work, the fleld became free for her. I am convinced that she had
no desire previous to that time to make any claims for herself. Her letters
give evidence of this."
Mr. Dresser's health again weakened from overwork, and after living in the
West for a time he returned to Massachusetts and besran his public work as
mental teacher and healer. In Boston Mr. Dresser found that Mrs. Eddy's
pupils nnd rejected pupils were practising with the sick, and he believed that
their work was inferior to Quimby's. This gave him confidence to begin. In
1882 Mr. and Mrs. Dresser began to practise in Boston, and in 1883 they
were holding class lectures, teaching from the Quimby manuscripts and prac
tising the Quimby method.
From this the "facts with regard to Mrs. Eddy and Mr. Quimby spread, and
this was the beginning of the Quimby controversy.
80 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
The unprejudiced historian finds discrepancies, not only in
the dates of Mrs. Eddy's discovery, but in her accounts of the
particular episodes which occasioned it. In the several editions
of Science and Health, for example, there are two elaborate
versions. In the early editions Mrs. Eddy associates her dis
covery with experiments which she made to cure herself of
dyspepsia; in later editions, as the result of a miraculous re
covery from a spinal injury received in a fall on the ice in
Lynn, in 1866. Both these episodes are related in all editions
of the book. In the early versions, however, the recovery from
dyspepsia receives the greater emphasis ; while in recent editions
the fall on the ice assumes the chief importance, with the other
story forced more and more into the background.
In the first edition of Science and Health (1875), Mrs. Eddy
gives the following account of how she was led to see the truth :
When quite a child, we adopted the Graham system for dyspepsia, ate
only bread and vegetables, and drank water, following this diet for years;
we became more dyspeptic, however, and of course thought we must diet
more rigidly; so we partook of but one meal in twenty-four hours, and
this consisted of a thin slice of bread, about three inches square, without
water; our physician not allowing us with this simple meal, to wet our
parched lips for many hours thereafter; whenever we drank, it produced
violent retchings. Thus we passed most of our early years, as many
can attest, in hunger, pain, weakness and starvation. At length we learned
that while fasting increased the desire for food, it spared none of the
sufferings occasioned by partaking of it, and what to do next, having
already exhausted the medicine men, was a question. After years of
suffering, when we made up our mind to die, our doctors kindly assuring
us this was our only alternative, our eyes were suddenly opened, and we
learned suffering is self-imposed, a belief, and not truth. That God
never made men sick; and all our fasting for penance or health is
not acceptable to Wisdom because it is not the science in which Soul
governs sense. Thus Truth, opening our eyes, relieved our stomach, also,
and enabled us to eat without suffering, giving God thanks; but we never
afterwards enjoyed food as we expected to, if ever we were a freed slave,
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 81
to eat without a master; for the new-born understanding that food could
not hurt us, brought with it another point, viz., that it did not help us as
we had anticipated it would before our changed views on this subject;
food had less power over us for evil or for good than when we consulted
matter before spirit and believed in pains or pleasures of personal sense.
As a natural result we took less thought about " what we should eat or what
drink," and fasting or feasting, consulted less our stomachs and our
food, arguing against their claims continually, and in this manner despoiled
them of their power over us to give pleasure or pain, and recovered
strength and flesh rapidly, enjoying health and harmony that we never
before had done.
The belief that fasting or feasting enables man to grow better, morally or
physically, is one of the fruits of the " tree of knowledge " against which
Wisdom warned man, and of which we had partaken in sad experience; be
lieving for many years we lived only by the strictest adherence to dietetics
and physiology. During this time we also learned a dyspeptic is very far
from the image and likeness of God, from having " dominion over the
fish of the sea, the fowls of the air, or beasts of the field"; therefore
that God never made one; while the Graham system, hygiene, physiology,
materia medica, etc., did, and contrary to his commands. Then it was
that we promised God to spend our coming years for the sick and suffer
ing; to unmask this error of belief that matter rules man. Our cure
for dyspepsia was, to learn the science of being, and " eat what was set
before us, asking no question for conscience' sake; yea to consult matter
less and God more."
In the latest editions, Mrs. Eddy relates this incident, but
does not connect herself with it. " I knew a woman," she
says, " who, when quite a child, adopted the Graham system
to cure dyspepsia," giving the incident merely as an illustra
tion of Christian Science healing.
At present, Christian Scientists date the dawn of the new era
from February 1, 1866, on the evening of which day Mrs.
Eddy fell on the ice. She says in Retrospection and Intro
spection:
It was in Massachusetts, February, 1866, and after the death of the
magnetic doctor, Mr. P. P. Quimby, whom Spiritualists would associate
therewith, but who was in no-wise connected with this event, that I dis
covered the Science of Divine Metaphysical Healing, which I afterwards
82 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
named Christian Science. The discovery came to pass in this way. During
twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical
effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the
Scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental
phenomenon.
My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an
accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was
the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself,
and how to make others so.
Even to the Homeopathic physician who attended me, and rejoiced in
my recovery, I could not then explain the modus of my relief. I could
only assure him that the Divine Spirit had wrought the miracle a miracle
which later I found to be in perfect Scientific accord with divine law. 1 '
In a sketch of Mrs. Eddy, published by the Christian Science
Publishing Society, still a later version is given :
In company with her husband, she was returning from an errand of
mercy, when she fell upon the icy curbstone, and was carried helpless
to her home. The skilled physicians declared that there was absolutely
no hope for her, and pronounced the verdict that she had but three
days to live. Finding no hope and no help on earth, she lifted her heart
to God. On the third day, calling for her Bible, she asked the family to
leave the room. Her Bible opened to the healing of the palsied man,
Matt, ix, 2. The truth which set him free, she saw. The power which
gave him strength, she felt. The life divine, which healed the sick of the
palsy, restored her, and she rose from the bed of pain, healed and free.
Several documents can be brought in refutation of this claim.
Mrs. Eddy's own letter to Julius A. Dresser, after the death
of Quimby, apparently disproves the miraculous account given
above. This letter, already quoted in full in the preceding
chapter, contains the first recorded reference to this accident:
Two weeks ago I fell on the sidewalk (writes Mrs. Eddy), 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.
18 Retrospection and Introspection, p. 38.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 83
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?
In this letter, although it was written two weeks after the
mishap in question, Mrs. Eddy makes no reference to a miracu
lous recovery. In fact, she apparently fears a return of her
old spinal trouble and asks Mr. Dresser to protect her against
it by the Quimby method. She adds that, although she has
not placed her " intelligence in matter," she is " slowly failing."
In the first edition of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy refers
to this recovery, but merely as an interesting demonstration of
Scientific healing. She also describes it in a letter written in
1871 to Mr. W. W. Wright. Wright, a well-known citizen of
Lynn, and a prospective student, addressed several questions
to Mrs. Eddy concerning Christian Science. " What do you
claim for it," he says, " in cases of sprains, broken limbs,
cuts, bruises, etc., when a surgeon's services are generally re
quired? " To which Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Glover, replied:
I have demonstrated upon myself in an injury occasioned by a fall,
that it did for me what surgeons could not do. Dr. Gushing 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.
Here again Mrs. Eddy cites the experience merely as a re-
84 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
markable instance of the power of Christian Science; and does
not connect it in any way with her revelation.
The Dr. Gushing to whom Mrs. Eddy refers in this letter
is still living at Springfield, Mass. He has the clearest recol
lection of Mrs. Eddy and the accident in question. He is an
ex-president of the Massachusetts Homoeopathic Society. From
his records he has made the following affidavit:
COMMOHWEAI/TH OF MASSACHUSETTS
COUNTY OF HAMPDEN, SS.:
Alvin M. Gushing, being duly sworn, deposes and says: I am seventy-
seven years of age, and reside in the City of Springfield in the Common
wealth of Massachusetts. I am a medical doctor of the homeopathic
school and have practised medicine for fifty years last past. On July 13
in the year 1865 I commenced the practice of my profession in the City
of Lynn, in said Commonwealth, and, while there, kept a careful and
accurate record, in detail, of my various cases, my attendance upon and
my treatment of them. One of my cases of which I made and have such
a record is that of Mrs. Mary M. Patterson, then the wife of one Daniel
Patterson, a dentist, and now Mrs. Mary G. Eddy, of Concord, New
Hampshire.
On February 1, 1866, I was called to the residence of Samuel M. Bubier,
who was a shoe manufacturer and later was mayor of Lynn, to attend
said Mrs. Patterson, who had fallen upon the icy sidewalk in front of
Mr. Bubier's factory and had injured her head by the fall. I found her
very nervous, partially unconscious, semi-hysterical, complaining by word
and action of severe pain in the back of her head and neck. This was early
in the evening, and I gave her medicine every fifteen minutes until she
was more quiet, then left her with Mrs. Bubier for a little time, ordering
the medicine to be given every half hour until my return. I made a
second visit later and left Mrs. Patterson at midnight, with directions to
give the medicine every half hour or hour as seemed necessary, when
awake, but not disturb her if asleep.
In the morning Mrs. Bubier told me my orders had been carried out
and said Mrs. Patterson had slept some. I found her quite rational but
complaining of severe pain, almost spasmodic on moving. She declared that
she was going to her home in Swampscott whether we consented or not.
On account of the severe pain and nervousness, I gave her one-eighth of
a grain of morphine, not as a curative remedy, but as an expedient to
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 85
lessen the pain on removing. As soon as I could, I procured a long sleigh
with robes and blankets, and two men from a nearby stable. On my
return, to my surprise found her sound asleep. We placed her in the
sleigh and carried her to her home in Swampscott, without a moan. At
her home the two men undertook to carry her upstairs, and she was so
sound asleep and limp she "doubled up like a jack-knife," so I placed
myself on the stairs on my hands and feet and they laid her on my back,
and in that way we carried her upstairs and placed her in bed. She slept
till nearly two o'clock in the afternoon; so long I began to fear therd had
been some mistake in the dose.
Said Mrs. Patterson proved to be a very interesting patient, and one of
the most sensitive to the effects of medicine that I ever saw, which
accounted for the effects of the small dose of morphine. Probably one-
sixteenth of a grain would have put her sound asleep. Each day that
I visited her, I dissolved a small portion of a highly attenuated remedy
in one-half a glass of water and ordered a teaspoonful given every two
hours, usually giving one dose while there. She told me she could feel
each dose to the tips of her fingers and toes, and gave me much credit
for my ability to select a remedy.
I visited her twice on February first, twice on the second, once on the
third, and once on the fifth, and on the thirteenth day of the same month
my bill was paid. During my visits to her she spoke to me of a Dr.
Quimby of Portland, Maine, who had treated her for some severe illness
with remarkable success. She did not tell what his method was, but I
inferred it was not the usual method of either school of medicine.
There was, to my knowledge, no other physician in attendance upon Mrs.
Patterson during this illness from the day of the accident, February 1,
1866, to my final visit on February 13th, and when I left her on the
13th day of February, she seemed to have recovered from the disturbance
caused by the accident and to be, practically, in her normal condition. I did
not at any time declare, or believe, that there was no hope for Mrs.
Patterson's recovery, or that she was in a critical condition, and did not
at any time say, or believe, that she had but three or any other limited
number of days to live. Mrs. Patterson did not suggest, or say, or
pretend, or in any way whatever intimate, that on the third, or any
other day, of her said illness, she had miraculously recovered or been
healed, or that, discovering or perceiving the truth of the power employed
by Christ to heal the sick, she had, by it, been restored to health. As I
have stated, on the third and subsequent days of her said illness, resulting
from her said fall on the ice, I attended Mrs. Patterson and gave her
medicine; and on the 10th day of the following August, I was again
called to see her, this time at the home of a Mrs. Clark, on Sumner Street,
in said City of Lynn. I found Mrs. Patterson suffering from a bad
86 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
cough and prescribed for her. I made three more professional calls upon
Mrs. Patterson and treated her for this cough in the said month of
August, and with that, ended my professional relations with her.
I think I never met Mrs. Patterson after August 31, 1866, but saw her
often during the next few years and heard that she claimed to have dis
covered a new method of curing disease.
Each of the said visits upon Mrs. Patterson, together with my treatment,
the symptoms and the progress of the case, were recorded in my own
hand in my record book at the time, and the said book, with the said
entries made in February and August, 1866, is now in my possession.
I have, of course, no personal feeling in this matter. In response to
many requests for a statement, I make this affidavit because I am assured
it is wanted to perpetuate the testimony that can now be obtained, and
be used only for a good purpose. I regard it as a duty which I owe
to posterity to make public this particular episode in the life of Mary
Baker G. Eddy.
ALVIN M. GUSHING.
On this second day of January, in the year one thousand, nine hundred
and seven, at the City of Springfield, Massachusetts, personally appeared
before me, Alvin M. Cushing, M.D., to me personally known, and made
oath that he had read over the foregoing statement, and knows the contents
thereof, and that the same are true; and he, thereupon, in my presence,
did sign his name at the end of said statements, and at the foot of each
of the three preceding pages thereof.
RAYMOND A. BIDWELL, Notary Public.
It will be noted that although Mrs. Eddy's revelation and
miraculous recovery occurred on February third, Dr. Cushing
visited her professionally three times after she had been re
stored to health by divine power. Dr. Cushing says that he
visited her on the third day when, writes Mrs. Eddy, she
had her miraculous recovery; and also two days later. In
August, seven months after her discovery of Christian Science,
he was called in to treat her for a cough, and made four pro
fessional visits during that month.
Quimby's adherents believe that Mrs. Eddy's own contra
dictory statements invalidate her claims that God miraculously
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 87
revealed to her the principle of Christian Science. They assert
that, on the other hand, they can clearly prove that she ob
tained the basic ideas of her system from Phineas P. Quimby.
They can prove their contention, they add, from the sworn
testimony of many reputable witnesses. They do not rely,
however, chiefly upon personal testimony. They put forth as
the chief witness against Mrs. Eddy, Mrs. Eddy herself. They
seek to disprove practically all her later statements regarding
Quimby by quoting from her own admitted writings and from
letters.
They assert that Mrs. Eddy obtained from Quimby, not
only her ideas, but the very name of her new religion. Mrs.
Eddy herself says that in 1866 she named her discovery Chris
tian Science. Quimby, however, called his theory Christian
Science at least as early as 1863. In a manuscript written
in that year, entitled " Aristocracy and Democracy," he used
these identical words. In the main, however, Quimby called
his theory the " Science of Health and Happiness," the " Science
of Christ," and many times simply " Science."
CHAPTER VI
THE QUIMBY CONTEOVERSY CONTINUED MRS. EDDY*S ATTEMPTS
TO DISCREDIT QUIMBY HER CHARGE THAT HE WAS ALWAYS
A MESMERIST QUIMBY*S ADHERENTS DEFEND HIM
THE controversy is chiefly upon two points: whether Quimby
healed mentally, through the divine power of mind, or physic
ally, through mesmerism or animal magnetism; and whether
he himself developed his own theory and wrote his own manu
scripts or obtained his ideas from Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Eddy,
when accused of having appropriated Quimby's theories, has
always declared that her system had not the slightest similarity
to his. Christian Scientists heal by the direct power of God,
precisely as did Jesus Himself. They regard mesmerism, or
hypnotism, as the supreme error. " Animal magnetism," once
wrote the Rev. James Henry Wiggin, Mrs. Eddy's literary ad
viser, " is her devil. No church can long get on without a
devil, you know." Therefore, if Mrs. Eddy proves that Quimby
practised this art, and healed by it, to her followers she has
more than proved her case. In Retrospection and Introspec
tion, she says that Quimby was a " magnetic doctor," and im
plies that he was a spiritualist. " It was in Massachusetts,
February, 1866," she says, " and after the death of the mag
netic doctor, Mr. P. P. Quimby, whom Spiritualists would asso
ciate therewith, but who was in no-wise connected with this
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 89
event, that I discovered the Science of Divine Metaphysical
Healing, which I afterwards named Christian Science." This
idea she has elaborated many times. In Miscellaneous Writings
she tells the story of her visit to Quimby in these words :
About the year 1862, while the author of this work was at Dr. VaiPs
Hydropathic Institute in New Hampshire, this occurred: A patient con
sidered incurable left that institution, and in a few weeks returned
apparently well, having been healed, as he informed the patients, by one
Mr. P. P. Quimby, of Portland, Maine.
After much consultation among ourselves, and a struggle with pride,
the author, in company with several other patients, left the Water Cure,
en route for the aforesaid doctor in Portland. He proved to be a magnetic
practitioner. His treatment seemed at first to relieve her but signally
failed in healing her case.
Having practised Homeopathy, it never occurred to the author to learn
his practice, but she did ask him how manipulation could benefit the sick.
He answered kindly and squarely, in substance, " Because it conveys elec
tricity to them." That was the sum of what he taught her of his medical
profession. 1
In the Christian Science Journal for June, 1887, Mrs. Eddy
repeats the same idea:
I never heard him intimate that he healed disease mentally; and many
others will testify that, up to his last sickness, he treated us magnetically,
manipulating our heads, and making passes in the air while he stood in
front of us. During his treatments I felt like one having hold of an
electric battery and standing on an insulated stool. His healing was never
considered or called anything but Mesmerism.
In numerous other articles, Mrs. Eddy has declared that
Quimby healed by animal magnetism; that he never said he
healed mentally, never recognised the superiority of mind to
matter, or any divine principle in his work. These statements,
however, hardly agree with that made in the letter to W. W.
Wright, written in 1871 and quoted in this chapter, in which
1 Miscellaneous Writings (1897), p. 378.
90 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
she refers to Quimby as " an old gentleman who had made it a
research for twenty-five years, starting from the standpoint
of magnetism, thence going forward and leaving that behind."
In the letter published on November 7, 1862, in the Portland
Courier, Mrs. Eddy herself defended Quimby from the very
charge which she now brings against him that he healed by
animal magnetism. On this point, she wrote:
Again, is it by animal magnetism that he heals the sick? Let us
examine. I have employed electro-magnetism and animal magnetism, and
for a brief interval have felt relief, from the equilibrium which I fancied
was restored to an exhausted system or by a diffusion of concentrated
action. But in no instance did I get rid of a return of all my ailments,
because I had not been helped out of the error in which opinions involved
us. My operator believed in disease, independent of the mind; hence I
could not be wiser than my master. But now I can see dimly at first, and
only as trees walking, the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's
faith and works; and just in proportion to my right perception of truth
is my recovery. This truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelli
gence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if received
understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their normal action;
and the mechanism of the body goes on undisturbed. That this is a science
capable of demonstration, becomes clear to the minds of those patients who
reason upon the process of their cure. The truth which he establishes
in the patient cures him (although he may be wholly unconscious thereof) ;
and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease. . . . After
all, this is a very spiritual doctrine; but the eternal years of God are with
it, and it must stand firm as the rock of ages. And to many a poor
sufferer it may be found, as by me, " the shadow of a great rock in a
weary land."
Hardly anything could be more specific than this.
In 186%, Mrs. Eddy, while she was still Quimby's patient,
declared that he healed, not by animal magnetism, but by the
" truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelligence
to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself." Again,
*' the truth which he establishes in the patient cures him . . .
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 91
and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease."
In 1871, while teaching and practising Quimby's method
for a livelihood, she declared that he started " from the stand
point of magnetism, thence going forward and leaving that
behind." 2
In 1887, when at the head of a great organisation of her
own, she says : " he treated us magnetically. . . . His healing
was never considered or called anything but Mesmerism."
Now Mrs. Eddy says that Quimby's method was purely
" physical "; then, in 1862, she wrote that, " after all, this is
a very spiritual doctrine," and describes it as " the great prin
ciple which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works." In an
other communication to the Portland Courier, written November,
1862, Mrs. Eddy specifically declared that Quimby healed after
Christ's method. She said:
P. P. Quimby stands upon the plane of wisdom with his truth. Christ
healed the sick, but not by jugglery or with drugs. As the former speaks
as never man before spake, and heals as never man healed since Christ, is
he not identified with truth? And is not this the Christ which is in
him? We know that in wisdom is life, "and the life was the light of
man." P. P. Quimby rolls away the stone from the sepulchre of error,
and health is the resurrection. But we also know that " light shineth in
darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not."
Mrs. Eddy repeated the same thought in the verses which
she published, over her own name, in a Lynn newspaper, on
February 22, 1866. She entitled them, " Lines on the Death
of Dr. P. P. Quimby, Who Healed with the Truth that Christ
Taught in Contradistinction to All Isms." The letters written
by Mrs. Eddy to Quimby in the years 1862, '63, '64, and '65,
extracts from which were printed, express the same conviction.
2 See extract from letter to Mr. W. W. Wright, p. 101 of this chapter.
92 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
On September 14, 1863, in asking for an u absent treatment,"
Mrs. Eddy wrote : " I would like to have you in your omni
presence visit me at eight o'clock this evening." In a letter
dated Warren, May, 1864, she writes that she has been ill,
but adds, " I am up and about today, i.e., by the help of the
Lord (Quimby)." In the quotation from Retrospection and
Introspection above, Mrs. Eddy associates Quimby with spirit
ualists. Yet, forty years ago, she delivered a public lecture
to prove that he was not a spiritualist. She records the event
in a letter to Quimby, dated Warren, April 24, 1864 :
Jesus taught as man does not, who then is wise but you? Posted at
the public marts of this city is this notice, Mrs. M. M. Patterson will
lecture at the Town Hall on P. P. Quimby's Spiritual Science healing
disease, as opposed to Deism or Rochester Rapping Spiritualism.
Quimby's manuscripts, his defenders assert, clearly show that
when Mrs. Eddy knew him he had dropped mesmerism for his
new system. In 1859 three years before he ever saw Mrs.
Eddy he clearly distinguished between physical and spiritual
healing between the permanent healing of disease through
God, Wisdom, or the Christ method, and its temporary and
ineffectual healing through ignorance, symbolically called
Beelzebub.
The question is asked me by some, is the curing of disease a science?
I answer yes. You may ask who is the founder of that science? I
answer Jesus Christ. Then comes the question, what proof have you that
it is a science? Because Christ healed the sick, that of itself is no proof
that he knew what he was doing. If it was done, it must have been done
by some law or science, for there can be no such thing as accident with
God, and if Christ was God, he did know what he was doing. When he was
accused of curing disease through Beelzebub or ignorance, he said, If I
cast out devils or disease through Beelzebub or ignorance, my kingdom or
science cannot stand, but if I cast out devils or disease through a science
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 93
or law, then my kingdom or law will stand, for it is not of this world.
When others cast out disease they cured by ignorance, or Beelzebub, and
there was no science in the cure, although an effect was produced, but
not knowing the cause, the world was none the wiser for their cures. At
another time when told by his disciples, that persons were casting out
devils in his name, and they forbid them, he said, they that are with us are
not against us, but they that are not with us, or are ignorant of the laws
of curing, scattereth abroad, for the world is none the wiser. There you
see, he makes a difference between his mode of curing and theirs. If
Christ's cures were done by the power of God, and Christ was God, he
must have known what that power or science was, and if he did, he knew
the difference between his science, and their ignorance. His science was
His Kingdom, therefore it was not of this world, and theirs being of this
world, he called it the Kingdom of Darkness. To enter into Christ's
Kingdom, or science, was to enter into the laws of knowledge, of curing
the evils of this world of darkness. As disease is an evil, it is of this
world and in this kingdom of darkness. To separate one world from
another, is to separate life, the resurrection of one is the destruction of
the other. 8
Mrs. Eddy, to prove that Quimby was merely a mesmerist,
emphasises the fact that he frequently rubbed his patients'
heads. According to the present Christian Science belief, that
is the cardinal sin. Physical contact with the patient implies
that the treatment is of this world; in order that healing be
Divine, Christ-like, its only instrument must be mind. On this
one point the controversy has been long and bitter. It figures
as conspicuously in this dispute as did the word filioque in the
contentions of the early Christian Church. Mrs. Eddy, in the
Christian Science Journal of June, 1887, says :
If, as Mr. Dresser says, Mr. Quimby's theory (if he had one) and practice
were like mine, purely mental, what need had he of such physical means
as wetting his hands in water and rubbing the head? Yet these appliances
he continued until he ceased practice; and in his last sickness the poor
man employed a homeopathic physician. The Science of Mind-healing would
be lost by such means and it is a moral impossibility to understand or
to demonstrate this science through such extraneous aids. Mr. Quimby,
* From a manuscript written in 1859.
94 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
never to my knowledge, thought that matter was mind; and he never
intimated to me that he healed mentally, or by the aid of mind. Did he
believe matter and mind to be one, and then rub matter in order to
convince the mind of truth? Which did he manipulate with his hands,
matter or mind? Was Mr. Quimby's entire method of treating the sick
intended to hoodwink his patients?
Quimby's followers freely admit that, on some occasions,
he dipped his hands in water and rubbed the patient's head.
They deny, however, that this was an essential part of the
cure. Mr. Julius A. Dresser explains the circumstances thus :
Some may desire to ask, if in his practice, he ever in any way used
manipulation. I reply that, in treating a patient, after he had finished
his explanations, and the silent work, which completed the treatment, he
usually rubbed the head two or three times, in a brisk manner, for the
purpose of letting the patient see that something was done. This was a
measure of securing the confidence of the patient at a time when he was
starting a new practice, and stood alone in it. I knew him to make
many and quick cures at a distance sometimes with persons he never saw
at all. He never considered the touch of the hand as at all necessary;
but let it be governed by circumstances, as was done eighteen hundred
years ago. 4
In Mrs. Eddy's early days, she treated in precisely the same
way. As will be described in the next chapter, she lived in
several Massachusetts towns, teaching and practising the
Quimby cure. She always instructed her students, after treat
ing their patients mentally, to rub their heads. In addition,
Mrs. Eddy would dip her hands in water and lay them over
the stomach of the patient, repeating, as she did this, the words :
" Peace, be still." Several of Mrs. Eddy's students of that
time are still practising, and they still, in accordance with
her instructions of nearly forty years ago, manipulate their
patients. It was not until 1872 that she learned that the
4 The True History of Mental Science, p. 25.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 95
practice was pernicious. She tells the story as follows, in a
pamphlet, The Science of Man, published in 1876:
When we commenced this science, we permitted students to manipulate
the head, ignorant that it could do harm, or hinder the power of mind
acting in an opposite direction, viz., while the hands were at work and
the mind directing material action. We regret to say it was the sins
of a young student that called our attention to this question for the first
time, and placed it in a new moral and physical aspect. By thorough
examination and tests, we learned manipulation hinders instead of helps
mental healing; it also establishes a mesmeric connection between patient
and practitioner that gives the latter opportunity and power to govern
the thoughts and actions of his patients in any direction he chooses, and
with error instead of truth. This can injure the patients and must always
prevent a scientific result. . . . Since our discovery of this malpractice
in 1872, we have never permitted a student with our consent to manipulate
in the least, and this process unlearned is utterly worthless to benefit
the sick. 5
This is an admission on Mrs. Eddy's part that, for six years
after her discovery of the " absolute principle of metaphysical
healing," she herself taught the method which she now asserts
disproves that Quimby ever healed by the power of mind.
Quimby's adherents maintain that the fact that during these
six years she followed his instructions implicitly and rubbed
her patients' heads, is merely another proof that she obtained
her original conception of mental healing from him. In Mis
cellaneous Writings Mrs. Eddy explains this head-rubbing on
the same ground as did Quimby, that is, that the average
weak and doubting mind needed an outward sign :
It was after Mr. Quimby's death, that I discovered, in 1866, the
momentous facts relating to Mind and its superiority over matter, and
named my discovery Christian Science. Yet, there remained the difficulty
of adjusting in the scale of Science a metaphysical practice, and settling
the question, What shall be the outward sign of such a practice: if a
5 P. 12.
96 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Divine Principle alone heals, what is the human modus for demonstrating
this? . . . My students at first practised in slightly different forms.
Although / could heal mentally, without a sign save the immediate recovery
of the sick, my students' patients, and people generally, called for a sign
a material evidence wherewith to satisfy the sick that something was being
done for them; and I said, "Suffer it to be so now," for thus saith our
Master. Experience, however, taught me the impossibility of demonstrat
ing the Science of Metaphysical Healing by any outward form of practice. 8
Other pupils of Quimby, among them Mr. Julius A. Dresser,
resented his being presented to the world by Mrs. Eddy as a
mesmerist and magnetic healer. They asserted again and again
that he healed by mental science purely, and that Mrs. Eddy
had misrepresented him and his methods. Mr. Dresser made
a statement to that effect in the Boston Post, February 24,
1883. Mrs. Eddy replied to this letter (Boston Post, March 7,
1883), admitting that Quimby " may have had a theory in
advance of his method," but making the claim that it was she
who first asked him to " write his thoughts out," and that she
would sometimes so transform his manuscripts that they were
virtually her own compositions. She says:
We never were a student of Dr. Quimby's. . . . Dr. Quimby never
had students, to our knowledge. He was an Humanitarian, but a very
unlearned man. He never published a work in his life; was not a
lecturer or teacher. He was somewhat of a remarkable healer, and at the
time we knew him he was known as a mesmerist. We were one of his
patients. He manipulated his patients, but possibly back of his practice
he may have had a theory in advance of his method. . . . We knew him
about twenty years ago, and aimed to help him. We saw he was looking
in our direction, and asked him to write his thoughts out. He did so,
and then we would take that copy to correct, and sometimes so transform
it that he would say it was our composition, which it virtually was; but
we always gave him back the copy and sometimes wrote his name on the
back of it.
Miscellaneous Writings (1897), pp. 379 and 380.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 97
In a revised edition of Julius A. Dresser's pamphlet, The
True History of Mental Science, Mr. Dresser's son, Horatio W.
Dresser, says :
It has frequently been claimed that Mrs. Eddy was Quimby's secretary,
and that she helped him to formulate his ideas. It has also been stated
that these manuscripts were Mrs. Eddy's writings, left by her in Portland;
that the articles printed in this pamphlet were Mrs. Eddy's words, as
nearly as she can recollect them (Christian Science Sentinel, February 16,
1899). There is absolutely no truth in any of these statements or suppo
sitions. Mrs. Eddy never saw a page of the original manuscripts; and
Volume I, loaned her by my father in 1862, was his copy from a copy.
Mrs. Eddy may have made a copy of this volume for her own use, but
the majority even of the copied articles Mrs. Eddy never saw. I have
read and copied all of these articles, and can certify that they contain
a very original and complete statement of the data and theory of mental
healing. There are over eight hundred closely written pages, covering
one hundred and twenty subjects, written previous to March, 1862, more
than six months before Mrs. Eddy went to Dr. Quimby.
In the 1884 edition of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy, writing
of Quimby, says:
The old gentleman to whom we have referred had some very advanced
views on healing, but he was not avowedly religious neither scholarly.
We interchanged thoughts on the subject of healing the sick. I restored
some patients of his that he failed to heal, and left in his possession some
manuscripts of mine containing corrections of his desultory pennings
which I am informed, at his decease, passed into the hands of a patient
of his, .now residing in Scotland. He died in 1865 and left no published
works. The only manuscript that we ever held of his, longer than to
correct it, was one of perhaps a dozen pages, most of which we had
composed.
This manuscript of " perhaps a dozen pages," is clearly the
one called by Quimby, Questions and Answers. The original
copy, now in the possession of the writer, in the handwriting
of Quimby's wife, is dated February, 1862, eight months before
98 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Quimby had ever seen Mrs. Eddy. From this manuscript Mrs.
Eddy taught for several years after Quimby's death, and she
sold copies of it to her early students for $300 each. 7 Its
history will be given in detail and its contents analysed in the
next chapter.
In refutation of Mrs. Eddy's general assertion that she
herself taught Quimby what he knew about mental science,
and that she corrected and so largely contributed to the Quimby
manuscripts, Quimby's defenders again quote Mrs. Eddy herself.
They once more draw upon her early letter to the Portland
Courier. This, they say, does not read like a letter written
by master to pupil. If Mrs. Eddy were the teacher and Quimby
the student, would she, they ask, speak of him in this wise?
" Now, then, his works are but the result of superior wisdom,
which can demonstrate a science not understood. . . . But now
I can see dimly at first, and only as trees walking, the great
principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works; and
just in proportion to my right perception of truth is my
recovery." If Mrs. Eddy, they add, were at that time writing
Quimby's manuscripts, would she, in this same letter, have ex
pressed herself thus : " At present I am too much in error
to elucidate the truth, and can touch only the keynote for
the master hand to wake the harmony. . . . To many a poor
sufferer may it be found, as by me, ' the shadow of a great
rock in a weary land.' '
Mrs. Eddy's poem on Quimby's death, already quoted, is
apparently the grateful tribute of pupil to teacher. Its con
cluding lines ill sustain Mrs. Eddy's present position :
1 For the $300 Mrs. Eddy's students also obtained twelve lessons in the
Quimby cure.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
" Rest should reward him who hath made us whole,
Seeking, though tremblers, where his footsteps trod."
Her letters to Quimby, 1862-'65, also fail to substantiate
this impression that Quimby was under Mrs. Eddy's instruc
tion. " I have the utmost faith in your philosophy," she wrote
in 1862. Other phrases, scattered through the letters, read: 8
"Dear doctor, what could I do without you? ... I am
to all who see me a living wonder, and a living monument of
your power. . . . My explanation of your curative principle
surprises people. . . . Who is wise but you ?" She wrote from
Warren, Me., in the spring of 1865, that she had been asked
to treat sick people after the Quimby method. She refuses
to do so, she adds, because she considers that she is still in
her " pupilage."
In connection with Mrs. Eddy's claim that she herself largely
wrote the Quimby manuscripts, the following extract from an
affidavit of Mrs. Sarah G. Crosby of Waterville, Me., an
intimate friend of Mrs. Eddy when she was under Quimby's
treatment, is also of interest:
I know little of the history of said Mrs. Patterson between 1866 and
1877, when she called me professionally 8 to Lynn, in February, 1877, a
few weeks after her marriage to Asa G. Eddy, to report a course of
lessons to a class of nine pupils. She told me she wished a copy of these
lessons for Mr. Eddy to study, that he, too, might teach classes. These
lectures were in all material respects the same as I had myself been taught
by said Dr. Quimby and that Mrs. Patterson and I had so often discussed,
and which she had tried so hard to make me understand and adopt when
we were together in Portland and later in Albion; the same teaching
about Truth and Error and matter and disease, the same method of curing
disease by Truth casting out Error, the same claim that it was the method
8 For further extracts from Mrs. Eddy's letters to Quimby, see Chapter IV.
9 Mrs. Crosby was an expert court stenographer.
100 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
adopted by Jesus. I do not hesitate to say that Mrs. Eddy's teachings in
1877, and Dr. Quimby's teachings in 1864 were substantially the same; in
fact, as I heard them both, I know they were.
In June, 1883, an attorney representing said Mrs. Patterson came to see
me at Waterville, my present home, and interviewed me regarding her
work with Dr. Quimby in Portland in 1864. I refused to answer his
questions and he left, but returned the next day bearing an affectionate
letter from said Mrs. Patterson. The following is a copy thereof:
" MY DEAR SISTER,
SARAH, ,
I wanted to see you myself but it was impossible for me to leave my
home and so have sent the bearer of this note to see you for me.
Two nights ago I had a sweet dream of Albert 1 " and the dear face
was so familiar, Oh how I loved him ! and in the morning a thought popped
into my head to ask Sarah to help me in this very trying hour.
These are the circumstances. A student " of my husband's took the class-
book of mine that he studied, put his name to most of it, and published
it as his own after he was through with the class.
Then was the time I ought to have sued him, but Oh, I do so dislike
a quarrel that I hoped to get over it without a law-suit.
So I noticed in my next edition of ' Science and Health ' his infringe
ment with a sharp reprimand thinking that would stop him, but this winter
he issued another copy of my work as the author, and then I sued him.
The next thing he did was to publish the falsehood that I stole my works
from the late Dr. Quimby. When everything I ever had published has been
written or edited by me as spontaneously as I teach or lecture.
10 It will be remembered that the " spirit " friendship of Mrs. Patterson's
dead brother, Albert Baker, for Mrs. Crosby, formed a close bond in the
friendship of the two women, and that he communicated with Mrs. Crosby
through his sister. See Chapter IV.
11 In the early '80's, Edward J. Arens published a pamphlet entitled Old
Theology in its Application to the Healing of the Sick; the Redemption of
Man from the Bondage of Sin and Death, and His Restoration to an In
heritance of Everlasting Life. In this Arens borrowed liberally, in word and
idea, from Science and Health. In 1883 Mrs. Eddy sued Arens for infringe
ment of copyright. Arens said, in defence, that he had not borrowed from
Mrs. Eddy, but from the late P. P. Quimby, of Portland, Me. He added
that Mrs. Eddy had herself appropriated Quimby's ideas, in other words,
that both had drawn their philosophy from the same source. The court
decided in Mrs. Eddy's favour, and issued a perpetual injunction restraining
Arens from circulating his books. On the strength of this decision Mrs. Eddy
and her followers have declared that the United States courts have decided
the issue of the Quimby controversy in her favour. There is nothing in this
decision contrary to the claims of Quimby's friends. The court, they agree,
simply decided that Mrs. Eddy held a valid copyright upon Science and Health
and that Arens had violated that copyright. They have never denied either
of these facts. They freely admit that Mrs. Eddy wrote Science and Health
as it stands, and that she has a property interest in it. They are not dis
cussing legal technicalities, but only the moral issue involved, which, they add,
did not and properly could not, be considered by the court.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 101
Now dear one, I want you to tell this man, the bearer of this note,
that you know that Dr. Quimby and I were friends and that I used to
take his scribblings and fix them over for him and give him my thoughts
and language which as I understood it, were far in advance of his.
Will you do this and give an affidavit to this effect and greatly oblige
your Affectionate Sister Mary."
I read the foregoing appeal for help from said Mrs. Patterson, then
Eddy, and as it was clearly a request that I should make oath to what
was not true, I informed the attorney that I should not make the
affidavit asked by his client, as it would not be a true statement. He
then threatened to summon me to the trial, but I think I made him
understand that I would not be a desirable witness on his side of the case.
He thereupon departed, and I was not summoned to testify. And since
that interview, I have only a public knowledge of said Mrs. Patterson-Eddy.
In her private correspondence, Mrs. Eddy has said, in so
many words, that she taught the Quimby system. Reference
has already been made to the correspondence in March, 1871,
between Mrs. Eddy then Mrs. Glover and Mr. W. W. Wright
of Lynn. Mr. Wright specifically asked this question:
6th: Has this theory ever been advertised or practised before you
introduced it, or by any other individual?
To this Mrs. Eddy replied :
6th: Never advertised, and practised by only one individual who healed
me, Dr. Quimby of Portland, Me, an old gentleman who had made it a
research for twenty-five years, starting from the stand-point of magnetism
thence going forward and leaving that behind. 7 discovered the art in
a moment's time, and he acknowledged it to me; he died shortly after
and since then, eight years, I have been founding and demonstrating
the science. . . . please preserve this, and if you become my student
call me to account for the truth of what I have written
Respectfully
M M B GLOVER
Mrs. Eddy has never attempted to reconcile the statements
which she made before the publication of Science and Health
with the very different ones which she has made since.
102 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
The explanation by which she seeks to account for her early
expressions of devotion and gratitude to Quimby is not one
which tends to lessen the perplexities of the historian. She
simply asserts that she wrote these tributes to Quimby while
under mesmeric influence and is not properly responsible for
them at all.
In the Boston Post, in a letter dated March 7, 1883, after
Julius A. Dresser had made public some of the letters already
quoted, she wrote as follows:
Did I write those articles purporting to be mine? I might have written
them twenty or thirty years ago, for I was under the mesmeric treatment
of Dr. Quimby from 1862 until his death in 1865. He was illiterate
and I knew nothing then of the Science of Mind-healing, and I was as
ignorant of mesmerism as Eve before she was taught by the serpent.
Mind Science was unknown to me; and my head was so turned by animal
magnetism and will-power, under his treatment, that I might have written
something as hopelessly incorrect as the articles now published in the
Dresser pamphlet. I was not healed until after the death of Mr. Quimby;
and then healing came as the result of my discovery in 1866, of the Science
of Mind-healing, since named Christian Science.
In 1887, when Julius A. Dresser published his True History
of Mental Science, the Quimby-Eddy controversy reached its
climax. Mrs. Eddy, says Horatio W. Dresser, requested her
literary adviser, Rev. James Henry Wiggin, to answer the
pamphlet. Mr. Wiggin asked Mrs. Eddy if she had written
the letters in the Portland newspapers, the letter to Dresser,
the poem on Quimby's death, and other effusions. Mrs. Eddy
admitted that she had. " Then," replied Mr. Wiggin, " there
is nothing to say," and declined the task. In a personal letter
Mr. Wiggin says :
What Mrs. Eddy has, as documents clearly prove, she got from P. P.
Quimby, of Portland, Me., whom she eulogised after death as the great
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 103
leader and her special teacher. . . . She has tried to answer this 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.
Mrs. Eddy, however, issued the following challenge :
To WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Mr. George A. Quimby son of the late Phineas P. Quimby, over his
own signature and before witnesses, stated in 1883, that he had in his
possession at that time all the manuscript that had been written by his
father. And I hereby declare that to expose the falsehood of parties
publicly intimating that I have appropriated matter belonging to the
aforesaid Quimby, I will pay the cost of printing and publishing the
first edition of those manuscripts with the author's name:
Provided, that I am allowed first to examine said manuscripts, and do
find that they were his own compositions, and not mine, that were left
with him many years ago, or that they have not since his death, in 1865,
been stolen from my published works. Also that I am given the right
to bring out this one edition under the copyright of the owner of said
manuscripts, and all the money accruing from the sales of said book
shall be paid to said owner. Some of his purported writings, quoted by
Mr. D , were my own words as near as I can recollect them.
There is a great demand for my work, " Science and Health, with
Key to Scriptures," hence Mr. D 's excuse for the delay to publish
Quimby's manuscripts namely, that this period is not sufficiently enlight
ened to be benefited by them (?) is lost, for if I have copied from
Quimby, and my book is accepted, it has created a demand for his.
MARY BAKER G. EDDY.
This proposition was ignored by Mr. Quimby, owing to his
own knowledge of Mrs. Eddy and of his father's manuscripts.
Quimby's adherents declare that the provisions made in her
offer indicate what her claims would have been if the manu
scripts had been given into her hands as she had already
announced that Dr. Quimby's writings were her own and that
the proposition was made with the object of securing possession
of the manuscripts.
104. LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
In a letter to Mr. A. J. Swartz, a mental healer of Chicago
who interested himself in the case, dated February 22, 1838,
George A. Quimby explained his position:
Your letter with enclosure at hand. I judge that you offer to defend
the memory of my father, the late P. P. Quimby. . . . Please permit
me to say that I have no doubt of your kind intention to come to the
rescue of my father, but I do not feel that there is the slightest necessity
for it. ... If I were in prison, in solitary confinement for life, I
should be too busy to get into any kind of a discussion with Mrs. Eddy.
I have my father's manuscripts in my possession, but will not allow
them to be copied nor to go out of my hands. Answering your further
inquiries, I have no written article of Mrs. Eddy's in my possession, have
never had, nor did my father ever have, nor did she ever leave any with
either of us. Neither of us have ever " stolen " any of her writings nor
anything else. In fact, we both have been able to make a living without
stealing. . . .
Yours truly,
GEORGE A. QUIMBY.
From the history of this controversy, it is evident that, for
Mrs. Eddy, there have existed two Phineas P. Quimbys: one
the Quimby who was her physician and teacher, who roused her
from the fretful discontent of middle-age, and who gave her
purpose and aspiration; the other the Quimby who, after the
publication of Science and Health, became, in a sense, her
rival, whom she saw as an antagonist threatening to invalidate
her claims. If she has been a loser through this controversy,
it is not because of what she borrowed from Quimby, but because
of her later unwillingness to admit her obligation to him. Had
she observed the etiquette of the regular sciences, where personal
ambition is subsidiary to a desire for truth, and where dis
coverers and investigators are scrupulous to acknowledge the
sources from which they have obtained help, it would have
strengthened rather than weakened her position.
CHAPTER VII
DR. AND MRS. PATTERSON IN LYNN THEIR SEPARATION MRS.
PATTERSON AS A PROFESSIONAL VISITOR SHE TEACHES
HIRAM CRAFTS THE QUIMBY " SCIENCE " MRS. PATTERSON
IN AMESBURY
ALTHOUGH after Mrs. Eddy's second visit to Quimby in the
early part of 1864 she always desired to teach his doctrines
and could think and talk of little else, it was not until 1870
that she was able to establish herself as a teacher of metaphysical
healing. The six years intervening are important chiefly as
the period of Mrs. Eddy's novitiate. During that time she
drifted from one to another of half a dozen little towns about
Boston ; but amid all vicissitudes one thing remained fixed and
constant, her conviction that she was the person destined to
teach and popularise Quimbyism.
Mrs. Patterson's long visit at the home of Mrs. Sarah Crosby,
at Albion, Me., has already been referred to in the fourth
chapter of the present volume. She went to Mrs. Crosby's
house in May, 1864, remaining there most of the summer and
leaving in the early autumn. She then rejoined her husband,
Dr. Patterson, at Lynn, Mass., where the doctor had begun
to practise and had taken an office at 76 Union Street. In the
Lynn Weekly Reporter, of June 11, 1864, the following ad
vertisement appears for the first time:
105
106 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
DENTAL NOTICE
DR. D. PATTERSON
Would respectfully announce to the public that be has returned to
Lynn, and opened an office in B. F. & G. N. Spinney's new building, on
Union St., between the Central Depot & Sagamore Hotel, where he will
be happy to greet the friends and patrons secured last year while in the
offices of Drs. Davis and How, and now he hopes to secure the patronage
of " all the rest of mankind " by the exhibition of that skill which close
study and many years of first-class and widely-extended practice enable
him to bring to the aid of the suffering. He is aware that he has to
compete with able practitioners, but yet offers his services fearlessly,
knowing that competition is the real stimulus to success, and trusting to
his ability to please all who need Teeth filled, extracted or new sets.
He was the first to introduce LAUGHING GAS in Lynn for Dental
purposes and has had excellent success with it. Terms lower than any
where else for the same quality of work.
Dr. Patterson and his wife first boarded at 42 Silsbee Street,
where they remained for some months, afterward moving to the
house of O. A. Durall, in Buffum Street.
The doctor's dental practice in Lynn was fairly good, and
people liked him for a bluff, jovial fellow, none too clever, but
honest and kind of heart. Both he and his wife were at this
time prominent members of the Linwood Lodge of Good Tem
plars, at Lynn, and old members of the lodge remember the
active part which Mrs. Patterson took in their meetings. She
was often called upon to read, or to speak on matters under
discussion, and was always ready to do so. Her remarks never
failed to command attention, and the Good Templars of Lynn
considered her " smart but queer." Members of the lodge who
are still living say that she discussed Quimbyism whenever she
found opportunity to do so, and, although they were con
siderably amused by her extravagant metaphors and could make
nothing of her " philosophy," they had no doubt that it was
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 107
very profound and recondite. It was when she was returning
from one of these Good Templar meetings, February 1, 1866,
that Mrs. Patterson had the fall from the effects of which she
says she was miraculously healed. She, with a party of fellow
Templars, was passing the corner of Oxford and Market Streets,
when she slipped upon the icy sidewalk and fell. She was
carried into the house of Samuel Bubier, where Dr. Gushing
attended her, and the next day, at her urgent request, she
was moved to the house on the Swampscott Road, where she
and her husband were then boarding. It was on the following
day, according to Mrs. Eddy's account, that she received her
revelation, and in this house Christian Science was born. In
the following spring the Pattersons took a room in the house
of P. R. Russell, at the corner of Pearl and High Streets, Lynn.
Here, after about two months, Dr. Patterson finally left his
wife, and they never lived together after this time. In refer
ring to her husband's desertion of her, Mrs. Eddy says :
In 1862 1 my name was Patterson; my husband, Dr. Patterson, a dis
tinguished dentist. After our marriage I was confined to my bed with a
severe illness, and seldom left bed or room for seven years, when I was
taken to Dr. Quimby, and partially restored. I returned home, hoping
once more to make that home happy, but only returned to a new agony,
to find my husband had eloped with a married woman from one of the
wealthy families of that city, leaving no trace save his last letter to us,
wherein he wrote " I hope some time to be worthy of so good a wife." 2
1 Letter to the Boston Post, March 7, 1883.
2 From Mrs. Eddy's statement it Is impossible to tell whether by " that city
she means Sanbornton Bridge, where she returned after her first visit to
Quimby, or Lynn, where she joined her husband after her second visit. Neither
in Lynn nor Sanbornton Bridge do the people who know the Pattersons recall
any elopement on Dr. Patterson's part. 1'. R. Russell, in whose house the
Pattersons were living when the Doctor deserted his wife, says in his affidavit
"While they were living at my house, Dr. Patterson went away and did
not return. I do not know the cause of his going. I never heard that he
eloped with any woman, and I never heard Mrs. Patterson say that he had
eloped with any woman. Mrs. Patterson never said anything whatever to me
on the subject of her husband's departure. I never heard anything against
Dr. Patterson's character either then or since."
108 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
After leaving his wife, Dr. Patterson went to Littleton, N. H.,
where he practised for some years. Afterward he led a roving
life, wandering from town to town, until he at last went back
to the home of his boyhood, at Saco, Me., where he secluded
himself and lived the life of a hermit until his death in 1896.
Bitter experience awaited Mrs. Patterson after her husband's
desertion. Whatever may have been the cause for his leaving,
Mrs. Patterson did not, at that time, claim the sympathy of
her friends on account of it, and to her landlord and his wife
she maintained silence on the subject, merely saying in answer
to inquiries, that he had gone away. According to Mrs. Patter
son's relatives, her husband went about the separation deliber
ately, announcing his intention and his reason 3 to her family,
and making what provision he was able for her support. 4
In the fall of 1865 Mark Baker, Mrs. Patterson's father,
died, and at about the same time her sister, Mrs. Tilton, closed
her door forever against Mrs. Patterson. 5 Her only child,
George Glover, at that time a young man, she had sent away
in his childhood. Mrs. Patterson was, therefore, for the first
time in her life, practically alone in the world and largely
dependent upon herself for support. Untrained in any kind
of paid work, she fell back upon the favour of her friends
or chance acquaintances, living precariously upon their bounty,
and obliged to go from house to house, as one family after
3 To her family Dr. Patterson said that he was unable to endure life with
Mrs. Patterson any longer.
4 For several years after their separation Dr. Patterson gave his wife an
annuity of $200, which was paid in small instalments.
5 When Mrs. Tilton, who had taken care of Mrs. Patterson from childhood
and supported her in her widowhood, finally turned against her sister, she
was as hard as she had been generous before. " I loved Mary best of all
my sisters and brothers," she said to her friends, " but it is all gone now."
The bitterness of her feeling lasted to the day of her death. She instructed
her family not to allow Mary to see her after death nor to attend her
funeral, and her wishes were carried out.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 109
another wearied of her. For a while she stayed on at the
Russells', but as she was unable to pay even the $1.50 a week
rental which they charged her, she was served with eviction
papers and dispossessed of her room within a month after
Dr. Patterson's departure. Mr. Russell, her landlord, says that
the matter of the rent was merely a pretext. He wished Mrs.
Patterson to go because his wife, who had greatly admired her
when she first came into the house, soon declared that she could
not endure Mrs. Patterson's remaining there. His father, Rev.
P. R. Russell, also strongly objected to Mrs. Patterson's pres
ence.
The month of August, or a part of it, Mrs. Patterson spent
with Mrs. Clark, in Summer Street, Lynn, and it was there that
Dr. Gushing treated her for a severe cough. She next stayed
with Mrs. Armenius Newhall, but soon afterward left the house,
at Mrs. Newhall's request.
Mrs. James Wheeler of Swampscott, in her own town known
as " Mother " Wheeler from her gentle qualities and her eager
ness to help and comfort every one, then offered Mrs. Patterson
a shelter.
At the Wheelers', as elsewhere, Mrs. Patterson talked con
tinually of Quimby and declared that it was the ambition of
her life to publish his notes on mental healing. Mrs. Julia
Russell Walcott, a sister of Mrs. Patterson's former landlord,
and an intimate friend of Mrs. Wheeler, says in her affidavit:
Mrs. Patterson was the means of creating discord in the Wheeler
family. She was unkind in her language to and treatment of Mrs. James
Wheeler, at the same time exacting extra personal service and attention to
her daily wants.
One morning I sat in the parlour at the Wheeler house when Mrs.
110 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Patterson came down to breakfast. The family breakfast was over, but
Mrs. Wheeler, according to her usual custom, had prepared a late breakfast
for Mrs. Patterson. Mrs. Wheeler, Mrs. Patterson, and myself were alone
in the house. I had come in late the previous evening and Mrs. Patterson
did not know of my presence in the house. She entered the breakfast
room from the hall, and began at once, and without any apparent cause,
to talk to Mrs. Wheeler in a most abusive manner, using violent and
insulting language.
I immediately went into the breakfast room and commanded her to stop,
which she did at once. I indignantly rebuked Mrs. Patterson and in
formed her that I should tell Mrs. Wheeler's family of her conduct.
Mrs. \Vheeler did not respond to Mrs. Patterson. 'To me she said,
" Thank God, Julia, that you were here, this time. I have often borne
this."
Mrs. Patterson was, soon after this, requested to leave the Wheeler
house, and did so. Mrs. Wheeler received nothing in payment for Mrs.
Patterson's board. When Mrs. Wheeler asked Mrs. Patterson for a settle
ment, Mrs. Patterson replied to the effect that she had " treated " a wounded
finger for Mr. Wheeler and that this service was equivalent to what she
had received from Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler, in board, lodging, etc.
Upon leaving the Wheelers, Mrs. Patterson took refuge with
the Ellis family. Mrs. Mary Ellis lived at Elm Cottage,
Swampscott, with her unmarried son, Fred Ellis, master of a
boys' school in Boston. Both she and her son were cultivated
persons, and they felt a certain sympathy with Mrs. Patterson's
literary labours. Wherever she went, Mrs. Patterson was pre
ceded by the legend that she was writing a book. During
the time which she spent with Mrs. Ellis, she remained in her
room the greater part of each day, working upon the manu
script which eight years later was to be published under the
title, Science and Health. In the evening she often joined
Mr. Ellis and his mother downstairs, and read them what she
had written during the day, telling them of Dr. Quimby and
his theories of mind and matter, and explaining how she meant
to develop them.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 111
While in Lynn Mrs. Patterson continued to take an interest
in Spiritualism. The older Spiritualists of Lynn remember
her taking part as a medium in a circle which met at the home
of Mrs. George Clark in Summer Street. Mrs. Richard Hazel-
tine says : 6
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 com
municate 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.
Mrs. Mary Gould, a Spiritualist medium in Lynn, remembers
that at one time Abraham Lincoln was one of Mrs. Glover's
controls.
In the winter of 1866-67 Mrs. Patterson met Hiram Crafts
at a boarding-house in Lynn. Crafts was a shoe-worker of East
Stoughton, who had come to Lynn to work in a shoe factory
there for the winter. Mrs. Patterson tried to interest every
one she met in Quimby's theories and saw in the serious shoe
maker a prospective pupil. What she told Crafts of this new
system of doctoring appealed to him strongly ; he was a Spirit
ualist and was deeply interested in psychic phenomena. After
he returned home, he sent for Mrs. Patterson to come to East
8 From the affidavit of Mrs. Richard Hazeltine of Lynn.
7 Although Mrs. Patterson did not divorce Dr. Patterson until 1873, she
resumed her former name of Glover soon after he went away.
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Stoughton and teach him. She joined the Crafts, accordingly,
in the early part of 1867, and lived for some months in their
home at East Stoughton now Avon instructing Mr. Crafts
in the Quimby method of healing. Early in the spring Crafts
T
o THE SICK.
DR. H. S. CRAFTS,
Would say unhesitatingly, I can cure you, and
have never failed to cure Consumption, Catarrh,
Scrofula, Dyspepsia and Rheumatism, with
many other forms of disease and weakness, in
which I am especially successful. If you give
me a fair trial and are not helped, I will re
fund your money.
The following certificate is from a lady in
this city,
Mrs. Raymond :
H. S. CRAFTS, Office 90, Main street:
In giving to the public a statement of my
peculiar case, I am actuated by a motive to
point out the way to others of relief from their
sufferings. About 12 years since I had an
internal abscess, that not only threatened to
destroy my life at that time, but which has
ever since continued to affect me in some form
or another internally, making life well nigh a
burden to bear. I have consulted many puysi-
cians, all of whom have failed to relieve me of
this suffering, and in this condition, while grow
ing worse year by year, about three weeks ago
I applied to Dr. H. S. Crafts, who, to my own,
and the utter astonishment of my friends, has,
in this incredibly short time, without medicines
or painful applications, cured me of this chronic
malady. In conclusion, I can only quote the
words of a patient who was healed by his
method of cure : " I am convinced he is a skill
ful Physician, whose cures are not the result
of accident." I reside in Taunton, at Weir
street Railroad Crossing.
ABIGAIL RAYMOND.
Taunton, May 13, 1867. my!4-dT&S&wlm
An advertisement of Hiram S. Crafts, which appeared in a Taunton
newspaper, May 13, 1867. Mr. Crafts had moved from East Stoughton
to Taunton, taking his wife and Mrs. Eddy with him.
went to Taunton, taking his wife and Mrs. Patterson with him,
and opened an office. He was the first of Mrs. Eddy's students
to go into practice. His advertisement in a Taunton paper is
reprinted herewith. Mrs. Patterson did not practise herself,
but remained with the family to teach and advise Crafts. Con-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 113
cerning Mrs. Patterson and her relation to the Crafts, 8 Ira
Holmes, brother of Mrs. Crafts, makes the following affidavit:
Ira Holmes, being duly sworn, deposes and says:
I am 76 years of age. I reside in Stoughton, Massachusetts. I first
met Mrs. Mary Patterson, now known as Mary Baker G. Eddy, of Concord,
New Hampshire, in the year 1867. She was then living at the home of Mr.
and Mrs. Hiram S. Crafts in East Stoughton, which is now called Avon.
Mrs. Hiram S. Crafts is my sister, and Hiram S. Crafts is a brother of
my wife, Mrs. Ira Holmes. The two families were, therefore, intimately
connected, and I was acquainted with what occurred in the Crafts home.
Hiram Crafts and his wife, Mary Crafts, told me that they first met
Mary Patterson in a boarding house in Lynn, Mass., where Hiram and
Mary Crafts lived temporarily while Hiram Crafts was working in a Lynn
shoe manufactory. Mr. and Mrs. Crafts were Spiritualists, and they have
told me that Mrs. Patterson represented to them that she had learned a
" science " that was a step in advance of Spiritualism. She wished to teach
this science to Hiram Crafts, and after Mr. and Mrs. Crafts had returned
from Lynn to their home in East Stoughton, Massachusetts, Mrs. Patterson
came to their home for the purpose of teaching this new science to Hiram
Crafts. I have heard her say many times, while she was living at Crafts'
that she learned this science from Doctor Quimby. I have heard her say
these words: "I learned this science from Dr. Quimby, and I can impart
it to but one person." She always said this in a slow, impressive manner,
pronouncing the word " person " as if it were spelled " pairson."
From my sister, Mary Crafts, and her husband, Hiram S. Crafts, I
learned that Hiram Crafts had entered into an agreement with Mrs.
Patterson to pay her a certain sum of money for instructing him in
Quimby's science.
After Hiram Crafts had learned it, he took some patients for treatment,
in East Stoughton, but in a short time he, with Mrs. Crafts and Mrs.
Patterson, moved to Taunton, Mass., for the purpose of practising the
healing system which Mrs. Patterson had taught him. I never knew
of Mrs. Patterson treating, or attempting to treat, any sick person. I
understood, from her and from Mr. and Mrs. Crafts, that she could
not practise this science, but could teach it, and could teach it to only
one person.
While Mrs. Patterson lived in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Crafts, she
caused trouble in the household, and urged Mr. Crafts to get a bill of
divorce from his wife, Mary Crafts. The reason Mrs. Patterson gave for
1 Hiram Crafts died last year. His widow is now living with a brother in
Brockton, Mass.
114 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
urging Mr. Crafts to divorce his wife was, that Mrs. Crafts stood in the
way of the success of Mr. Crafts and Mrs. Patterson in the healing
business. Mrs. Crafts, my sister, was gentle, kind, and patient, and in
no way merited Mrs. Patterson's dislike of her. Mrs. Crafts waited upon
Mrs. Patterson, did the housework and marketing, and in every way
sought to advance the interests of her husband, Hiram S. Crafts. When
Mrs. Crafts discovered that Mrs. Patterson was attempting to influence
Mr. Crafts to apply for a divorce, she, my sister, Mary Crafts, prepared
to pack up her possessions and to leave her husband's house. The result
of this was that Mr. Crafts would not consent to lose his wife, and as
Mrs. Crafts would not remain unless Mrs. Patterson went away, Mrs.
Patterson was obliged to leave the home of Mr. and 'Mrs. Crafts. This
was while they were residing in Taunton, Mass. After Mrs. Patterson's
departure, Mr. and Mrs. Crafts returned to East Stoughton to live, and
Hiram S. Crafts no longer practised the healing system taught by Mrs.
Patterson.
I make this statement of my own free will, solely in the interest of
justice.
IEA HOLMES.
COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS
NORFOLK, SS:
STOUGHTON, February 7, 1907.
Then personally appeared the above named Ira Holmes and acknowledged
the foregoing instrument by him subscribed, to be his free act and deed,
before iiic
GEO. O. WENTWORTH, Notary Public.
Many years afterward, when the Crafts were living in Hebron,
N. H., and Mrs. Eddy had retired to Concord, N. H., she sent
for Mr. Crafts and paid his expenses to Pleasant View to
deliver into her hands his copy of the manuscript which she
had used in teaching him, probably a copy of the Quimby
manuscript, which he did.
After leaving the Crafts, Mrs. Patterson seems to have
gone to Amesbury to the home of Captain and Mrs. Nathaniel
Webster. Concerning Mrs. Webster and Mrs. Patterson's stay
at her house, Mrs. Mary Ellis Bartlett, a granddaughter of
Mrs. Webster, makes the following affidavit:
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 115
Mary Ellis Bartlett, being duly sworn, deposes and says:
I am 55 years of age, and I am a citizen of Boston, Massachusetts.
I am the daughter of William R. Ellis and Mary Jane Ellis, and the
granddaughter of Captain Nathaniel Webster and Mary Webster, who
for many years resided in Amesbury, Massachusetts. In the years between
1865 and 1870 my grandparents, Captain and Mrs. Webster, were living
in Amesbury, Mass., at what is now No. 5 Merrimac Street. Captain
Webster was a retired sea captain, and at that time was superintendent of
cotton mills in Manchester, New Hampshire, of which E. A. Straw, his
son-in-law, who was later Governor of New Hampshire, was agent for
many years. My Grandmother Webster was a well-known Spiritualist.
Grandfather Webster was away from home, attending to his business in
Manchester, much of the time, returning home to Amesbury about once
in two weeks, to remain over Sunday. My grandmother was, therefore,
much alone, and because of this, and for the further reason that she was
deeply interested in Spiritualism in all its forms, she had at her house
constant visitors and charity patients who were Spiritualists. Invalids,
cripples, and other unfortunate persons were made welcome, and my
grandmother took care of them when they were ill and lodged and
boarded them free of charge. She had, or believed she had, spiritual
communications in regard to their various ailments, which she followed
in prescribing for them and in her treatment of them. My grandmother
was what was called a " drawing medium " and a " healing medium." She
drew strange pictures under the influence of the spirits. Many of these
pictures are now in existence, and some of them are in my possession,
having been given to me by my grandmother.
Grandmother Webster had a room in her house which was used for spirit
ual seances, and for all grandmother's spiritistic work. This room was on
the ground floor, situated in the rear of the front parlour. It was decorated
in blue, according to the direction of grandmother's spirit control, blue
being a colour favoured by the spirits. The room was furnished with the
usual chairs, tables, couch, etc., but this furniture was called by my
grandmother and her Spiritualist friends, " spiritual furniture," because
it was used only for spiritual purposes. There was a couch which grand
mother called her " spiritual couch." She thought she could sleep upon
it when she could not sleep elsewhere. Upon it she took her daytime
naps, and sometimes during a restless night she was able to sleep if she
lay upon this couch. There was a table in the room which was used for
the laying on of hands by the Spiritualists at the seances held in the
room, and there was an old chair which had belonged to Captain Webster's
mother, in which grandmother always sat for her spirit communications.
Above this room, which was known as the " spiritual room," was a bedroom.
One night in the autumn of 1867, as nearly as I can fix the date, a
116 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
woman, a stranger, came to my grandmother's door, and told her that
she had been led by the spirits to come to her house, for the reason
that it was " a nice, harmonious home." My grandmother, who was sympa
thetic and hospitable, and, above all, a devoted Spiritualist, who would
never turn another Spiritualist away, upon hearing this, exclaimed, " Glory
to God ! Come right in ! " The woman thus admitted told my grandmother
that she was Mrs. Mary Glover, a Spiritualist, and that she had been
drawn as above described to my grandmother's house. Mrs. Glover did
not explain further why she came and did not say from what place she
had come. My grandmother gave her the use of the bedroom over the
spiritual room, and also the use of the spiritual room. Here grandmother
and Mrs. Glover continued to hold spiritualistic stances, in which Mrs.
Glover took an active part, passing into the trance state and giving what
grandmother believed to be communications from the spirits.
Mrs. Glover became permanently settled at Grandmother Webster's
house. She was treated as a guest, was waited upon, and was cared for
in every respect. My Grandfather Webster, coming home and finding
Mrs. Glover established in the house, was displeased because she was
there. He told my grandmother that he did not want Mrs. Glover to
remain. . . . But Mrs. Glover continued to live in the house, and
after a few months, during which my grandmother's admiration for Mrs.
Glover had begun to grow less, Mrs. Glover informed my grandmother
that she had learned a new science which she thought was something
beyond Spiritualism. She said she had learned it from Dr. Quimby of
Portland, Maine, and that she had brought copies of some of his manu
scripts with her. She talked about it and read the manuscripts to my
grandmother, who did not, however, believe that the " science " was an
improvement or a step beyond Spiritualism. From that time forward
Mrs. Glover talked of Quimby's science. She was writing what she told
grandmother was a revision of the Bible. She always sat in the spiritual
chair at the spiritual table in grandmother's spiritual room to do her
writing, and sometimes after she had written for hours, she would gather
up all the pages she had filled with writing and tear them up, because
she could not make them read as she wished.
My father, William R. Ellis, was in 1867 living in New York, with
his three children myself, my sister, and my brother. My mother had
died three or four years before. Our family had always spent the summer
school vacation at my grandparents' home in Amesbury, Mass., and when
it was time for us to leave New York, my father always went to Amesbury
in advance of the rest of us, in order to clear my grandmother's house
of broken-down Spiritualists and sick persons, so that we might have
enough room in the house and because he thought the atmosphere of so
much sickness and Spiritualism was unwholesome for young children.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 117
My father, upon first seeing Mrs. Glover in the house, had told my
grandmother that she, Mrs. Glover, should not be permitted to remain.
My grandmother, upon being urged by my father
and grandfather to dismiss Mrs. Glover, at last told her that she was no
longer welcome and asked her to go away. Mrs. Glover ignored my grand
mother's request and continued to live in the house
Failing to succeed in getting Mrs. Glover to leave the house, my grand
mother sent for my father. He arrived in the early evening of the follow
ing Saturday. When grandmother had told him of the trouble and how
Mrs. Glover refused to go away, she asked my father to see if he could
not make Mrs. Glover leave the house. My father commanded Mrs. Glover
to leave, and when she steadfastly refused to go, he had her trunk
dragged from her room and set it outside the door, insisted upon her
also going out the door, and when she was outside he closed the door
and locked it. I have frequently heard my father describe this event
in detail, and I have heard him say that he had never expected, in
his whole life, to be obliged to put a woman into the street. It
was dark at the time, and a heavy rain was falling. My grandparents
and my father considered it absolutely necessary to take this step, harsh
and disagreeable as it seemed to them.
The above statement is made partly from my own personal knowledge,
and partly from hearing it many, many times from my father, my grand
mother, and my Grandfather Webster, who have related it to me and
others of the family until it has come to be a well-known part of our
family history. I make this statement of my own free will, solely in
the interests of justice.
MABY ELLIS BAETLETT
STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS,
SUFFOLK, SS:
Personally appeared the above named Mary Ellis Bartlett, and made
oath that the foregoing statements covering eleven sheets, each of which
is subscribed by her, are true to the best of her knowledge and belief,
this sixth day of February, 1907.
HERBERT P. SHELDOH, Notary Public.
When Mrs. Glover was thus left without a lodging-place
for the night, Mrs. Richardson, another of Mrs. Webster's
Spiritualist guests, who was in the house at the time, was
118 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
moved to compassion and took Mrs. Glover down the street
to the house of Miss Sarah Bagley, a dressmaker, who was a
fellow Spiritualist.
DR. ROUNDY AND WIFE,
/CLAIRVOYANT, Magnetic and Electric Physi-
v cians, have recently furnished a house on
Quincy avenue, in QUINCY, MASS., where they are
still Healing the Sick with good success. Board
and treatment reasonable. Address, QUI.XCY,
MASS. 6w* June 6.
ANY PERSON desiring to learn how to heal the
sick can receiTe of the undersigned instructi6n
that will enable them to commence healing on a
principle of science with a success far beyond
any of the present modes. No medicine, elec
tricity, physiology or hygiene required for un
paralleled success in the most difficult cases. No
pay is required unless this skill is obtained. Ad
dress, MRS. MARY B. GLOVER, Amesbury, Mass.,
Box 61. tff June 20.
TV/TRS. MARY LEWIS, by sending their autograph,
"-I- or lock of hair, will give psychometrical de
lineations of character, answer questions, &c.
Terms $1.00 and red stamp. Address, MARY
LEWIS, Morrison, Whiteside Co., 111.
June 20. 20w*.
The above advertisement, in which Mrs. Eddy offers to teach a new
kind of healing based on a " principle of science," appeared July 4, 1868,
in the Banner of Light, the official organ of New England Spiritualists.
Mrs. Eddy was then living at the home of the Websters in Amesbury,
and the number of Captain Webster's post-office box was 61.
Miss Bagley took the friendless woman into her home, and
here, in addition to the small sum which she paid for her
board, Mrs. Glover taught Miss Bagley the Quimby method
of treating disease. Miss Bagley developed such powers as a
healer that she soon abandoned her needle and began to practise
" professionally." Mrs. Glover was generally known in Ames-
bury as a pupil of Dr. Quimby, and it was rumoured in the
village that before Mrs. Glover was through with her " science "
she was going to walk on the waters of the Merrimac. Two
Amesbury girls were so interested in this report that, one
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 119
afternoon when Mrs. Glover attended some merrymaking on the
river bank, they went down and lingered on the bridge, hoping
that she might be tempted to try her powers on that festal
occasion.
To-day the Christian Scientists of Lynn draw a pathetic
picture of the persecuted woman, driven from door to door,
carrying her great truth in her bosom, and finding no man
ready to receive it. And it is not to be wondered at that
those who regard Mrs. Eddy as the recipient of God's most
complete revelation, find here material for legend, and liken
her wanderings to those of the persecuted apostles.
There is no indication that these harsh experiences ever,
in the least, subdued Mrs. Glover's proud spirit. Wherever
she went, she took her place as the guest of honour, and she
consistently assumed that she conferred favour by accepting
hospitality. She did not hesitate to chide and reprimand mem
bers of the families she visited, to criticise and interfere with
the administration of household affairs. She seems never to
have known discouragement or to have felt apprehension for the
future, but was content with dominating the house in which
she happened to be and with striving to win a following among
the friends of the family. While she certainly cherished a
vague, half-formulated plan to go out into the world some day
and teach the Quimby doctrine, her imperative need was to con
trol the immediate situation; to be the commanding figure
in the lodge, the sewing-circle, the family gathering. The one
thing she could not endure was to be thought like other people.
She must be something besides plain Mrs. Glover, invalid,
poetess, healer, propagandist, guest; she must be exceptional
120 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY,
at any cost. Even while she was dependent upon precarious
hospitality, Mrs. Glover managed to invest her person and her
doings with a certain form and ceremony which was not without
its effect. She spent much time in her room; was not always
accessible; had her meals prepared at special hours; made
calls and received visitors with a certain stress of graciousness
and condescension. She had the faculty of giving her every
action and word the tone of importance. She was now a woman
of forty-seven ; her wardrobe was shabby and scant ; she still
rouged her cheeks ; the brown hue of her hair was crudely
artificial; her watch and chain and several gold trinkets were,
with the Quimby manuscripts, her only treasures. Certainly,
neither village gossips nor rustic humourists had spared her.
But the stage did not exist that was so mean and poor, nor the
audience so brutal and unsympathetic, that Mrs. Glover could
not, unabashed, play out her part.
CHAPTER VIII
TWO YEARS WITH THE WENTWORTHS IN STOUGHTON MRS.
PATTERSON INSTRUCTS MRS. WENTWORTH FROM THE QUIMBY
MANUSCRIPTS AND PREPARES HER FIRST BOOK FOR THE PRESS
WHEN Mrs. Glover left Amesbury, she went to Stoughton,
to the home of Mrs. Sally Wentworth, whom she had met when
she was with Hiram Crafts. Mrs. Wentworth had a consump
tive daughter whom she took to Hiram Crafts for treatment,
and in his house she met Mrs. Glover and became much interested
in her system of healing. Her curiosity about the Quimby mind
cure was not surprising, as she was a practical nurse and had
much to do with illness. She was frequently called upon to
care for the sick in the neighbourhood, and was locally famous
for the comfort she could give them by rubbing their limbs and
bodies. She was a Spiritualist and believed in the healing
power of Spiritualism. " Old Ase Holbrook," a Spiritualist
and clairvoyant " doctor," often asked Mrs. Wentworth to
assist him in the care of his patients. In Mrs. Glover's system
of healing she hoped to find something which she could put
into beneficial practice in her work. Mrs. Glover went into Mrs.
Wentworth's house to teach her the Quimby system for a con
sideration of three hundred dollars, which sum was to cover
her board and lodging for a considerable period of time.
The Wentworth household then consisted of the parents and
121
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
two children, Charles and Lucy, the daughter being about
fourteen years of age. The married son, Horace T. Went-
worth, often dropped in to see his mother, and Mrs. Went-
worth's niece a spirited girl, now Mrs. Catherine Isabel Clapp,
was in and out of the house continually. Mrs. Glover lived
with the Wentworths for about two years, leaving them only
to make occasional visits in the neighbourhood or at Amesbury.
At first all the family took great pleasure in, her visit. Al
though Mrs. Glover seldom held her friends long, and although
her friendships often terminated violently, when she exerted
herself to charm, she seldom failed. Mrs. Wentworth used re
proachfully to declare to her less impressionable niece, " If
ever there was a saint upon this earth, it is that woman." Both
the children were fond of Mrs. Glover, but Lucy abandoned her
self to adoration. The child followed her about, waited upon
her, and was eager to anticipate her every wish, even at the
cost of displeasing her parents. She resented the slightest
criticism of their guest, and was deeply hurt by the jests which
were passed in the village at Mrs. Glover's expense.
Mrs. Glover's highly coloured speech, her odd clothes, and
grand ways, her interest in strange and mysterious subjects, her
high mission to spread the truths of her dead master, made
her an interesting figure in a humdrum New England village,
and her very eccentricities and affectations varied the monotony
of a quiet household. Her being " different " did, after all,
result in material benefits to Mrs. Glover. All these people
with whom she once stayed, love to talk of her, and most of
them are glad to have known her, even those who now say
that the experience was a costly one. She was like a patch
of colour in those gray communities. She was never dull, her
old hosts say, and never commonplace. She never laid aside
her regal air; never entered a room or left it like other people.
There was something about her that continually excited and
stimulated, and she gave people the feeling that a great deal
was happening.
Except for occasional angry outbursts, it was this engaging
aspect of Mrs. Glover that, for many months, the Wentworths
saw. She was tiresome only when she talked of Dr. Quimby,
and then only because she discoursed upon him and his philos
ophy so often. Mrs. Clapp describes how, after long disserta
tions on mind and matter, Mrs. Glover would fold her hands
in her lap, tilt her head on one side, and gently nodding, would,
in mincing tones, enunciate this sentence:
" I learned this from Dr. Quimby, and he made me promise
to teach it to at least two persons before I die."
She confided this fact to every one, always in the same phrase,
with the same emphasis, and with the same sweetness, until it
became a fashion for the village girls to mimic her.
The estrangement which resulted in Mrs. Glover's leaving the
house began in a difficulty between her and Mr. Wentworth.
Mr. Wentworth was indignant because Mrs. Glover had at
tempted to persuade his wife to leave him and to go away
with her and practise the Quimby treatment. After this, Mrs.
Glover's former kindly feeling toward the family seemed to
disappear altogether. Mrs. Clapp remembers going to the
house one day and being disturbed by the sound of violent
pounding on the floor upstairs. Her aunt, with some em
barrassment, explained that Mr. Wentworth was sick in bed,
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
and that Mrs. Glover had shut herself in her room and was de
liberately pounding on the floor above his head to annoy him.
Other things of a similar nature occurred, and Mrs. Wentworth
was finally compelled to ask Mrs. Glover to leave the house as
soon as she could find another place to stay. Horace T. Went
worth, in his affidavit, says:
" Mrs. Wentworth consulted a member of the family as to the
best way to bring about Mrs. Glover's departure. By this
time my mother was almost in a state of terror regarding
Mrs. Glover. She was so afraid of her that she hardly dared
to go to sleep at night. She had a lock put on the door of
her room so that Mrs. Glover could not get access to her, and
ordered her to leave the house."
Mrs. Glover chose for her departure a day when all the
members of the Wentworth family were away from home.
She took the train for Amesbury, without a word of good-bye
to any one. When the Wentworths returned that night, they
went to Mrs. Glover's room and knocked, but could get no
reply. Horace, the son, suggested forcing the lock, but his
mother would not permit it, saying that such a liberty might
offend Mrs. Glover, who had probably gone to spend the night
with one of the neighbours. The next day they inquired among
their friends, but could get no news of their missing guest.
Several days went by, and Mrs. Wentworth, becoming alarmed
lest some mischance might have befallen Mrs. Glover, told her
son to force the door and see if any clue to her whereabouts
could be found in her room.
Horace T. Wentworth, in his affidavit, thus describes his
entering the room:
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 125
A few days after Mrs. Glover left, I and my mother went into the
room which she had occupied. We were the first persons to enter the
room after Mrs. Glover's departure. We found every breadth of matting
slashed up through the middle, apparently with some sharp instrument.
We also found the feather-bed all cut to pieces. We opened the door
of a closet. On the floor was a pile of newspapers almost entirely con
sumed. On top of these papers was a shovelful of dead coals. These
had evidently been left upon the paper by the last occupant. The only
reasons that they had not set the house on fire evidently were because the
closet door had been shut, and the air of the closet so dead, and because
the newspapers were piled flat and did not readily ignite were folded
so tight, in other words, that they would not blaze.
Mrs. Clapp, in her affidavit, substantiates this statement.
The Wentworths never saw or directly heard from Mrs.
Glover again.
While Mrs. Glover was in Stoughton, she apparently had
no ambition beyond expounding Quimby's philosophy and de
claring herself his disciple. She made no claim to having origi
nated anything she taught.
Although Mrs. Eddy now believes that she discovered the
secret of health through divine revelation in 1866, she was
often ill while in the Wentworth house, 1868-1870, and on
several occasions was confined to her bed for considerable
periods of time. During her illnesses Mrs. Wentworth nursed
and cared for her, rubbing her and treating her after the
Quimby method.
During her stay in Stoughton she made no claim to having
received a divine revelation, or to having discovered any
system of her own. She seldom associated her teachings
with religion as such, and preached Quimbyism merely
as an advanced system of treating disease. In instructing
Mrs. Wentworth she used a manuscript, which, she always
126 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
said, had been written by " Dr. Quimby of Portland, Me." She
held this document as her most precious possession. "One day
when I was at the Wentworths'," recently said Mrs. Clapp,
" Mrs. Wentworth was busy copying this manuscript. I went
to the buttery to get what I wanted, but couldn't find it, and
called Mrs. Wentworth. She got up to get it for me, but
before doing so, she put the manuscript in the desk and locked
it. I expressed surprise that she should take such pains when
she was only stepping across the room for a moment, and she
said : ' Mrs. Glover made me promise never to leave this manu
script, even for a moment, without locking the desk.' '
Mr. Horace T. Wentworth of Stoughton now has his mother's
manuscript. He has made affidavit 1 that this is the document
1 COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS.,
COUNTY OF NORFOLK, SS.
Horace T. Wentworth, being duly sworn, deposes and says :
I am sixty-four years of age, and reside in the Town of Stoughton, in the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and have resided there for upwards of
sixty-two years past. I am the son of Alanson C. and Sally Wentworth, and
my mother resided in said town of Stoughton from her birth to the time of
her death, in 1883.
I became acquainted with Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy, now of Concord, N. H.,
and known as the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, in the year
1868, when she was the wife of one Daniel Patterson, with whom she was
not living, and was known by the name of a former husband, one George W.
Glover, and called herself Mrs. Mary M. Glover.
In 1867, Mrs. Glover came to Stoughton, and took up her residence at the
house of one Hiram Crafts in said Town of Stoughton, and in 1868, after
leaving said Crafts, she went upon the invitation of my mother, to the resi
dence of said Mrs. Sally Wentworth, of said Stoughton, and there continuously
resided until the spring of the year 1870. Very often during the years 1868,
1869, and 1870, I saw and talked with said Mrs. Glover at my mother's said
residence. Mrs. Wentworth invited said Mrs. Glover to visit her for the
express purpose of being taught, by said Mrs. Glover, a system of mental
healing, which said Mrs. Glover said she had been taught by one Dr. Phineas
P. Quimby, of Portland, Me. Said Mrs. Glover often spoke to me of said
system of mental healing and always ascribed its origin and discovery to said
Quimby. Said Mrs. Glover was outspoken in her acknowledgment that she learned
her mental healing system from said Quimby, and never, to my knowledge,
while at my mother's house, made the slightest claim or pretensions to having
discovered or originated it herself.
Said Mrs. Glover, upon coming to my mother's house, lent my mother her
manuscript copy of what she, Mrs. Glover, said were writings of said Quimby,
and permitted my mother to make a full manuscript copy thereof, and said
manuscript copy of the writings of said Quimby, in my mother's handwriting,
and with corrections and interlineations in the handwriting of Mrs. Glover, is
now, and has been since my mother's death, in my possession.
On the outside, said copy is entitled " Extracts from Do_ctor P. P. Quimby's
Writings," and at the head of the first page, on the inside, said copy is
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 127
copied by his mother from Mrs. Glover's, and that he has him
self heard Mrs. Glover attribute the original to Dr. Quimbj.
His brother, Charles O. Wentworth ; his sister, Mrs. Arthur L.
Holmes (then Miss Lucy Wentworth), and his cousin, Mrs.
Catherine Isabel Clapp, have made affidavits to the same effect.
This includes all members of the Wentworth household now
living.
The Wentworth manuscript itself powerfully supports these
affidavits. Of chief interest are the title-page and the first
further entitled " The Science of Man, or the Principle which Controls all
Phenomena." There is a preface of two pages with Mrs. Mary M. Glover's
name signed at the end. The extracts are in the form of fifteen questions
and answers and are labelled, " Questions by patients, Answers by Dr. Quimby."
Annexed hereto, marked " Exhibit A," is a full and complete copy of my
mother's said copy of Mrs. Glover's said copy of Dr. Quimby's writings. . . .
Annexed hereto and marked " Exhibit B " is a photograph of the first page
of Mrs. Wentworth's manuscript plainly showing the additions made in a
handwriting not my mother's. All of the said first page shown in Exhibit B
Is my mother's handwriting except the words " Wisdom Love & " added to the
beginning of the fifteenth line, the word " of " and the symbol " & " added to
the sixteenth line and the words " is in it " added to the seventeenth line,
none of which additions is in my mother's handwriting.
Annexed hereto and marked " Exhibit C " is a photograph of the second page
of said manuscript plainly showing further additions in a handwriting not
my mother's. All of the said second page shown in Exhibit C is in my
mother's handwriting except the words " wisdom love & " added to the second
line, the word " believe " added to the eleventh line, none of which additions
is in my mother's handwriting.
I am perfectly familiar with my mother's handwriting ; but am not familiar
enough with said Mrs. Glover's handwriting to state positively from my ac
quaintance with it, that the said added words are written by her. This manu
script, however, came directly into my hands from my mother's desk at the
time of her death ; the added words are not in the handwriting of any member
of my family ; they are, as will be seen, in the nature of corrections to my
mother's writing of said Mrs. Glover's signed preface to Dr. Quimby's teach
ings, and, having compared them with unquestionable writing of said Mrs.
Glover's, found with my mother's papers, and seen them to be strikingly
similar, I am confidently of the opinion that they are the writing of the only
person interested in the correction of said Mrs. Glover's preface to said Dr.
Quimby's writings, to wit, said Mrs. Mary M. Glover Mrs. Mary Baker G.
Eddy herself.
I have been often urged to make these facts known in the public interest,
and have for years felt it my duty to tell the truth and the whole truth. . . .
HORACE T. WEXTWORTH.
On this 9th day of February, 1907, at the Town of Stoughton, in the Com
monwealth of Massachusetts, personally appeared before me, Horace T. Went
worth, to me personally known, and made oath before me that he had read
over the foregoing statement and knows the contents thereof, and that the
same are true ; and he, thereupon, in my presence, did sign his name at the
end of said statement, and at the foot of the cover.
EDGAR F. LEONARD, Justice of the Peace.
And before me a Notary Public appeared Horace T. Wentworth and made
oath to above statement. ' HENEY W. BRITTON, Notary Public.
Stought'iii, Muss.
Feb. Qth, 1007.
128 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
two pages, which are here reproduced in facsimile. The title-
page reads, " Extracts from Doctor P. P. Quimby's Writings."
On the first page of the manuscript appears the title, *' The
Science of Man or the principle which controls all phenomena."
Then follows a preface, signed " Mary M. Glover." Following
this is a marginal note, " P. P. Q.'s Mss.," and at this point
begins the Quimby paper. Others who have copies of this
same document declare that Mrs. Glover taught from them
and sold them as copies of Quimby's manuscript.
By examining the pages reproduced in facsimile, the reader
will observe that some one has edited them, that certain words
are written in, not in the handwriting of Mrs. Wentworth.
Beginning the fourth paragraph of the first page, are the
words, " Wisdom Love & " ; two lines below this, are the words,
" is in it " ; on the second page, second line, again, " wisdom
love & " ; and on the eleventh line of the same page, " believe."
Mrs. Clapp, who was familiar with Mrs. Glover's handwriting
at the time, having copied many pages of her manuscript, takes
oath that she believes these interlineations to be Mrs. Glover's.
Mr. William G. Nixon of Boston, who, as the publisher for
several years of Mrs. Eddy's books, handled thousands of pages
of her manuscript, also takes oath that in his opinion these
words are in her handwriting. George A. Quimby of Belfast,
Me., has lent to the writer one of his father's manuscripts,
entitled, " Questions and Answers." This is in the handwriting
of Mr. Quimby's mother, the wife of Phineas P. Quimby, and
is dated, in Mrs. Quimby's handwriting, February, 1862, nine
months before Mrs. Eddy's first visit to Portland. For twenty
closely written pages, Quimby's manuscript, " Questions and
/*i.
/r
M.-1ne./*~ <
..
/ O-/VJ
fit iAJJ-tX- , 111(
, (
.
iei~f**..i <*.
Title page and part of the first page of the manuscript from which Mrs.
Glover taught Mrs. Wentworth the system of mental healing
which she ascribed to P. P. Quimby
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 129
Answers," is word for word the same as Mrs. Glover's manu
script, " The Science of Man." 2
The relation of Quimby's " Questions and Answers " to the
Christian Science doctrine will be discussed in a later chapter.
The following quotations, taken at random, illustrate the fact
that the Quimby manuscript abounds in ideas and phrases
familiar to every Christian Scientist.
If I understand how disease originates in the mind and fully believe
it, why cannot I cure myself?
Disease being made by our beliefs or by our parents' beliefs or by
public opinion, there is no one formula of argument to be adopted, but
every one must be hit in their particular case. Therefore it requires great
shrewdness or wisdom to get the better of the error.
I know of no better counsel than Jesus gave to His Disciples when
He sent them forth to cast out devils, and heal the sick, and thus in
practice to preach the Truth " Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as
doves." Never get into a passion, but in patience possess ye your soul, and
at length you weary out the discord and produce harmony by your Truth
destroying error. Then it is you get the case. Now, if you are not afraid
to face the error and argue it down, then you can heal the sick.
The patient's disease is in his belief.
Error is sickness. Truth is health.
In this science the names are given thus: God is Wisdom. This Wisdom
is not an individuality but a principle, embraces every idea form, of
which the idea, man, is the highest hence the image of God, or the
Principle.
Understanding is God.
All sciences are part of God.
Truth is God.
There is no other Truth but God.
God is Wisdom. God is Principle.
Wisdom, Love, and Truth are the Principle.
Error is matter.
Matter has no intelligence.
To give intelligence to matter is an error which is sickness.
Matter has no intelligence of its own, and to believe intelligence is in
matter is the error which produces pain and inharmony of all sorts; to
2 The manuscript Science of Man, from which Mrs. Glover taught, is not the
same work as her printed pamphlet of that title.
130 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
hold ourselves we are a principle outside of matter, we would not be
influenced by the opinions of man, but held to the workings only of a
principle, Truth, in which there are no inharmonies of sickness, pain or sin.
For matter is an error, there being no substance, which is Truth, in a
thing which changes and is only that which belief makes it.
Christ was the Wisdom that knew Truth dwelt not in opinion, and
that matter was but opinion that could be formed into any shape which
the belief gave to it, and that the life which moved it came not from it,
but was outside of it.
In teaching Mrs. Wentworth, Mrs. Glover supplemented the
Quimby manuscripts with oral instruction. She taught Mrs.
Wentworth to rub her patient's head, precisely as did Quimby,
and to say, as she did so : " It is not necessary for me to rub
your head, but I do it to concentrate my thoughts." In addi
tion she taught Mrs. Wentworth to lay her hands over the
patient's stomach.
Mrs. Eddy left a few scraps of writing at the Wentworths',
all connected with her teachings. Of especial interest are the
instructions which she wrote out to direct Mrs. Wentworth
in treating the sick. These Mr. Horace T. Wentworth has in
her own handwriting. The first two pages of this manuscript
read as follows: (The spelling, punctuation, etc., follow the
original MS.)
An argument for the sick having what is termed fever chills and heat
with sleepless nights, and called spinal inflammation.
The patient has been doctoring the sick one patient is an opium eater,
with catarrh, great fear of the air, etc. Another had inflammation of
the joints or rheumatism, and liver complaint another scrofula and rheuma
tism, and another dyspepsia, all of them having the most intense fear.
First the fever is to be argued down. What is heat and chills we
answer nothing but an effect produced upon the body by images of
disease before the spiritual senses wherefore you must say of heat and
chill you are not hot you are not cold you are only the effect of fright
there is no such thing as heat and cold if there were you would not
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 131
grow hot when angry or abashed or frightened and the temperature
around not changed in the least.
Inflammation is not inflammation or redness and soreness of any part
this is your belief only and this belief is the red dragon the King of
beasts which means this belief of inflammation is the leading lie out of
which you get your fright that causes chills and heat. Now look it down
cause your patient to look at this truth with you call upon their spiritual
senses to look with your view which sees no such image and thus waken
them out of their dream that is causing them so much suffering, etc.
In her autobiographical sketches, Mrs. Eddy does not men
tion the years she spent in Stoughton, Taunton, and Ames-
bury. In Restrospection and Introspection, page 39, she says,
after recounting the manner of her miraculous recovery and
revelation in 1866:
I then withdrew from society about three years, to ponder my mission,
to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind, that should take
the things of God and show them to the creature, and reveal the great
curative Principle, Deity.
The record of these wandering, vagarious years from 1864
to 1870 is far from being satisfactory biography; the number
of houses in which she lived, her quarrels and eccentricities,
by no means tell us the one thing which is of real importance:
what, all this time, was going on in Mrs. Glover's own conscious
ness. Wherever she went, she taught, now a shoemaker, now
a dressmaker, now a boy in the box factory ; and wherever she
went, she wrote. Her first book was not published until 1875,
but for eight years before she was always writing; working
upon articles and treatises which were eventually incorporated
in this first edition of Science and Health. As early as 1866,
when she was in Lynn, she said that she was writing a Bible,
and was almost through Genesis. Several years later, at the
Wentworths', she pointed affectionately to a pile of note-paper
132 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
tied up with a string, which lay on her desk, and told Mrs.
Clapp that it was her Bible, and that she had completed the
Book of Genesis. Mrs. Clapp at that time copied for Mrs.
Glover a bulky manuscript, which she believes was one of the
early drafts of Science and Health. She recalls many passages,
and remembers her amusement in copying the following passage,
which now occurs on page 413 of Science and Health:
The daily ablutions of an infant are no more natural or necessary than
would be the process of taking a fish out of water every day and covering it
with dirt in order to make it thrive more vigorously thereafter in its native
element.
After Mrs. Clapp had finished copying the manuscript, Mrs.
Glover took it to Boston to find a publisher. Six hundred
dollars, cash, in advance, was the only condition on which a
publisher would undertake to get out the book, and Mrs. Glover
returned to Stoughton and vainly besought Mrs. Wentworth
to mortgage the farm to raise money.
Mrs. Glover's persistence was all the more remarkable in
that the trade of authorship presented peculiar difficulties for
her. Although from her youth she had never lost an oppor
tunity to write for the local papers, and although when she
first went to Dr. Quimby she introduced herself to him as an
" authoress," her contributions in the old files of the Lynn papers
show that she had had no training in the elementary essentials
of composition. The quoted extracts from her written in
structions to Mrs. Wentworth are indicative of her difficulties
with punctuation, which was always a laborious second thought
with her. From her letters and early manuscripts it is evident
that lucid, clean-cut expression was almost impossible to Mrs.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 133
Glover. Some of her first dissertations upon Quimbyism were
so confused as to be almost unintelligible. She had, indeed, to
fashion her own tools in those years when she was carpentering
away at her manuscript and struggling to get her mass of notes
into some coherent form. Her mind was as untrained as her
pen. Logical thought was not within her compass, and even
her sporadic ideas were vague and befogged. Yet, strangely
enough, her task was to present an abstract theory, and to
present it largely in writing.
Everything depended upon her getting a hearing. In the
first place, her doctrine was her only congenial means of making
a living. In the second, it was the one thing about which she
knew more than the people around her, and ft gave her that
distinction which was necessary to her. Above all, she had a
natural aptitude for the subject and absorbed it until it literally
became a part of her. Mercenary motives were always strong
with Mrs. Glover, but no mercenary motive seems adequately
to explain her devotion to this idea. After Quimby's death in
'66, his other pupils were silent; but Mrs. Glover, wandering
about with no capital but her enthusiasm, was preaching still.
Her fellow-students in Portland were people of wider experi
ence than she, and had more than one interest; but only one
idea had ever come very close to Mrs. Glover, and neither
things present nor things to come could separate her from it.
But Mrs. Glover had not the temperament of the dreamer and
devotee. There was one thing in her stronger even than her
monomania, and that was her masterfulness. Others of his
pupils lost themselves in Quimby's philosophy, but Mrs. Glover
lost Quimby in herself.
CHAPTER IX
MRS. GLOVER GOES INTO PARTNERSHIP WITH RICHARD KENNEDY
THEIR ESTABLISHMENT IN LYNN MRS. GLOVER's FIRST
DISCIPLES DISAGREEMENTS AND LAWSUITS
WHEN Mrs. Glover left Stoughton early in the year 1870,
she went directly to the home of her friend, Miss Sarah Bagley,
in Amesbury, Mass.
During her former stay in Amesbury, more than two years
before, she had undertaken the instruction of a boy in whom
she saw exceptional possibilities. When she first met Richard
Kennedy, he was a boy of eighteen, ruddy, sandy-haired, with
an unfailing flow of good spirits and a lively wit which did
not belie his Irish ancestry. From his childhood he had made
his own way, and he was then living at Captain Webster's
and working in a box factory. Mrs. Glover recognised in him,
as she did in every one she met, excellent capital for a future
practitioner. He studied zealously with her while she remained
at the Websters', and when she was compelled to leave the
house, Kennedy, with Quixotic loyalty becoming his years, left
with her. After she went to Stoughton, Mrs. Glover wrote to
him often, and whenever he could spare the time, he went over
from Amesbury to take a lesson. After her break with the
Wentworths, Mrs. Glover at once sought him out. He was
then her most promising pupil, and her only hope of getting
134
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 135
the Quimby science upon any practical basis. Her experiment
with Hiram Crafts had failed and she had not succeeded in
her efforts to induce Mrs. Crosby in Albion, or Mrs. Wentworth
in Stoughton, to give up their homes and go into the business
of teaching and practising the Quimby system with her. What
Mrs. Glover most wanted was a partner, and she now saw one
in Richard Kennedy. He was nearly twenty-one and suffi
ciently well-grounded in the principles of mind-cure to begin
practising. Mrs. Glover had not, up to this time, achieved
any success as a healer herself, and she had come to see that
her power lay almost exclusively in teaching the theory. With
out a practical demonstration of its benefits, however, the
theory of her Science excited little interest, and it was in con
junction with a practising student that she could teach most
effectively. She entered into an agreement with young Kennedy
to the effect that they were to open an office in Lynn, Mass.,
and were to remain together three years.
In June, 1870, Mrs. Glover and Richard Kennedy went to
Lynn. They stayed temporarily at the home of Mrs. Clarkson
Oliver, whom Kennedy had known in Amesbury, while he looked
about for suitable offices. He heard that Miss Susie Magoun,
who conducted a private school for young children, had just
leased a building on the corner of Shepard and South Common
Streets and was desirous of subletting the second floor. Miss
Magoun, now Mrs. John M. Dame of Lynn, remembers how
one June evening, when she was looking over the building to
decide upon the arrangement of her schoolrooms, a very boyish-
looking young man appeared and nervously asked whether she
intended to let a part of the house. He said he was looking
136 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
for offices for a physician. Miss Magoun, misled by his youth
ful appearance, at once supposed that he wanted the rooms
for his father, which caused the boy some embarrassment. He
told her that the five rooms upstairs would not be too many
for him, as he should bring with him " an elderly woman who
was writing a book," and they would each need offices and
sleeping-rooms. Miss Magoun liked the boy's candour and told
him he might move in. He drew a sigh of relief, telling her
that so many people had refused him that he had almost lost
heart. Even when Miss Magoun's friends prophesied that she
would lose her rent, she did not repent of her bargain ; and
she never afterward had occasion to do so. Miss Magoun's
first meeting with Mrs. Glover occurred some days later, when
her new tenants came to take possession of their rooms. As
she was hurrying through the hall to her classroom, young
Kennedy stopped her and introduced his partner. Mrs. Glover
bowed and at once began to explain to her astonished landlady
the Quimby theory of the universe and the non-existence of
matter.
Kennedy's sign, which was put on a tree in the yard, read
simply : " Dr. Kennedy." The rooms upstairs were very plainly
furnished, for Mrs. Glover had no money and her student very
little. They bought only such articles of furniture as were
absolutely necessary, covered the floor with paper oil-cloth, and
put up cheap shades at the windows. Much to Miss Magoun's
surprise, patients began to come in before the first week was
over, and at the end of the month Kennedy was able to pay
his rent promptly. By the first of September the young man's
practice was flourishing. Miss Magoun's school was in excel-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 137
lent standing, and the fact that his office was in the same build
ing recommended the young practitioner, while she herself was
glad to say a good word for him whenever she could. It
became a common thing for the friends of discouraged invalids
to say : " Go to Dr. Kennedy. He can't hurt you, even if he
doesn't help you." His offices were sometimes so crowded that
he would have to ask his patients to await their turn below
in Miss Magoun's parlour. The children in the school were fond
of him, and he often found time to run downstairs about dis
missal hour and help Miss Magoun and her assistant get the
younger pupils into their wraps and overshoes. He knew them
all by name, and sometimes joined in their games.
Mrs. Glover herself, during these first months, remained much
in the background, a solitary and somewhat sombre figure, ap
plying herself to her work with ever-increasing seriousness.
For the first time she was free from pecuniary embarrassments,
and she concentrated her energies upon her teaching, and
writing with a determination which she had never before shown.
She seldom went out of the house, was usually silent at Miss
Magoun's dinner-table, and the school children, when they met
her in the hall, hurried curiously past the grave, abstracted
woman, who never spoke to them or noticed them. Far from
relaxing in an atmosphere of comparative prosperity, she was
impatient of the easy-going friendliness of the people about her.
She was contemptuous of the active part which Kennedy took
in the social life around him, and resented his having much to
do with Miss Magoun's young friends. She continually urged
him to put aside every other interest and concentrate himself
wholly upon Science. She was annoyed at the women patients
138 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
who came often for treatment, and when she saw them sitting
in the front office awaiting their turn, she sometimes referred
to them as " the stool-pigeons." She began in these days to
sense the possibilities of the principle she taught, and to see
further than a step ahead. She often told Kennedy that she
would one day establish a great religion which would reverence
her as its founder and source. " Richard," she would declare,
looking at him intently, " you will live to hear the church-bells
ring out my birthday." And on July 16, 1904, they did
her own bells, in her own church at Concord.
The feeling of at last having her foot in the stirrup seemed
to crystallise and direct Mrs. Glover's ambition as adversity
had never done. She had something the world had waited for,
she told Kennedy, and she meant to make the world pay for it.
She often declared that she had been born an unwelcome child,
and that from the first every man's hand had been against her.
Although she was in her fiftieth year, Mrs. Glover had not
reached the maturity of her powers. During these early years
in Lynn she becomes in every way a more commanding and
formidable person. Since she no longer had to live by her
wits, certain affectations and ingratiating mannerisms became
less pronounced. The little distinction for which she had
fought so tenaciously, and which she had been put at such
shifts to maintain, was now respectfully admitted by all her
students and by some even reverently. She began to dress
better. Her thin face filled out, her figure lost its gauntness
and took on an added dignity. People who were afraid of her
complained that her " hawk-eye " looked clear through them,
and persons who admired her compared her eye to an eagle's.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 139
Once relieved of the necessity of compelling attention from
hither and yon, she conserved her powers and exerted herself
only when she could hope for a commensurate result. In follow
ing her through the six years prior to 1870, one is struck with
her seeming helplessness against herself and against circum
stances, and with the preponderant element of blind chance in
her life. Before she had been in Lynn a year, she had come
to work with some sort of plan, and her life was more orderly
and effective than it had ever been before. Her power was
one of personality, and people were her material; her church,
which so persistently denies personality, is built upon it. Her
abilities were administrative rather than executive, and without
a cabinet she exemplified the old fable of the impotence of
the head without the body.
Mrs. Glover at first called the thing she taught merely
" science," but when she had her professional cards printed they
read:
MRS. MARY M. GLOVER,
TEACHER OF
MORAL SCIENCE.
Her first students in Lynn were persons whom Richard Ken
nedy had cured or friends of his patients. The case of two
young men in her first class will serve to illustrate. Mrs.
Charles S. Stanley, who was suffering from tuberculosis in an
advanced stage, was greatly benefited by Kennedy. She en
treated her husband and her half-brother to take instruction
under Mrs. Glover, and they did so. Her husband at first felt
that he had an aptitude for the subject and eventually became
140 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
a practising student. As to the half-brother, George Tuttle,
Mrs. Glover felt that there she had cast her seed upon stony
ground ; and certainly he must have been an incongruous figure
in the little circle which met in her rooms to " unlearn matter."
A stalwart, strapping lad, he had just returned from a cruise
to Calcutta on the sailing vessel John Clark, which carried
ice from Boston Harbour to the Indies. The young seaman,
when asked what he thought he would get out of Mrs. Glover's
class, replied that he didn't think about it at all, he joined
because his sister asked him to. He even tried, in a bashful way,
to practise a little, but he says that when he actually cured
a girl of dropsy, he was so surprised and frightened that he
washed his hands of Moral Science.
Mrs. Glover's course consisted of twelve lectures and extended
over a period of three weeks. Her students were required to
make a copy of the Quimby manuscript which Mrs. Glover called
" The Science of Man," and although each was allowed to
keep his copy, he was usually put under a formal three-thousand-
dollar bond not to show it. As soon as the student had taken
the final lesson, Mrs. Glover addressed him or her as " Doctor,"
and considered that a degree had been conferred. Often she
wrote her students a congratulatory letter upon their gradua
tion, addressing them by their newly acquired titles.
The members of her first class in Lynn each paid one hundred
dollars for the lessons. Each also agreed to give Mrs. Glover a
percentage on the income from his practice. Tuttle and Stan
ley executed an agreement with her which was substantially in
the following words :
" Lynn, Aug. 15, 1870. We, the undersigned, do hereby
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 141
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 re
ceive from practising or teaching the science. We also agree
to pay her one thousand dollars in case we do not practise
or teach the above-mentioned science that she has taught us.
(Signed) G. H. Tuttle, Charles S. Stanley."
Trouble arose between George Tuttle and Charles Stanley
and their teacher, and Mrs. Glover dismissed Stanley from
the class. Although he afterward practised mental healing
with some success, it was not with Mrs. Glover's sanction, and
he finally became a homreopathic physician. In 1879 Mrs.
Glover brought a suit in equity in the Essex County Court
against Tuttle and Stanley for unpaid tuition. Judge George
F. Choate, 1 the referee in the case, at his death left among
his papers his book of minutes on this case of " Mary B. Eddy
vs. G. H. Tuttle et al." written out in long hand, which throws
light on Mrs. Glover's methods of teaching and on her relation
to her pupils. Judge Choate's notes on Stanley's testimony
are in part as follows :
I went to Mrs. Eddy for the purpose of taking lessons She pretended
to teach me She never taught me anything I never told anybody I prac
tised her method.
I was acquainted with Dr. Kennedy in Lynn. He practised physical
manipulation. He first led me to commence practice, etc. My wife was
doctored by Dr. Kennedy My wife told me Mrs. Eddy wanted to see me.
I went, and Mrs. Eddy said she was about starting a class for others
like me She said she had manuscripts, not books, etc. She said she
taught setting bones and obstetrics she said she could teach me in six
weeks to be as good a physician as any in the city. She wanted $100.
I said I was too poor and could not pay I left. My wife and I went
1 George F. Choate of Salem was for many years probate judge in Essex
County, Mass.
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
again in the evening, and she urged me finally I paid her $25 advance.
Then I saw Tuttle with a manuscript. He said to get one to copy. I
got paper. I asked her to postpone my lessons till, etc. She said you
don't require to eat in order to live. I said yes. She said she had
got so far that she could live without eating. She called me and Tuttle
to a room, showed me a paper. When she asked us to sign, I objected
She said when we had learned this and the other one (manuscript) which
she would have for us, she would go with us and find a place, etc., and
on these conditions, i. e., that she would teach us obstetrics, setting
bones, and would go with us and find place, etc., I signed the agreement. 2
She said she always went with students to see them well located, that
she required this agreement that she furnished other manuscripts, that this
one was only a commencement.
She turned me out of the class at the end of three weeks. She told
me I couldn't practise her method anyway because I was a Baptist We
were to have a six weeks' course, and it was at end of two weeks she
told me to leave.
Finding that I could have a good effect upon my wife when she was
sick and would have severe coughing spells, I thought likely I could have
a good effect upon others. I saw what was in those manuscripts and
asked her when the others she spoke of were coming. I asked her what
to do if called to a person with a broken limb She said if so, tell them
there isn't any broken limb, that it is all belief, etc.
The testimony of George H. Tuttle, in the same suit, is
recorded in Judge Choate's minutes as follows:
In 1870 I knew Mrs. Eddy was a student of hers. My sister was
being attended by Dr. Kennedy, and through my sister I was induced
to go up to Mrs. Eddy's with Dr. Stanley and my sister. We signed
an agreement This is the agreement She showed us how all diseases
could be cured and that there was no sort of disease that she could not
cure Said that she would make us more successful than any physician.
The instructions were simply that we were to understand the teachings
of the manuscript and that fully understanding it we should be able
to heal all disease We took lessons for a week and a half to two weeks,
in the evenings only, but every day, I think There used to be an abundance
of talk between her and Stanley Considerable misunderstanding about
payments and about his religion. She said that he couldn't be a success
in this line so long as he adhered to the Baptist faith.
a The text of this agreement is given above.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 143
She said she could walk on the water Could live without eating He
disputed with her Offered to stand it without eating as long as she, and
she backed down She was to enable us to heal all diseases bone-setting
obstetrics and to treat everything successfully, and she was to go with
us and see that we had success.
She used to hold up consumption and tell us that there was no such
thing as lungs no liver and they were all imagination She became
dissatisfied sometimes with him (Stanley) and sometimes with me Finally
she recalled the manuscripts, claiming that she wanted to make some
alterations. I haven't got mine back, but she gave me another one finally.
This is the one. Our instructions ceased She had taken our manuscripts,
and we were literally turned out I learned from Stanley that he had
been dismissed.
We went to see her and demanded our manuscripts Did not get them
She complained of him, said she was dissatisfied that he had fallen from
grace and was going back on it was attracted to the Baptist belief,
etc., and he could not go on Dr. Stanley and I went up together for
the manuscripts. I don't remember the talk, but there were faultfindings.
She was dissatisfied with him because he didn't pay and with his
dulness and inability to comprehend it (her Science) In the first place
she had held out to us that the knowledge of her principle and the
possession of this power would surely attract patients to us, so that we
couldn't fail to get patients She said she had seen the dead raised I
didn't know if dead could be raised I in part believed that those appar
ently dead had been raised.
I got treatment by Dr. Kennedy In as much as she sent us out to
Dr. Kennedy for a (practical) example, I suppose, She taught rubbing,
putting hand in water and upon the stomach, etc.
She claimed that Stanley must surrender everything, surrender the
Baptist as every other creed At the time we went for our manuscripts
we were both turned out Stanley gave her a piece of his mind told her
she was a fraud, etc.
I never regularly practised, because I never understood it.
Stanley said to her she was a fraud in getting the manuscripts back
and generally He was very mistrustful throughout. I don't think he had
studied even the three weeks out.
She said she would give us other manuscripts in reference to bone
setting I don't remember what she said about obstetrics; she said generally
that he would have only to walk into the room and be filled with the
understanding, and all pain would disappear I don't know but that some
thing further was to be done in cases of bone setting.
When Mrs. Eddy took the stand, she said :
144 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
I told the defendant it was a very good method and better than I had
found before of healing sick. I taught him the method. I told him it
was through the action of mind upon the body Don't recollect that I said
it would cure all diseases. I didn't limit or unlimit it. I don't know
that I meant for him to understand that it will heal everything I presume
I intended him to understand that it was a better method than any other.
I don't think I ever told any student that it would heal every disease.
I cannot give you an explanation you have not studied it. The principle
is mind operating on the body.
The mind is cause of disease Through mind scarlet fever and diph
theria are cured I have found that through the action of mind I could
cure, as I have done, apoplexy, paralysis, etc., Heart disease, enlargement
of heart, consumption are cured by mind I have cured cases of con
sumption found hopeless by action of mind, blindness, deafness, etc.
The Prisoner of Chillon found that gray hairs are produced through
the mind I haven't tried my system on old age yet.
I didn't promise to teach him bone setting or obstetrics. Nor that I
would furnish other manuscripts, nor that I would go with him to find
his place, etc. Might have said I would make him a good physician
I taught him the application of hands and water He told me he hadn't
the means to pay me and that if I would take him by installments, he
would study I didn't dismiss him, but he said " I understand enough
now to do more than any of your students," that he knew enough now
to go right into practice.
I never taught mesmerism. I did teach the laying on of hands not
with power I did teach manipulation in 'sixty-seven, 'sixty-eight and
'sixty-nine and in 'seventy I ceased I can't tell the date Can't tell if
'seventy, 'seventy-one.
I did teach Mr. Stanley manipulation that was not my principle, it
was my method My method was metaphysical I taught it I don't know
for what it was because I saw a hand helped me I thought it was a
good method I can't say whether it is a science, I can't say whether
a part or the whole of it is a science if it is practised right it is a
science that part which is effective and heals the sick is a science I
don't know as I can explain it. I do not claim it as a discovery (manipula
tion), I had known of it always. Can't tell if I knew of this will power
before I knew Dr. Quimby It is not always necessary to know what is
the belief.
I should generally require them (my students) to keep the ten com
mandments Should require them to be moral.
I can argue to myself that striking my hand upon the table will not pro
duce 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
145
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 / have seen the dead in
understanding raised 3 The infant is the son of the parent and the
parents' mind governs its mind Through the parents' mind I cure the
infant.
Before 1872 I taught manipulation and the use of water.
That was not all I taught I never said that was the science, but I
said it was a method, and until I saw a student doing great evil, etc.*
Richard Kennedy in his testimony said:
I went to Lynn to practise with Mrs. Eddy. Our partnership was only
in the practice, not in her teaching.
I practised healing the sick by physical manipulation The mode was
operating upon the head giving vigorous rubbing This was a part of her
system that I had learned The special thing she was to teach me was
the science of healing by soul power I have never been able to come
to knowledge of that principle She gave me a great deal of instruction
of the so-called principle, but I have not been able to understand it She
claimed that it would cure advanced stages of consumption and the worse
cases of violent disease, that these were but trifles under her Science.
I was there at the time Stanley was there I made the greatest effort
to practise upon her principle, and I have never had any proof that I
had attained to it or had any success from it.
I had nothing to do with the instructions She told me that she had
expelled Mr. Stanley from the class of his incompetency to understand
her science that it was impossible to convince him of the folly of his
times that his faith in a personal God and prayer was such that she
could not overcome it She used the word Baptist in connection with him
because he was a Baptist but it was the same with all other creeds.
So long as they believed in a personal God and the response to prayer,
they could not progress in the scientific religion I performed the manipu
lation of Mr. Stanley as follows:
Mrs. Eddy requested me to rub Mr. Stanley's head and to lay special
stress upon the idea that there was no personal God, while I was rubbing
him.
I never entirely gave up my belief in a personal God, though my belief
was pretty well shaken up.
3 See letter to W. W. Wright on page 149.
4 Reference to Richard Kennedy.
146 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
In rendering a decision in favour of Tuttle and Stanley,
Judge Choate said:
Upon a careful examination I do not find any instructions given by
her nor any explanations of her " science " or " method of healing " which
appear intelligible to ordinary comprehension, or which could in any way
be of value in fitting the Defendant as a competent and successful prac
titioner of any intelligible art or method of healing the sick, and I am
of opinion that the consideration for the agreement has wholly failed,, and
I so find.
Within a few weeks after her first class was organised, Mrs.
Glover raised her tuition fee to three hundred dollars, which
price was never afterward changed. Concerning her reasons
for fixing upon this sum, Mrs. Eddy says :
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.
God has since shown me, in multitudinous ways, the wisdom of this
decision; and I beg disinterested people to ask my loyal students if they
consider three hundred dollars any real equivalent for my instruction
during twelve half-days, or even in half as many lessons. 5
In 1888 Mrs. Eddy reduced the course of twelve lessons to
seven, but the tuition fee still remained three hundred dollars.
In the Christian Science Journal for December, 1888, she pub
lished the following notice:
Having reached a place in teaching where my students in Christian
Science are taught more during seven lessons in the primary class than they
were formerly in twelve, and taught all that is profitable at one time,
hereafter the primary class will include seven lessons only. As this number
of lessons is of more value than twice this number in times past, no change
is made in the price of tuition, three hundred dollars. Mary Baker G.
Eddy.
6 Retrospection and Introspection, p. 71.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 147
Most of Mrs. Glover's early students were artisans; many
of them shoe-workers. Lynn was then a city of about thirty
thousand inhabitants, and shoemaking was, as it now is, the
large and characteristic industry. Many of the farmers about
the country had little shoeshops in their backyards, and during
the winter season took out piecework from the factories. The
majority of the village and country boys had had something to
do with shoemaking before they went into business or chose a pro
fession, and when Whittier went from the farm to attend the
academy at Haverhill, he was able to pay his way by making
slippers. Among Mrs. Glover's first students were S. P. Ban
croft, a shoe-worker; George W. Barry, foreman in a shoeshop;
Dorcas Rawson, a shoe-worker, and her sister Mrs. Miranda R.
Rice ; Charles S. Stanley, a shoe-worker ; Miss Frances Spinney,
who had a shop in which she employed a score of girls to sew
on women's shoes ; Mrs. Otis Vickary ; George H. Allen, who
was employed in his father's box factory, and Wallace W.
Wright, then accountant in a bank.
Liberal religious ideas flourished in New England thirty-five
years ago, and although one woman left the class because
" Mrs. Glover was taking Christ away from her," most of the
students were ready to accept the idea of an impersonal God
and to deny the existence of matter. Even Dorcas Rawson,
who was an ardent Methodist and had " professed holiness,"
unhesitatingly accepted the statement that God was Principle.
From the very beginning of her teaching Mrs. Glover had
with her students those differences which later made her career
so stormy. After the defection of Stanley and Tuttle, Mrs.
Vickary, dissatisfied with her instruction, sued for and recov-
148 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
ered the one hundred and fifty dollars which she had paid
in advance for tuition. 6 Wallace Wright, one of the most
intelligent of her early students, publicly attacked in the Lynn
press the " Moral Science," as it was then called, which he had
studied under Mrs. Glover.
Wallace W. Wright was the son of a Universalist clergyman
of Lynn, and a brother of Carroll D. Wright, who afterward
became United States Commissioner of Labour. He was re
garded as one of the most promising young business men in
Lynn, when he was drowned in the wreck of the City of Colum
bus, off Gayhead Light, January 18, 1884. When he first
studied under Mrs. Glover, he was very enthusiastic over her
Science and, much to his own surprise, made several successful
demonstrations.
Before he entered her class, he had made careful inquiries
about the nature of what she taught. Both he and his father
were interested in her claims and wished to pin Mrs. Glover down
to exact statements concerning her Science. He wrote her a
letter, asking her nine questions, and requesting an answer to
each in writing.
(Here follow the most significant of Mr. Wright's questions,
together with Mrs. Glover's answers') : 7
QUESTION 1 Upon what principle is your science founded?
ANSWER 1 On God, the principle of man.
The suit, Mrs. Otis Vickary versus Mary M. B. Patterson, was entered In
the Lynn Police Court on August 3, 1872. (Mrs. Clover had not yet obtained
legal right to use her former name.) The Lynn Five Cent Savings-Bank was
summoned as Trustee. Both the Savings-Rank and the Defendant were de
faulted, apparently for failure to appear and answer, and judgment was ren
dered for the Plaintiff, and execution issued for the amount of $150 and $5.73
for costs, on August 9th.
7 Mr. Wright's sixth question and Mrs. Glover's answer, in which she ad
mits that Dr. Quimby practised her Science and had made it a subject of re
search for twenty-five years, was quoted on page 101.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 149
QUESTION 2 Is a knowledge of anatomy necessary to the success of
the student or practitioner?
ANSWER 2 It is a hindrance instead of help, anatomy belongs to
knowledge, the Science I teach, to God, one is the tree whereof wisdom
forbade man to partake, the other is the " tree of life."
QUESTION 3 Will it meet the demands of extreme, acute cases?
ANSWER 3 Yes, beyond all other known methods of healing; it is
in acute and extreme cases that this science is seen most clearly in its
demonstrations over matter.
QUESTION 4 Is a knowledge of disease necessary to effect cures?
ANSWER 4 This " knowledge " is what science comes to destroy.
QUESTION 7 Does it admit of universal application?
ANSWER 7 Yes, even to raising or restoring those called dead. I have
witnessed this myself, therefore I testify of what I have seen. 8
In June, 1871, Mr. Wright went to Knoxville, Tenn., and
there entered into practice. Of this experience he afterward
wrote :
The 9th of last June found me in Knoxville, Tennessee, as assistant
to a former student. We met with good success in a majority of our
cases, but some of them utterly refused to yield to the treatment. Soon
after settling in Knoxville I began to question the propriety of calling
this treatment " Moral Science " instead of mesmerism. Away from the
influence of argument which the teacher of this so-called science knows
how to bring to bear upon students with such force as to outweigh any
attempts they may make at the time to oppose it, I commenced to think
more independently, and to argue with myself as to the truth of the
positions we were called upon to take. The result of this course was to
convince me that I had studied the science of mesmerism.'
Wright accordingly wrote to Mrs. Glover from Knoxville,
asking her to refund the three hundred dollars which he had paid
for his tuition and also to compensate him for the two hundred
dollars which his venture had cost him. On his return to Lynn
8 In Mrs. Eddy's testimony in her suit against Stanley and Tuttle, printed in
this article, she states that she has seen the dead in understanding awaken
through her Science. See page 145.
9 Lynn Transcript, January 13, 1872.
150 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
he called upon Mrs. Glover and repeated this request. On
January 13, 1872, Mr. Wright published a signed letter in
the Lynn Transcript, stating that he believed Moral Science
and Mesmerism to be one and the same thing, and warning
other students against being misled. Mrs. Glover replied to
this letter in the same paper, January 20th, stating that Mr.
Wright had made an unreasonable demand to which she had
refused to accede, and that he was now attacking her Science
from motives of revenge:
"Tis but a few weeks since he called on me and threatened that if I
did not refund his tuition fee and pay him $200 extra he would prevent
my ever having another class in this city. Said he, " my simple purpose
now is revenge, and I will have it " and this, too, immediately after
saying to individuals in this city that the last lesson the class received
of which he was a member, was alone worth all he had paid for tuition.
. . . Very soon after this, however, I received a letter from him
requesting me to pay him over and above all I had received from him, or
in case I should not, he would ruin the Science. I smiled at the threat
and told a lady at my side, "If you see him, tell him first to take a
bucket and dip the Atlantic dry, and then try his powers on this next
scheme." . . .
My few remaining years will be devoted to the cause I have espoused,
viz: to teach and to demonstrate the Moral and Physical Science that
can heal the sick. Well knowing as I do that God hath bidden me, I
shall steadfastly adhere to my purpose to benefit my suffering fellow-
beings, even though it be amid the most malignant misrepresentation and
persecution.
MARY M. B. GLOVEB
This controversy continued several weeks, occupying columns
of the Transcript, and on February 10th, Mr. Wright issued
the following challenge:
And now in conclusion I publicly challenge Mrs. Mary Baker Glover
to demonstrate her science by any of the following methods, promising,
if she is successful, to retract all I have said, and humble myself by
asking forgiveness publicly for the course I have taken. Her refusal to do
this, by silence or otherwise, shall be considered a failure of her cause:
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 151
1st: To restore the dead to life again as she claims she can.
2nd: To walk upon the water without the aid of artificial means as
she claims she can.
3rd: To live 24 hours without air, or 24 days without nourishment of
any kind without its having any eifect upon her.
4th: To restore sight when the optic nerve has been destroyed.
5th: To set and heal a broken bone without the aid of artificial means.
I am, respectfully,
W. W. WRIGHT
At this point Mrs. Glover retired from the controversy,
but five of her students, George W. Barry, Amos Ingalls, George
H. Allen, Dorcas Rawson, and Miranda Rice wrote a protest
to the Lynn Transcript, February 17th, ignoring Mr. Wright's
challenge, but defending their teacher and her Science, and
declaring that his charges against both were untrue. Mr.
Wright had the last word and ended the controversy, February
24th, by exultantly declaring that Mrs. Glover and her Science
were practically dead and buried ; which certainly suggests that
the gift of prophecy was denied him.
Mrs. Glover's pen at this period was not employed exclusively
in controversy. In the Lynn Transcript, November 4, 1871,
appear the following verses :
LINES ON RECEIVING SOME GRAPES
BY MARY BAKER GLOVER
Beautiful grapes would I were thee,
Clustering round a parent stem,
The blessing of my God to be,
In woodland, bower or glen;
Where friend or foe had never sought
The angels " born of apes,"
And breathed the disappointed thought,
Behold! They're sour grapes.
152 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
And such, methinks, e'en Nature shows
The fate of Beauty's power
Admired in parlour, grotto, groves,
But faded, O how sour!
Worth, unlike beauty fadeless, pure,
A blessing and most blest,
Beyond the shadows will endure,
And give the lone heart rest.
For the Transcript.
Though Mrs. Glover's classes grew larger, and Richard Ken
nedy's practice steadily increased, frequent disagreements oc
curred between him and his teacher. He found that the Quimby
method was, like every other method of treating disease, limited
in its scope, and urged Mrs. Glover to modify her sweeping
statements concerning its possibilities which greatly angered
her. His common-sense rebelled when Mrs. Glover told her
students that she could hold her finger in the flame of a candle
without feeling pain, and her grim ambition rather repelled
him. Although he was almost filial in his dutifulness, her
tyranny in trivial matters tried even his genial temper. About
a year after they opened their office, Miss Magoun married
John M. Dame of Lynn, and gave up her school, leaving the
Moral Scientists to sublet from another tenant.
On Thanksgiving night of that year (1871) Mrs. Glover
and Kennedy went to Mrs. Dame's new home to play cards.
At the card-table Kennedy and Mrs. Glover played against
each other, Kennedy and his partner playing, apparently,
the better game. Mrs. Glover, who could not endure to be
beaten in anything, lost her temper and declared that Richard
had cheated. The young man was chagrined at being thus
RICHARD KENNEDY
From a photograph taken in Lynn, Mass., in 1871
Photograph by Bowers
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 153
taken to task before his friends. The frequent scenes caused
by Mrs. Glover's jealous and exacting disposition had worn
out his patience. When he and Mrs. Glover reached home that
night, he tore his contract with her in two and threw it into
the fire, telling her that he would no longer consider himself
bound by it. Mrs. Glover threatened and entreated, but to no
purpose, and even when she fell to the floor in a swoon Kennedy
was not to be moved.
From that night Kennedy prepared to leave Mrs. Glover.
Their separation took place in the spring of 1872. When they
settled their accounts, Mrs. Glover was left with about six
thousand dollars in money. While they remained together,
Kennedy had paid their living expenses and had given Mrs.
Glover half of whatever money was left from his practice, while
Mrs. Glover's income from teaching was entirely her own.
After this separation Kennedy took another office in Lynn,
and Mrs. Glover remained for some months in their old rooms.
She afterward boarded with the Chadwells on Shepard Street,
later stayed at the home of Dorcas Rawson, and still later lived
for some time in a boarding-house at Number 9 Broad Street,
opposite the house which she eventually purchased.
The Essex County registry of deeds shows that on March 31,
1875, Francis E. Besse, in consideration of $5,650, deeded to
" Mary M. B. Glover, a widow woman of Lynn," the property
at Number 8 Broad Street, which became the first official head
quarters of Christian Science. 10 This house, a small two-and-a-
half story building, is still standing. When Mrs. Glover moved
in, shortly after her purchase, she occupied only the second
10 When Mrs. Glover bought this property, she assumed the mortgage on it
of 2,800.
154 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
floor, renting the first floor of the house to a succession of
tenants. She used as her study a little low-ceiled room on the
third floor, lighted by one window and a skylight. Here she
completed the manuscript of Science and Health^ read the
proofs of the first edition, and prepared the second and third
editions. The Christian Science reading-room of Lynn is now
in this building. At the time of the June communions lx at
the Mother Church in Boston, thousands of people go out to
visit the little skylight room which they regard as the cradle
of their faith. The room has, of course, been changed since
Mrs. Eddy worked there. The woodwork has been painted
white, and the walls and ceiling are now pale blue and cream
colour, dotted with gold stars. None of the original furniture
remains ; but the chair and table are said to be very like those
which Mrs. Eddy used, and on the shelf is a clock like that
which used to count the hours while Mrs. Eddy measured time
out of existence. On the low wall there hangs not without a
stirring effect of contrast a very light and airy water-colour
of the gray tower of the original Mother Church in Boston.
Over the door is frescoed the First Commandment:
" Thou shalt have no other Gods before me."
11 These yearly communions at the Mother Church in Boston have this year
(1908) been discontinued by order of Mrs. Eddy.
CHAPTER X
MRS. GLOVER'S INFLUENCE OVER HER STUDENTS QUIMBY DIS
CREDITED DANIEL HARRISON SPOFFORD MRS. GLOVER's
MARRIAGE TO ASA GILBERT EDDY
WHATEVER disagreement Mrs. Glover had with individual
students, their number constantly increased, and for every de
serter there were several new adherents. Her following grew
not only in numbers but in zeal; her influence over her students
and their veneration of her were subjects of comment and aston
ishment in Lynn. Of some of them it could be truly said that
they lived only for and through Mrs. Glover. They -continued
to attend in some manner to their old occupations, but they
became like strangers to their own families, and their personali
ties seemed to have undergone an eclipse. Like their teacher,
they could talk of only one thing and had but one vital interest.
One disciple let two of his three children die under metaphysical
treatment without a murmur. Another married the woman
whom Mrs. Glover designated. Two students furnished the
money to bring out her first book, though Mrs. Glover at that
time owned the house in which she lived, and her classes were
fairly remunerative.
The closer students, who constituted Mrs. Glover's cabinet
and bodyguard, executed her commissions, transacted her busi
ness, and were always at her call. To-day some of these who
155
156 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
have long been accounted as enemies by Mrs. Eddy, and whom
she has anathematised in print and discredited on the witness-
stand, still declare that what they got from her was beyond
equivalent in gold or silver. They speak of a certain spiritual
or emotional exaltation which she was able to impart in her
classroom ; a feeling so strong that it was like the birth of a
new understanding and seemed to open to them a new heaven
and a new earth. Some of Mrs. Glover's students experienced
this in a very slight degree, and some not at all, but such as
were imaginative and emotional, and especially those who had
something of the mystic in their natures, came out of her class
room to find that for them the world had changed. They lived
by a new set of values ; the colour seemed to fade out of the
physical world about them; men and women became shadow-
like, and their own humanity grew pale. The reality of pain
and pleasure, sin and grief, love and death, once denied, the
only positive thing in their lives was their belief and that was
almost wholly negation. One of the students who was closest
to Mrs. Glover at that time says that to him the world outside
her little circle seemed like a madhouse, where each inmate was
given over to his delusion of love or gain or ambition, and the
problem which confronted him was how to awaken them from
the absurdity of their pursuits. It is but fair to say that
occasionally a student was more of a royalist than the king,
and that Mrs. Glover herself had a very sound sense of material
values and often reminded an extravagant follower to render
unto Cassar what was his due.
Among the enthusiasts of Mrs. Glover's following was Daniel
Harrison Spofford, who became a very successful practitioner
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 157
of mental healing, and at one time had offices in Boston, Haver-
hill, and Newburyport, dividing his time among the three
places. Spofford was one of the most interesting of Mrs.
Glover's students and an important factor in the early de
velopment of Christian Science. 1 He was born at Temple,
N. H., and when he was a boy of ten came to eastern Massa
chusetts with his brother and widowed mother. He was put
out to work for farmers about the country, and, although he
was a frail boy, he did a man's work. He was working as a
watchmaker's apprentice when, in his twentieth year, he entered
the army. He enlisted in '61 and served in the Army of the
Potomac, in Hooker's brigade, until he was mustered out in
'64, taking part in some twenty engagements, among them
Gettysburg and the second battle of Bull Run. On his return
from the army he went to work in a shoe factory in Lynn.
He first met Mrs. Glover in 1871, when she was with Richard
Kennedy, and he had access, through another student, to the
manuscripts from which she taught. During the next three
years, which he spent in the South and West, he carried these
manuscripts with him and studied them. He was thoughtful
and reflective by nature, and even when he was a chore boy
on the farm he read the Bible diligently and went about his
work in the barn and in the field, pondering deeply upon the
paradoxes of the old theology. He had worked out a kind
of transcendentalism of his own, and he found something in
the Quimby manuscripts which satisfied a need of his nature.
When he came back to Lynn, in the spring of 1875, he began
to experiment among his friends in the healing power of this
1 Mr. Spofford now lives opposite the old Whittier homestead, on the road be
tween Haverhill and Amesbury.
158 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
system, and made several cures which were much talked about.
Mrs. Glover soon heard of this and sent Spofford a letter, in
which she said: " Mr. Spofford I tender you a cordial invitation
to join my next class and receive my instruction in healing the
sick without medicine, without money and without price."
Spofford, who was then about thirty-three years of age,
accordingly entered Mrs. Glover's class in April, 1875, and
in a few weeks her teaching had become to him the most im
portant thing in the world. Mr. Spofford still says that no
price could be put upon what Mrs. Glover gave her students,
and that the mere manuscripts which he had formerly studied
were, compared to her expounding of them, as the printed
page of a musical score compared to its interpretation by a
master. His teacher recognised in him a mind singularly
adapted to her subject, and a nature sincere and free from
self-seeking. She turned many of her students over to him for
instruction in Scriptural interpretation, addressed him as
" Harry," and showed her appreciation of his loyalty by pre
senting to him, in a silver case, the gold pen with which Science
and Health was written.
In May, a month after he entered her class, Mr. Spofford
opened an office in Lynn and put out his sign, " Dr. Spofford,
Scientific Physician." His success was as rapid as Richard
Kennedy's had been, although it would be difficult to find two men
more unlike than these, who were perhaps the most intelligent
and able of all Mrs. Glover's practising students. Kennedy
was cheerful, impulsive, practical, and blessed with a warm
enjoyment of the world as it is. He made a host of friends,
whom he managed to see very often, and always found a thou-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 159
sand agreeable duties which he discharged punctiliously. Spof-
ford was an idealist, somewhat tinged with the gentle melan
choly of the dreamer a type with which the literature of New
England has made us all familiar. His frame was delicate, his
hands and features finely cut, and his eyes were intense and
very blue in colour. His voice was low, and his manner gentle
and somewhat aloof.
Foremost in loyalty among Mrs. Glover's women students
was Mrs. Miranda Rice, who remained in constant attendance
upon her, acting as mediator between her and recalcitrant
students, and attending her in those violent seizures of hysteria
which continued to torture her. Mrs. Rice says that during
these attacks the poor woman would often lie unconscious for
hours together; at other times she would seem almost insane,
would denounce all her friends, declare that they were all perse
cuting and wronging her, and that she would run away, never
to come back.
In spite of the hardships of her service, Mrs. Rice remained
Mrs. Glover's friend for about twelve years Mrs. Glover rarely
kept her friends so long. Mrs. Rice always felt under obliga
tion to her teacher, for she had paid no tuition when she
entered her class, and one of Mrs. Glover's most noted demon
strations for years recounted in succeeding editions of Science
and Health occurred when she attended Mrs. Rice in childbed.
Mrs. Rice still affirms that the birth was absolutely painless.
George W. Barry, a student who avowed that Mrs. Glover
had cured him of consumption, was long active in her service
and he always addressed her as " Mother." Once when Bronson
Alcott, that undiscouraged patron of metaphysical cults, went
160 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
to Lynn upon an invitation from Mrs. Glover and addressed
her class, he turned to Barry and, struck by his youthful
appearance, asked, " How old are you, young man ? " Barry
replied, " I am five years old, sir," explaining that it was five
years ago that he first began to study under Mrs. Glover. Two
years after he had thus defined existence, Barry sued Mrs.
Glover, then Mrs. Eddy, for money due him for services to her
extending over a period of five years; some of the instances
set forth in his bill of particulars give an interesting glimpse
of life at Number 8 Broad Street. Among the services ren
dered, as stated in this bill, was : " Copying the manuscript of
the book entitled Science and Health, and aiding in arrange
ment of capital letters and some of the grammatical construc
tions." (The Referee in the case found that Barry had copied
out in long hand twenty-five hundred pages, and allowed him
more than the usual copyist rate, " on account of the difficulty
which a portion of the pages presented to the copyist by reason
of erasures and interlineations.") Other services mentioned in
Barry's bill were : " Copying manuscript for classes and help
ing to arrange the construction of some of the sentences " ;
" copying Mrs. Glover's replies to W. W. Wright's newspaper
articles " ; " searching for a publisher " ; " moving her goods
from the tenement on South Common Street, Lynn, i.e., dispos
ing of some at the auction room, storing others in my uncle's
barn, and storing trunks and goods at my father's house,
clearing up rooms, paying rent for the same " ; " attending
to her financial business, i.e., withdrawing monies from Boston
savings banks, going to Boston to get United States coupon
bonds, taking in my care two mortgages," etc.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 161
Further services mentioned in Barry's bill were : " Aiding in
buying and caring for the place at Number 8 Broad Street;
aiding in selection of carpets and furniture, helping to move,
putting down carpets, etc., and working in the garden." In his
bill of expenditures he said that he had paid out money on
Mrs. Glover's account for rent, car-fare, postage, stationery,
printing, express charges, and boots. In her reply Mrs. Glover
stated that she had repaid him for all these expenditures, and
that the boots were a present from the plaintiff. On the wit
ness-stand she further stated that she taught him " how to
make an interrogation point and what capitals to attach to
the names of the Deity." She affirmed that she had cured him
of disease. " I gave him mind as one would treat a patient
with material medicine," she told the judge. Mrs. Glover later
reproachfully published some verses which she said Barry wrote
her before his defection:
O, mother mine, God grant I ne'er forget,
Whatever be my grief or what my joy,
The unmeasured, unextinguishable debt
I owe to thee, but find my sweet employ
Ever through thy remaining days to be
To thee as faithful as thou wast to me.*
Surrounded as she was by these admiring students, who
hung upon her words and looked to her for the ultimate wisdom,
Mrs. Glover gradually became less acutely conscious of Quimby's
relation to the healing system she taught. She herself was
being magnified and exalted daily by her loyal disciples, in
whose extravagant devotion she saw repeated the attitude of
"Science and Health (1881), Vol. II., p. 15.
162 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
many of Quimby's patients herself among them to their
healer. Instead of pointing always backward and reiterating,
" I learned this from Dr. Quimby," etc., she began to acquiesce
in the belief of her students, who regarded her as the source
of what she taught. Her infatuated students, indeed, desired
to see no further than their teacher, and doubtless would not
have looked beyond her had she pointed. Consequently she said
less and less about Quimby as time went on, and- by 1875, when
her first book, Science and Health, was issued, she had crowded
him altogether out of his " science." 3
In the history of the Quimby manuscript, from which she
taught during the five years, 1870-1875, one can trace the
steps by which Mrs. Glover, starting as the humble and grateful
patient of Quimby, arrived at the position of rival, and pre
tender to his place. We have seen that while she was in
Stoughton, Mrs. Glover wrote a preface, signed " Mary M.
Glover," to her copy of Quimby's manuscript, " Questions and
Answers," and that she made slight changes in, and additions
to, the text. In examining the copies of this manuscript which
were given out to her students in Lynn, 1870-1872, we find
that this signed preface has been incorporated in the text, so
that the manuscript reads like the composition of one person,
and that instead of being issued with a title-page, reading
" Extracts from P. P. Quimby's Writings," as was the Stough
ton manuscript, the copies given out in Lynn were unsigned.
This manuscript Mrs. Glover called " The Science of Man, or
the Principle which Controls Matter." In 1870 she took out
a copyright upon a book entitled : The Science of Man by which
8 There Is only a casual mention of Quimby in the first edition of Science
and Health.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 163
the Sick are Healed Embracing Questions and Answers in Moral
Science Arranged for the Learner by Mrs. Mary Baker Glover.
This seems to have been only a precautionary measure, however,
as she took no steps to publish the pamphlet until 1876. When
it appeared, it contained allusions to events which happened
after 1872, and it must have been largely rewritten after the
date of the copyright.
In Stoughton " The Science of Man " was the only manu
script from which Mrs. Glover taught. By the time she arrived
in Lynn, however, she had worked out another treatise, which
she sometimes entitled " Scientific Treatise on Mortality, As
Taught by Mrs. M. B. Glover," and sometimes gave no title
at all. Mr. Horatio Dresser and Mr. George A. Quimby, the
two persons best acquainted with Phineas P. Quimby's writings,
say that this second manuscript is only partially his, and
seems to be made up of extracts from his writings, woven to
gether and interspersed with much that must have been Mrs.
Glover's own. In her early teaching in Lynn she gave out
this new manuscript, first requiring her pupils to learn it by
heart, and following it up with " The Science of Man," which
still formed the basis of her lectures. She occasionally rein
forced her instruction by giving to a promising pupil still a
third manuscript, also a combination of Quimby and herself,
which she called " Soul's Inquiries of Man." At first, however,
Mrs. Glover gave Quimby credit for the authorship of the three
manuscripts, even for the two which seem to have been partly
her own composition.
The next important change in her manuscript occurred in the
spring of 1872, when Richard Kennedy left her. Mrs. Glover
164 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
was then without a practising student a serious disadvantage
to her and she was so angered that she conceived for Kennedy
a violent hatred, from which, without the slightest provocation
on his part, she suffered intensely for many years, and from
which it may be justly said she still suffers. Kennedy simply
changed his office, refused to discuss Mrs. Glover at all, and
went on practising. His success so annoyed Mrs. Glover that
she wished to repudiate him and his methods, and to do this
it was necessary to repudiate what she herself had taught him.
She therefore announced that she had discovered that the method
of treatment which she had taught Kennedy (i.e., wetting and
rubbing the patient's head) was harmful and pernicious. Mr.
Wright's articles in the Lynn Transcript had apparently sug
gested mesmerism to her, and she now declared that Kennedy
was a mesmerist and his treatment mesmerism. 3 x " 2 In the first
edition of Science and Health, page 193, she says:
Sooner suffer a doctor infected with smallpox to be about you than
come under the treatment of one that manipulates his patients' heads, and
is a traitor to science.
And on page 371 :
There is but one possible way of doing wrong with a mental method of
healing, and this is mesmerism, whereby the minds of the sick may be
controlled with error instead of Truth. . . . For years we had tested
the benefits of Truth on the body, and knew no opposite chance for doing
evil through a mental method of healing until we saw it traduced by an
erring student, and made the medium of error. Introducing falsehoods
into the minds of the patients prevented their recovery, and the sins of the
doctor was visited on the patients, many of whom died because of
this. . . .
Soon after her break with Kennedy she had all her students
strike out from their manuscript, " Scientific Treatise on Mortal-
11-2 The story of the beginning and growth of Mrs. Eddy's belief in mesmerism
is told in full in Chapter XII.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 165
ity," the passages regarding the manipulation of the patient's
head. These passages are within parentheses in the following:
That is, do not be discouraged but hold calmly and persistently on to
science that tells you you are right and they are in error, (and wetting
your hand in water, rise and rub their head, this rubbing has no virtue
only as we believe and others believe we get nearer to them by contact,
and now you would rub out a belief and this belief is located in the brain,
therefore as an M.D. lays a poultice where the pain is, so you lay your
hands where the belief is to rub it forever out) do not address your
thoughts for a moment to their body as you mentally argue down their
beliefs (and rub their heads) but take yourself, the Soul, to destroy the
error of life, sensation and substance in matter to your own belief, as
much as in you lies, etc.
" Manipulation," as she called it, became a thing of horror
to Mrs. Glover; it was the taint which distinguished the false
science from the true. Now, manipulation had been Quimby's
method of treating his patients, and as Mrs. Glover was a
person of singularly literal mind, breaking away from that
method gave her a sense not only of independence but of con
quest. She considered that she had improved upon the original
Quimby method and left it behind her. She still taught her
students to put their fingers upon the patient's head, but the
rubbing and the bowl of water were now symbols of the dark
abuses of " mental malpractice." Having abjured them, Mrs.
Glover felt that this Science was hers as it had never been before.
She felt that she had now a system which was practically her
own, and told Dr. Spofford she considered that Quimby had
been a detriment to her growth in Science. The more one
studies the illogical and literal quality of Mrs. Glover's mind
as evinced in her life and writings, the better one understands
how she could readily persuade herself that this was true.
166 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
The progress of this assimilation is easily followed:
First The writing of a signed preface to and the amending
of the original Quimby manuscript.
Second The incorporating of this preface in the text.
Third The composition of a second manuscript, partly her
own, from which she was able to teach successfully.
Fourth The discontinuation of " manipulation " in treat
ment.
Fifth The belief, fostered by her students, that her inter
pretation of the Quimby manuscript was far beyond the manu
script itself in scope and understanding.
Sixth The writing of the book, Science and Health, begun
in the later '60's and finished in 1875, in which Mrs. Glover
undoubtedly added much extraneous matter to Quimbyism, and
developed self-confidence by presenting ideas of her own.
Although the Christian Science Church was not chartered
until 1879> the first attempt at an organisation was made in
1875. Her students desired Mrs. Glover to conduct services
of public worship in Lynn, and to this end formed an association,
electing officers, and calling themselves the " Christian Scien
tists." In a memorandum book, kept by Daniel H. Spofford
in the spring of that year, appears the following entry :
May 26 At a meeting of students, 8 Broad street, there was a com
mittee of three appointed, consisting of Dorcas B. Rawson, George W.
Barry and D. H. Spofford, to ascertain what a suitable hall could be rented
for, and the amount which could be raised weekly toward sustaining Mrs.
Glover as teacher and instructor for one year. Committee to report night
of June 1.
This committee entered heartily into its labours and drew
up the following pledge, which was signed by eight students:
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 167
Whereas, in times not long past, the Science of Healing new to the
age, and far in advance of all other modes was introduced into the city of
Lynn by its discoverer, a certain lady, Mary Baker Glover,
And, whereas, many friends spread the good tidings throughout the
place, and bore aloft the standard of life and truth which had declared
freedom to many manacled with the bonds of disease or error,
And, whereas, by the wilful and wicked disobedience of an individual, 4
who has no name in Love Wisdom or Truth, the light was obscured by clouds
of misinterpretation and mists of mystery, so that God's work was hidden
from the world and derided in the streets,
Now therefore, we, students and advocates of this moral science called
the Science of Life, . . . have arranged with the said Mary Baker
Glover, to preach to us or direct our meetings on the Sabbath of each
week, and hereby covenant with one another, and by these presents do
publish and proclaim, that we have agreed and do each and all agree to
pay weekly, for one year, beginning with the sixth day of June, A.D., 1875,
to a treasurer chosen by at least seven students the amount set opposite
our names, provided nevertheless the moneys paid by us shall be expended
for no other purpose or purposes than the maintenance of said Mary Baker
Glover as teacher or instructor, than the renting of a suitable hall and
other necessary incidental expenses, and our signatures shall be a full
and sufficient guarantee of our faithful performance of this contract.
Mr. Spofford's memorandum book continues the story of this
association :
June 1 On receiving the report of the committee it was decided to rent
Templars' Hall, Market street, and the first regular meeting to be June 6.
Also a business meeting appointed June 8.
June 6 There were probably sixty in attendance at the meeting this
evening.
June 8 At the meeting this evening, George H. Allen was chosen presi
dent, George W. Barry, secretary, and Daniel H. Spofford, treasurer, the
society to be known as the " Christian Scientists." 6
For five successive Sundays Mrs. Glover discoursed to her
pupils in the Templars' Hall, receiving five dollars for each
address. The remaining five dollars of the amount subscribed
4 Presumably Richard Kennedy.
5 This, so far as can be learned, was the first time that Mrs. Glover's
students were called " Christian Scientists."
168 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
went toward paying incidental expenses. After the first twd
meetings a number of Spiritualists were attracted to the services-.
In the discussions following Mrs. Glover's talks they askfcd
questions which annoyed her, and she finally refused to continue
her lectures and abolished public services*
Toward the end of the same year the book, Science and
Health, made its first appearance in print. 6 Mrs. Glover was
Convinced that it was through this volume that she was to
make her way, and that the most important task before her
was to advertise it and push its sale. She accordingly en
trusted this work to her leading practitioner and chief adviser*
Daniel Spofford, persuading him to hand over his thriving
practice to one of her new students, Asa Gilbert Eddy.
Mrs. Glover first met Mr. Eddy through Mr. Spofford, to
whom Eddy had come as a patient. Although destined to
become the husband of Mrs. Glover and his name to be
indissolubly associated with Christian Science and made famous
throughout two continents, this new student was personally un
pretentious and had no suspicion of his future greatness. He
was of humble origin, coming from the village of South London
derry in the Green Mountains, where his father, Asa Eddy, was,
according to his neighbours and friends, a hard-working, plod
ding farmer. His mother, Betsey Smith Eddy, was a more
original character, and the children inherited many of her
peculiarities. Farm life was not congenial to Mrs. Eddy or*
her children. Their tastes and inclinations were not for the-
established and the orderly, and they consequently had little or-
nothing to do with the routine work of either farm or house.
A detailed account of the publication of this important book is given itt
the next chapter.
ASA GILBERT EDDY
Mrs. Eddy's third husband. He died in 1882
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 169
Mrs. Eddy was not a very marked example of New England
housewifely thrift, and she was pretty generally criticised for
her " slack " housekeeping and her inattention to her children.
The children, indeed, grew up as they would, satisfying their
hunger from the " mush-pot " in which they boiled the corn-
meal porridge which formed their main diet, and regulating
their habits and conduct, each to suit himself. They met with
no interference from their mother, who was much away from
home. Every morning after the children had been sent over
to the district school, which was only a few steps from the
house, it was Mrs. Eddy's invariable custom to hitch up her
horse and set forth on a trip through the country or to the
neighbouring towns. This drive usually lasted all day, and it
was the one thing that was performed with promptness and
regularity in the Eddy menage. To protect herself from rough
weather on her expeditions, Mrs. Eddy devised an ingenious
costume. From the front of her large poke bonnet she hung
a shawl, in which was inserted a 9x10 pane of window glass,
so placed that when she donned the costume the glass was
opposite her face. This handy contrivance kept out the wind
or rain or snow, without obscuring her vision ; and thus equipped,
Mrs. Eddy daily defied the vagaries of Vermont weather. The
children of the village called her " the woman with the looking-
glass."
Neighbourly comment and rebuke were lost on mother and
children alike. They themselves enjoyed the unhampered life
they led. It was only those who had a sense of order and
regularity who suffered from the Eddy method, and they were
all outside the Eddy family, unless indeed, it were Asa Eddy,
170 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
the father, who may sometimes have grown tired of returning
from his day's work in the fields to a deserted house, to make
a fire and prepare his own food.
As the boys grew older they were very ingenious about the
house. They learned to wash and iron their own clothes as
well as to make them, and while none of them would work on
the farm with their father they all knew how to run the loom,
which their mother kept in the kitchen, and upon which she
sometimes wove. They took naturally to the trades, and when
they started out for themselves one chose that of a carpenter,
another became a cobbler, a third a stone-cutter, a fourth a
clock-maker, and Asa Gilbert, the future husband of the
founder of the Christian Science Church, was a weaver. As
a boy Gilbert had been much with his mother, often accompany
ing her on her drives and winding the " quills " for her loom
on the rare occasions when she felt like spinning or weaving.
At school, where he was nicknamed " Githy," 7 he was backward
in everything except penmanship, in which he excelled and in
which he took great satisfaction. He had considerable personal
pride of a kind which showed itself in his odd choice of clothes,
his mincing gait, and the elaborate arrangement of his hair,
which he trained to curl under in a roll at the back and combed
up into a high " roach " in front. Like his brothers he was
fond of hunting and spent much of his time shooting at birds
or at a target. Sometimes he hired out to a farmer, but only
for a few days or weeks at a time, for he had no taste for
farming.
The family had no church connections or religious prefer-
f This nickname was won because Gilbert had a lisp and could not pronounce
the words, " geese eggs."
HISTORY OP CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 171
ences, but Mrs. Eddy had pinned her faith to a famous clair
voyant called " Sleeping Lucy," who lived up the valley at
Cavendish. " Sleeping Lucy," 8 whose real name was Mrs.
Lucy Cook, possessed what she called " a gift of nature," by
means of which she passed into a sleep or trance and was
able, when in this sleeping state, to diagnose cases of sickness
and to prescribe remedies for them. Mrs. Eddy's faith in
" Sleeping Lucy " was profound, and whenever any of her
family were ill she bundled them up and took them to Cavendish
to see the clairvoyant. When Spiritualism was introduced, it
appealed at once to Mrs. Eddy, and she and her son Gilbert
became ardent believers, attending the Spiritualist meetings and
seances for miles around.
When Gilbert left home, about 1860, he went to Springfield,
Vt., to run a " spinning jack " in a woollen mill, and later
when the woollen mill burned, he found employment in a baby-
carriage factory in the same village. Altogether he was in
Springfield until late in the 'sixties, and after spending some
time again in Londonderry, he drifted to East Boston and be
came agent for a sewing machine. In spite of the shiftlessness
of his bringing up, Gilbert developed a strain of thrift and
economy. While in Springfield he had worked regularly and
hoarded his savings. He lived by himself in meagre quarters
and did his own housework, including his washing, and he made
his own trousers. His sister-in-law, Mrs. Washington Eddy of
New Haven, Conn., says, that when he visited his brother, he
always helped her with the housework, especially with the iron
ing. She says that " he could do up a shirt as well as any
8 " Sleeping Lucy " later went to Montpelier and to Boston, where, under
another name, she became well known and prosperous.
172 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
woman." By means of his good management Gilbert was able
to purchase from his parents the deed of their farm, which
at his own death went by will to his -wife, Mary Baker G. Eddy,
who sold it for $1,500 to Stephen Houghton, a neighbour of
the Eddys in Londonderry.
It was while Gilbert was acting as sewing machine agent in
East Boston that he heard of Daniel H. Spofford as a healer
and went to him as a patient. Spofford talked with him about
the method he practised and when Eddy became interested,
Spofford advised him to study the system and become a practi
tioner himself. Eddy eagerly accepted the advice and Spofford
introduced him to Mrs. Glover, who at once enrolled him as
a member of her next class.
People who knew Eddy well in Lynn describe him as a
quiet, dull little man, docile and yielding up to a certain point,
but capable of a dogged sort of obstinacy. He was short of
stature, slow in his movements, and always taciturn. When
he first came to Lynn people remarked upon his old-fashioned
dress and singular manner of wearing his hair. He usually
wore a knitted Cardigan jacket and a long surtout gathered
very full at the waist and a light cinnamon in colour.
From their first acquaintance he and his teacher manifested
a cordial regard for each other. He alone of all her students
was permitted to call her by her first name, Mary, and she
addressed him as Gilbert, often speaking of him to other pupils,
and extolling his willingness and obedience. After Mr. Spof-
ford's patients had been transferred to Eddy, some of Mrs.
Glover's students began to feel that her interest in the new
practitioner was out of all proportion to his usefulness in the
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 173
Science. Mrs. Glover became aware of this jealousy and was
greatly distressed by it. She felt that her students were lean
ing on her too heavily, and that by demanding her attention
and even by thinking about her so constantly, they drained her
powers and unfitted her for her work. She spoke much in these
days of a temperamental quality which compelled her to take
on the ills and perplexities of her friends and to suffer from
them as if they were her own. She continually besought her
students not to " call upon her " in thought when they were
sick or in trouble. For some months before her marriage to
Gilbert Eddy she seems to have felt completely at the mercy
of her students' minds, and that she must find some way to put
a barrier between their thoughts and her own. An almost in
coherent letter, written to Daniel Spofford two days before her
marriage, indicates great mental distress, and she evidently
felt that her favouritism toward Eddy had been the subject
of criticism.
" Now, Dr. Spofford," she writes, " won't you exercise reason
and let me live or will you kill me? Your mind is just what has
brought on my relapse and I shall never recover if you do not
govern yourself and TURN YOUR THOUGHTS wholly away from
me. Do for God's sake and the work I have before me let me get
out of this suffering I never was worse than last night and
you say you wish to do me good and I do not doubt it. Then
won't you quit thinking of me. I shall write no more to a male
student and never more trust one to live with. It is a hidden
foe that is at work read Science and Health page 193, 1st
paragraph.
" No STUDENT nor mortal has tried to have you leave me
174 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
that I know of. Dr. Eddy has tried to have you stay you
are in a mistake, it is God and not man that has separated us
and for the reason I begin to learn. Do not think of returning
to me again I shall never again trust a man They know not
what manner of temptations assail God produces the separation
and I submit to it so must you. There is no cloud between
us but the way you set me up for a Dagon is wrong and
now I implore you to return forever from this , error of per
sonality and go alone to God as I have taught you.
" It is mesmerism that I feel and is killing me it is mortal
mind that only can make me suffer. Now stop thinking of me
or you will cut me off soon from the face of the earth."
Gilbert Eddy called on his teacher that same evening, and
must have reassured the distracted woman as to the trust
worthiness of his sex, for on the next day he was the proud
bearer to Spofford of the following note, even the date line
of which breathes peace :
SABBATH EVE, Dec. 31, '76.
DEAR STUDENT:
For reasons best known to myself I have changed my views in respect
to marrying and ask you to hand this note to the Unitarian clergyman
and please wait for his answer.
Your teacher,
M. B. G.
Hand or deliver the reply to Dr. Eddy.
When Mr. Spofford read the note he remarked:
" You've been very quiet about all this, Gilbert."
" Indeed, Dr. Spofford," protested the happy groom, " I
didn't know a thing about it myself until last night."
He then produced the marriage license from his pocket,
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 175
and Mr. Spofford noticed that the ages of both the bride and
groom were put down as forty years. Knowing that Mrs.
Glover was in her fifty-sixth year, he remarked upon the in
accuracy, but Mr. Eddy explained that the statement of age
was a mere formality and that a few years more or less was
of no consequence.
On New Year's Day, 1877, the Rev. Samuel B. Stewart
performed the marriage ceremony at Mrs. Glover's home on
Broad Street. The wedding was unattended by festivities, but
several weeks later Mrs. Eddy's friends and students assembled
one evening to offer the usual bridal gifts and congratulations.
An interesting picture of this friendly gathering is found in
an account published in the Lynn Recorder, February 10, 1877.
CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS' FESTIVAL
MR. EDITOR A very pleasant occasion of congratulations and bridal
gifts passed off at the residence of the bride and bridegroom, Dr. and
Mrs. Eddy, at No. 8 Broad St., on the evening of the 31st ult. The
arrival of a large number of unexpected guests at length brought about
the discovery that it was a sort of semi-surprise party, and thus it proved,
and a very agreeable surprise at that. It afterwards appeared that the
visitors had silently assembled in the lower parlour, and laden the table
with bridal gifts, when the door was suddenly thrown open and some of the
family invited in ta find the room well packed with friendly faces; all of
which was the quiet work of that mistress of all good management, Mrs.
Bixby. One of the most elaborate gifts in silver was a cake basket. A
bouquet of crystallised geranium leaves of rare varieties encased in glass
was charming, but the presents were too fine to permit a selection. Mr.
S. P. Bancroft gave the opening address a very kind and graceful speech,
which was replied to by Mrs. Glover-Eddy with evident satisfaction, when
alluding to the unbroken friendship for their teacher, the fidelity to Truth
and the noble purposes cherished by a number of her students and the
amount of good compared with others of which they were capable. The
happy evening was closed with reading the Bible, remarks on the Scriptures,
etc. Wedding cake and lemonade were served, and those from out of town
took the cars for home,
SPECTATOR.
CHAPTER XI
THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF tl SCIENCE AND HEALTH " - CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE AS A SYSTEM OF METAPHYSICS - AS A RELIGION
AS A CURATIVE AGENT
book upon which Mrs. Glover had been at work for so
long, was first published in 1875. For eight years she had been
writing and rewriting, with unabated patience, and wherever she
went she had enlisted the interest of her friends and had set
them to copying her manuscripts and getting them ready for
a possible printer. While she was staying with the Went-
worths in Stoughton she carried her copy to Boston to look
for a publisher, and when the printer to whom she showed it
asked to be paid in advance, Mrs. Glover tried to persuade
Mrs. Wentworth to lend her the money. Had Mrs. Glover then
been successful in her search for a publisher, Christian Science
in its present form would never have existed; for at that
time she had not dreamed of calling the system anything but
Quimby's " science."
By 1875, however, Mrs. Glover had persuaded herself that
she owed very little to the old Maine philosopher, 1 and when
her book appeared she said no more of Quimby or of her
promise to teach his science " to at least two persons before
I die."
Neither Mrs. Glover nor the printer took any financial risk
1 The story of Mrs. Glover's absorption of Quimby is told in Chapter X,
176
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 177
in the publication of the book, when it was at last brought out ;
but two of Mrs. Glover's students, Miss Elizabeth Newhall and
George Barry, were prevailed upon to advance $1,500. Owing,
however, to the many changes in the proofs which Mrs. Glover
made after the plates were cast, the edition cost $2,200, which
Miss Newhall and Mr. Barry paid. Mrs. Glover, in spite of
her reluctance to risk money on it, believed intensely in her
book, and from the first she declared that it would sell. Even
when the first edition of 1,000 copies fell flat on the market
and Daniel Spofford was obliged to peddle them about person
ally, Mrs. Glover did not lose confidence in the future of her
book, but immediately set about revising the volume for a
second edition.
Mrs. Glover and Mr. Spofford advertised the book by means
of handbills and through the newspapers, printing testimonials
of the wonderful cures made by the application of the science,
and urging all to buy the book which would tell them all about
it. Copies were sent to the leading New England newspapers
for review, accompanied by a request to the editors to print
nothing about the book if a favourable notice could not be
given. This request was respected by some of the papers, but
others criticised the book severely or referred to it flippantly.
Copies were also sent to the University of Heidelberg, to
Thomas Carlyle, and to several noted theologians and literary
men. But the book made no stir, and outside of the little
band of devoted Christian Scientists, its advent was unobserved.
Whatever imperishable doctrine the book may have contained
it was not suggested by the outward form of the volume, which
was an ill-made, cheap-looking affair. It contained 456 pages
178 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
and sold for $2.50 at first, but later, when the sales fell off,
it went willingly for $1.
Mrs. Glover called her book Science and Health, 2 an adapta
tion of Quimby's name for his healing system, " The Science
of Health." It contained eight chapters entitled in their order :
" Natural Science," " Imposition and Demonstration," lf Spirit
and Matter," " Creation," " Prayer and Atonement," " Mar
riage," " Physiology," and " Healing the Sick." , In these chap
ters Mrs. Glover attempted to set forth the theory of her
" Science " of healing and the theological and metaphysical
systems upon which it was based. It was a serious undertaking,
but Mrs. Glover, with no preparation but her study of the
Quimby manuscripts, and no resources but an illimitable con
fidence in the success of her undertaking, felt equal to the
task; and judged by Mrs. Glover's standard, her venture was
a success.
Even after her eight years struggle with her copy, the book,
as printed in 1875, is hardly more than a tangle of words and
theories, faulty in grammar and construction, and singularly
vague and contradictory in its statements. Although the book
is divided into chapters, each having a title of its own, there
is no corresponding classification of the subject, and it is only
by piecing together the declarations found in the various chap
ters that one may make out something of the theories which
Mrs. Glover had been trying for so long to express.
The basic ideas of the book and much of the terminology
were, of course, borrowed from the Quimby papers which Mrs.
Glover had carried reverently about with her since 1864, and
2 The Key to the Scriptures, which now forms a part of the title, was not
yet written.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 179
from which she had taught his doctrines. But in the elabora
tion and amplification of the Quimby theory, Mrs. Glover
introduced some totally new propositions and added many an
ingenious ornament.
On its metaphysical side Mrs. Glover's science went a step
beyond the conclusions of the idealistic philosophers that we
can have no absolute knowledge of matter, but only a sense
impression of its existence ; she asserted that there is no matter
and that we have no senses. The five senses being non-existent,
Mrs. Glover pointed out that " all evidence obtained therefrom "
is non-existent also. " All material life is a self-evident false
hood." But while denying the existence of matter, Mrs. Glover
gave it a sort of compulsory recognition by calling it " mor
tality." And as such it assumes formidable proportions. It
is error, evil, a belief, an illusion, discord, a false claim, dark
ness, devil, sin, sickness, and death; and all these are non
existent. Her denials include all the physical world and man
kind, and all that mankind has accomplished by means of his
reason and intelligence. " Doctrines, opinions, and beliefs, the
so-called laws of nature, remedies for soul and body, materia
medica, etc., are error," Mrs. Glover declared; but she tempered
the blow by adding : " This may seem severe, but is said with
honest convictions of its Truth, with reverence for God and
love for man."
In Mrs. Glover's system all that exists is an immortal
Principle which is defined as Spirit, God, Intelligence, Mind,
Soul, Truth, Life, etc., and is the basis of all things real.
This universal Principle is altogether good. In it there is no
evil, darkness, pain, sickness, or other forms of what Mrs.
180 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Glover called " error." Man is a Spiritual being only, and
the world he inhabits is a Spiritual world. The idea that
he is a physical body as well as an immortal soul, is an illusion
introduced into the world by Adam and strengthened by all
the succeeding generations. In this philosophy it is impossible
for man to be both spiritual and material. " We are Spirit,
Soul, and not body, and all is good that is Spirit." " The
parent of all discord is this strange hypothesis, that Soul is
in body, and Life in matter." But by one of the contradic
tions which abound on every page, Mrs. Glover, in accounting
for what seems to be the existence of the body, said that even
when man shall have attained the realisation that he is Spirit
only, his body will still be here but that it will have no sensa
tion : " How are we to escape from flesh, or mortality, except
through the change called death? By understanding we never
were flesh, that we are Spirit and not matter. When the belief
that we inhabit a body is destroyed we shall live, but our
body will have no sensation."
To live by this " science " man must clear his mind of all
his previous beliefs, and must understand that all he has be
lieved himself to be, is a falsehood, and that his conduct and
the conduct of the whole human race from the beginning have
been erroneous. He must ignore his physical body and the
material things about him, and he must no longer depend upon
the laws of nature or of man, but be governed by spiritual
law only. " There is no material law that creates or governs
man, or that man should obey ; obedience to spiritual law is
all that God requires, and this 1 law abrogates matter," wrote
Mrs. Glover.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 181
What seems to be the physical world, Mrs. Glover said, is a
vision created by " mortal mind," that error or belief in matter
which is forever at war with Immortal Mind, and which Mrs.
Glover's philosophy denied yet constantly recognised. " Ma
terial man," she wrote, " and a world of matter, reverse the
science of being and are utterly false; nothing is right about
them; their starting point is error, illusion."
The physical forces of nature are likewise illusory. They
exist, according to Mrs. Glover, not in fact, but because mortal
mind at some time imagined matter and imagined it to contain
certain properties. " Vertebrates, articulates, mollusks, and
radiates are simply what mind makes them. They are technical-
ised mortality that will disappear when the radiates of Spirit
illumine sense and destroy forever the belief of Life and In
telligence in matter." " Repulsion, attraction, cohesion, and
power supposed to belong to matter, are constituents of mind."
" The so-called destructive forces of matter, and the ferocity
of man and beast are animal beliefs."
All this is a part of what Mrs. Glover called the " dream of
life in matter." In time, when the world shall have accepted
Christian Science, Mrs. Glover believed, all this will be changed :
" All this must give place to the spiritualised understanding.
. . . Material substance, geological calculations, etc., will be
swallowed up in the infinite Spirit that comprehends and evolves
all idea, structure, form, colouring, etc., that we now suppose
are produced by matter."
In Christian Science, as Mrs. Glover stated it, all human
knowledge which, she held, has done so much harm in the world,
will be wiped out, and as man proceeds in the Christian Science
182 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
faith, he will gain a complete understanding of the true science
of life. This understanding will come through spiritual insight
which " opens to view the capabilities of being, untrammelled
by personal sense, explains the so-called miracles, and brings
out the infinite possibilities of Soul, controlling matter, discern
ing mind, and restoring man's inalienable birthright of do
minion."
When man shall have reached this summit of understanding
he will be infallible, unable to make mistakes, for " Mistakes
are impossible to understanding, and understanding is all the
mind there is."
In giving a religious foundation to her science, Mrs. Glover
allowed herself a free hand, for here she was not restrained
by the limits of Quimbyism. Quimby had not aimed to give
his system a religious tone, but he dealt with the same problems
that religion has tried to solve, and he believed that the severe
doctrines of the churches overlooked the real solution of man's
destiny, and did incalculable damage in the world by spreading
fear and the belief that man was naturally born to sin. His
own theory, it will be remembered, was that man had had these
beliefs of sin and fear and disease so borne in upon him and
impressed upon him that he was spiritually weakened and
made impotent by an overruling conviction of his own unworthi-
ness. Quimby's gospel was the gospel of healthy-mindedness.
He assumed that the vivifying principle which pervaded the
universe was absolutely good and that goodness was man's
natural inheritance. Quimby also taught that the mission of
Jesus Christ was to restore to man his birthright of goodness
and happiness and health; to point the way, as he put it, to
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 183
Harmony ;' and Harmony, in Quimby's philosophy, was Heaven.
He also presented the theory of the dual nature of Christ.
Jesus, he said, was the human man ; Christ, the man of God. 3
In making out her theological system, Mrs. Glover took in
these modest ideas of Quimby, borrowed something from the
Shaker sect (see Appendix C) and the " revelations " of Andrew
Jackson Davis (see Appendix B), and introduced new and
quite original ideas of her own. She made argument futile
at the outset by claiming for her religion the advantage of
direct inspiration and revelation. " The Bible," she wrote,
" has been our only text-book. . . . The Scriptures have both
a literal and spiritual import, but the latter was the especial
interpretation we received, and that taught us the science of
Life outside of personal sense." " We can not doubt the
inspiration that opened to us the spiritual sense of the
Bible." *
Mrs. Glover described the process by which she arrived at
the true meaning of the Bible : " The only method of reaching
the Science of the Scripture, hence, the Truth of the Bible, is
to rise to its spiritual interpretation, then compare its sayings,
and gain its general tenor, which enables us to reach the ascend
ing scale of being through demonstration ; as did prophet and
apostle." By pursuing this method she came, inevitably, to
some curious conclusions concerning the beginning of the world
and the origin of man. Parts of the Bible she accepted liter
ally, other parts were declared to be allegorical, and some
of its statements she rejected altogether as mistakes of the
3 An exposition of Quimby's doctrine is contained in Chapter III of this
volume.
4 In later editions of Science and Health the idea of revelation is greatly
enlarged upon and emphasised.
184 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
early translators and copyists. " From the original quota
tions," wrote Mrs. Glover, " it appears the Scriptures were not
understood by those who re-read and re-wrote them. The true
rendering was their spiritual sense." And again : " The thirty
thousand different readings given the Old, and the three thou
sand the New Testament, account for the discrepancies that
sometimes appear in the Scriptures."
In the chapter called " Creation," Mrs. Glover stated that
the Trinity as commonly accepted is an error. " There is
but one God. . . . That three persons are united in one body
suggests a heathen deity more than Jehovah. . . . Life, Truth,
and Love are the triune Principle of man and the universe;
they are the great Jehovah, and these three are one, and our
Father which art in heaven." In later editions Christian Sci
ence is said to be the Holy Comforter.
The creation of the universe and man had its origin in this
triune Principle. The creation was the Idea of Principle; and
man and the universe began to exist, not at the moment they
received visible form, but before that at the very moment,
in fact, that the Idea of them occurred to Principle. " Intelli
gence " [that is, Principle], said Mrs. Glover, "made all that
was made, and every plant before it was in the ground; every
mineral, vegetable, and animal were ideas of the eternal thought."
Their form was only a " shadowing forth " of what Principle
or Intelligence had already mentally created; for all that was
made and all that grew was not developed by natural law,
but was literally ordered into being by the First Principle or
Creative Wisdom : " The seed yields not an herb because of a
propagating principle in itself; for there is none, inasmuch
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 185
as Intelligence made all that was made; the idea was only to
shadow forth what Intelligence had made."
" Water," in Mrs. Glover's interpretation, was made to corre
spond to Love, out of which Wisdom produced the " dry land "
which is, said Mrs. Glover, " the condensed idea of the universe."
The statement in the Bible that God divided the light from the
darkness is said to mean that " Truth and error were distinct
in the beginning and never mingled." This statement was made
without explanation of how " error " came to be co-existing
with Truth in the beginning, or by whom it was created. Mrs.
Glover apparently had forgotten for the moment that " error "
is a belief only and that this illusion originated with Adam.
The firmament which God placed in the midst of the waters
to divide them, was, according to Science and Health, the
understanding that divided the waters into those " above " and
those " below," into the spiritual and material, that we learn
are separated forever. . . . Understanding interpreted God
and was the dividing line between Truth and error ; to separate
the waters which were under the firmament from those above
it; to hold Life and Intelligence that made all things distinct
from what it made, and superior to them, controlling and pre
serving them, not through laws of matter, but the law of
spirit."
Mrs. Glover did not mention even here why the " spiritual "
should be separated from the " material " by the firmament
of understanding, if, as she taught, there is and never has
been any material life. But, " Unfathomable Mind," as Mrs.
Glover said, " had expressed itself."
" It was in obedience to Intelligence and not matter," that
186 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
the earth brought forth grass, and trees yielded fruit. Nature
was like the setting of a stage, where scenes could be shifted
at will. Intelligence brought forth landscapes * l ' z " even as a
picture is produced by the artist." " The grass and the trees
grew," not from the ground, but " from out the infinite thought
that expressed them." In the creation of the solar system
Mrs. Glover saw a complete endorsement of her theory that
vegetation lived by Intelligence only : " The Scripture gives
no record of solar light until after time had been divided into
day and night, and vegetation was formed, showing you light
was the symbol of the Life-giving Creator, and not a source
of life to the vegetable kingdom. . . . Matter never repre
sented God; geology cannot explain the earth, nor one of its
formations."
The animal creation, according to Mrs. Glover's idea, was
originally mild and harmless. " Beast and reptile," she said,
" were neither carnivorous nor poisonous." Wisdom -held do
minion over reptiles in those first days, and the savage traits
of wild animals to-day are the result of erroneous human think
ing. Mortal mind has impressed these qualities into the animal
kingdom. It was because they understood this that Moses
" made a staff as a serpent," and Daniel feared not the hungry
lions. "When immortality is better understood," Mrs. Glover
said, " there will follow an exercise of capacity unknown to
mortals."
In the story of the creation of man as recorded in Genesis,
41 - s Mrs. Glover also taught that the natural law which produces flowers and
fruit can be changed at will, even now, if one has a grasp of her science.
In a personal letter written in 1896 she stated that she had caused an apple
tree to blossom in January, and had frequently performed " some such trifles
in the floral line," while living in Lyun.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 187
Mrs. Glover found much that would not fit into her plan of the
universe, but she explained this : " In Genesis, the spiritual
record of the universe and man is lost sight of, it was so material
ised by uninspired writers." And, " the scripture not being
understood bj its translators was misinterpreted." " The
translators of that record wrote it in the error of being . . .
hence their misinterpretations. . . . They spake from error,
of error . . . which accounts for the contradictions in that
glorious old record of Creation." " A wrong version of the
Scriptures has hidden their Truth." According to Mrs.
Glover's version, man was formed as follows :
When, as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, God said:
" Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them
have dominion . . . over all the earth," He meant by the word
" us " to indicate His triune Principle of Life, Truth, and Love.
The word, " them," referred to man in the plural. It " signi
fies plurality, for man was the generic name of mankind."
Therefore, we have the conclusion that God, in his triune
capacity of Life, Truth, and Love, made, not one man, but
all mankind : " In contradistinction to the belief that God made
one man, and man made the rest of his kind, science reveals
the fact that he made all."
" So God created man in His own image, male and female
created He them," means, in the Science and Health version,
that mankind thus created, merely " reflected the Principle of
male and female, and was the likeness of ' Us,' the compound
Principle that made man." It is to be understood that God,
himself, not being a person, can have no " gender," " inasmuch
as He is Principle embracing the masculine, feminine, and
188 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
neuter." Indeed, if one of these genders predominates over
another in the triune Principle, it is the feminine, for " We have
not," said Mrs. Glover, " as much authority in science, for
calling God masculine as feminine, the latter being the last,
therefore the highest idea given of him." Also : " Woman
was a higher idea of God than man, insomuch as she was the
final one in the scale of being; but because our beliefs reverse
every position of Truth, we name supreme being masculine
instead of feminine."
This creation of man, as recorded in the first chapter of
Genesis, and explained by Science and Health, was, according
to Mrs. Glover, the only real creation of man. This man is
not given a name in the Bible. He was mankind, the immortal
Idea of the First Principle, and he inhabited the inanimate
universe, and was given dominion over it. " All blessings and
power," said Science and Health, " came with the creations of
Spirit and as such they were to multiply and replenish the
earth on this basis of being, and subdue it, making matter sub
servient to spirit, and all would be harmonious and immortal."
That is, that as intended in the beginning, this spiritual universe
was to continue its existence, and Idea or man was to " multiply
and replenish the earth " solely by the will of the Spirit. The
products of the earth were to come forth when and how original
man dictated. " In this science of being the herb bore seed
and the tree fruit, not because of root, seed or blossom, but
because their Principle sustained these ideas."
There were no laws of nature, or of man, for none was
5 In more recent years Christian Scientists have declared their belief that
Mrs. Eddy is the " feminine principle of Deity," and much has been written
by her followers in defence of this position.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
needed. All was Mind or Infinite Spirit. Man, the male and
female Idea of God, was to bring forth his kind, through the
law of Spirit only. 8 "That matter propagates itself through
seed and germination is error, a belief only."
When God had thus made mankind, according to Mrs.
Glover's version, he rested, and he had nothing to do with
making anything that came later. Of the Bible statement:
" Thus the heavens and earth were finished and all the hosts
of them," Mrs. Glover said : " Here the scripture repeats again
the science of creation, namely, that all was complete and
finished, therefore that nothing has since been made." Having
finished creation, God rested on the seventh day, and this again
supplied to Mrs. Glover proof that whatever was created there
after was not of God, but a myth only. Creation was finished,
and the Great Principle was at rest.
But somehow, and because of the carelessness, no doubt, of
the early translators, a second creation was started, after the
seventh day. But the story of this supplementary creation,
related in the second chapter of Genesis, is purely mythical and
imaginary, Mrs. Glover declared. It is due entirely to mis
interpretation, and is wholly untrustworthy. How this belief
in a further creation started is not explained, even in Science
and Health, but it seemed to originate with the discovery that
" God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was
6 This theory is the basis of the Christian Science belief that children born
of the flesh are not born according to the " science of being." Christian
Science discourages the birth of children in the usual way, but permits it as
" expedient " for the present. In the future when, as they believe, the world
shall be more spiritual, children will appear as products of Spirit only, and
they will come by whatever means they are desired. " Should universal mind
or belief adopt the appearing of a star as its formula of creation, the advent
of mortal man would commence as a star." " Belief may adopt any condition
whatever, and that will become its imperative mode of cause and effect."
"Knowledge will . . . diminish and lose estimate in the sight of man;
and Spirit instead of matter be made the basis of generation."
190 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
not a man to till the ground." Mrs. Glover had already pointed
out that rain and light were not necessary to the growth of
vegetation, and there was not a man to till the ground because,
to quote Mrs. Glover, " there was no necessity of it," for " the
earth brought forth spontaneously, and man lived not because
of matter." " Man was the Idea of Spirit, and this Idea tilled
not the ground for bread."
" But," we are told in that fatal second chapter of Genesis,
" there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole
face of the ground." That was error, " the figurative mist
of earth," and " that which started from a matter basis,"
in Mrs. Glover's interpretation. " And," to quote Genesis
again, " the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man
became a living soul." Here, then, was the beginning of a
" belief of life in matter," and this belief has accompanied us
throughout the ages. " The first record," says Science and
Health, " was science ; the second was metaphorical and myth
ical," and " the supposed utterances of matter."
Mrs. Glover thought it was unfortunate that whoever wrote
the first reports of the creation had not, by making judicious
comments, indicated which was the true and which the make-
believe record : " Had the record divided the first statement of
creation from the fabulous second, by saying ' after Truth's
creation we will name the opposite belief of error, regarding
the origin of the universe and man,' it would have separated
the tares from wheat, and we should have reached sooner the
spiritual significance of the Bible." But there was no clue,
and the error went on.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 191
This man of error, who was formed after creation was fin
ished, was named Adam. The significance of his name is not
explained in the first edition of Science and Health, but in later
editions, Mrs. Eddy, ignoring the Hebraic origin of the word,
gives it this literal interpretation : " Divide the name Adam into
two syllables, and it reads, A dam, or obstruction." Adam
was to obstruct our growth in spirituality. Adam, the belief
of life in matter, was the first " mortal man," and with him
came sickness, sin, and death, and all the troop of error.
Adam, being a " product of belief," and Eve a product of
Adam, " both were beliefs of Life in matter." At once they set
about their " mortal " mischief. They ate of the tree of knowl
edge, which was " the symbol of error," in which originated
" theology, materia medica, mesmerism, and every other 'ology
and 'ism under the sun." The fruit of the tree which Eve
gave to Adam was, Mrs. Glover suggested, " a medical work,
perhaps."
The driving of Adam out of Eden is " a clear and distinct
separation of Adam, error, from harmony and Truth, wherein
Soul and Sense, person and Principle, Spirit and matter, are
forever separate." The history of Adam and his descendants,
then, is one of mortality and error, an evil dream that has no
reality, and this is Mrs. Glover's contention. " There is no
mortal man, or reality to error," she declared. We are not as
we have thought, the descendants of Adam ; but we are the off
spring of that first nameless man who dwelt with God before
Adam was. We have been so influenced, however, by the
Adam belief that we have lost sight of our true inheritance.
The immediate outlook for the sons of error is not encourag-
192 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
ing, for we are told that " error will continue for seven thousand
years, from the time of Adam, its origin. At the expiration
of this period Truth will be generally comprehended, and
science roll back the darkness that now hides the eternal sun
shine and lift the curtain on Paradise, where earth produces
at the command of Intelligence, and Soul, instead of sense,
govern man."
Mrs. Glover believed thoroughly that, in the meantime, it
was her mission to restore to man his original state of spiritu
ality. Throughout the centuries since Adam, there has been
but one other who brought the message of " science " to man
kind. " Jesus of Nazareth," Mrs. Glover wrote, " was the most
scientific man of whom we have any record." " The Principle
He demonstrated was beyond question, science," and she refers
to Him as " The great Teacher of Christian Science," and
the " Pioneer of the science of Life."
Mrs. Glover's explanation of the dual nature of Christ was
like Quimby's. Christ she defined as God, or " the Principle
and Soul of the man Jesus ; constituting Christ-Jesus, that is,
Principle and Idea." But Mrs. Glover went farther than
Quimby and presented a new explanation of the origin and
birth of Christ. She said : " Why Jesus of Nazareth stood
higher in the scale of being, and rose proportionately beyond
other men in demonstrating God, we impute to His spiritual
origin. He was the offspring of Soul, and not sense; yea, the
son of God. The science of being was revealed to the virgin
mother, who in part proved the great Truth that God is the
only origin of man. The conception of Jesus illustrated this
Truth and finished the example of creation." The birth
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 193
of Christ without a physical father was, in Mrs. Glover's
idea, an advance toward the science of being, which dis
penses not only with the physical father, but the physical
mother as well, and declares that man is born of Spirit only.
In support of her argument, Mrs. Glover referred to the fact
that some of the lower forms of animal life propagate their
kind by self-division, and she said : " the butterfly, bee, etc.,
propagating their species without the male element . . . corro
borates science, proving plainly that the origin of the universe
and man depends not on material conditions." Self-division
and parthenogenesis are, apparently, held to be less material
methods of reproduction, and less in accordance with natural
law, than methods in which the " male element " is employed.
The idea that " God is the only author of man " came first,
Mrs. Glover said, to the mother of Christ, and she demonstrated
it, producing the child Jesus. " The illumination of spiritual
sense had put to silence personal sense with Mary, thus master
ing material law, and establishing through demonstration that
God is the father of man," she wrote. Also : " The belief that
life originates with the sexes is strongest in the most material
natures ; whereas the understanding of the spiritual origin of
man cometh only to the pure in heart. . . . Jesus was the off
spring of Mary's self-conscious God-being in creative Wisdom."
But the virgin mother, we are told, " proved the great Truth
that God is the only origin of man," only " in part." If she
had proved it completely she would have had to dispense with
herself as mother; and in that case Jesus would have been a
perfect demonstration of Mrs. Glover's " science of being."
Being born, however, of an actual and visible mother, Jesus
194 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
was not altogether free from the universal illusion of personal
sense. He was the Idea of Principle, it is true, " but born of
woman, that is, having in part a personal origin, he blended
the idea of Life, that is, God, with the belief of Life in matter,
and became the connecting link between science and personal
sense ; thus to mediate between God and man."
Although Mrs. Glover wrote many a page to prove that
Spirit and matter cannot unite and must forever be separate,
and was almost violently emphatic in her statement of this
principle, she seemed unconscious of the fact that, in making
God the spiritual father of Jesus, and Mary His personal
mother, and their producing together, the child in whom was
" blended " the idea of God with the belief of Life in matter,
she was contradicting at all points the very thing she was so
laboriously trying to prove. But Mrs. Glover was never afraid
of contradicting herself, and her explanation accounted, in
some manner, for the origin and nature of Christ, and such
as it was, it was made to serve her purpose.
It was, she said, the Son of God, or Christ, who " walked
the wave and stilled the tempest," healed the sick, restored the
blind, and declared that " I and the Father are one " ; and it
was Mary's son, or Jesus, who endured temptation, suffered in
Gethsemane, and died upon the cross. " Christ, understanding
that Soul and body are Intelligence and its Idea, destroyed
the belief that matter is something to be feared and that sick
ness and death are superior to harmony and Life. His king
dom was not of this world, He understood Himself Soul and
not body, therefore He triumphed over the flesh, over sin and
death. He came to teach and fulfil this Truth, that established
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 195
the Kingdom of Heaven, or reign of harmony on earth." But
the man Jesus was not unconscious of " matter conditions."
Although, Mrs. Glover thought, He " experienced few of the
so-called pleasures of personal sense; perhaps He knew its
pains." This illustrated, also, that " Truth, in contact with
error, produced chemicalisation." Chemicalisation, in Mrs.
Glover's vocabulary, meant that when Truth and error, which
cannot mingle, first come together, the contact of these two
opposing forces, like the two parts of a Seidlitz powder, sets
up a violent agitation and eruption. This is chemicalisation,
and during its process Truth may sometimes seem to be affected
by error, but when it subsides it is found that error is van
quished, and Truth has prevailed. " Hence," said Mrs. Glover,
" our Master's sufferings came through contact with sinners ;
but Christ, the Soul of man, never suffered." She taught that
" Had the Master utterly conquered the belief of Life in matter,
He would not have felt their infirmities, but," she continued,
" He had not yet risen to this His final demonstration."
The death on the cross is interpreted as a " demonstration "
of " science." " He r armitted them the opportunity to destroy
His body mortal, chat He might furnish the proof of His
immortal body m corroboration of what He taught, that the
Life of man was God, and that body and Soul are inseparable.
. . . Neither spear nor cross could harm Him; let them think
to kill the body, and, after this, He would convince those He
had taught this science, He was not dead, and possessed the
same body as before. Why His disciples saw Him after the
burial, when others saw Him not, was because they better under
stood His explanations of the phenomenon." Christ had " tri-
196 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
umphed over sense, and sat down at the right hand of the
Father, having solved being on its Principle."
The atonement received a new interpretation. Atonement
means " at-one-ment " with God, Mrs. Glover said. " Jesus
of Nazareth explained and demonstrated his oneness with the
Father, for which we owe Him endless love and homage." But
that is all. There was no sacrifice on Calvary. Christ's mis
sion was to show us how to forsake the belief .of life in matter,
" but not to do it for us, or to relieve us of a single responsi
bility in the case." " ' Work out your own salvation,' is the
demand of Life and Love," said Mrs. Glover, " and to this end
God worketh with you."
Prayer, as commonly practised, had no place in Mrs. Glover's
religion, in which God is Principle and not Person. " To ad
dress Deity as a Person," she said, " impedes spiritual progress
and hides Truth." " Prayer is sometimes employed, like a
Catholic confession, to cancel sin, and this impedes Christianity.
Sin is not forgiven ; we cannot escape its penalty. . . . Suffer
ing for sin is all that destroys it." " When we pray aright,
we shall . . . shut the door of the lips, and in the silent sanctu
ary of earnest longings, deny sin and sense, and take up the
cross, while we go forth with honest hearts, labouring to reach
Wisdom, Love, and Truth."
Mrs. Glover gave a spiritual interpretation of the Lord's
prayer, converting it from a supplication to an affirmation of
the properties of the Deity as she conceived them:
Harmonious and eternal Principle of man,
Nameless and Adorable Intelligence,
Spiritualise man;
Control the discords of matter with the harmony of Spirit.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 197
Give us the understanding of God,
And Truth will destroy sickness, sin, and death, as it destroys the belief
of intelligent matter,
And lead man into Soul, and deliver him from personal sense,
For God is Truth, Life, and Love forever. 7
When Science and Health was first published, Mrs. Glover
believed that church organisations, church buildings, and
" creeds, rites, and doctrines," were obstructions to spiritual
growth. " We have no need of creeds and church organisa
tions." " The mistake the disciples of Jesus made to found
religious organisations and church rites, if indeed they did
this, was one the Master did not make." " No time was lost
by our Master in organisations, rites, and ceremonies, or in
proselyting for certain forms of belief." " We have no record
that forms of church worship were instituted by our great
spiritual teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, ... a magnificent edifice
was not the sign of Christ's church." " Church rites and cere
monies have nothing to do with Christianity . . . they draw
us toward material things . . . away from spiritual Truth."
" Worshipping in temples made with hands ... is not the true
worship." " The soft palm upturned to a lordly salary, and
architectural power making dome and spire tremulous with
' This prayer has been re-interpreted in the successive editions of Science
and Health, and in the last edition (1909) it reads as follows, the lines alter
nating with the Lord's Prayer as given in the New Testament :
Our Father which art in heaven,
Our Father-Mother God, all Harmonious,
Hallowed he thy name,
Adorable One,
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy Kingdom is come; Thou art ever present.
Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
Enable us to know, as in Heaven, so on earth, God is omnipotent, supreme.
Give us this day our daily bread ;
Give us grace for today; feed the famished affections;
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors ;
And Love is reflected in Jove;
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil ;
And God leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth us from sin, disease,
and death.
For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.
For God is infinite, all power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all and All.
198 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
beauty, that turns the poor and stranger from the gate, shuts
the door on Christianity." " The man of sorrows was not in
danger from salaries or popularity." 8
Mrs. Glover's theory of the origin of disease was based upon
Quimby's science of health. Her fundamental proposition was,
like Quimby's, that mind is the only causation, and that disease,
as well as all other disharmonies of man, is due to man's stead
fast belief that his body contains certain properties over which
his mind has no control. But, enlarging upon the Quimby
theory, Mrs. Glover declared that the body itself is a mere
supposition which mankind has imagined for itself and has
come to believe in implicitly. Starting from her standpoint
that man is an immortal, spiritual being, having a form, it is
true, as he at present believes, but that form being a " sensa-
tionless body," an inanimate figure, which may live, breathe,
and move, not in accordance with any laws of its own, but
in response only to the will of its owner, who is Spirit, Mrs.
Glover argued that this spiritual body of man cannot see,
hear, feel, smell, or taste, except as Spirit desires. He can
not think, or reason, or perform any of the physical or mental
functions commonly attributed to man, only as Spirit wills.
Spirit, in her idea, is the man. The body is the mere instru
ment of Spirit.
This Spirit, which governs the body and owns it, is not
an individual spirit. There are not just so many bodies and an
equal number of spirits to govern them. Spirit, as described,
8 Since 1875 Mrs. Eddy's ideas of church buildings and church organisations
have been considerably broadened. Her organised churches are now more than
six hundred in number, nnd her congregations worship in costly temples, and
have a very complete ecclesiastical system ; and the founder of the church and
the head of the entire church system is Mrs. Eddy herself.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 199
is singular, general, and pervasive; and mankind, as well as
trees, animals, and all phenomena, is simply the furniture of
the universe, made for the use and convenience of universal
Spirit. These sensationless bodies of Spirit were not very
clearly defined, but in some places in her book Mrs. Glover said
that they are " immortal " and " indestructible."
It follows that this sensationless body cannot, by any possi
bility, know, of and by itself, either sickness or health. It
can have no sensation whatever, and in Mrs. Glover's system,
this spiritual man, whose body is sensationless, is the only man
that exists. Man, as we know him, a combination of brain,
nerves, muscle, etc., is that false, hereditary image of physical
life which we inherited from Adam. Along with our belief in
this physical body, we have inherited a deeply-rooted conviction
that this mythical body is capable of certain sensations, such
as sight, hearing, etc., and is susceptible to the influences of
the mythical physical conditions about it. This belief has given
rise to other beliefs, and the result is that man has invented
a very intricate and complicated system of physical life, giving
names and attributes to various parts of his body, and clothing
it and feeding it, in the belief that it requires clothes and food
for comfort and nourishment. And, most remarkable of all,
he has come to believe that his body can be sick, and can suffer
from a derangement of its parts. Labouring under this de
lusion, man has imagined that, by administering certain rem
edies to his body, this mythical body will be pleased, and will
often consent to get well. If not, if man believes very firmly
that his body is very sick, and that it cannot get well, then
the remedies do not please his body and it will not consent
800 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
to get well. Then man becomes convinced that his body ceases,
of its own volition, to live, and that it is then dead and has
no longer power to see, smell, hear, think, or suffer. He be
lieves also that his spirit, which he imagined had been imprisoned
within his body, is, by the death of his body, set free, and
that it then goes off to a world inhabited by other spirits of
other dead bodies, and there continues to dwell.
This, according to Science and Health, is the status of
" material mankind " to-day. The mission of Jesus Christ
was to lead man back to the way of Truth and to restore to
him his rightful spiritual character and the power over his
body and over all created things. But the work of Christ was
incomplete. Although He gave His message, and made His
demonstration, He could not finish His task because of " the
materiality of the age " in which He lived. He practised and
taught Christian Science, and Mrs. Glover went so far as to
call Him its " pioneer " ; but He left no written statement of
its theory, no text-book, and no formula? by which His disciples
could permanently confound disease. That was left to Mrs.
Glover, who, after centuries of ignorance, and when the world
had lost sight of the real mission of its Saviour, appeared to
" this age " to teach and demonstrate and write all Truth in
its fulness.
In applying her principle to the present material conditions,
Mrs. Glover was emphatic and radical ; and it must be admitted
that her discussions showed a wonderfully scant knowledge of
matters that are merely temporary and mortal. This, however,
in the light of her science, would have been considered a proof
of her fitness for the task of demolishing mortality, for Mrs.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 201
Glover came, not to save, but to destroy all man-made knowledge
and human institutions. In her world of Spirit, knowledge was
an outcast, and the less she knew about what she called the
" 'ologies and 'isms " the clearer and more searching was her
spiritual vision.
If man would get out of his material state and into the realm
of Spirit and Intelligence, he must first, she told him, unlearn
all that he had learned. All knowledge is harmful, particularly
a knowledge of physiology, for it creates false beliefs, and, like
obedience to " the so-called laws of health," it multiplies diseases
and increases the death rate. Materia medica, physiology,
hygiene, and drugs were the deadliest enemies to Mrs. Glover's
science. The hardly-won knowledge of the physical scientists
was, she declared, the densest and most harmful ignorance.
Again and again she repeated, " there is no physical science,"
and taught her readers that all the laws of nature were to be
defied and set at naught. In accordance with his spiritual
nature and origin, man should never admit the belief that he
has a physical body, or that he dwells in a world of matter
which can affect his body. All things are at his command,
and the beliefs of cold, heat, pain, or discomfort, should be
dismissed at once ; and they will disappear. " Why," Mrs.
Glover demanded, " should man bow down to flesh-brush, flannel,
bath, diet, exercise, air, etc. ? " The belief that man requires
food, clothing, and sleep, she said, is strengthened by the doc
tors, and it is the doctors, too, who are principally to blame
for the existence and continuance of disease. Disease is a
habit, and the habit grows more prevalent as education and
enlightenment spread, in proof of which she pointed out that
202 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
there is less sickness among the uncivilised races and among
animals than among the highly cultivated classes. " The less
mind there is manifested in matter, the better. When the un
thinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again." If man would
believe that matter has no sensation " then the human limb
would be replaced as readily as the lobster's claw." " Epizootic
is an educated finery that a natural horse has not." " The
snowbird sings and soars amid the blasts; he has no catarrh
from wet feet."
" Obesity," Mrs. Glover wrote, " is an adipose belief of
yourself as a substance." " All the diseases on earth," said
Science and Health, " never interfered for a moment with man's
Life. Man is the same after, as before a bone is broken, or
a head chopped off." But for the present, Mrs. Glover ad
vised, if such accidents seem to occur one might as well seem
to call a surgeon. " For a broken bone, or dislocated joint,"
she wrote naively, " 'tis better to call a surgeon, until mankind
are farther advanced in the treatment of mental science. To
attend to the mechanical part, a surgeon is needed to-day . . .
but the time approaches when mind alone will adjust joints
and broken bones, if," she added, " such things were possible
then."
Food is not necessary to nourish and sustain the body.
" We have no evidence," said Mrs. Glover, " of food sustaining
Life, except false evidence." " We learn in science food neither
helps nor harms man." Yet Mrs. Glover took care to warn
her readers not to be too radical on this point. " To stop
utterly eating and drinking," she said, " until your belief
changes in regard to these things, were error," and she ad-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
monished them to " get rid of your beliefs as fast as possible."
In treating a patient, who is under the delusion of sickness,
there is a stated method. It must first be thoroughly understood
that his disease has its origin in the mind. His body may seem
to suffer because it is at the mercy of his mind, and as long
as his mind retains " a mental image " of toothache, cancer,
tuberculosis, fever, dyspepsia, or any form of bodily discomfort,
his body will respond and will seem to develop the particular
belief of sickness that is in his mind. The object, then, is to
abolish the mental picture of disease. The Christian Science
healer " in case of decaying lungs, destroys in the mind of his
patient this belief, and the Truth of being and immortality of
man assert themselves . . . and the lungs become sound and
regain their original proportions." The belief in the mind of
the patient is not always easily destroyed, but the healer must
be patient. " When healing the sick," said Mrs. Glover, " make
your mental plea, or better, take your spiritual position that
heals, silently at first, until you begin to win the case, and
Truth is getting the better of error." That is, while the
patient is lying before you, convulsed with pain, you must
retreat within yourself and fight out the disease in a mental
argument with error, contending that there is no pain and
that the patient is deluded. This course, faithfully pursued,
according to Science and Health, will result in an overwhelming
conviction that the patient is not held in the throes of error,
and the disease will begin to subside. " Then your patient is
fit to listen," said Mrs. Glover, " and you can say to him,
' Thou art whole,' without his scorn." She advised the healer
to " explain to him audibly, sometimes, the power mind has
204 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
over body, and give him a foundation ... to lean upon, that
he may brace himself against old opinions." " The battle lies
wholly between minds, and not bodies, to break down the beliefs
of personal sense, or pain in matter, and stop its supposed
utterances, so that the voice of Soul, the immortality of man,
is heard."
As a preventative of disease, Christian Science is equally
effective. " You can prevent or cure scrofula, hereditary dis
ease, etc., in just the ratio you expel from mind a belief in the
transmission of disease, and destroy its mental images ; this will
forestall the disease before it takes tangible shape in mind,
that forms its corresponding image on the body." " When
the first symptoms of disease appear, knowing they gain their
ground in mind before they can in body, dismiss the first mental
admission that you are sick; dispute sense with science, and
if you can annul the false process of law, alias your belief in
the case, you will not be cast into prison or confinement."
" Speak to disease as one having authority over it." " Not to
admit disease, is to conquer it."
One of the signs that the healer's efforts are successful, and
that Truth is working against error in the patient is " chem-
icalisation," which has been previously referred to in this chap
ter. In healing, chemicalisation first shows itself in a violent
aggravation of all the patient's symptoms of disease, but neither
the patient nor the healer should be alarmed at this. It is a
beneficial process, and during it the error or poisonous thought
in the patient's system will be thrown off, and when it is over
the patient will be well.
The patient can be treated just as effectively without the
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 205
bodily presence of his healer, for the healer's mind can work
upon the mind of his patient equally "well, be he absent or present.
Absent treatment is, therefore, regularly practised in Christian
Science.
Despite Mrs. Glover's protest against all " knowledge," she
seemed to admit that her healers should know something of
physiology and materia medica, sufficient, at least, to recog
nise symptoms and to understand the names of both symptoms
and diseases. " When healing mentally," she wrote, " call each
symptom by name, and contradict its claims, as you would a
falsehood uttered to your injury," for " if you call not the
disease by name, when you address it mentally, the body will
no more respond by recovery than a person will reply whose
name is not spoken ; and you can not heal the sick by argument,
unless you get the name of the disease." That is, if a patient
happened to be labouring under the belief that he was afflicted
with yellow fever, and the lay healer, whose knowledge of medical
science is, by the terms of his religion, as limited as he can
possibly make it, did not recognise the disease, and was ignorant
of its name, then the healer could not heal, and Truth would
stand powerless while the patient died of this rare and un
familiar belief.
In the contemplation of death, Mrs. Glover did not weaken
in theory. Death is the great and final test of Christian Sci
ence. It is, she said, " the last enemy to be overcome," and
" much is to be understood before we gain this great point
in science." Healers must " never consent to the death of man,
but rise to the supremacy of spirit." But whether or not they
consent to it, Mrs. Glover recognised that death, although false,
206 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
is, for the present, an incontrovertible fact. " Contemplating
a corpse," she wrote, " we behold the going out of a belief."
One might conclude, from Mrs. Glover's reasoning, that a
" corpse " might be exactly that " immortal " and " sensation-
less " body which belongs to Spirit. The belief of Life in
matter has " gone out." It is as " sensationless " as it is pos
sible to be. Yet the all-powerful and all-pervading Principle,
of which she said so many things, never quickens a " corpse "
nor works its wonders through the dead.
But in spite of her statement that death is " the going out
of a belief," Mrs. Glover said in another passage : " 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."
The system seems altogether hopeless if one attempts to
follow Mrs. Glover's reasoning. If a mortal man's belief in
material life continues even after his mortal and material life
is dissolved, it being all the time understood that " belief,"
" material life," and " mortal man " are one and the same,
then what chance has man to become separated from his belief
in himself? Mrs. Glover had a suspicion that all this was
confusing and tried to help it out. "From the sudden "sur
prise," she wrote, " of finding all that is mortal unreal, . . .
the question arises, who or what is it that believes? "
" God is the only Intelligence, and can not believe because
He understands. . . . Intelligence is Soul and not sense, Spirit
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 207
and not matter, and God is the only Intelligence, and there is
but one God, hence there are no believers ! " That is the an
swer. " So far as this statement is understood, it will be ad
mitted," said Mrs. Glover; and who shall say that she is not
right ?
Among the many incidental ideas which Mrs. Glover added
to Quimbyism is her qualified disapproval of marriage. Quimby
had a large family and saw nothing unspiritual in marriage;
and although Mrs. Glover had twice been married, and became
a wife for the third time a year later, she believed that marriage
had not a very firm spiritual basis. In defining the real pur
pose of marriage she said nothing about children. " To hap-
pify existence by constant intercourse with those adapted to
elevate it, is the true purpose of marriage." " The scientific
morale of marriage is spiritual unity. . . . Proportionately as
human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal har
monious being will be spiritually discerned."
In addition to the development of her " science," Mrs. Glover
described a later discovery in regard to it. Some of her " false
students," she said, were substituting mesmerism for " science "
when healing the sick. The chapters called " Imposition and
Demonstration," and " Healing the Sick," are largely taken
up with an account of how this false doctrine, which is a per
version of Christian Science, originated, and a warning of its
evil effects. This practice of mesmerism was the forerunner
of what she later called " Malicious Animal Magnetism." The
In a chapter called "Wedlock," in Miscellaneous Writings (18971, Mrs.
Eddy, after an evasive discussion of the subject, squarely puts the question :
"Is marriage nearer right than celibacy? Human knowledge inculcates that
it is, while Science indicates that it is not." Also: "Human nature has
bestowed on a wife the right to become a mother ; but if the wife esteems not
this privilege, by mutual consent, exalted and increased affections, she may
win a higher."
208 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
story of its origin and development will be told in the next
chapter.
The book, Science and Health, has, since 1875, been through
nearly five hundred editions. It has been revised and edited
many times since the original version appeared, and there have
been important additions to the doctrine from time to time;
but the first edition contained, in the main, the body of the
Christian Science faith as it is to-day. The first three editions
of Science and Health were marred by bitter personal references
to those whom Mrs. Glover considered her enemies. These de
nunciations were summed up in a chapter called " Demonology,"
which was published in the third edition (see chapter xii).
Mrs. Glover was persuaded by Rev. James H. Wiggin, her
literary adviser, to omit this chapter from later editions, on
the ground that it was libellous. The " Key to the Scriptures "
was added to the book in 1884. It consisted originally of a
" Glossary," in which certain words in the -Bible were given
new meanings through Mrs. Glover's spiritual interpretation.
For example, " death " is said to mean " an illusion " ;
" Mother," should read " God " ; evening is " mistiness of
mortal thought " ; " bridegroom " is " spiritual understanding,"
etc. This glossary was for the use of her students in reading
the Bible. The most conspicuous addition to the doctrine is
contained in the chapter called " Apocalypse," which was first
printed in 1886. In this chapter Mrs. Eddy adopts a belief
similar to the belief the Shakers entertain of their founder,
Ann Lee, namely, that she is the woman referred to in the
Apocalypse, and represents the " feminine principle of Deity."
10 For other similarities to be found between the religious beliefs of the
Shakers and Christian Science, see Appendix C.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 209
From the study of Quimby's theory, as given in chapter iii,
and the foregoing statement of Mrs. Glover's more elaborate
system, as contained in Science and Health, it will be seen
that Quimby's " science of man," as he tried to teach and
practise it, was simply a new way of applying an old truth;
and that Mrs. Glover, in the process of making Quimby's idea
her own, merely added to it certain abnormalities, which, if
universally believed and practised, would make of Christian
Science the revolt of a species against its own physical struc
ture; against its relation to its natural physical environment;
against the needs of its own physical organism, and against
the perpetuation of its kind. But in spite of the radical
doctrines laid down in Science and Health, neither Mrs. Glover
nor her followers attempted to practise them in their daily
lives ; nor do they do so now. In relation to their physical
existence and surroundings, Mrs. Eddy and all Christian Scien
tists live exactly as other people do; and while they write and
teach that physical conditions should be ignored, and the seem
ing life of the material world denied, they daily recognise their
own mortality, and have a very lively sense of worldly thrift
and prosperity. Mrs. Eddy's philosophy makes a double ap
peal to human nature, offering food both to our inherent
craving for the mystical and to our desire to do well in a worldly
way, and teaching that these extremes are not incompatible in
" science." Indeed, as one of the inducements offered to pur
chasers of the first edition of Science and Health, Mrs. Glover
advertised it as a book that " affords opportunity to acquire a
profession by which you can accumulate a fortune," and in the
book itself she said that " Men of business have said this science
210 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
was of great advantage from a secular point of view." And
in later and more prosperous days Mrs. Eddy ha's written in
satisfied retrospect : " In the early history of Christian Science
among my thousands of students few were wealthy. Now,
Christian Scientists are not indigent ; and their comfortable
fortunes are acquired by healing mankind morally, physically,
and spiritually." Whatever may be the Christian Science
theories regarding the nothingness of other forms of matter,
the various forms of currency continue to appear very real
to the spiritualised vision of its followers. Mrs. Eddy insists
that her healers shall be well paid. The matter of payment
has, she thinks, an effect upon the patient who pays. She
says : " Christian Science demonstrates that the patient who
pays what he is able to pay is more apt to recover than he
who withholds a slight equivalent for health." Worldly pros
perity, indeed, plays an important part in the Christian Science
religion to-day. It is, singularly enough, considered a sign
of spirituality in a Christian Scientist. Poverty is believed
to be an error, like sin, sickness, and death ; " and Christian
Scientists aim to make what they call their " financial demon
stration " early in their experience. A poor Christian Scientist
is as much of an anomaly as a sick Christian Scientist.
11 We were demonstrating over a lack of means, which we had learned was
just as much a claim of error to be overcome with Truth as ever sickness
or sin was. Contributor to the Christian Science Journal, September, 1898.
The lack of means is a lupine ghost sired by the same spectre as the lack
of health, and both must be met and put to flight by the same mighty means of
our spiritual warfare. Contributor to the Christian Science Journal, October,
1904.
CHAPTER XII
MRS. EDDY'S BELIEF THAT SHE SUFFERED FOR THE SINS OF OTHERS
LETTERS TO STUDENTS THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT
OF MALICIOUS ANIMAL MAGNETISM A REVIVAL OF WITCH
CRAFT
Indeed, one of the most primitive and fundamental shapes which the
relation of cause and effect takes in the savage mind, is the assumed con
nection between disease or death and some malevolent personal agency. . . .
The minds of civilised people have become familiar with the conception of
natural law, and that conception has simply stifled the old superstition as
clover chokes out weeds. . . . The disposition to believe was one of the
oldest inheritances of the human mind, while the capacity for estimating
evidence in cases of physical causation is one of its very latest and most
laborious acquisitions. JOHN FISKE.
AT the beginning of 1877, her seventh year as a teacher
in Lynn, Mrs. Eddy and her Science were little known outside
of Essex County, though the first edition of Science and Health
had been published more than a year before, and the author
was busy preparing a second edition. Her loyal students,
however, believed that she was on the way to obtain wider
recognition. Miss Dorcas Rawson, Mrs. Miranda Rice, and
Daniel Spofford laboured unceasingly for her interests. Mr.
Eddy, immediately upon his marriage, withdrew from practice,
dropping the patients he had taken over from Mr. Spofford, and
devoted himself entirely to his wife's service. Three days after
her marriage Mrs. Eddy wrote to one of her students concerning
Mr. Eddy : " I feel sure that I can teach my husband up to a
2U
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
higher usefulness, to purity, and the higher development of all
his latent noble qualities of head and heart."
In spite of the frequent jars and occasional lawsuits between
Mrs. Eddy and her students, new candidates for instruction
were constantly attracted by the Science taught at Number 8
Broad Street, where the large sign, " Mary B. Glover's Chris
tian Scientists' Home " still aroused the curiosity of the
stranger.
The Christian Science faith has, from the beginning, owed
its growth to its radical principle that sickness of soul and
body are delusions which can be dispelled at will, and that the
natural state of the human creature is characterised by health,
happiness, and goodness. The message which Mrs. Eddy
brought to Lynn was substantially that God is not only all-
good, all-powerful, and all-present, but that there is nothing
but God in all the Universe; that evil is a non-existent thing,
a sinister legend which has been handed down from generation
to generation until it has become a fixed belief. Mrs. Eddy's
mission was to uproot this implanted belief and to emancipate
the race from the terrors which had imprisoned it for so many
thousands of years. " Ye shall know the Truth," she said,
" and the Truth shall make you free."
Yet Mrs. Eddy herself was not always well, was not always
happy. She used at first to account for this seeming incon
sistency by explaining that she bore in her own person the ills
from which she released others. When sick or distraught, Mrs.
Eddy frequently reminded her students that Jesus Christ was
bruised for our transgressions and bore upon His shoulders
the sin and weakness of the world He came to save. She
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
apparently did not realise that Christ, by the very act of His
atonement, admitted the reality of sin, while she, having denied
its existence, had forfeited any logical right to suffer because
of it. The missionary who frees the savage from the fear of
demons and witchcraft, and the nurse who assures the child
that there is no evil thing lurking for him in the dark, do not
suffer from the enlightenment they bring, and they do not
assume the fear which the child casts off. Mrs. Eddy, on the
contrary, for many years believed that she herself suffered
from the torturing belief she had taken away from others. The
reader will remember that in 1863 Mrs. Eddy wrote to Dr.
Quimby that while treating her nephew, Albert Tilton, to rid
him of the habit of smoking, she herself felt a desire to smoke.
By 1877 Mrs. Eddy not only believed that she suffered from
the physical ills from which her students were released, but
declared that her students followed her in thought and selfishly
took from her to feed their own weakness. The work upon the
second edition of her book could not go on because they nour
ished themselves upon her and sapped her powers.
By the 1st of April, three months after her marriage to
Mr. Eddy, she was almost in despair, and on April 7th she
wrote one of her students : " I sometimes think I can not hold
on till the next edition is out. Will you not help me so far as
is in your power, in this way? Take Miss Norman, she is an
interesting girl and help her through. She will work for the
cause but she will swamp me if you do not take hold. I am
at present such a tired swimmer, unless you do this I have more
than I can carry at present. Direct your thoughts and every
body's else that you can away from me, don't talk of me."
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
A week later she fulfilled an old threat, and, attended by her
husband, went away for some weeks, leaving no address ;
" driven," as she said, " into the wilderness." She felt that
if her students did not know her whereabouts, their minds could
not <so persistently prey upon hers. The following letter to
Daniel Spofford is postmarked Boston, April 14th, but seems
to have' been written upon the eve of Mrs. Eddy's flight from
Lynn.
DEAR STUDENT This hour of my departure I pick up from the carpet
a piece of paper write you a line to say I am at length driven into the
wilderness. Everything needs me in science, my doors are thronged, the
book lies waiting, but those who call on me mentally in suffering are in
belief killing me ! Stopping my work that none but me can do in their
supreme selfishness; how unlike the example I have left them! Tell
this to Miss Brown, Mr. McLauthlen, Mrs. Atkinson, and Miss Norman 1
but do not let them know they can call on me thus if they are doing this
ignorantly and if they do it consciously tell McLauthlen and them all
it would be no greater crime for them to come directly and thrust a
dagger into my heart they are just as surely in belief killing me and
committing murder.
The sin lies at their door and for them to meet its penalty sometime.
You can teach them better, see you do this.
O! Harry, 2 the book must stop. I can do no more now if ever. They
lay on me suffering inconceivable. MARY.
If the students will continue to think of me and call on me, I shall at
last defend myself and this will be to cut them off from me utterly in
a spiritual sense by a bridge they cannot pass over and the effect of
this on them they will then learn.
I will let you hear from me as soon as I can bear this on account of my
health; and will return to prosecute my work on the Book as soon as I
can safely. I am going far away and shall remain until you will do
your part and give me some better prospect.
Ever truly,
MARY.
1 Four of Mrs. Eddy's students. Miss Brown was an invalid of Ipswich. Miss
Norman was also of Ipswich, and a friend of Miss Brown. Mrs. Atkinson was
the wife of Mayor Atkinson of Newburyport. Mr. George T. McLauthlen was
a manufacturer of machinery in Boston.
2 Mr. Spofford's Christian name is Daniel Harrison. Mrs. Eddy always called
him " Harry."
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 215
Mrs. Eddy believed that her students not only depended upon
her for their own moral and physical support, but that, when
treating their patients, their minds naturally turned to her,
in whom dwelt the healing principle, and unconsciously coupled
her in thought with the ill of the patient, which was thus trans
ferred to her.
Even after she had escaped into solitude, the book progressed
but slowly, and she complained that whenever she had succeeded
in concentrating herself upon her work, the beliefs (illnesses)
of other people would seize her " as sensibly as a hand." From
Boston, shortly after her departure, she wrote to a trusted
student one of those incoherent letters which indicate the ex
citement under which Mrs. Eddy sometimes laboured.
April, 1877, Sunday.
DEAR STUDENT: I am in Boston to-day feeling very very little better
for the five weeks that are gone. I cannot finish the Key 3 yet I will
be getting myself and all of a sudden I am seized as sensibly by some
others belief as the hand could lay hold of me my suiferings have made
me utterly weaned from this plane and if my husband was only willing
to give me up I would gladly yield up the ghost of this terrible earth
plane and join those nearer my Life. . . . Cure Miss Brown 4 or I
shall never finish my book. Truly yrs. M.
A letter to Mr. Spofford, written a week after she left
Lynn, and postmarked Fair Haven, Conn., shows that despite
her sufferings she was eagerly planning for the second edition
of her book and that, notwithstanding the cold reception of
the first edition, her faith in its ultimate success was unshaken.
April 19, 1877.
MY DEAR STUDENT, ... I will consider the arrangement for em
bellishing the book. I had fixed on the picture of Jesus and a sick man
the hand of the former outstretched to him as in rebuke of the disease;
3 Key to tlie Scriptures.
4 The student from Ipswich referred to in the preceding letter.
216 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
or waves and an ark. The last will cost less I conclude and do as well.
No rainbow can be made to look right except in colours and that cannot
be conveniently arranged in gilt. Now for the printing would 480 pages
include the Key to Scriptures and the entire work as it now is? The
book entitled Science and Health is to embrace the chapter on Physiology
all the same as if this chapter was not compiled in a separate volume;
perhaps you so understand it. If the cost is what you stated, I advise
you to accept the terms for I am confident in the sale of two editions
more there can be a net income over and above it all. If I get my health
again I can make a large demand for the book for I shall lecture and
this will sell one edition of a thousand copies (if I can stand it). I am
better, some. One circumstance I will name. The night before I left,
and before I wrote you those fragments, Miss Brown went into con
vulsions from a chemical, was not expected to live, but came out of it
saying she felt perfectly well and as well as before the injury supposed
to have been received. I thought at that time if she was not " born
again " the Mother would die in her labours. O, how little my students can
know what it all costs me. Now, I thank you for relieving me a little
in the other case, please see her twice a week; in healing you are benefitting
yourself, in teaching you are benefitting others. I would not advise you
to change business at present the rolling stone gathers no moss; persevere
in one line and you can do much more than to continually scatter your
fire. Try to get students into the field as practitioners and thus healing
will sell the book and introduce the science more than aught but my
lecturing can do. Send the name of any you can get to study for the
purpose of practising and in six months or thereabouts we will have them
in the field helping you. If you have ears to hear you will understand.
Send all letters to Boston. T. O. Gilbert will forward them to me at
present.
Now for the writings you named. I will make an agreement with you
to publish the book the three years from the time you took it and have
twenty-five per cent royalty paid me; at the end of this period we will
make other arrangements or agreements or continue those we have made
just as the Spirit shall direct me. I feel this is the best thing for the
present to decide upon. During these years we shall have a treasurer
such as we shall agree upon and the funds deposited in his or her hands
and drawn for specified purposes, at the end of these three years if we
dissolve partnership the surplus amount shall be equally divided between
us; and this is the best I can do. All the years I have expended on that
book, the labour I am still performing, and all I have done for students
and the cause gratuitously, entitle me to some income now that I am
unable to work. But as it is I have none and instead am sued for $2,700 5
B Reference to George W. Barry's suit for payment for services rendered.
See Chapter X.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
for what? for just this, I have allowed my students to think I have no
rights, and they can not wrong me !
May God open their eyes at length.
If you conclude not to carry the work forward on the terms named,
it will have to go out of edition as I can do no more for it, and I believe
this hour is to try my students who think they have the cause at heart
and see if it be so. My husband is giving all his time and means to help
me up from the depths in which these students plunge me and this is all
he can do at present. Please write soon.
As ever,
MARY.
Send me the two books that are corrected and just as soon as you
can, and I with Gilbert will read them. 6
Please tell me if you are going to have the chapter on Physiology in a
book by itself that I may get the preface ready as soon as I am able.
I do nothing else when I have a day I can work. Will send you the
final corrections soon.
Think of me when you feel strong and well only, and think only of me
as well
Ever yrs. in
Truth
MABY.
It is an interesting fact that, however incoherent Mrs. Eddy
became in other matters, she was never so in business. Through
hysteria and frantic distress of mind, her shrewd business sense
remained alert and keen. When, upon receipt of this letter,
Mr. Spofford wrote her that he did not see how he could pay
all the cost of printing, advertising, and putting the second
edition upon the market, and still pay Mrs. Eddy her twenty-
five cent, royalty upon each copy sold, she replied to him that
her work upon the book would more than offset his invested
capital :
" The conditions I have named to you," she wrote, " I think
are ju$t. I give three years and more to offset the capital
6 Mr. Spofford had agreed to mark the typographical and other errors in
two copies of the first edition of Science and Health.
218 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
you put into printing. . . . Now dear student you can work
as your teacher has done before you, unselfishly, as you wish to
and gain the reward of such labour ; meantime you can be fitting
yourself for a higher plane of action and its reward."
The above letters, with their refrain of dread, seem anomalous
from one who had discovered the secret of health and happiness.
Although she absolutely denied the influence of heredity, Mrs.
Eddy told her students that she had a congenital susceptibility
to assume the mental and physical ills of others. She felt that
such a state was incompatible with a full realisation of the
principles of Christian Science, and in the first edition of Science
and Health she says of Christ:
He bore their sins in his own person; that is, he felt the suffering their
error brought, and through this consciousness destroyed error. Had the
Master utterly conquered the belief of Life in matter, he would not have
felt their infirmities; he had not yet risen to this his final demonstration. 7
Mrs. Eddy believed that she herself in time overcame this
weakness, and says in the edition of 1881 :
In years past we suffered greatly for the sick when healing them, but
even that is all over now, and we cannot suffer for them. But when we
did suffer in belief, our joy was so great in removing others sufferings
that we bore ours cheerfully and willingly. This self-sacrificing love has
never left us, but grows stronger every year of our earth life. 8
Malicious mesmerism, an important addition to Mrs. Eddy's
Science, was developed gradually, almost by chance. Even the
most haphazard philosopher is likely at some time to have to
account for the element of evil, but Mrs. Eddy came to do so
purely through the exigencies of circumstances, and was quite
unconscious that she was repeating history. She added to her
7 Science and Health (1875), p. 130.
8 Science and Health (1881), chapter vi. p. 38.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 219
philosophy from time to time, to meet this or that emergency,
very much as a householder adds an ell or a wing to accom
modate a growing family. Christian Science as it stands to
day is a kind of autobiography in cryptogram; its form was
determined by a temperament, and it retains all the convolutions
of the curiously duplex personality about which it grew.
When Richard Kennedy left Mrs. Eddy in 1872, she was
confronted by a trying situation. It was inconceivable to her
that, having broken away, he should not try to harm her, and
she felt that his very popularity put her in the wrong. The
means with which Mrs. Eddy met emergencies were often, in
deed almost always, in themselves ill-adapted to her ends; but
she had a truly feminine adroitness in making the wrong tool
serve. When she thought it necessary to discredit Mr. Kennedy
and to demonstrate that his success was illegitimate, she caught
up the first weapon at hand, which happened to be mesmerism.
Mesmerism loomed large in Mrs. Eddy's vision just then, for
only a few months before Wallace W. Wright had published
a number of articles in the Lynn Transcript, asserting that the
Science taught by Mrs. Eddy was identical with mesmerism.
She had been obliged to confess that there was an outward
similarity. Here was the solution, ready made. When Ken
nedy left her, he left true Metaphysics behind. How, then,
could he still succeed? By mesmerism, that dangerous counter
feit which so resembled the true coin. Mrs. Eddy thus ex
plained her discovery:
Some newspaper articles falsifying the science, calling it mesmerism,
etc., but especially intended, as the writer informed us, to injure its
author, precipitated our examination of mesmerism in contradistinction
l .o our metaphysical science of healing based on the science of Life. Filled
220 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
with revenge and evil passions, the mal-practitioner can only depend on
manipulation, and rubs the heads of patients years together, fairly in
corporating their minds through this process, which claims less respect
the more we understand it, and learn its cause. Through the control this
gives the practitioner over patients, he readily reaches the mind of the
community to injure another or promote himself, but none can track his
foul course. 9
Without a doubt Mrs. Eddy had speculated somewhat upon
the possibility of a malignant use of mind power before Ken
nedy's separation from her, but she never got very far with
abstractions until she had a human peg to hang them on. Her
indignation against Kennedy gave her reflections upon the
subject of malignant mind power a vigorous impetus, and she
fell to work to develop the converse of her original proposition
with almost as much fervour and industry as she had bestowed
upon the proposition itself. She thus explained her discovery
of Kennedy's " malpractice " :
Some years ago, the history of one of our 10 young students, as known
to us and many others, diverged into a dark channel of its own, whereby
the unwise young man reversed our metaphysical method of healing, and
subverted his mental power apparently for the purposes of tyranny
peculiar to the individual. A stolid moral sense, great want of spiritual
sentiment, restless ambition, and envy, embedded in the soil of this student's
nature, metaphysics brought to the surface, and he refused to give them
up, choosing darkness rather than light. His motives moved in one groove,
the desire to subjugate; a despotic will choked his humanity. Carefully
veiling his character, through unsurpassed secretiveness, he wore the mask
of innocence and youth. But he was young only in years; a marvelous
plotter, dark and designing, he was constantly surprising us, and we half
shut our eyes to avoid the pain of discovery, while we struggled with the
gigantic evil of his character, but failed to destroy it. ... The second
year of his practice, when we discovered he was malpractising, and told
him so, he avowed his intention to do whatever he chose with his mental
power, spurning a Christian life, and exulting in the absence of moral
Science and Health (1875), p. 375.
"Throughout this chapter on Demonology Mrs. Eddy uses the editorial "we"
In referring to herself. Mr. Eddy is designated as " our husband."
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 221
restraint. The sick clung to him when he was doing them no good, and
he made friends and followers with surprising rapidity, but retained them
only so long as his mesmeric influence was kept up and his true character
unseen. The habit of his misapplication of mental power grew on him
until it became a secret passion of his to produce a state of mind de
structive to health, happiness, or morals. . . . His mental malpractice
has made him a moral leper that would be shunned as the most prolific
cause of sickness and sin did the sick understand the cause of their
relapses and protracted treatment, the husband the loss of his wife, and
the mother the death of her child, etc. 11
Mrs. Eddy had always been able to wring highly-coloured
experiences from the most unpromising material, and she never
accomplished a more astonishing feat than when she managed
to see a melodramatic villain in Richard Kennedy. Her hatred
of Kennedy was one of the strongest emotions she had ever felt,
really a tragic passion in its way, and since the cheerful, ener
getic boy who had inspired it was in no way an adequate
object, she fell to and made a Kennedy of her own. She fash
ioned this hypothetical Kennedy bit by bit, believing in him
more and more as she put him together. She gave him one
grisly attribute after another, and the more terrible she made
her image, the more she believed in it and hated and feared
it ; and the more she hated and feared it, the more furiously she
wrought upon it, until finally her creation, a definite shape of
fear and hatred, stood by her day and night to harry and tor
ment her.
Without Malicious Mesmerism as his cardinal attribute, the
new and terrible Kennedy could never have been made. It was
like the tragic mask which presented to an Athenian audience
an aspect of horror such as no merely human face could wear.
By a touch really worthy of an artist Mrs. Eddy made the
11 Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 2.
222 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
boy's youth, agreeable manner, and even his fresh colour con
ducive to a sinister effect. Given such a blithe and genial
figure, and suppose in him a power over the health and emo
tions of other people, and a morbid passion for using it to the
most atrocious ends, and you have indeed the young Nero,
which title Mrs. Eddy so often applied to Kennedy.
Mrs. Eddy feared this imaginary Kennedy as only things
born of the imagination can be feared, and dilated upon his
corrupt nature and terrible power until her new students, when
they met the actual, unconscious Kennedy upon the street, shud
dered and hurried away. During the sleepless nights which
sometimes followed an outburst of her hatred, Mrs. Eddy would
pace the floor, exclaiming to her sympathetic students : " Oh,
why does not some one kill him? Why does he not die? "
She afterward wrote of him :
Among our very first students was the mesmerist aforesaid, who has
followed the cause of metaphysical healing as a hound follows his prey,
to hunt down every promising student if he cannot place them in his track
and on his pursuit. Never but one of our students was a voluntary mal-
practitioner ; he has made many others. . . . This malpractitioner tried
his best to break down our health before we learned the cause of our
sufferings. It was difficult for us to credit the facts of his malice or to
admit they lie within the pale of mortal thought."
To Richard Kennedy and his mesmeric power Mrs. Eddy
began to attribute, not only her illnesses, but all her vexations
and misfortunes ; any lack of success in her ventures, any
difficulties with her students.
In the famous chapter on Demonology she enumerates a long
list of friends whose warm regard for her was destroyed by
Kennedy's mesmeric power. " Our lives," she writes, " have
"Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 34.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 223
since floated apart down the river of years." She charges this
" mental assassin " with even darker crimes.
The husband of a lady who was the patient of this malpractitioner
poured out his grief to us and said: "Dr. K has destroyed the happiness
of my home, ruined my wife, etc."; and after that, he finished with a double
crime by destroying the health of that wronged husband so that he died.
We say that he did these things because we have as much evidence of it
as ever we had of the existence of any sin. The symptoms and circumstances
of the cases, and the diagnosis of their diseases, proved the unmistakable
fact. His career of crime surpasses anything that minds in general can
accept at this period. We advised him to marry a young lady whose
affection he had won, but he refused; subsequently she was wedded to
a nice young man, and then he alienated her affections from her husband. 11
The real Richard Kennedy must not be confounded with the
smiling Elagabalus of Mrs. Eddy's imagination. While she
was perfecting her creation, the flesh-and-blood Kennedy was
establishing an enviable record for uprightness, kindliness, and
purity of character. In 1876 he became prosperous enough
to move his office to Boston. There he was, as he had been in
Lynn, an active agent for good. He had made many friends
and had built up a good practice, when, in 1881, in the third
edition of Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy broke forth into that
tirade of invective which she called " Demonology " the flower
of nine years of torturing hatred. Kennedy's old friends in
Lynn were stirred to mirth rather than indignation when a
passage like the following was applied to a man whose amiability
was locally proverbial:
The Nero of to-day, regaling himself through a mental method with
the tortures of individuals, is repeating history, and will fall upon his
own sword, and it shall pierce him through. Let him remember this when,
in the dark recesses of thought, he is robbing, committing adultery, and
13 Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 6.
224 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
killing; when he is attempting to turn friend away from friend, ruthlessly
stabbing the quivering heart; when he is clipping the thread of life,
and giving to the grave youth and its rainbow hues; when he is turning
back the reviving sufferer to her bed of pain, clouding her first morning
after years of night; and the Nemesis of that hour shall point to the
tyrant's fate, who falls at length upon the sword of justice. 14
In the beginning, then, Malicious Mesmerism was advanced
merely as a personal attribute of Richard Kennedy, and was a
means by which Mrs. Eddy sought to justify her hatred. In
the first edition of Science and Health, though she usually links
it with some reference to Kennedy, Mrs. Eddy occasionally
refers to mesmerism as an abstract thing, apart from any
personality.
In coming years the person or mind that hates his neighbour, will have
no need to traverse his fields, to destroy his flocks and herds, and spoil
his vines; or to enter his house to demoralise his household; for the
evil mind will do this through mesmerism; and not in propria personce
be seen committing the deed. Unless this terrible hour be met and re
strained by Science, mesmerism, that scourge of man, will leave nothing
sacred when mind begins to act under direction of conscious power.
The sign of the mesmerist, however, the plague spot which
he could not conceal, was " Manipulation " the method which
she had taught Kennedy and afterward repudiated. " Sooner
suffer a doctor infected with smallpox to be about you," she
cries, " than come under the treatment of one who manipulates
his patients' heads." And again, " the malpractitioner can
depend only on manipulation." From 1872 to 1877 Mrs. Eddy
counted many victims of Kennedy's mesmeric power, but charged
no other student with consciously and maliciously practising
mesmerism. In 1877, however, an open rupture occurred be
tween Mrs. Eddy and Daniel Spofford. Now, Mr. Spofford
"Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 38.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 225
was, like Kennedy, a man with a personal following, and his
secession would mean that of his party. Though she never
hated Spofford as bitterly as she hated Kennedy, he was the
second of her seceding students who was deemed important
enough to merit the charge of mesmerism a, charge which
conferred a certain distinction, as only those who had stood in
high places ever incurred it.
But in her book, published only two years before, Mrs. Eddy
had clearly and repeatedly stated that the mesmerist could
" depend only on manipulation," and could always be detected
thereby. Now Mr. Spofford did not manipulate he had been
so soundly taught that he would sooner have put his hands
into the fire. Accordingly, Mrs.' Eddy got out a postscript to
Science and Health. The second edition, which Mr. Spofford
had laboured upon and helped to prepare, was hastily revised
and converted into a running attack upon him, hurried to press,
labeled Volume II., and sent panting after Science and Health,
which was not labeled Volume I., and which had already been
in the world three years. This odd little brown book, with
the ark and troubled waves on the cover, is made up of a
few chapters snatched from the 1875 edition, interlarded
with vigorous rhetoric such as the following apostrophe to
Spofford :
Behold ! thou criminal mental marauder, that would blot out the
sunshine of earth, that. would sever friends, destroy virtue, put out Truth,
and murder in secret the innocent befouling thy track with the trophies
of thy guilt, I say, Behold the " cloud, no bigger than a man's hand,"
already rising in the horizon of Truth, to pour down upon thy guilty
head the hailstones of doom.
The purpose of this breathless little courier a book of 167
226 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
pages in looks very unlike the sombre 480-page volume which
had preceded it was to announce that mesmerism could be
practised without manipulation indeed, that the practice was
more pernicious without a sign than with it. Mrs. Eddy thus
explained her new light upon the subject:
Mesmerism is practised through manipulation and without it. And we
have learned, by new observation, the fool who saith " There is no God "
attempts more evil without a sign than with it. Since " Science and
Health " first went to press, we have observed the 'Crimes of another
mesmeric outlaw, in a variety of ways, who does not as a common thing
manipulate, in cases where he sullenly attempted to avenge himself of
certain individuals, etc. But we had not before witnessed the mal-
practitioner's fable without manipulation, and supposed it was not done
without it; but have learned it is the addenda to what we have described
in a previous edition, but without manipulating the head. 18
Malicious Mesmerism, or Malicious Animal Magnetism, first
conceived as a personal attribute of Richard Kennedy, was
six years later stretched to accommodate Daniel Spofford. By
1881, when the third edition of Science and Health appeared,
a personal animosity had fairly developed into a doctrine, and
Mrs. Eddy was well on the way toward admitting a general
principle of evil a thing she certainly never meant to admit.
She had decided that mesmerism was not merely a trick em
ployed in practice, but a malignant attitude of mind, and that a
person evilly disposed, by merely wishing his neighbour harm,
could bring it to him unless the object of his malice were wise
in Metaphysics and could treat against this evil mind-power.
Unless a man were thus protected by Christian Science, his
enemy might, through Mesmerism or Mortal Mind, bring upon
him any kind of misfortune ; might ruin his business, cause a
13 Science and Health (1878), p. 136.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
rash to break out upon his face, vex his body with grievous
humours, cause his children to hate him and his wife to become
unfaithful.
Having instanced a few cases of the evil workings of the hidden agency
in our midst, our readers may feel an interest to learn somewhat of the
indications of this mental malpractice of demonology. It has no outward
signs, such as ordinarily indicate mesmerism, and its effects are far more
subtle because of this. Its tendency is to sour the disposition, to occasion
great fear of disease, dread, and discouragement, to cause a relapse of
former diseases, to produce new ones, to create dislikes or indifference to
friends, to produce sufferings in the head, in fine, every evil that demon
ology includes and that- metaphysics destroys. If it be students of ours
whom he attacks, the malpractitioner and aforesaid mesmerist tries to
produce in their minds a hatred towards us, even as the assassin puts
out the light before committing his deed. He knows this error would
injure the student, impede his progress, and produce the results of error
on health and morals, and he does it as much for that effect on him as
to injure us. 18
The question is often asked, " How did Mrs. Eddy justify
this evil power with her scheme of metaphysics? If God is all
and all is God, where does Malicious Mesmerism come in? "
The answer is evident; when the original Science of Man, as
she had learned it from Quimby, and as she at first taught it,
no longer met the needs of her own nature, Mrs. Eddy simply
went ahead and added to her religion out of the exuberance
of her feelings, leaving justification to the commentators
and she has rapped them soundly whenever they have attempted
it.
No philosophy which endeavours to reduce the universe to one
element, and to find the world a unit, can admit the existence
of evil unless it admits it as a legitimate and necessary part
of the whole. But the very keystone of Mrs. Eddy's Science
Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, p. 35.
228 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
is that evil is not only unnecessary but unreal. Admitting evil
as a legitimate part of the whole would be to deny that the
whole was good and was God. Admitting evil in opposition
to good would be to deny that good and God were the whole.
Whenever a train of reasoning seemed to be leading to the
wrong place, Mrs. Eddy could always drop a stitch and begin
a new pattern on the other side. Since neither the allness
of God nor the Godhood of all could explain the injuries and
persecutions which she felt were inflicted upon her, she fell back
upon Mortal Mind.
" As used in Christian Science," she says, " animal magnet
ism is the specific term for Error, or Mortal Mind."
Mortal Mind is Mrs. Eddy's explanation of the seeming exist
ence of evil in the world. 17 Whatever seems to be harmful,
sin, sickness, earthquakes, convulsions of the elements, are
due to the influence of Mortal Mind. Now, Mortal Mind, she
says, has no real existence except as a harmful tradition; she
affirms that its very name is a fallacy, and she admits it merely
for the sake of argument. Hence, though there is no such
thing as evil, there is an accumulated belief in evil, a tradition
which overshadows us, as Mrs. Eddy says, " like the deadly
Upas tree." The belief in evil, then, is the only evil that
exists. This belief is Mortal Mind, and Mortal Mind is Mes
merism.
17 Mortal mind includes all evil, disease, and death ; also, all beliefs relative
to the so-called material laws, and all material objects, and the law of sin
and death.
The Scripture says, " The carnal mind (in other words mortal mind) is
enmity against God ; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed
can be.'' Mortal mind is an illusion ; as much in our waking moments as in
the dreams of sleep. The belief that Intelligence, Truth, and Love, are in
matter and separate from God, is an error ; for there is no intelligent evil,
and no power besides God, Good. God would not be omnipotent if there were
in reality another mind creating or governing man or the universe. Miscel
laneous Writings, p. 36, Sixty-sixth Edition (1883-1896).
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
Mrs. Eddy says:
The origin of evil is the problem of ages. It confronts each generation
anew. It confronts Christian Science. The question is often asked, if
God created only the good, whence comes the evil?
To this question Christian Science replies: Evil never did exist as an
entity. It is but a belief that there is an opposite Intelligence to God.
This belief is a species of idolatry, and is not more true or real than
that an image graven on wood or stone is God. 18
But concerning the origin of the belief in evil, Mrs. Eddy
is silent ; and certainly with the belief we are immediately
concerned, since that and that alone "brought death into the
world, and all our woe." The cause of this knot or tangle in
the human consciousness, however, remains unexplained down
to the very last page of the very last edition of Science and
Health.
The Rev. James Henry Wiggin, for some years Mrs. Eddy's
literary adviser, said that " Mesmerism was her Devil," and
it does seem that she has routed Satan from pillar to post
only to be confronted by him at last. By designating evil as
Mortal Mind, and declaring that it was non-existent, Mrs.
Eddy evidently believed herself well rid of it; and she was
bewildered to find that she was still afraid of it, and that it
could do her harm. Unwittingly she was demonstrating Kant's
proposition that " a dream which we all dream together, and
which we all must dream, is not a dream, but a reality."
Mrs. Eddy's method of protecting herself against Malicious
Mesmerism the " adverse treatment " which later became such
a prolific source of scandal in the Christian Science Church
was first practised by her students about 1875. By now mes
merism had become an indispensable household convenience.
18 Miscellaneous Writings (1896) p. 346.
230 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
After she moved into her Broad Street house, Mrs. Eddy had
a long succession of tenants and housekeepers, all of whom
she at first found satisfactory, but against whom she soon had
a grievance. She accused nearly all of them of stealing; of
taking her coal, her blankets, her feather pillows, her silver
spoons, and especially of taking her knives and forks, which
kept magically disappearing like the food to which the clown
sits down in the pantomime. It seemed as if the only way
in which she could keep these knives and forks at all was actually
to hold them in her hands. All this trouble she bitterly ac
credited to Kennedy. People came into her house well disposed
toward her, she said ; he set his mind to work upon their minds,
and in a few days she could see the result. They avoided her,
looked at her doubtfully, and her spoons and pillows began
playing hide and seek again.
Mrs. Eddy talked of Kennedy continually, and often in
her lectures she wandered away from her subject, forgot that
her students were there to be instructed in the power of universal
love, and would devote half the lesson hour to bitter invective
against Kennedy and his treachery. This, of course, made an
unfavourable impression upon new students, and Mrs. Eddy's
advisers, Mr. Spofford, Mrs. Rice, and Miss Rawson, besought
her to control her feeling and not to darken the doctrine of
Divine love by the upbraidings of hatred. When thus advised
she would tell her students how she had withdrawn herself from
the world and laboured night and day through weary years,
" standing alone with God," that she might give this great
truth to men; and how Kennedy had perverted it and put it
to evil uses. Not only did he rob her of her students and set
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
the minds of men against her, she declared, but he pursued her
mind " as a hound pursues its prey," causing her torment,
sleeplessness, and unrest. She explained that even his cures
were made at her expense ; that when standing beside his patients
and " rubbing their heads years together," he took up Mrs.
Eddy in thought, united her mentally with the sick, and cured
them by throwing the burden of their disease upon her. Thus
weighed down by the ills of his patients, she could go no further.
Unless some means were found of protecting her against Ken
nedy, she must sink under his persecution and her mission be
unfulfilled. In this extremity she implored her students to
save her by treating against Kennedy and his power.
Those of Mrs. Eddy's students who did not know Mr. Ken
nedy believed that their teacher was suffering acutely at his
hands. She so wrought upon their sympathies that they actu
ally consented to meet at her house and take part in this treat
ment, which they believed would injure the young man. One
of the faithful students present in the circle would say to the
others :
Now all of you unite yourselves in thought on Kennedy; that he cannot
heal the sick, that he must leave off calling on Mrs. Glover mentally,
that he shall be driven out of practice and leave the town, etc.
Mrs. Eddy was never present at these sessions, and her
students soon discontinued them. One of the number, who used
to meet with the others to treat against Kennedy, explains that
he was unwilling to go on with it because he discovered that
the more he wished evil to Kennedy, the more he felt the pres
ence of evil within himself. He writes that " while thoughts
born of love or its attributes are unlimited in their power to
232 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
help both their author and their object, thoughts born of
malice influence only those who originate them."
Although no open rupture occurred between Mrs. Eddy and
Daniel Spofford until the summer of 1877, by the spring of
1877 Mrs. Eddy's feeling for him had begun to cool. It will
be remembered that she had turned a number of her students
over to Mr. Spofford for instruction in the Interpretation of
the Scriptures. As a teacher, Mr. Spofford proved so popular
that Mrs. Eddy repented the authority she had given him. His
success in practice also made her restive, doubtless one of the
causes which led her to insist upon his turning his practice
over to Asa Gilbert Eddy and devoting his time to pushing the
sale of her book. It would be scarcely fair to draw the con
clusion that Mrs. Eddy resented the success of her students
in itself, but she certainly looked upon it with apprehension
if the student showed any inclination to adopt methods of his
own or to think for himself. Mrs. Eddy required of her stu
dents absolute and unquestioning conformity to her wishes ;
any other attitude of mind she regarded as dangerous. She
often told Mr. Spofford that there was no such thing as devo
tion to the principle of revealed truth which did not include
devotion to the revelator. " I am Wisdom, and this revelation
is mine," she would declare when a student questioned her
decision.
In July, 1877, Mr. Spofford closed out the stock of Science
and Health, which he had received from George H. Barry and
Elizabeth M. Newhall, the students who had furnished the
money to publish the book. Mr. Spofford paid over the money
which he had received for the books, something over six hundred
233
dollars, to these two students, and although Mrs. Eddy had
agreed to ask for no royalty upon the first edition, she was
exceedingly indignant that the money had not been paid to her.
She declared that Mr. Barry and Miss Newhall had advanced
the money to further the cause, and that whatever was realised
from the sale of the first edition should have gone toward
getting out a second. Mr. Spofford told her that if Mr.
Barry and Miss Newhall wished to put the money into a second
edition, there was nothing to prevent their doing so, but that
he had received from them a number of books which were their
property, and he was in duty bound to turn over to them any
money received for the same. Mr. Barry and Miss Newhall
lost over fifteen hundred dollars on the edition, and Mr.
Spofford paid out five hundred dollars of his own money for
advertising and personal expenses, besides giving his time
for several months. Mrs. Eddy made no effort to reimburse
them.
The estrangement thus brought about between Mrs. Eddy and
Mr. Spofford continued until, in January, 1878, Mr. Spofford
was expelled from the Christian Scientists' Association and
received the following notice:
Dr. D. H. Spofford of Newburyport has been expelled from the
Association of Christian Scientists for immorality and as unworthy to be
a member.
Lynn, Jan. 19th, 1878.
Secretary of the Christian Scientists' Association, Mrs. H. N. Kingsbury.
A notice also appeared in the Newburyport Herald, stating
that Daniel H. Spofford had been expelled for alleged immo
rality from the Christian Scientists' Association of Lynn. Mr.
Spofford brought no action against the Association, as he
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
thought the charge would be considered absurd and could do
him no harm.
" Immorality " was a favourite charge of Mrs. Eddy's ; she
insisted it meant that a student had been guilty of disloyalty
to Christian Science. The very special and wholly unauthor
ised meanings which Mrs. Eddy had given to many common
words in writing Science and Health doubtless confirmed her
in the habit of empirical diction. An amusing ins.tance of this
occurred years afterward, when Mrs. Eddy quarrelled witk a
woman prominent in the Mother Church in Boston, and de
clared that she was an adulteress. When the frantic woman
appealed to her to know what in Heavgn's name she meant,
Mrs. Eddy replied gravely, " You have adulterated the Truth ;
what are you, then, but an adulteress ? "
The test of loyalty in a disciple was obedience. " Whosoever
is not for me is against me," Mrs. Eddy declared in an angry
interview with Mr. Spofford. If a student were " against "
her, there could be but one cause for his hardening of heart
Richard Kennedy and Malicious Mesmerism. Mr. Spofford was
amazed, therefore, in the spring of 1878, to find that a bill
had been filed before the Supreme Judicial Court at Salem,
charging him with practising witchcraft upon one of Mrs.
Eddy's former students, Lucretia L. S. Brown of Ipswich.
Lucretia Brown was a spinster about fifty years of age,
who lived with her mother and sister in one of the oldest houses
in Ipswich, facing upon School-house Green. When she was a
child, Miss Brown had a fall which injured her spine, and she
was an invalid for the greater part of her life. Although not
absolutely bedridden, she had often to keep to her bed for
weeks together, and seldom walked further than the church.
She conducted a crocheting agency, taking orders for city
dealers, and giving out piece-work to women in the village who
wished to earn a little pin-money. Miss Lucretia was noted
for her system and her neatness. On certain days of the week
she gave out this crochet work at exactly two o'clock in the
afternoon, and whoever arrived a few minutes early had to
await the stroke of the clock, as Miss Brown was not visible
until then. The women who came for work gathered in the
sitting-room, and one by one they were admitted to Miss Lu-
cretia's sleeping chamber, where she received them in a bed
incredibly white and smooth. They used to wonder how Miss
Lucretia could lie under a coverlid absolutely wrinkleless, and
how she could handle her worsted and give all her directions
without rumpling the smoothness of the turned-back sheet, or
marring the geometrical outline of her pillow. As the candi
date retired from Miss Brown's presence, her bundle of yarn
was sharply eyed by the other women who waited in the sitting-
room, as there was a rumour that Miss Lucretia gave more
work to her favourites than to others, and that they rolled
their worsted up tightly to conceal the evidence of her partiality.
In the matter of good housewifery, the three Brown ladies
were triumphant and invincible. They carried their daintiness
even into their diet, regarding anything heavier than
the most ethereal food as somewhat too virile and indelicate
for their spinster household. The assertion was once made that
Essex was the cleanest county in Massachusetts, and Ipswich
was the cleanest town in Essex, and the Browns were the cleanest
people in Ipswich. Even when Miss Lucretia was suffering
236 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
from her worst attacks and was supposed to be helpless in
bed, she was occasionally discovered late at night, slipping about
the house and " tidying up " under cover of darkness.
Before Miss Lucretia knew Mrs. Eddy and Miss Rawson,
she was a Congregationalist, but after she was healed by
Christian Science she withdrew from her old church. Her cure
was much talked about. After she was treated by Miss Rawson,
she was able to be up and about the house all day and to walk
a distance of two or three miles, whereas before she had made
much ado to call upon a neighbour at the other end of the
Green. After her healing she made some effort to practise upon
other people, but Ipswich folk were slow to quit their family
doctors in favour of the new method.
Miss Brown, however, remained a devout Scientist until her
death in 1883, and up to that time occasionally took a case.
The story goes that she got the cold she died of by airing the
house too thoroughly after having treated one of her patients.
Fifty years of frantic cleanliness were not to be overcome in
an instant ; and although Miss Lucretia well knew that disease
was but a frame of mind, that contagion was a myth, and that
dirt itself was only a " belief," the moment a patient was out
of the house, up went the windows, and the draperies went
out on the clothes-line.
In her last illness she called in her old family physician,
but refused to let him prescribe for her, explaining that she
merely wished him to diagnose her case so that her Christian
Science healer would know what to treat her for. Her death
was as orderly as her life. When she felt that her " belief "
(pneumonia) was gaining on her, she called in her mother and
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 237
sister, talked over her business, and put her affairs in order,
telling them where they would find all her things. When she
had given all her directions, she asked them if there were any
thing about which they wished to question her. When they
replied in the negative, she said, " Good-bye, Mother. Good
bye, Sister," and smoothing once again that never-wrinkled,
turned-back sheet, she folded her hands and almost instantly
died.
In 1878, when Miss Brown believed that Mr. Spofford had
bewitched her, she was a patient of Miss Dorcas Rawson. Miss
Rawson and her sister, Mrs. Rice, it will be remembered, were
among Mrs. Eddy's first students in Lynn. They were daugh
ters of a large family in Maine, and when they were very
young girls came to Lynn to make their way in the shoe shops.
Miranda soon married Mr. Rice and left the factory. After
the two sisters had studied with Mrs. Eddy, Dorcas also left
the factory and became a practising healer. She was as ardent
in her new faith as she had been before in Methodism. While
a Methodist she had been one of a number who " professed
holiness," that is, who felt that in their daily walk they were
so near to God that His presence protected them from even
the temptation to sin. Miss Rawson was a thoroughly good
and unselfish woman, and so earnest and forceful that perhaps
in a later day she would have been called " strong-minded."
However devoted in service, such a firm and independent nature
would almost inevitably clash with Mrs. Eddy's at times, and
Miss Rawson had more than one painful difference with her
teacher. But it was hard for Miss Rawson to give up a friend,
harder than to bear with Mrs. Eddy's unreasonableness. After
238 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
these disagreements she always came back, telling her friends
that she could not endure to be separated from Mrs. Eddy in
spirit, and that, when she was, she felt her health failing
and discouragement threatening to overwhelm her.
When, under her treatment, Miss Brown suffered a relapse,
Miss Rawson, in her perplexity, went to Mrs. Eddy. Mrs.
Eddy had the solution at her tongue's end. Daniel Spofford,
in his general opposition to truth, was exercising upon Miss
Brown his mesmeric arts. Miss Rawson was at first loath to
believe this. Mr. Spofford was an old and trusted friend;
even had he been subsidised by Richard Kennedy, why should
Mortal Mind, as exercised by Mr. Spofford, prevail over Divine
Mind as employed by Miss Rawson? But Mrs. Eddy convinced
her, with her will or against it, and also convinced poor Miss
Brown.
Mr. Spofford's acquaintance with Miss Brown had been slight.
When she was studying with Mrs. Eddy, she, with other stu
dents, had entered his class in the Interpretation of the Scrip
tures. When Miss Brown's health began to fail, he had not
seen her for some months and was ignorant alike of her illness
and the supposed cause of it. After Miss Lucretia had begun
to regard him as the author of her ills, Mr. Spofford was in
Ipswich one day and bethought him of calling upon his old
student. Accordingly he went down to the Green and knocked
at her cottage. Miss Brown herself came to the door and
immediately fell into great agitation. Ordinarily a pale woman,
her cheeks and forehead flushed so hotly that Mr. Spofford
innocently thought that she must be making preserves and had
just come from the stove. She stood for a moment, very ill
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 239
at ease, and, without asking him to come in, begged him to
excuse her and ran back into the house. When she reappeared,
she seemed even more distracted than before, and Mr. Spofford
now felt sure that he had intruded upon some critical moment
in preserve-making, and told her that he would call again when
he next happened to be in Ipswich. He went away, leaving
Miss Brown to wonder whether he had merely come to see how
his victim did, or whether he had come to do her further
harm.
By this time Mrs. Eddy had Mr. Spofford upon her mind
almost as constantly as she had Richard Kennedy. In April,
a month before the charge of witchcraft was made against
him, Mrs. Eddy filed a bill in equity against Mr. Spofford to
recover tuition and a royalty on his practice. This suit was
still pending when the witchcraft case came up, and was dis
missed June 3d because of defects in the writ and insufficient
service. The Newburyport Herald of May 16th, in comment
ing editorially upon the witchcraft case, said : " Mrs. Eddy
tried, some time since, to induce us to publish an attack
upon Spofford, which we declined to do, and we under
stand that similar requests were made to other papers in the
county."
In preparing to prosecute the witchcraft case, Mrs. Eddy
first selected twelve students from the Christian Scientists'
Association she has always been partial to the apostolic num
ber and called on these students to meet her at her house and
treat Mr. Spofford adversely, as other students had formerly
treated Richard Kennedy. She required each of these twelve
students, one after another, to take Mr. Spofford up mentally
240 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
for two hours, declaring in thought that he had no power
to heal, must give up his practice, etc. Mr. Henry F. Dunnels
of Ipswich was one of the chosen twelve. He says in his
affidavit : " When the Spoff ord lawsuit came along, she took
twelve of us from the Association and made us take two hours
apiece, one after the other. She made a statement that this
man Spofford was adverse to her and that he used his mesmeric
or hypnotic power over her students and her students' patients,
and hindered the students from performing healing on their
patients, and we were held together to keep our minds over
this Spofford to prevent him from exercising this mesmeric
power over her students and patients. This twenty-four hours'
work was done in her house."
Having thus prepared her case through the agency of Divine
Mind, Mrs. Eddy next set about making the most of human
devices. She went to her lawyer in Lynn and had him draw
up a bill of complaint in Miss Brown's name, setting forth the
injuries which Miss Brown had received from Mr. Spofford's
mesmeric malice, and petitioning the court to restrain him from
exercising his power and using his arts upon her. The text
of the bill is in part:
Humbly complaining, the Plaintiff, Lucretia L. S. Brown of Ipswich in
said County of Essex, showeth unto your Honours, that Daniel H. Spofford,
of Newburyport, in said County of Essex, the defendant in the above
entitled action, is a mesmerist and practises the art of mesmerism and by
his said art and the power of his mind influences and controls the minds
and bodies of other persons and uses his said power and art for the
purpose of injuring the persons and property and social relations of
others and does by said means so injure them.
And the plaintiff further showeth that the said Daniel H. Spofford
has at divers times and places since the year eighteen hundred and
seventy-five, wrongfully and maliciously and with intent to injure the
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
plaintiff, caused the plaintiff by means of his said power and art great
suffering of body and mind and severe spinal pains and neuralgia and
a temporary suspension of mind, -and still continues to cause the plaintiff
the same. And the plaintiff has reason to fear and does fear that he
will continue in the future to cause the same. And the plaintiff says that
said injuries are great and of an irreparable nature and that she is wholly
unable to escape from the control and influence he so exercises upon her
and from the aforesaid effects of said control and influence.
As Mrs. Eddy's attorney flatly refused to argue the case
in court, she arranged that one of her students, Edward J.
Arens, should do so. At the opening of the Supreme Judicial
Court in Salem May 14, 1878, Mrs. Eddy and Mr. Arens
appeared under power of attorney for Miss Brown, attended
by some twenty witnesses, " a cloud of witnesses," as the Boston
Globe put it in an account of the hearing. When they were
assembled at the railway station in Lynn to take the train for
Salem, one of the witnesses went to Mrs. Eddy and protested
that he knew nothing whatever about the case and would not
know what to say were he called upon to testify. " You will
be told what to say," replied Mrs. Eddy reassuringly.
Having arrived at the Salem Court House, Mrs. Eddy and
her loyal band awaited in the jury-room the entrance of the
chief justice. As soon as Judge Horace Gray had taken his
seat, Mr. Arens arose and presented his petition for a hearing
on the bill of complaint. He then made an exposition of the
case to the Judge, who ordered that an order of notice be
served upon Mr. Spofford, and appointed Friday, May 17th,
for a hearing of the case. Mr. Arens at once took the train
for Newburyport to search for Mr. Spofford, as Mrs. Eddy
feared that he might escape into another State.
Meanwhile the Massachusetts press was making the most of
242 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
the novel legal proceedings at Salem. A reporter from the
Boston Globe called at Miss Brown's house in Ipswich, but was
told that she was away from home. Of this call the Globe
published the following account :
In an interview with a sister of Miss Brown, the latter being out of
town, the lady informed the Globe reporter that she and her family believed
that there was no limit to the awful power of mesmerism, but she still had
some faith in the power of the law, and thought that Dr. Spofford might
be awed into abstaining from injuring her sister further. That he does
so she believes there is no possibility of a doubt. In answer to a query put
by the reporter, she admitted that should Dr. Spofford prove so disposed,
even though he be incarcerated behind the stone walls at Charlestown,
he could still use his mesmeric power against her sister.
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. The case was appealed, and the
appeal waived the following November.
So, after a lapse of nearly two centuries, another charge of
witchcraft was made before the court in Salem village. But
it was an anachronism merely, and elicited such ridicule that
it was hard to realise that, because of charges quite as fanciful,
one hundred and twenty-six persons were once lodged in Salem
jail, nineteen persons were hanged, and an entire community
was plunged into anguish and terror.
During the long years that the grass had been growing and
withering above the graves of Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse
and their wretched companions, one of the most important of
all possible changes had taken place in the world a change
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 243
in the mode of thinking. The work of Descartes, Locke, and
Sir Isaac Newton had become a common inheritance; the rela
tion of physical effect with physical cause had become estab
lished even in ignorant and unthinking minds, and a schoolboy
of 1878 would have rejected as absurd the evidence upon which
Judge Hawthorne condemned a woman like Mary Easty to
death.
Mrs. Eddy's attempt to revive the witch horror was only a
courtroom burlesque upon the grimmest tragedy in New Eng
land history. It is interesting only in that it demonstrates
how surely the same effects follow the same causes. When Mrs.
Eddy had succeeded in overcoming in her students' minds the
tradition of sound reasoning of which they and their century
were the fortunate heirs, when she had convinced them that there
were no physical causes for physical ills, she had unwittingly
plunged them back into the torturing superstitions which it had
taken the world so long to overcome. The capacity for esti
mating evidence in cases of physical causation, which John
Fiske calls " one of the world's latest and most laborious acqui
sitions," once denied, the Christian Scientists had parted with
that rational attitude of mind which is the basis of the health
and sanity of modern life ; which has abolished religious perse
cution as well as controlled contagious disease, and has made
a revival of the witchcraft terror as impossible as a recurrence
of the Black Death. This rational habit of mind once broken
down, two good women like Lucretia Brown and Dorcas Rawson
could suspect a good man of the malice of a fiend. Among this
little group of people who had been friends and fellow-seekers
after God, there broke out, in a milder form, that same scourge
244 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
of fear and distrust which demoralised Salem from 1692 to
1694. In the attempt to bring the glad tidings of emancipa
tion from the operation of physical law, which is sometimes
cruel, Mrs. Eddy had come back to the cruelest of all debasing
superstitions that of attributing disease and misfortune to a
malevolent human agency.
CHAPTER XIII
THE " CONSPIRACY TO MUEDEE " CASE AEEEST OF EDDY AND
AEENS ON A SENSATIONAL CHAEGE HEAEING IN COUET
DISCHAEGE OF THE DEFENDANTS
FEOM 1877 to 1879 Mrs. Eddy was in the law-courts so
frequently that the Boston newspapers began to feature her
litigations and to refer to them and to her with disrespectful
jocularity.
In March, 1877, George W. Barry, 1 one of her students,
brought his suit against Mrs. Eddy for twenty-seven hundred
dollars for services rendered her in copying the manuscript of
Science and Health, attending to her business, storing her goods,
putting down her carpets, working in her garden, and paying
out money for her on various accounts. This suit dragged
on until October, 1879, when it was decided in Barry's favour,
the referee awarding him three hundred and ninety-five
dollars and forty cents, with interest from the date of his
writ.
In February of 1878, Mrs. Eddy brought suit against
Richard Kennedy in the Municipal Court of Suffolk County
to recover seven hundred and fifty dollars upon a promissory
note which bore the date February, 1870, several months previ-
1 A full account of this action was given In Chapter X.
245
248 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
ous to the date upon which Mrs. Eddy and Kennedy went to
Lynn to practise, and which read as follows :
February, 1870.
In consideration of two years' instruction in healing the sick, I hereby
agree to pay Mary M. B. Glover, one thousand dollars in quarterly in
stalments of fifty dollars commencing from this date.
(Signed) RICHARD KENNEDY.
Mr. Kennedy admitted having signed the note, but testified
that when Mrs. Eddy asked him to do so she ?aid that she
would never collect it, and that she wanted the paper simply
to show to prospective students to convince them of the monetary
value of her instruction. He further testified that though, when
he signed the note, he had been studying with Mrs. Glover-Eddy
for two years, he believed at the time that she was withholding
from him the final and most illuminating secrets of her Science,
and that he had reason to believe that, if he complied with her
request in regard to the note, she would disclose them to him.
In his answer he stated that Mrs. Eddy had " obtained the
promissory note declared on by pretending that she had im
portant secrets relating to healing the sick which she had not
theretofore imparted to defendant, and which she promised to
impart after the making and delivery to her of said note, and
she then had no such secrets and never afterward undertook
to impart or imparted such secrets."
The Municipal Court awarded judgment for the plaintiff
of seven hundred and sixty-eight dollars and sixty-three cents,
but the case was carried to the Superior Court and tried before
a jury, which returned a verdict for Mr. Kennedy.
In April, 1878, came Mrs. Eddy's suit against George H.
Tuttle and Charles S. Stanley, two of her earliest students, to
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 247
discover the amount of their practice and to recover a royalty
thereon, which was decided in favour of the defendants. 2
In April, 1878, Mrs. Eddy brought her action against
Daniel Spofford to discover the amount of his practice and
to recover royalty thereon. Her original idea was to collect
a royalty from all her practising students, which arrangement,
could she have held them to it, would, in time, have been very
remunerative. This case was dismissed for insufficient service.
In May of the same year came the witchcraft case, Brown vs.
Spofford, of which Mrs. Eddy was the instigator, and in which
she represented the plaintiff in court.
These lawsuits reached a sensational climax when, in October,
1878, Asa Gilbert Eddy and Edward J. Arens were arrested
on the charge of conspiracy to murder Daniel H. Spofford.
It will be remembered that Mr. Spofford had been one of
the most earnest and trusted of Mrs. Eddy's students. She had
permitted him to assist in her teaching, had given him the pen
with which Science and Health was written, and had intrusted
to him the sale of her book. She seems at one time even to
have considered the possibility of his being her successor.
In a letter dated October 1, 1876, she writes:
My joy at having one living student after these dozen years of struggle,
toil and defeat, you at present cannot understand, but will know at a
future time when the whole labour is left with you. . . . The students
make all their mistakes leaning on me, or working against me. You are
not going to do either, and certainly the result will follow that you will
be faithful over a few things and be made ruler over many.
2 This suit has already been referred to in Chapter IX. From Judge Choate's
finding it would seem that his decision was hased largely on the fact that when
Mrs. Eddy taught Tuttle and Stanley in 1870 she still instructed her students
to " manipulate " the heads of their patients, whereas she later repudiated this
method and declared hefore Judge Choate that it was of no efficacy in healing
the sick, thus discrediting the instruction she had given the defendants.
248 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
She continually consulted Mr. Spofford in the preparation
of the second edition of Science and Health (the little book
which was eventually converted into an intermittent attack upon
him), and in a letter written several weeks after the above
she says:
LYNN, Oct. 22, '76.
Da. SPOFFOED
Dear Student Your interesting letter just read. I am in a condition
to feel all and more than all you said. The mercury of' my mind is rising
as the world's temperature of thought heats up and the little book " sweet
in the mouth " but severe and glorious in its proof, is about to go forth
like Noah's dove over the troubled waves of doubt, infidelity and bigotry,
to find if possible a foothold on earth. ... I have great consolation
in you, in your Christian character that I read yet more and more, the
zeal that should attend the saints, and the patient waiting for our Lord's
coming.
Press on; You know not the smallest portion, comparatively, of your
ability in science. . . . Inflammation of the spinal nerves are what I
suffer most in belief. 8
There was no middle ground with Mrs. Eddy, and it was
her policy to strike before she could be struck. After her
disagreement with Mr. Spofford concerning his disposition of
the money he had received from the sale of her book, she de
nounced him as an enemy to truth, had her students begin
to treat against him, expelled him from the Christian Scientists'
Association, tried to induce the county papers to publish attacks
upon him, and launched two lawsuits at him within a month
of each other. Mrs. Eddy and her husband gave such wide
circulation to the charge that Mr. Spofford had been dishonest
in regard to the sale of the book, that the publishers of the
book felt called upon to publish the following statement:
8 This refers to Mrs. Eddy's continued ill health.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 249
TO THE PUBLIC
Having heard certain malicious statements concerning our business
transactions with Dr. D. H. Spofford of Newburyport, we, the undersigned,
original publishers of " Science and Health," written by Mary Baker
Glover of Lynn, in justice to him desire to correct them. He settled
with us July 25th, 1877, paying several hundred dollars cash and giving
notes (which were promptly taken up when due) for the further amount
of his indebtedness. His account had been carefully examined by counsel
and found correct and satisfactory. We desire to STOP the untruths
which some person or persons have set afloat.
GEORGE W. BARRY,
Jan. 21st, 1878. E. M. NEWHALL,
Mrs. Eddy was now convinced that Spofford was a mesmerist
and openly denounced him as a malpractitioner. 4 Her students
had orders to discredit him as widely as possible, and Mr.
Spofford soon began to see the result of their efforts in the
falling off of his practice. It was Mr. Arens' practice which
Mrs. Eddy was now endeavouring to build up.
Edward J. Arens was a Prussian who had come to Lynn as
a young man, where he worked as a carpenter until he was able
to open a cabinet-making shop. He was a good workman, but
was not particularly successful in his business, and was fre
quently involved in litigation. Although his educational oppor-
4 She thus explained her position in the local press :
" BOTH SIDES
" Mr. EDITOR : We desire to say through the columns of your interesting
weekly, that certain threatening letters received by ourself, and an esteemed
citizen of one of your adjacent towns, had hetter be discontinued.
"These letters are from a Mr. Noyes [Spofford's attorney] of Newburyport,
under orders of D. H. Spofford, who is already prosecuted by us to answer at
a higher tribunal than the prejudice, falsehood or malice, before which some
people would arraign others.
" We have befriended this former student of ours when friendless, we have
effected cures for him professionally, not only in the cases of Mrs. Atkinson,
Miss Tandy, and Miss Ladd. but others, and we did this without any reward,
but to gain some place for him in the public confidence.
" As the founder of a Metaphysical practice, we have a warm interest In
the success of all our students, and have always promoted it, unless compelled
in some especial instances, by a strong sense of our duty to the public, to speak
of a MALPRACTICE.
" AUTHOR OF SCIENCE AND HEALTH.
250 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
tunities had been limited, he had an active mind. He read a
great deal, was restless, eager, and ambitious. When he be
came a student of Mrs. Eddy's, he gave up his cabinet business
and, naturally hot-headed and impulsive, he threw himself into
metaphysical healing with great enthusiasm. He came to Mrs.
Eddy's succour in a critical hour, when she desperately needed
a man who could devote himself effectively to her cause. Mr.
Eddy had never been a man of much initiative, and his terror
of mesmerism had cowed him beyond his natural docility.
By this time Mrs. Eddy's hatred for Mr. Spofford had
reached the acute stage, where it kept her walking the floor
at night, declaring that Spofford's mind was pursuing and
bullying hers, and that she could not shake it off. Mr. Eddy,
a helpless spectator of his wife's misery, used to declare that
the man ought to be punished for persecuting her, and be
lieved that Mr. Spofford's mind was on their track night and
day, seeking to break down Mrs. Eddy's health, to get their
property away from them, and to overthrow the movement.
Mr. Spofford, on the other hand, was scarcely less distraught.
He still believed that Mrs. Eddy had brought him the great
truth of his life, and that, however unworthy, she had a divine
message. He felt his separation from her deeply, and was
amazed and terrified by her vindictiveness. He feared that
Mrs. Eddy would not stop until she had entirely destroyed his
practice, and he never knew what weapon she would use against
him next. Only a state of panic on both sides can explain
the developments of the autumn of 1878.
One morning early in October a heavy-set, rather brutal-
looking man knocked at the door of Mr. Spofford's Boston
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 251
office, Number 297 Tremont Street, and said he wanted to see
the Doctor. Mr. Spofford glanced at the man and, thinking
he was not the sort of person who would be likely to consult
a mental healer, asked him if he were sure that he had come to
the right kind of a doctor. The man introduced himself as
James L. Sargent, a saloon-keeper, took from his pocket a card
which Mr. Spofford had left on the door of his Newburyport
office, and, pointing to the name on it, said that was the doctor
he had come to see. After taking a seat in the consulting-room,
Sargent asked Mr. Spofford whether he knew two men named
Miller and Libby. Mr. Spofford replied that he did not.
" Well, they know you," insisted Sargent, " and they want
to get you put out of the way. Miller, the young man, says
you are going with the old man's daughter and he wants to
marry her himself." Sargent went on to explain that these
two men had offered him five hundred dollars to put Mr. Spof
ford out of the way and had paid him seventy-five dollars in
advance. He declared that, while he meant to get all the money
he could out of it, he had no intention of risking his neck, and
said that he had already notified State Detective Hollis C. Pink-
ham and had asked him to watch the case.
Mr. Spofford immediately called upon Pinkham and found
that Sargent had told him the same story. Pinkham said,
however, that he had paid very little attention to the story, as
Sargent had a criminal record, and he had thought that the
man was up to some game to square himself with the Police
Department. He promised to look into the matter more care
fully, and Mr. Spofford went away.
Several days later Sargent came in and said that Miller and
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Libby were pressing him. He had gone to them for more
money, assuring them that Mr. Spofford was already dead,
but they had sent a young man to Spofford's office to investi
gate, and accused Sargent of playing them false.
Mr. Spofford was now thoroughly alarmed. Sargent sug
gested that he accompany him to his (Sargent's) brother's
house at Cambridgeport and conceal himself there while he
(Sargent) tried to collect the money promised him by Miller
and Libby. Mr. Spofford consulted with Detective Pinkham
and then disappeared. Sargent, so he later declared in
court, informed Miller and Libby, whom he identified as
Edward J. Arens and Asa Gilbert Eddy, that he had dis
posed of Mr. Spofford, whereupon he received a part of the
money promised him. Mr. Spofford left Boston Tuesday, Oc
tober 15th, and remained about two weeks at the house of
Sargent's sister-in-law. Sargent had promised to come out and
give him news of the case, but as he failed to do so, Mr.
Spofford then returned to Boston, going first to his brother's
store in Lawrence. In the meantime his friends had been
greatly alarmed at his disappearance, had advertised him as
missing, and had published a description of him in the Boston
papers.
On October 29th Edward J. Arens and Asa G. Eddy were
arrested and held in three thousand dollars bail for examina
tion in the Municipal Court on November 7th.
As Mrs. Eddy afterward indignantly wrote, " the principal
witnesses for the prosecution were convicts and inmates of
houses of ill fame in Boston." A motley array of witnesses,
certainly, confronted the judge when the Municipal Court con-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 253
vened on the afternoon of November 7th. Sargent was a bar
tender with a criminal record. George Collier, his friend, was,
at that time, under bonds, waiting trial on several most un
savoury charges. Laura Sargent, the sister of James Sargent,
who kept a disorderly house at Number 7 Bowker Street,
appeared with several of her girls, all vividly got up for the
occasion and ingenuously pleased at coming into court in the
dignified role of witnesses for the Commonwealth. Mr. H. W.
Chaplin appeared for the prosecution, and Russell H. Conwell
appeared for the defendants. Mr. Chaplin briefly opened the
case for the Government, contending that he should be able
to prove directly that the defendants had conspired to take
the life of Mr. Spofford, and that Sargent had been paid
upwards of two hundred dollars toward the five hundred dollars
due him for the job. The evidence adduced at the hearing
was in substance as follows:
James L. Sargent testified that he was a saloon-keeper in
Sudbury Street, 5 that he had become acquainted four months
before with a man who called himself " Miller," but whom
he recognised as the defendant, Arens ; that Miller, or Arens,
came to his saloon to tell fortunes ; that Arens had told him
he knew of a good job where three or four hundred dollars
could be made; that he, Sargent, inquired about the job, and
Arens asked him if he could be depended on; that Sargent
assured him on that point, and Arens then told him that he
wanted a man " licked," and " he wanted him licked so that
he wouldn't come to again."
5 Sargent stated in court that, when he first met Mr. Arens, he was a
bartender in a saloon on Portland Street. He had been running a place of
his own for about six weeks when the hearing occurred.
254 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
I told him [said Sargent] that I was just the man for him, and Arens
said the old man [Libby] would not pay out more than was absolutely
necessary to get the job done, as he had already been beaten out of
seventy-five dollars. I met Arens the following Saturday at the corner
of Charles and Leverett streets at five o'clock, and we walked down
Charles Street into an alleyway. He said Libby was not satisfied and
wanted to see me himself. . . . We selected a spot in a freight-yard
where he and the old man [Libby] would meet me in half an hour. In
the meantime, fearing that the affair might be a plot of some kind against
myself, I borrowed a revolver of a friend and got another friend named
Collier to go with me. Collier secreted himself in a freight-car with
the door partially opened, so that he could overhear any conversation, and
at the appointed time I met Arens and a man who was known to me as
" Libby," but whom I recognise as the defendant, Eddy. . . . Eddy
asked me how much money I wanted to do the job, and I told him I ought
to have one hundred dollars to start with. He asked if I would take
seventy-five dollars at the outset, and I said I would. He wanted to
know if I would be square, and I told him yes. He then said he had but
thirty-five dollars with him that night, which he would give me, and
'would send the remainder by Arens on the following Monday. I told him
no, I must have the whole at that time. Just then a man came walking
down the freight-yards, and Arens told me in a quick tone to meet him
Monday morning. I did so, and Arens passed me seventy-five dollars.
. . . A few days later I met Arens again, and he said he would bring
me directions where to find Dr. Spofford. He gave me an advertisement,
clipped from some newspaper, giving the days when I could find Dr.
Spofford at his offices in Haverhill and Newburyport.
After telling in detail of his own delay in following in
structions and of spending the money and putting Arens off,
Sargent's testimony continued:
We went to the Hotel Tremont, and Arens gave me sixteen dollars,
with which I went to the Doctor's office in Newburyport. I did not see
the Doctor, but brought away one of his business cards; came back and
called at Dr. Spofford's office and had a conversation with him. I after
ward met Arens on the Common by appointment, and told him I had
made arrangements to have the Doctor go out of town. ... In a
few days he met me on the Common again. He said I was playing it
on him and that the whole thing was a put-up job, for Dr. Spofford
was in his office. He had sent a boy to find out.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 255
Sargent said he met Arens several times after that, and
finally they agreed that Sargent should take Spofford into
the country on the pretence that he had a sick child. He took
the Doctor to his brother's in Cambridgeport and kept him
there about two weeks. The fact that Spofford had dis
appeared was published in the papers. Sargent said he had
met Arens after that, and told him that he had made away
with the Doctor, and that he had done it about half -past seven
in the evening. Sargent said that Arens replied that he had
known this that he had felt it, and had a way of telling such
things that other people knew nothing of.
He saw him several times afterward, and finally Arens agreed
to pay him some money. They met in Lynn on Monday, after
the disappearance of Spofford. Mr. Eddy was also there, and
Arens paid the witness twenty dollars.
Their plan, Sargent said, had been to take Spofford out
on some lonely road and have him knocked in the head with
a billy, afterward causing the horse to run away, first en
tangling the body with the harness, so it would appear that
death was caused by accident.
Another witness was Jessie Macdonald, who had lived as
housekeeper with Mr. and Mrs. Eddy eight months. She had
never seen Spofford, but she had heard Mr. Eddy say that
Spofford kept Mrs. Eddy in agony, and that he would be glad
if Spofford were out of the way. She had heard Mrs. Eddy
read a chapter from the Old Testament which says that all
wicked people should be destroyed.
James Kelly testified to holding a conversation with Sargent,
who told him of the job he had on hand.
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
John Smith, Sargent's bartender, testified that he saw Arens
in Sargent's saloon four times.
Laura Sargent, James Sargent's sister, who kept a house
of ill-fame in Bowker Street, testified that Sargent had a room
in her house, and that Arens had come there three or four
times to see him ; also that Sargent had given her seventy-five
dollars to keep for him, saying he was going away to his
brother's in Cambridgeport.
Hollis C. Pinkham, the detective employed on the case, said
that Sargent had laid the case before him, and that he had told
Sargent to go ahead and find out what he could; that he had
seen Sargent and Arens together in conversation on the Com
mon; that he had followed Eddy to his home in Lynn, and
had seen Sargent go toward the door of Eddy's house there;
that he had asked Eddy if he had arranged to put Spofford
out of the way ; that Eddy had denied having been in Sargent's
saloon or meeting him in a freight-yard ; that Arens had main
tained he had never seen or known Sargent, even when con
fronted with Sargent.
Detective Chase Philbrick, also employed on the case, testified
to seeing Sargent at Eddy's house in Lynn; saw him try to get
in, but fail to do so. He corroborated the evidence of Pinkham.
George A. Collier, a carpenter, was an important witness.
He said he worked in Sargent's saloon when he was out of a
job, and told of going with Sargent to the freight-house and
concealing himself in an empty car, leaving the door ajar,
so that he might hear a conversation between Sargent and
another man. He corroborated Sargent's testimony as to
what transpired.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 257
This closed the case for the Government. The defence offered
no evidence, as this was a case where only probable cause for
suspicion was to be shown, and it was then to go to a higher
court. Mr. Conwell, counsel for the defendants, did not in
dicate what line the defence would take.
Counsel for the Government submitted no argument, but
called the attention of the court to the chain of circumstances
which had been brought out by the evidence, and which he
believed was strong enough to justify holding the defend
ants.
Judge May remarked that the case was a very anomalous
one, but that there was, in his opinion, sufficient evidence to
show that the parties should be held to appear before the
Superior Court. He therefore fixed the amount of bail at
three thousand dollars each for the appearance of the defend
ants at the December term of the Superior Court.
The case was called in the Superior Court in December, 1878,
and an indictment was found on two counts. 6
The Superior Court record reads:
This indictment was found and returned into Court by the Grand Jurors
at the last December term, when the said Arens and Eddy were severally
set at the bar and having said indictment read to them, they severally
said thereof that they were not guilty.
The first read : " That Edward J. Arens and Asa G. Eddy of Boston afore
said, on the 28th day of July in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight
hundred and seventy -eight, Boston aforesaid, with Force and Arms, being
persons of evil minds and dispositions did then and there unlawfully conspire,
combine, and agree together feloniously, wilfully, and of their malice afore
thought, to procure, hire, incite, and solicit, one James L. Sargent, for a certain
sum of money, to wit, the sum of five hundred dollars, to be paid to said
Sargent by them, said Arens and Eddy, feloniously, wilfully, and of his, said
Sargent's malice aforethought, in some way and manner and by some means,
Instruments, and weapons, to said jurors unknown, one, Daniel H. Spofford, to
kill and murder. Against the law, peace, and dignity of said Commonwealth."
The second count charged the prisoners with hiring Sargent " with force and
arms in and upon one, Daniel H. Spofford, to beat, bruise, wound, and evil treat,
against the law, peace, and dignity of said Commonwealth."
258 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
This indictment was thence continued to the present January term,
and now the District Attorney, Oliver Stevens, Esquire, says he will
prosecute this indictment no further, on payment of costs, which are
thereupon paid. And the said Arens and Eddy are thereupon discharged.
January 31, 1879.
There is no memorandum filed with the papers in the case
to show the reason for the not. pros., and a letter of inquiry
sent July, 1905, to the late Oliver Stevens, the District Attor
ney, elicited the reply that he had kept no data concerning
the case, and the circumstances which caused him to enter a
nol. pros, had gone from his mind.
On October 9th, six days before Mr. Spofford fled to Cam-
bridgeport, he received a letter from Mrs. Eddy, dated from
Number 8 Broad Street, Lynn. It read as follows :
DEAR STUDENT,
Won't you make up your mind before it is forever too late to stop
sinning with your eyes wide open? I pray for you that God will influence
your thoughts to better issues and make you a good and great man, and
spare you the penalty that must come if you do not forsake sin.
I am ready at any time to welcome you back, and kill for you the
fatted calf, that is, destroy in my own breast the great material error
of rendering evil for evil or resenting the wrongs done us. I do not
cherish this purpose toward any one. I am too selfish to do myself this
great injury. I want you to be good and happy in being good for you
never can be happy without it. I rebuke error only to destroy it not to
harm you, but to do you good. Whenever a straying student returns to
duty, stops his evil practice or sin against the Holy Ghost, I am ready
to say, " neither do I condemn thee, go and sin no more." I write you
at this time only from a sense of the high and holy privilege of charity,
the greatest of all graces. Do not mistake my motive, I am not worldly
selfish in doing this, but am only desirous to do you good. Your silent
arguments to do me harm have done me the greatest possible good; the
wrath of man has praised Thee. In order to meet the emergency, Truth has
lifted me above my former self, enabled me to know who is using this
argument and when and what is being spoken, and knowing this, what is
said in secret is proclaimed on the house top and aifects me no more than
for you to say it to me audibly, and tell me I have so and so; and to hate
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 259
my husband; that I feel others; that arguments cannot do good; that
Mrs. Rice cannot; that my husband cannot, etc., etc. I have now no need
of human aid. God has shut the mouth of the lions. The scare disappears
when you know another is saying it and that the error is not your own.
May God save you from the effects of the very sins you are committing
and which you have been and will be the victim of when the measure you
are meting shall be measured to you. Pause, think, solemnly and selfishly
of the cost to you. Love instead of hate your friends, and enemies even.
This alone can make you happy and draw down blessings infinite.
Have I been your friend? Have I taught you faithfully the way of
happiness? and rebuked sternly that which could turn you out of that
way? If I have, then I was your friend and risked much to do you good.
May God govern your resolves to do right from this hour and strengthen
you to keep them. Adieu,
M. B. GLOVER EDDY.
In the 1881 edition of Science and Health Mrs. Eddy takes
up this conspiracy case at length, giving a careful and de
tailed explanation of it. 7 In her exposition she quotes this
letter as a proof of the fact that she was still trying to reclaim
Mr. Spofford when the conspiracy was invented. Mr. Spoff ord,
on the other hand, since he had not heard from Mrs. Eddy
for seventeen months, believed that Mrs. Eddy intended this
letter should be found in his mail-box after his disappearance,
to avert suspicion from her.
In her exposition of the case Mrs. Eddy explains it entirely
as the result of demonology or mesmerism. She implies that
it was a conspiracy hatched by Richard Kennedy and Mr.
Spofford to injure the sale of the second edition of her book,
which had been out but a few weeks when her husband was
placed under arrest:
The purpose of the plotters was evidently to injure the reputation
of metaphysical practice, and to embarrass us for money at a time when
they hoped to cripple us in the circulation of our book. This is seen
7 Science and Health (1881), chapter vi, pp. 20-33.
260 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
in the fact that our name was in any way introduced in the case when
we were not implicated by the law and by the gospel. 8
Mrs. Eddy attributed Mr. Kennedy's participation in the
plot to the fact that her suit against him for the amount
of the promissory note signed in Amesbury in 1870 was still
pending. She says :
The mental malpractitioners managed that entire plot; and if the leading
demonologist can exercise the power over mind, and govern the conclusions
and acts of people as he has boasted to us that he could do, he had ample
motives for the exercise of his demonology from the fact that a civil
suit was pending against him for the collection of a note of one thousand
dollars, which suit Mr. Arens was jointly interested in.'
In her exposition of the case Mrs. Eddy published affidavits
from Caroline Fifield and Margaret Dunshee, in which they
testified that Mr. Eddy was instructing a class in Metaphysics
in Boston Highlands at the hour when Sargent and Collier
declared they had seen him in a freight-yard in East Cambridge.
She also published the following confession which, she said,
Mr. Eddy had received from Collier a few weeks after the
hearing before the Grand Jury:
TATJNTON, Dec. 16, 1878.
To DRS. ASIA G. EDDY and E. J. ARNES feeling that you have been
greatly ingered by faulse charges and knowing their is no truth in my
statement that you attempted to hire James L. Sargent to kil Dr. Spoford
and wishing to retract as far as poserble all things I have sed to your
ingury, I now say that thair is no truth whatever in the statement that I
saw you meet James L. Sargent at East Cambridge or any outher place
and pay or offer to pay him any money that I never hurd a conversation
betwene you and Sargent as testifyed to by me whouther Spoford has any
thing to do with Sargent I do not know all I know is that the story I told
on the stand is holy faulse and was goton up by Sargent.
GEO. A. COLLIER.
8 Science and Health (1881), chapter vl, p. 22.
Science and Health (1881) chapter vi, p. 29.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
This letter was subsequently reinforced by an affidavit said
to have been made by Collier before a justice in Taunton, on
December 17, 1878, in which he makes a similar declaration.
The evidence on both sides is of the most anomalous and
inconsequential character and reads like the testimony heard in
the nightmare of some plethoric judge. The witnesses for the
prosecution were, with the exception of Jessie Macdonald and
the two detectives, utterly worthless as sources of testimony.
Mrs. Eddy's charge that the plot was the malicious inven
tion of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Spofford can be regarded only as
the delusion of an unreasonable and over-wrought woman. The
only other possible solution would advance Sargent as the in
stigator of the plot. If a double blackmailing enterprise could
be attributed to Sargent, the tangle could be easily explained.
But this hypothesis is weakened by the fact that he never asked
for or received any money from Mr. Spofford. And why a
saloon-keeper from Sudbury Street should have gone so far from
his familiar haunts and associates, and should have aspired to
play a part in the quarrels of the Christian Scientists, remains a
difficult question.
CHAPTER XIV
MES. EDDY ADDRESSES BOSTON AUDIENCES SHE IS TORTURED BY
HER FEAR OF MESMERISM ORGANISATION OF " THE CHURCH
OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST " WITHDRAWAL OF EIGHT LEADING
MEMBERS MRS. EDDY ? S RETREAT FROM LYNN
As early as 1878, Mrs. Eddy began to give occasional
lectures in a Baptist church on Shawmut Avenue, in Boston,
and in 1879 she gave Sunday afternoon talks in the Parker
Fraternity Building on Appleton Street. Her audiences were
not large. Sometimes, on a fine afternoon as many as fifty
persons would be present, while again the number would fall
as low as twenty-five. Mrs. Eddy came up from Lynn on
Sunday afternoon, attended by Mr. Eddy, and often by several
of her students. She usually wore a black silk gown and a
hat when she spoke, used gold-bowed spectacles, and was con
fident and at ease upon the rostrum. Mr. Eddy, dressed in a
black frock-coat, acted as usher and passed the collection-plate.
Mrs. Eddy spoke on the curative aspect of her Science almost
entirely, relating many individual instances of the astonishing
cures she and her students had performed. The religious ele
ment in her discussions was incidental and rather cold. She
never hinted at repentance, humility, or prayer in the ordinary
sense, as essential to regeneration. Moral reform came natu
rally as a result of adopting Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy
262
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 263
possessed on the platform that power of moving people to a
state of emotional exaltation which had already proved so
effective in her classroom.
After the lecture Mrs. Eddy always came down from the
platform and shook hands cordially with her audience. The
company usually separated into two groups, one surrounding
Mr. Eddy and the other gathering about his wife. Mr. Eddy,
in a low voice, would recommend the interested inquirer to join
one of Mrs. Eddy's classes and thus come into a fuller under
standing of the subject. Occasionally a visitor would ask
Mrs. Eddy why she used glasses instead of overcoming the
defect in her eyesight by mind. This question usually annoyed
her, and on one occasion she replied sharply that she " wore
glasses because of the sins of the world," probably meaning that
the belief in failing eyesight had become so firmly established
throughout the ages that she could not at once overcome it.
Mrs. Eddy's audiences were largely made up of people who
were interested in some radical theory of theology or medicine.
Mr. Arthur T. Buswell, for instance, who afterward became
prominent in the Christian Science movement, had been em
ployed in the New England Hygiene Home, a water-cure sana
torium at West Concord, Vt., and had come to Boston to prac
tise hydropathy. 1 His friend, James Ackland, who attended
the lectures with him, was a professor of phrenology.
When Mrs. Eddy felt that one of the Sunday afternoon
visitors had become interested in her lectures, Mr. Eddy mildly
but persistently followed him up. He used often to drop in
1 Mr. Buswell had first become interested in mind cure through Dr. John A.
Tenney, now a physician at Number 2 Commonwealth Avenue, who, in turn,
had become interested in the subject through Dr. Evans, a pupil of Quimby's.
264 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
at Mr. Buswell's office and lay before him the material and
spiritual advantages of a course with Mrs. Eddy, telling him
that it was impossible to realise the wonder of Mrs. Eddy's
teaching from her public lectures. He always entered the
office quietly, glancing back over his shoulder to see whether
he were being followed, and spoke in a very low tone, looking
nervously about him as he talked. He explained that the
mesmerists were constantly on his trail, and that to avoid them
extreme caution was necessary on his part. If he walked
with Mr. Buswell on the street, he slipped along as if trying
to avoid observation, and would sometimes suddenly catch Bus-
well's sleeve and pull him into a doorway, as if he felt mesmer
ism in the air, telling him it was very important that they
should not be seen together, as the mesmerists were always
shadowing him, ready to set to work upon the minds of pros
pective students and prejudice them against Mrs. Eddy.
Mr. Buswell and his friend Ackland, the phrenologist, were
finally persuaded to go to Lynn and study under Mrs. Eddy.
They both roomed in Mrs. Eddy's house, and Mr. Buswell's
experience there was a pleasant one. Mrs. Eddy's fortunes
were then at a low ebb. There was now a good deal of feeling
against her in the town, and her frequent differences with her
followers and the scandal caused by the witchcraft and con
spiracy cases had reduced the number of her students. There
were but three in Mr. Buswell's class, and one of these dropped
out, leaving only Mr. Ackland and himself to complete the
course. Other students who came under Mrs. Eddy's instruc
tion at about this time were: Hanover P. Smith, a young man
who worked in his aunt's boarding-house in Boston and who
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 265
afterward became incurably insane; Joseph Morton, who was
a maker of flavoring extracts in Boston, and who was in
terested in astrology; and Edward A. Orne.
Litigation had been a heavy drain upon Mrs. Eddy finan
cially. She and Mr. Eddy let the lower floor of their house,
occupying, themselves, only the upstairs rooms, and now they
rented one of those. They did their own housework, and Mrs.
Eddy was exceedingly cheerful and courageous about it. Mr.
Buswell remembers finding her on her knees with soap and
pail one afternoon, scrubbing her back stairs. When he re
proved her for undertaking such heavy work, she laughed and
replied that it was good for her to stir about after writing
all morning, adding that she could not get good help, as the
mesmerists immediately affected her servants. Mr. Buswell
remembers that in her classroom she sometimes related how
once when she was driving through Boston in an open carriage,
a cripple had come up to the carriage, and she had put out
her hand and healed him. She also told of returning home
after several days' absence to find her window plants drooping
and dying. She had discovered that when she was in the
house the plants could live without sunlight or moisture, so,
instead of watering them, she put them in the attic and treated
them mentally, after which they were completely restored. 2
Sometimes, on the same morning that she related one of these
extravagant anecdotes, she would tell, with apparent apprecia-
2 This incident may have been one of the " floral demonstrations " referred
to in a letter sent from Pleasant View, March 21, 1896, which says :
"... While Mrs. Eddy was in a suburban town of Boston she brought
out one apple blossom on an apple tree in January when the ground was
covered with snow. And in Lynn demonstrated in the Floral line some such
small things. But Mrs. Woodbury was never with her in a single instance of
these demonstrations.
" Respectfully
" MARY BAKER EDDY."
266 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
tion, how Bronson Alcott, after reading Science and Health,
had said that no one but a woman or a fool could have written it.
At this time the skeleton in the house was still Malicious
Mesmerism. Ever since his arrest upon the charge of con
spiracy to murder, Mr. Eddy had seemed stupefied by fear,
and he went about like a man labouring under a spell. He
was trying to teach a little, but said that the mesmerists broke
up his classes. He had a tendency to brood upon the few
things in which he was interested at all, and he used to become
deeply despondent, confiding to the loyal students his fear
that the work would be utterly broken down and trampled out.
Mrs. Eddy was nervous about her mail, and believed that
her letters were intercepted. When she wrote letters now, she
had one of her students take them to some remote part of the
town and drop them into one of the mail-boxes farthest away
from her house. She believed that the mesmerists kept her
under continual espionage, and she seldom went out of the
house alone. When Mr. Eddy got home after a trip to Boston,
ten miles distant, she would embrace him and thank God that
he had escaped the enemy once again. Mrs. Eddy's heaviest
cross was that the mesmerists were apparently triumphant.
She was greatly chagrined by the fact that Richard Kennedy
had been able to build up a practice in Boston, and his pros
perity hurt her like a personal affront. He had stolen his
success, she said. Within a year after the conspiracy trouble,
Edward Arens also incurred her displeasure, and she added
him to the list of mesmerists. She kept photographs of Ken
nedy, Spofford, and Arens in her desk, Kennedy's picture
marked with a black cross, and the other two marked with red
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 267
crosses. Kennedy was still regarded as the Lucifer of mesmer
ism and the source of the corrupting influence. In the course
of time he had fellows, but never a rival. It was when Mrs.
Eddy would become agitated in talking of these three men
that her students first noticed that violent trembling of the
head, which was the beginning of the palsy which afterward
afflicted Mrs. Eddy. Mesmerism became the dominating con
ception of her life, and it is difficult to find a parallel for such
a constant and terrifying sense of evil unless one turns to
Bunyan in the days before his conversion, or to Martin Luther
in the monastery of Wittenberg, when he lived under such a
continual oppression of sin that the gates of hell seemed always
open just under the flagstones as he paced the cloisters. 3 Her
illnesses, like Luther's earache, were purely the result of a
consciously malicious agency ; but, unlike Luther's, Mrs. Eddy's
depression never came from a feeling of unworthiness or a sense
of sin.
After she left Richard Kennedy, Mrs. Eddy seems for some
years to have given little thought to the project which she used
to discuss with him of founding a new church. It is quite
possible that even then by " church " she meant a new faith
rather than an organised sect. In the first edition of Science
and Health she expressed her opinion that church organisation
was a hindrance rather than a help to the highest spiritual
development.
We have no need of creeds and church organisation to sustain or explain
a demonstrable platform, that defines itself in healing the sick, and casting
* " In the monastery of Wittenberg, he constantly heard the Devil making a
noise in the cloisters ; and became at last so accustomed to the fact, that he
related that, on one occasion, having been awakened by the sound, he perceived
that it was only the Devil, and accordingly went to sleep again. The black
stain in the castle of Wartburg still marks the place where he flung an ink-
bottle at the Devil." Lecky, Rationalism in Europe.
268 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
out error. The uselessness of drugs, the emptiness of knowledge that
puffeth up, and the imaginary laws of matter are very apparent to those
who are rising to the more glorious demonstration of their God-being.
The mistake the disciples of Jesus made to found religious organisations
and church rites, if indeed they did this, was one the Master did not make;
but the mistake church members make to employ drugs to heal the sick,
was not made by the students of Jesus. Christ's church was Truth, " I
am Truth and Life," the temple for the worshippers of Truth is Spirit
and not matter. . . .
No time was lost by our Master in organisations, rites, and ceremonies,
or in proselyting for certain forms of belief. 4
The very fact, however, that Christian Science was irrecon
cilable with the doctrines of any of the established churches
must have suggested that it should have an organisation of
its own. A belief which presented a new theory of the Godhead,
of sin and the atonement, which declared that petitions to a
personal Deity could not obtain for man truth, life, or love, 5
needed an organisation behind it if it were to be successfully
propagated. Mrs. Eddy's most useful and effective students
had been active in church work before they came into Christian
Science. They missed their old church associations and wanted
a church to work for. They believed that their new faith was
a revival of the apostolic method of healing, a new growth from
the original root of Christianity, and it was as a religion,
rather than a philosophy, that they liked to regard it. While
most of these students had first allied themselves with Christian
Science chiefly because they wished to heal or to be healed,
a mere scheme of therapeutics, even metaphysical therapeutics,
was too deficient in sentiment to hold them together and fire
them with the zeal which the cause demanded. Mrs. Eddy
began to realise this and to see that the time had come to
4 Science and Health (1875), pp. 166, 167.
6 Science and Health (1875), p. 289.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 269
emphasise the more expressly religious features of Christian
Science.
The first Christian Science organisation was that formed
June 8, 1875, when eight of Mrs. Eddy's students banded to
gether, calling themselves " the Christian Scientists," and pledg
ing themselves to raise money enough to have Mrs. Eddy address
them every Sunday. On July 4, 1876, the students reorgan
ised into " The Christian Scientists' Association," and this
society still held occasional informal meetings when first a church
organisation was talked of.
In 1879 Mrs. Eddy and her students took steps to form a
chartered church organisation. They elected officers and direct
ors, and chose a name, " The Church of Christ (Scientist)."
On August 6th they applied to the State for a charter. The
officers and directors were : Mary B. G. Eddy, president ;
Margaret J. Dunshee, treasurer; Edward A. Orne, Miss Dorcas
B. Rawson, Arthur T. Bus well, James Ackland, Margaret J.
Foley, Mrs. Mary Ruddock, Oren Carr, directors.
All proceedings were conducted with the greatest secrecy,
as Mrs. Eddy felt that it was imperative that the infant
church should be hidden from the knowledge of the mesmerists,
Spofford and Kennedy. When it was necessary for the newly
elected officers and directors to meet before a notary and to
sign the agreement of incorporation, Mrs. Eddy had a long
list of notaries looked up, and finally selected one in Charles-
town, a man who was known to Margaret Dunshee, and for
whom she could vouch that he had no affiliations with mesmer
ists. The students met at Mrs. Dunshee's house in Charles-
town, and, one by one, by circuitous routes, they went to the
270 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
notary's office, where the papers were made out and signed.
This meeting of the subscribers to the articles of incorporation
occurred August 15th, and the papers were filed and a charter
issued August 23, 1879. The purpose of the corporation was
given as " to carry on and transact the business necessary to
the worship of God," and Boston was named as the place
within which it was established. There were in all twenty-six
charter members, but by no means all of these were active in
the work. The membership roll represented, like those of most
new churches in small towns, all who could be persuaded to ally
themselves with the sect.
For the first sixteen months of its existence the church had
no regular place of meeting, but Sunday services were held at
the houses of various members in Lynn and Boston. The Lynn
meetings were usually held at the house of Mrs. F. A. Damon,
who was one of the most earnest workers in the new church. A
copy of the secretary's minutes of the Lynn meetings shows
that, in Mrs. Eddy's absence, either Mrs. Damon or Mrs. Rice
usually conducted the service. These minutes are interesting
in that they make one realise what a small organisation the
Christian Science Church then was. Half a dozen members,
gathered in Mrs. Damon's parlour on Jackson Street, consti
tuted a congregation. The minutes show that on one Sunday
five members were present; on another four; on another seven,
etc. The Boston circle of Christian Scientists, which met at
the house of Mrs. Clara Choate, was scarcely larger. The
service itself, however, was very much like the service now
used in the great church in Boston. The meeting opened with
silent prayer or with Mrs. Eddy's interpretation of the Lord's
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 271
Prayer ; then Mrs. Damon read from Science and Health, after
which Mrs. Rice read from the Scriptures. The following
record occurs for the meeting on September 5, 1880:
Meeting opened by Mrs. Damon in the usual way. Mrs. M. B. G. Eddy,
having completed her summer vacation, was present and delivered a dis
course on Mesmerism.
Whole number in attendance, twenty-two.
On the following Sunday the subject was again Mesmerism.
Mrs. Eddy's resuming of her duties seems to have been marked
by a vigorous return to this subject and by a marked increase
in the attendance.
On December 12, 1880, the Christian Scientists began to
hold their services in the Hawthorne rooms, on Park Street,
Boston. Mrs. Eddy usually preached and conducted the serv
ices, though occasionally one of her students took her place,
and now and again a minister of some other denomination was
invited to occupy the pulpit. In spite of the fact that she was
always effective on the rostrum, Mrs. Eddy seemed to dread
these Sunday services. The necessity for wearing spectacles
embarrassed her. When she sometimes wore glasses in her own
home, she apologised for doing so, explaining that it was a
habit she often rose above, but that at times the mesmerists
were too strong for her. She believed that the mesmerists
set to work upon her before the hour of the weekly services,
and on Sunday morning her faithful students were sometimes
called to her house to treat her against Kennedy, SpofFord, and
Arens, until she took the train for Boston. Certain ones of the
students were delegated to attend her from Lynn to Boston
and to occupy front seats in the Hawthorne rooms for the
272 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
purpose of treating her while she spoke. On the way back
to Lynn the party frequently discussed the particular kind
of evil influence which had been brought to bear upon Mrs.
Eddy during the service. Already Mrs. Eddy thought she
could tell which was Kennedy's influence and which was Spof-
ford's, and she could even liken their effect upon her to the
operation of certain drugs. Later Arens' malevolence, too,
came to have an aroma of its own, so that when Mrs. Eddy rose
in the morning she could tell by the kind of depression she
experienced which of the three was to be her tormentor for
the day. At times she was convinced that Kennedy and Spof-
ford were both annoying her, and not infrequently she declared
that the three mesmerists had all set upon her at once.
During the last few years the attitude of the Lynn public
toward Mrs. Eddy had changed from one of amused indifference
to one of silent hostility. Mrs. Eddy attributed this change
entirely to Kennedy and Spofford, and despairing of ever bring
ing her work to a successful issue in Lynn, she began planning
to take Christian Science up bodily and flee with it to some
place far removed from mesmerists. She decided to send Arthur
Buswell to some other part of the country, there to seek out
a spot for the planting of her church. Where to send him
was the question. Mrs. Eddy and Mr. Buswell got out a
map of the United States and studied it together. But, how
ever topical the map, there were no red or green lines to indi
cate where mesmerism ran light or heavy, and they realised
that the venture would be largely a leap in the dark. They
finally selected Cincinnati, attracted, Mr. Buswell says, by its
central location and by the number of railroads which seemed,
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 273
on the map, to pass through that city. Mr. Buswell was, ac
cordingly, despatched, at his own expense, to make straight
the path in Cincinnati, with the understanding that Mrs. Eddy
would follow him in six weeks. 6 She did not go, however, and
was greatly annoyed when Mr. Buswell ran out of money
and wrote to her for help. She replied that it was very evident
to her that mesmeric influences were abroad in Cincinnati as
well as in Lynn, and had inspired him with disloyal sentiments.
In the meantime Mrs. Eddy's forerunners in Boston had been
meeting with some success. Mrs. Clara Choate and her hus
band had taken a house on Shawmut Avenue and were intro
ducing the Christian Science treatment of disease. Edward J.
Arens came to Boston immediately after the unfortunate con
spiracy tangle, and fell to work with industry and courage.
He took an office at 32 Upton Street and began to do missionary
work among the marketmen down about Faneuil Hall, treating
a bronchial cold here and a case of rheumatism there. He
spoke occasionally in a hall in Charlestown, lecturing on Meta
physical Healing, and charging an admission fee of ten cents.
Among his first patrons was James C. Howard, a bookkeeper
who came to arrange for treatments for his invalid wife. This
was before Mrs. Eddy had entirely renounced Mr. Arens, and
it was in his office that Mr. Howard first met Mrs. Eddy. He
became interested in Christian Science and made one of a class
of two which Mrs. Eddy taught at Mrs. Choate's house. Mrs.
Eddy was then in need of practitioners, and she urgently needed
an active man of affairs to succeed Mr. Arens, toward whom
6 At about the same time that Mrs. Eddy sent Mr. Buswell to Cincinnati to
prepare a way for her, she sent Joseph Morton to New York on the same
mission, promising to follow later. He opened an office on Ninth Street, but,
as he found no patients, he soon returned to Boston.
274 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
she had begun to feel deep resentment. She was also desirous
of letting the lower floor of her Broad Street house, which had
been tenantless for some time, in spite of the fact that she had
tried very hard to rent it. In fact, Mrs. Eddy's differences
with her tenants, servants, and students had created a general
impression in Lynn that life at Number 8 Broad Street was
difficult and complicated. Mr. Howard, when he moved there
with his wife and children, certainly found it so. The Eddys
were in such perpetual terror of mesmerism that they could
give very little attention to anything else. They felt that the
sentiment toward them in Lynn had changed, and Mrs. Eddy was
so anxious and nervous that she easily gave way to petulance
and anger. Mr. Howard and Mr. Eddy were indefatigable
in their efforts to please her, but whatever they did, it usually
proved to be the wrong thing. She had lost all patience with
Mr. Eddy's slowness and had begun to exhibit annoyance at
his somewhat rustic manner and appearance. Mr. Eddy had
never been a particularly efficient man, and now his fear of
mesmerists kept him in a semi-somnambulant condition. He
sometimes became deeply discouraged in his efforts to help his
wife, and once bitterly confided to Mrs. Rice that he did not
believe God Almighty could please Mrs. Eddy.
Mr. Howard was an alert, adaptable young man who made
himself useful in a great many ways. He took charge of the
sale of the third edition of Mrs. Eddy's book, often acted as
her private secretary, and played the cornet at the Sunday
services in Hawthorne Hall. Mrs. Eddy at first seemed fond
of him and seemed to enjoy his musical accomplishment. But
she soon tired of him as she had tired of so many others, and
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 275
grew so exacting that when he went out to do her errands he
found it expedient to take down her instructions in writing, so
that if, by the time he returned, she had changed her mind
as to what she wanted done, he would have his notes to justify
himself. When Mr. Howard left Mrs. Eddy's house in Octo
ber, 1881, six months after he had moved into it, he had de
cided to leave the Church as well.
Mr. Howard was not the only Christian Scientist who came
to this decision. Discouragement and discontent had been
growing among Mrs. Eddy's oldest and most devout followers.
For a long while they said nothing to each other, and each
bore his disappointment and disillusionment as best he could.
They believed firmly in the principles of Christian Science and
hesitated to do anything which might injure the Church, but
they felt that no good, either to her or to themselves, could
come from their further association with Mrs. Eddy. Mr.
Howard, when he went to explain his position to Mrs. Rice
before he took the final step, found, to his amazement, that
both she and her sister, Miss Rawson, felt that they had come
to the end of their endurance and could follow Mrs. Eddy no
further. Five others of the leading women of the Church
confessed that they were discouraged and dissatisfied. They
were tired of being dragged as witnesses into lawsuits which
they believed were unwise, and which they knew brought dis
credit upon the Church and, discouraged by the outbursts of
rage which Mrs. Eddy apparently made no effort to control,
and which they believed helped to bring on the violent illnesses
for which they were perpetually called to treat her. Above
all, they were tired of Malicious Mesmerism. Several of her
276 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
students really believed that this subject had become a mono
mania with Mrs. Eddy. Christian Science seemed, for the time,
to have been superseded, and Demonology was the living and
important issue. After earnest discussion and consultation,
eight of Mrs. Eddy's most prominent students agreed to
withdraw from the Church together. They held a meeting
and drew up a memorial which each of them signed, and
of which each preserved a copy. This resolution read as
follows :
We, the undersigned, while we acknowledge and appreciate the under
standing 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 DUHANT,
MARGARET J. DUNSHEE,
DORCAS B. RAWSON,
ELIZABETH G. STUART,
JANE L. STRAW,
ANNA B. NEWMAN,
JAMES C. HOWARD,
MIRANDA R. RICE.
21st October, 1881.
On the night of October 21st this memorial was read aloud
by Mrs. F. A. Damon at the regular meeting of the Christian
Scientists' Association. This meeting, which was a heated
session, was prolonged until after midnight. The eight resig
nations were a complete surprise to Mrs. Eddy, and she ex
pressed her indignation at length, declaring that the resigning
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 277
members were all the victims of mesmerism. The next day
she made an effort to see in person several of the signers of
the memorial, but they kept well within their doors and refused
her admittance. Mr. Howard had been Mrs. Eddy's business
representative; Mrs. Dunshee, Mrs. Newman, and Mrs. Stuart
were all able and intelligent women, and their membership had
been a source of great pride to Mrs. Eddy. Mrs. Rice and
Miss Rawson had been her friends and followers for more than
eleven years, and were the only ones of her early students who
had been faithful until the founding of the Church. They had
believed in her sincerely, and had served her, heart and soul.
Because of Mrs. Rice's robust health, Mrs. Eddy liked to have
her much about her. Mrs. Rice had been more successful than
any other student in treating Mrs. Eddy in her illnesses, and
a messenger from Broad Street often summoned her to Mrs.
Eddy's side in the hours after midnight. When Mr. Eddy
was arrested on the charge of conspiracy and thrown into jail,
it was Mrs. Rice who persuaded her husband to furnish bail.
On the morning after her resignation from the Church, Mrs.
Rice saw Mrs. Eddy a moment from her window, but from
that day to this she has never seen her again.
Instead of accepting the eight resignations, Mrs. Eddy noti
fied the resigning members that they were liable to expulsion,
and summoned them to meet the Church on October 29th. They
did not appear, but at this meeting Mrs. F. A. Damon, at
whose house the church services were formerly held, and Miss
A. A. Draper, secretary of the Church, also resigned. In
their letters of resignation they stated that they " could no
longer entertain the subject of Mesmerism which had lately
278 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
been made uppermost in the meetings and in Mrs. Eddy's talks."
Edward A. Orne had quietly left the Church some time before,
and Mr. Buswell was in Cincinnati. There were scarcely a
dozen students left to whom Mrs. Eddy could turn in an hour
of need. During the next few months she worked incessantly
to rally her shattered ranks, and on February 3, 1882, the
few remaining members of the Christian Scientists' Association
published in the Lynn Union resolutions 7 censuring the act of
the seceding members, stamping their charges as untrue, and
indorsing Mrs. Eddy to the extent of affirming her " the chosen
messenger of God to the nations," and declaring that " unless
we hear Her voice we do not hear His voice."
Ardent as these resolutions were, they were the swan-song
of the movement in Lynn, and to this day the Christian Science
Church there has never prospered. Its members declare that
7 The following is a copy of these resolutions :
" At a meeting of the Christian Scientist association the following resolu
tions were unanimously adopted :
" Resolved, That we the members of the Christian Scientist association, do
herein express to our beloved teacher, and acknowledged leader, Mary B.
Glover Eddy, our sincere and heartfelt thanks and gratitude for her earnest
labours in behalf of this association, by her watchfulness of its interest, and
persistent efforts to maintain the highest rule of Christian love among its
members.
" Resolved, That while she has had little or no help, except from God, in the
introduction to this age of materiality of her book, Science and Health, and
the carrying forward of the Christian principles it teaches and explains, she
has been unremitting in her faithfulness to her God-appointed work, and we
do understand her to be the chosen messenger of God to bear his truth to the
nations, and unless we hear ' Her Voice,' we do not hear ' His Voice.'
" Resolved, That while many and continued attempts are made by the mal-
practise, as referred to in the book, Science and Health, to hinder and stop
the advance of Christian science, it has with her leadership attained a success
that calls out the truest gratitude of her students, and when understood, by
all humanity.
" Resolved, That the charges made to her in a letter, signed by J. C. Howard,
M. R. Rice. D. B. Rawson. and five others, of hypocrisy, ebullitions of temper,
and love of money, are utterly false, and the cowardice of the signers in re
fusing to meet her and sustain or explain said charges, be treated with the
righteous indignation it justly deserves. That while we deplore such wicked
ness and abuse of her who has befriended them in their need, and when wrong,
met them with honest, open rebuke, we look with admiration and reverence
upon her Christ-like example of meekness and charity, and will, in future,
more faithfully follow and obey her divine instructions, knowing that in so
doing we offer the highest testimonial of our appreciation of her Christian
leadership.
" Resolved, That a copy of these resolutions be presented to our teacher and
leader. Mary B. Glover Eddy, and a copy be placed on the records of. this
Christian Scientist association."
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 279
there is an error in belief there regarding Mrs. Eddy which
they find hard to overcome.
Mrs. Eddy at last despaired of conquering the prejudice
that had arisen in Lynn against her and her religion. While
she attributed this to the influence of the mesmerists, her
seceding students attributed it to the unpleasant notoriety
given her by her lawsuits and her quarrels with her followers.
Whether these lawsuits were really discreditable to Mrs. Eddy
or not, they were generally considered to be so in Lynn. People
did not stop to discover whether they arose on reasonable
grounds. The general public caught only the obvious paradox
that here were a group of people teaching a new religion and
professing to overcome sin and bodily disease through their
superior realisation of Divine love, and that they were con
stantly quarrelling and bickering among themselves, accusing
each other of fraud, dishonesty, witchcraft, bad temper, greed
of money, hypocrisy, and finally of a conspiracy to murder.
Unquestionably Mrs. Eddy, as the accepted messenger of God,
was more severely criticised for her part in these altercations
than if she had appeared before the courts merely as a citizen
of Lynn, and this criticism had much to do with the cloud
of suspicion and distrust which hung over the Church when,
in the early part of the winter of 1882, Mrs. Eddy left Lynn
forever behind her and went to Boston.
Mrs. Eddy's departure from Lynn was distinctly in the
nature of a retreat. A neutral field had become pronouncedly
hostile; her oldest friends and most ardent workers had left
her. Science and Health had been through three editions, but
less than four thousand copies of the book had been sold.
280 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
Her following was now, for the most part, made up of indiffer
ent material discontented women, and young men who had not
succeeded in finding their place in the world, or who had drifted
away from other professions. The Christian Science Church
was a struggling organisation with considerably less than fifty
members ; its history had been one of dissension, and its good
standing was all to make and Mrs. Eddy was then sixty-one
years old.
CHAPTER XV
THE MASSACHUSETTS METAPHYSICAL COLLEGE ORGANISED
DEATH OF ASA GILBERT EDDY MRS. EDDY's BELIEF THAT
HE WAS MENTALLY ASSASSINATED ENTRANCE OF CALVIN
A. FRYE
THE organisation of the Christian Science Church in August,
1879, seems to have suggested the organisation of another
institution, which, in the history of the Christian Science move
ment, is second in importance only to the Church itself. The
Massachusetts Metaphysical College was chartered January 31,
1881, and between that date and 1889, when it closed, about
four thousand persons studied Christian Science in this insti
tution, and to-day many practising healers have the degree of
C.S.B., C.S.D., or D.S.D. from Mrs. Eddy's college.
The college was organised something more than a year
before Mrs. Eddy removed permanently to Boston, and was,
in the beginning, one of the experiments by which she strove
to rehabilitate herself in Lynn. Its charter was issued under
an act passed in 1874, 1 an act so loose in its requirements,
resulting in the chartering of so many dubious institutions
and the granting of so many misleading diplomas, that, in 1883,
1 Acts and Resolves passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, 1874,
Chapter 375, Section 2 : " Such association may be entered into for any educa
tional, charitable, benevolent, or religious purpose ; for the prosecution of any
antiquarian, historical, literary, scientific, medical, artistic, monumental, or
musical purposes," etc., etc. This Chapter 375 was later merged into Chapter
115 of the Public Statutes.
281
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
medical institutions chartered under this act were prohibited
from conferring degrees. The purpose of the Massachusetts
Metaphysical College, as stated in the articles of agreement,
was : " To teach pathology, ontology, therapeutics, moral sci
ence, metaphysics, and their application to the treatment of
diseases." The signers to the articles of agreement were:
Mary B. G. Eddy, president; James C. Howard, treasurer;
Charles J. Eastman, M.D., Edgar F. Woodbury, James Wiley,
William F. Walker, and Samuel P. Bancroft, directors ; all
students of Mrs. Eddy's except Charles J. Eastman, who had
been a pupil in the little " dame's school " which Mrs. Eddy
taught at Tilton for a few months during her first widow
hood, and who at this time had a doubtful medical practice in
Boston.
The name " Massachusetts Metaphysical College " is some
what misleading. During the nine years of its existence this
institution never had a building of its own, or any other seat
than Mrs. Eddy's parlour, and, with very incidental exceptions,
Mrs. Eddy herself, during all this time, constituted the entire
faculty. 2 In short, the Massachusetts Metaphysical College,
subsequently of such wide fame among Christian Scientists,
was simply Mrs. Eddy, and its seat was wherever she happened
to be. To call it an institution was a very literal application
of the boast of the old Williams alumni that Mark Hopkins on
one end of a saw-log and a student on the other would make a
college.
The organisation of the college in 1881 in no way changed
Mrs. Eddy's manner of instruction. Her new letter-heads,
2 Mrs. Eddy states that her husband taught two terms In her college, that
her adopted son, E. J. Foster Eddy, taught one term, and that Erastus N. Bates
taught one class.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 283
indeed, told the public that the Massachusetts Metaphysical
College was located at Number 8 Broad Street, Lynn, but the
name was the only thing which was new. Classes of from two
to five students continued to meet on the second floor of Mrs.
Eddy's house, as before, and she gave but one course of study :
twelve lessons in mental healing, very similar to those she had
given to Miss Rawson, Mrs. Rice, and their fellow-students
eleven years before except that " manipulation " was now dis
countenanced, and denunciation of mesmerism was a prominent
feature of the lectures. The tuition fee was still three hundred
dollars, the price which Mrs. Eddy says she fixed under Divine
guidance; although, in many instances where the student was
unable to pay that amount, she took one hundred dollars instead.
When Mrs. and Mr. Eddy moved to Boston in the early
spring of 1882, they soon took a house at 569 Columbus Avenue,
Mrs. Eddy's first permanent home in Boston, and on the door
placed a large silver plate bearing the inscription, " Massa
chusetts Metaphysical College." At about this time Mr.
Eddy's health began to decline, and both he and his wife believed
that he was suffering from the adverse mental treatments of
Edward J. Arens.
After the charge of conspiracy to murder, brought in 1878,
a coldness developed between Mr. Arens and the Eddys. He
came to Boston, and began to exercise some originality in his
practice and teaching, which was, of course, very obnoxious
to Mrs. Eddy. In 1881 Mr. Arens published a pamphlet en
titled Theology, or the Understanding of God as Applied to
Healing the Sick. In this pamphlet Mr. Arens quoted ex
tensively from Science and Health, using the text of Mrs.
284 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Eddy's work where it answered his purpose, but substituting
his own ideas for many of her statements which he believed
were extreme or untenable. In his preface he announced that
he made no claim to the authorship of the doctrine which he
advanced, stating that it had been practised by Jesus and the
apostles, by the secret association of priests known as the
Gottesfreunde in the fourteenth century, and in the nineteenth
century by P. P. Quimby of Belfast, Me. He added that he
had made use of " some thoughts contained in a work by Eddy."
The third edition of Science and Health appeared a few months
later, containing a preface signed by Asa G. Eddy, which
scathingly denounced Arens as a plagiarist, and paid the follow
ing tribute to Mrs. Eddy:
" Mrs. Eddy's works are the outgrowths of her life. I never
knew so unselfish an individual, or one so tireless in what she
considers her duty. It would require ages and God's mercy
to make the ignorant hypocrite who published that pamphlet
originate its contents. His pratings are coloured by his char
acter, they cannot impart the hue of ethics, but leave his own
impress on what he takes. He knows less of metaphysics than
any decently honest man."
From this time on, the Eddys credited Mr. Arens with the
same malicious intervention in their affairs with which they
had already charged Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Spofford. As has
been mentioned before, Mrs. Eddy believed that the mesmeric
influence of each of these three men affected her differently, and
that each operated upon her in a manner analogous to the
effect of certain harmful drugs. The influence of Mr. Arens,
she insisted, affected her like arsenic. Hence, when Mr. Eddy's
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 285
health began to fail, she diagnosed his case as the result of
Mr. Arens' mesmeric influence, or, as she expressed it, " arsenical
poison, mentally administered." To say that Mr. Eddy be
lieved in malicious mesmerism more sincerely than did his wife
would perhaps be incorrect ; but his was the more passive nature,
and he had less power of reaction and recuperation. He was
convinced that he was being slowly poisoned, and daily treated
himself against Mr. Arens and his alliterative chemical equiva
lent.
When Mr. Eddy continued to grow steadily worse, Mrs. Eddy
became alarmed, and sent for a regular physician. She called
Dr. Rufus K. Noyes, then of Lynn, a graduate of the Dart
mouth Medical School, and who has now for many years been
a physician in Boston. Dr. Noyes found Mr. Eddy's case very
simple, and told Mrs. Eddy that her husband was suffering
from a common and very well-defined disease of the heart, and
that he might die at any moment. He came to see Mr. Eddy
twice after this, gave him advice as to diet, hygiene, and rest,
and suggested the usual tonics for the heart and general
system.
Mr. Eddy's death occurred on the morning of Saturday,
June 3d, some hours before daybreak, and almost immediately
Mrs. Eddy telegraphed Dr. Noyes to come up from Lynn and
perform an autopsy. 3 The autopsy was private, and was
conducted at the widow's request. Dr. Noyes found that death
had resulted from an organic disease of the heart, the aortic
8 Only the year before, Mrs. Eddy had expressed herself strongly against
post-mortem examinations : " A metaphysician never gives medicine, recommends
or trusts in hygiene, or believes in the ocular or the post-mortem examination
of patients." Science and Health (1881), Vol. I., p. 269.
" Many a hopeless case of disease is induced by a single post-mortem exami
nation," Science and Health (1881), Vol. I., p. 163.
286 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
valve being destroyed and the surrounding tissues infiltrated
with calcareous matter.
It is necessary to remember that, fantastic as the theory of
poisoning by mental suggestion may sound, Mrs. Eddy thor
oughly believed in it, and she considered her husband's death
absolute proof of the power of malicious mesmerism to destroy
life. Charles J. Eastman, who attended Mr. Eddy just before
his death, agreed with Mrs. Eddy that the symptoms were
those of arsenical poisoning, and she doubtless thought that
the autopsy would corroborate this opinion. After the autopsy
she still clung to her conviction, and, although Dr. Noyes
actually took Mr. Eddy's heart into the room where she was
and pointed out to her its defects, she still maintained that her
husband had died from mental arsenic. On Monday she gave
out the following interview : 4
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
* Boston Post, June 5, 1882.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 287
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 im
morality. 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
6 Dr. Carpenter was a well-known mesmerist who used to give public exhi
bitions in Boston.
6 Although Mrs. Eddy usually attributed her husband's death to Mr. Arens'
mesmeric influence, she sometimes mentioned Richard Kennedy as his accomplice.
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
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 con
stantly 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 con
stantly 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.
The " Doctor " Eastman whom Mrs. Eddy quotes as corrobo
rating her theory that Mr. Eddy died from arsenic was not
a graduate of any medical school, nor is there any evidence
that he had ever studied at one, though the then lax medical
laws of Massachusetts did not prevent him from writing M.D.
after his name. He was a director of Mrs. Eddy's college, and
his name appeared in her curriculum as an authority to be
consulted on instrumental surgery, which was not taught in
her classes. He was also dean of the so-called " Bellevue
Medical College," which was chartered under the same undis-
criminating act under which Mrs. Eddy's college was chartered,
and which was later reported as a fraudulent institution and
closed.
In the Christian Science Journal, June, 1885, Mrs. Eddy thus
explains Mr. Eastman's connection with her college, but neg
lects to say that he was one of the original directors:
Charles J. Eastman, M.D., was never a student of mine, and, to my
knowledge, never claimed to be a Christian Scientist. At the time Mr.
Rice ' alludes to he was a homeopathic physician and dean of the Bellevue
T The Rev. Mr. Rice, a former member of the Massachusetts legislature, had
written some newspaper articles against the issue of medical diplomas by Mrs.
Eddy's college.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 289
Medical College. His name appeared in my curriculum as surgeon to be
consulted outside, instrumental surgery not being taught in my college.
His name has been removed from my curriculum. Such are the facts where
with Rev. Mr. Rice would slander a religious sect.
MARY B. G. EDDY,
Prest. Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
Although a genial enough fellow personally, and a frequent
caller at Mrs. Eddy's house, Eastman's " professional " record
is almost incredibly sinister. His private practice was largely
of a criminal nature, and at the time when Mrs. Eddy made
him a director of her college he had already been indicted on
a charge of performing a criminal operation. In 1890 he was
again before the Grand Jury on a similar charge ; and in 1893,
upon a third charge (the patient having died from the effects
of the operation), he was sentenced to five years in the State
prison. Eastman served out his term, and died a few years
after his release.
Eastman's assertion that he found traces of arsenic in Mr.
Eddy's body was absolutely valueless as a medical opinion.
Mr. Eddy's funeral services were held at the house in Colum
bus Avenue, after which his remains were taken to Tilton, N. H.,
by Mr. George D. Choate, and interred in the Baker family
lot, Mrs. Eddy herself remaining in Boston. On the following
Sunday, Mrs. Clara Choate preached a eulogistic funeral
sermon before the Christian Science congregation still a small
body of less than fifty members. Mr. Eddy, indeed, died upon
the eve of the determining epoch in his wife's career, and could
have had no conception of the ultimate influence and extent
of the movement which bears his name.
Some time after Mr. Eddy's death, his wife wrote a colloquy
in verse, which she called " Meeting of my Departed Mother
290 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
and Husband," in which she expressed confidence in their blessed
state and in her own future.
In this dialogue the mother, Abigail Baker, asks of Mr.
Eddy:
Bearest them no tidings from our loved on earth,
The toiler tireless for Truth's new birth,
All unbeguiled?
Our joy is gathered from her parting sigh:
This hour looks on her heart with pitying eye, r
What of my child?
To this Mr. Eddy replies:
When severed by death's dream, I woke to life:
She deemed I died, and could not hear my strife
At first to fill
That waking with a love that steady turns
To God; a hope that ever' upward yearns,
Bowed to his will.
Years had passed o'er thy broken household band
When angels beckoned me to this bright land,
With thee to meet.
She that has wept o'er me, kissed thy cold brow,
Rears the sad marble to our memory now
In lone retreat.
By the remembrance of her earthly life,
And parting prayer, I only know my wife,
Thy child, shall come,
Where farewells cloud not o'er our ransomed rest,
Hither to reap, with all the crowned and blest,
Of bliss the sum.
Many of Mrs. Eddy's students, as well as Mrs. Eddy herself,
disregarded the evidence of the autopsy, and believed that Mr.
Eddy had died from mesmeric poison rather than from a disease
of the heart. Every new movement has its extremists, and
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 291
Christian Science was then so young that all sorts of extravagant
hopes were cherished among its enthusiasts. More than one
dreamer fervently believed that the grave was at last to be
cheated of its victory. In any case, Mr. Eddy's death was
regarded as a blow to the movement, but, since they believed
that the bodily organs were impotent to contribute to either
health or disease except as they were influenced by the belief
of the patient, it was much less discouraging to feel that Mr.
Eddy had died from the shafts of the enemy than from a simple
defect of the heart-valves. In the one case, his death was a
stimulus, a call to action; in the other, it was an impeachment
of Mr. Eddy's growth in Science, an indication that he had
not entirely got beyond the belief in the efficacy of the organs
of the body. Explained as the work of animal magnetism,
Mr. Eddy's death, which might otherwise have been a blow to
his wife professionally, was made to confirm one of her favourite
doctrines. It was upon the subject of malicious mesmerism
that many of her students had differed from her and fallen
away, and even the loyal found it the most difficult of her doc
trines to accept. Here, in Mr. Eddy's death, was absolute
evidence of what mesmerism might accomplish.
The hour had come when Mrs. Eddy needed all her friends
about her. Arthur T. Buswell was still in Cincinnati, where
he had been sent as a path-finder two years before. After
Mrs. Eddy's tart reply when he wrote to her asking financial
aid, their correspondence practically ceased until Mr. Eddy's
illness, when she sent him a request to give her husband absent
treatments. One day he received a telegram which said merely :
" Come to 569 Columbus Avenue immediately." He accordingly
292 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
gave up his position as Superintendent of Public Charities,
and started at once for Boston. When he arrived at 569
Columbus Avenue, he found Mr. Eddy dead in the house, and
Mrs. Eddy surrounded by half a dozen faithful students, and
almost frantic from fear. She declared that mesmerism had
broken down her every defence, that her students were powerless
to treat against it, and that she herself was at last prostrated.
Twice, she said, she had resuscitated her husband from the
power which was strangling him, but the third time her strength
was exhausted. Mesmerism was submerging them, and she felt
that she was barely keeping her own head above water. She
was afraid to go out of the house, and afraid to stay in it.
This was the end, she told her faithful women ; undoubtedly she
would speedily follow her husband. The light of truth was to
be put out, and the world would begin again its dreary vigil
of centuries.
But, although beset by grief and fear, Mrs. Eddy did not
abandon herself to lamentation. On the contrary, she sat
almost constantly at her desk, writing press notices and news
paper interviews upon the subject of her husband's death.
Mrs. Eddy, indeed, is never so commanding a figure as when
she. bestirs herself in the face of calamity. She gave way to
fear and dread only in the short intervals when she laid aside
her driven pen for rest, and her best energies were concentrated
upon how she should present to the public this misfortune
which, if wrongly understood, might be used as an effective
argument against Christian Science, and might retard her
advancement in a new field.
Soon after her husband's death, Mrs. Eddy, attended by
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 293
Mr. Buswell and Miss Alice Sibley, went to Mr. Buswell's old
home at Barton, Vt., to spend the remainder of the summer.
Mr. Buswell asserts that Mrs. Eddy was in an excessively
nervous and exhausted condition, approaching nervous prostra
tion, and that he was called up night after night to treat her
for those hysterical attacks from which she was never entirely
free. But, however ill she might have been the night before,
each day found her planning for the future of her church and
college, arranging for lectures to be given by her students,
looking about for new practitioners, and tirelessly devising
means to extend the movement. She knew that a practical
reconstruction of her household would now be necessary, and
began casting about in her mind for such of her students as
could be counted upon to devote themselves unreservedly to her
service. In one of her selections, certainly, she was not mis
taken. On the day they started back to Boston, Mrs. Eddy
asked Mr. Buswell to telegraph Calvin A. Frye, a young
machinist of Lawrence, Mass., who had lately studied with her,
to meet them at Plymouth, N. H. One is tempted to wonder
what Mr. Frye would have done, when this message reached
him, had he known of what it was to be the beginning. From
the day he joined Mrs. Eddy at Plymouth, and returned to
Boston with her, he has never left her. Having entered Mrs.
Eddy's service at the age of thirty-seven, he is now a man of
sixty-four, and is still at his post.
For twenty-seven years Mr. Frye has occupied an anomalous
position in Mrs. Eddy's household. He has been her house-
steward, bookkeeper, and secretary. When he attends her
upon her ceremonial drives in Concord, he wears the livery of
294 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
a footman. In a letter to her son, George Glover, written
April 27, 1898, Mrs. Eddy describes Mr. Frye as her " man-of-
all-work." Since Mrs. Eddy's retirement to Concord eighteen
years ago, Calvin Frye has lived in an isolation almost as com
plete as her own, the object of surmises and insinuations. He
has no personal friends outside of the walls of Pleasant View,
and the oft-repeated assertion that in twenty-seven years he has
not been beyond Mrs. Eddy's call for twenty-four hours is
perhaps literally true. Although her treatment of him has
often been contemptuous in the extreme, his fidelity has been
invaluable to Mrs. Eddy; but the actual donning of livery
by a middle-aged man of some education and of sturdy, inde
pendent New England ancestry, is a difficult thing to under
stand. Whether he feels the grave charges which have recently
been brought against him, or the ridicule of which he has long
been the object, it is not likely that any one will ever learn
from Mr. Frye. Whatever his motives and experiences, they
are securely hidden behind an impassive countenance and a
long-confirmed habit of silence.
Calvin A. Frye was born August 24, 1845, in Frye Village,
which is now a part of Andover, Mass., and which was formerly
called Frye's Mills, as it was a settlement which had grown up
about the saw-mill and grist-mill of Enoch Frye II., Calvin
Frye's grandfather. The Fryes were an old American family,
and their ancestors had taken part in the War of the Revolu
tion and the War of 1812. Calvin Frye's father, Enoch Frye
III., was born in the last year of the eighteenth century. After
preparing himself in the Phillips Andover Academy, he entered
Harvard University, and was graduated in 1821, with that
by Notuiau Photo Company
CALVIN A. FRYE
From a photograph taken about 1882
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 295
famous class to which belonged Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel
Hatch, Edward Loring, and Francis Cabot. The members
of this class, before their graduation, agreed to hold a reunion
every year for fifty years, and Enoch Frye was present at
the fiftieth and last reunion of his class at Cambridge in
1871.
After leaving college, Enoch Frye taught for a short time
as assistant master in one of the Boston schools. In 1823
he returned to Andover. While still a young man he had a
long illness which left him incurably lame and partially in
capacitated him. After his recovery he kept a small grocery-
store. He married Lydia Barnard, and they had four chil
dren, of whom Calvin was the third. While the children were
still very young, the mother became insane, and, with the ex
ception of lucid intervals of short duration, she was insane
until her death at an advanced age. She was twice placed in an
asylum, but, upon her return from her second stay there, she
begged her family not to send her away again, and for twelve
years thereafter she was the charge of her widowed daughter,
Lydia Roaf.
Each of Enoch Frye's children learned a trade, and Calvin,
after attending the public school in Andover, was apprenticed
as a machinist in Davis & Furber's machine-shops in North An
dover. He worked there until he joined Mrs. Eddy in 1882.
He was a good machinist, and left a steady and fairly re
munerative employment to follow her. When he was twenty-
six years old, Calvin married Miss Ada E. Brush of Lowell,
who was visiting in Lawrence, and who attended the same church.
She lived but one year, and after her death Calvin went back
296 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
to his father's house the family had moved to Lawrence in
the early '60's.
The Fryes were all calm, slow, and inarticulate. They kept
to themselves, both in Andover and in Lawrence, and never went
anywhere except to the Congregational Church, of which they
all were members. In their church relations they were as quiet
and unassertive as in their secular life. They went to service
regularly, but evinced no special interest in the church. Indeed,
their solitary manner of life seemed to come about from a gen
eral lack of interest in people and affairs, and they stayed
at home not so much because of an absorbing family life as
because they felt no impulse to stir about the world. The men
were all good mechanics, regular and steady in their habits ;
Lydia, the daughter, was patient, industrious, and self-sacri
ficing. As a family, the Fryes were long-lived. Enoch III.
lived from 1799 to 1886. His brother Andrew, now living,
is between ninety-five and ninety-six years old, and a sister also
lived to a great age. Careful, regular living and a systematic
avoidance of any excitement long preserved the Fryes in health
of mind and body. Certainly the forbears of Calvin Frye had
done their best to sheathe his nerves for the uneasy office to
which he was to be called and chosen.
Calvin and Lydia Frye first became interested in Christian
Science through their sister-in-law, Mrs. Oscar Frye. Mrs.
Clara Choate, a prominent healer in the Boston church, was
called to treat the insane mother, whom the family believed
was benefited by the treatments. Calvin took a course of in
struction under Mrs. Eddy, after which both he and Lydia prac
tised a little. After Calvin joined Mrs. Eddy in Boston, Lydia
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 297
followed him, and for some time did Mrs. Eddy's housework.
Returning ill to Lawrence, she underwent a severe surgical
operation, and at last died in reduced circumstances at the
home of a relative. Lydia was an ardent Christian Scientist,
and almost until the day she died stoutly declared that she " did
not believe in death."
From the day Calvin Frye entered the service of Mrs. Eddy,
he lived in literal accordance with the suggestion of that pas
sage in Science and Health 8 where Mrs. Eddy reminds us that
Jesus acknowledged no family ties and bade us call no man
father. Mrs. Eddy demanded of her followers all that they
had to give, and Mr. Frye, certainly, complied with her demand.
When his father, Enoch Frye III., died, on April 22, 1886,
four years after the son had entered Mrs. Eddy's service,
Calvin went down to Lawrence to attend the funeral, but his
precipitate haste indicated a short leave of absence. On the
way to the cemetery he stopped the carriage and boarded a
street-car bound for the railway-station, in order to catch the
next train back to Boston. By the time his sister Lydia died,
four years later, Calvin had become so completely absorbed in
his new life and duties that he did not acknowledge the notifica
tion of her death, did not go to her funeral, and did not respond
to a request for a small amount of money to help defray the
burial expenses. For him family ties no longer existed, and
death had become merely a belief.
8 Science and Health (1906), page 31.
CHAPTER XVI
MRS. EDDY'S BOSTON HOUSEHOLD A DAILY WARFARE AGAINST
MESMERISM THE P. M. SOCIETY AN ACTION AGAINST ARENS
FOR INFRINGEMENT OF COPYRIGHT
THE Massachusetts Metaphysical College, in Boston, was
first at 569 Columbus Avenue, and later at 571, the house
next-door. The houses, which are still standing, were then
exactly alike, narrow three-and-a-half-story dwellings with gray
stone fronts and slate roofs, a type of house very common in
Boston. When Mrs. Eddy returned to the city in the fall of
1882, attended by Mr. Bus well and Mr. Frye, she at once
resumed her classes ; this, of course, meant that the college had
reopened, for Mrs. Eddy was still the president and entire
faculty. Half a dozen or more of her students now made their
home in Mrs. Eddy's house, or, as they expressed it, " lived at
the college." Among these were Calvin Frye, Arthur Buswell,
Julia Bartlett, Hanover P. Smith, E. H. Hammond, and Mrs.
Whiting. (Luther M. Marston and Mrs. Emma Hopkins came
later.) They lived on a cooperative plan, each contributing
his share toward the household expenses, while Mr. Frye did the
marketing, engaged the servants, kept the accounts, and super
intended the housekeeping. Mrs. Eddy fitted up an office on
the first floor, where most of her resident students saw their
patients. They observed a system of rotation, and each had
298
HISTORY OP CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 299
his fixed office hours, so that the one room met the needs of
several practitioners. These practitioners, in one way and
another, helped to arouse an interest in Christian Science, and
Mrs. Eddy's classes began to grow larger. Her teaching was
not so much of a tax upon her strength as might be imagined,
for the twelve lectures were, by this time, an old story to her
and the same lecture was always given in practically the same
language. The lectures dealt with but one idea, and progressed
rather by figurative illustrations and repetitions than by the
development of a line of reasoning. But her duties by no
means ended with her lectures. She kept a sharp eye on the
finances of the college and the household expenditures, more than
once taking Mr. Frye to task for his mistakes in bookkeeping.
Mrs. Eddy's correspondence was now very large, and she usually
attended to it herself. She frequently occupied the pulpit at
Hawthorne Hall on Sunday, and was constantly writing replies
to attacks upon her church and college, besides press notices,
which Mr. Buswell took about to the editors of the Boston
papers in the hope of further advertising Mrs. Eddy and her
work. What with preaching, teaching, writing, and editing,
Mrs. Eddy had very little time for friendly personal in
tercourse. She was, as her students used proudly to declare,
in the saddle day and night. She went .out of the house but
seldom; though she liked to take a daily drive when she had
time for it. With her friends and resident students she never
talked of anything but Christian Science and the business
problems which confronted her. When other subjects were in
troduced, she grew absent-minded. She read very little except
the newspapers and the New York Ledger, which she had read
300 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
since her young womanhood, and which she still read regularly
every week. In earlier times Mrs. Eddy had been very fond
of Mrs. Southworth's novels, but now she discouraged the read
ing of fiction, and Science and Health was the only book she
kept in her room. When she lectured before her classes, Mrs.
Eddy usually had a vase of flowers upon the table at her side,
and, to illustrate the non-existence of matter, she often ex
plained that there were really no flowers there at all, and
that the bouquet was merely a belief of mortal mind. She was
fond of flowers in spite of the fact that she had always been
totally without a sense of smell she used, indeed, to tell her
students that the absence of a physical sense meant a gain in
spirituality.
There was singularly little social intercourse among the stu
dents who resided at the college. Mrs. Eddy was no idler, and
she found plenty of work for all her assistants. Occasionally,
in the evening, a fire was lighted in the parlour downstairs, and
she joined her students for an hour or two; but this did not
occur often. The two memorable festivities of the Christian
Scientists in the early '80's were the reception which Mrs.
Clara E. Choate gave for Mrs. Eddy upon the latter's return
from a visit to Washington, April 5, 1882, and the picnic at
Point of Pines, July 16, 1885, which commemorated the ninth
anniversary of the founding of the Christian Science Associa
tion, and was also Mrs. Eddy's sixty-fourth birthday. At this
picnic E. H. Harris, a dentist, and a new protege of Mrs.
Eddy's, gave a talk in which he mentioned the advantages of
Christian Science in the practice of dentistry; Mrs. Augusta
Stetson, who had recently come into the Association, and who
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 301
had been a professional elocutionist before she became a Chris
tian Scientist, recited two poems; and Mrs. Eddy gave a
" spiritual interpretation " of the ocean.
The atmosphere of Mrs. Eddy's house derived its peculiar
character from her belief in malicious mesmerism, which exerted
a sinister influence over every one under her roof. Her students
could never get away from it. Morning, noon, and night the
thing had to be reckoned with, and the very domestic arrange
ments were ordered to elude or to combat the demoniacal power.
If Mrs. Eddy had kept in her house a dangerous maniac or some
horrible physical monstrosity which was always breaking from
confinement and stealing about the chambers and hallways, it
could scarcely have cast a more depressing anxiety over her
household. Those of her students who believed in mesmerism
were always on their guard with each other, filled with suspicion
and distrust. Those who did not believe in it dared not admit
their disbelief. If a member of that household denied the
doctrine, or even showed a lack of interest in it, he was at once
pronounced a mesmerist and requested to leave.
Mr. Eddy's death had given malicious animal magnetism a
new vogue. Mrs. Eddy was now always discovering in herself
and her students symptoms of arsenical poison or of other bale
ful drugs. Her nocturnal illnesses, which she had for years
attributed to malicious mesmerism, were now more frequent and
violent than ever.
One of the principal duties of the resident students was to
treat Mrs. Eddy for these attacks. These seizures usually
came on about midnight. Mrs. Eddy would first call Mr. Frye,
and he, after hurrying into his clothes, would go about the
302 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
house, knocking at the doors of all the students, and calling
to them to dress immediately and hurry down to Mrs. Eddy's
room. After arousing the inmates of the house, he would hasten
through the deserted streets, summoning one after another of
the healers whom Mrs. Eddy considered most effective. When
they arrived at the college, they would find a group of sleepy
men standing in the hall outside Mrs. Eddy's door, talking in
low tones. They were called, one by one, by Miss Bartlett or
Mr. Frye, and admitted singly into Mrs. Eddy's chamber.
Sometimes she lay in a comatose condition, and would remain
thus for several hours, while each student, in his turn, sat
beside the bed and silently treated her for about twenty min
utes. He then left the room by another door than the one by
which he had entered, and another student took his place.
Again, the students would find Mrs. Eddy sitting up in bed,
with a high colour, her hair in disorder, wringing her hands
and uttering unintelligible phrases. On one occasion, when
Mrs. Eddy was walking the floor with a raging toothache, meta
physical treatment was abandoned, and several of her students
rushed up and down Tremont Street after midnight, trying
to persuade some dentist to leave his bed and come to her
relief.
In animal magnetism Mrs. Eddy found a satisfactory ex
planation for the seeming perversity of inanimate things.
Mesmerism caused the water-pipes to freeze and the wash-
boiler to leak. She was convinced that all the postal clerks and
telegraph operators in Boston had been mesmerised, and on one
occasion, when she was sending an important telegram to
Chicago, she sent Luther M. Marston, one of her students, to
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 303
West Newton to despatch it via Worcester, so that it need
not go through Boston at all.
When a contagion of influenza spread about Boston in the
early '80's, a number of the students in Mrs. Eddy's class
were affected by it. She paused one day in the midst of a
lecture to say : " I notice that a number of you are sneezing
and coughing, and the cause is perfectly apparent to me.
Kennedy and Spofford are treating you for hashish. Just
treat yourselves against hashish, and this will pass."
Even the students under Mrs. Eddy's own roof were at times
accused of resorting to malicious malpractice. On one occasion
Mr. Buswell secured the Rev. Dr. Andrew P. Peabody of Cam
bridge to preach before the Christian Science congregation at
Hawthorne Hall. It was announced by Mrs. Eddy, before the
students started for the service, that Mr. Frye was to introduce
Dr. Peabody to the audience. When the minister ascended the
rostrum, however, he was alone, and no one introduced him.
After several days had passed, Mr. Frye knocked at Mr. Bus-
well's door late one night, and told him that he was wanted in
the parlour. Mr. Buswell rose, dressed, and went downstairs,
where he found Mrs. Eddy and half a dozen resident students
sitting about the room. Mr. Buswell sat down, and for a few
minutes every one was silent. Then Mr. Frye rose and said,
" Mr. Buswell, I charge you with having worked upon my
mind last Sunday, so that I could not introduce the speaker."
Mrs. Eddy listened while Mr. Buswell defended himself. Sev
eral other students spoke, and then everybody went off to
bed.
In the summer of 1884 Mrs. Eddy taught her first class
304 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
in Chicago. She had now fallen out with Mrs. Clara Choate,
and for several weeks before she went West Mrs. Eddy was in
a state of great anxiety lest Mrs. Choate should " prostrate "
her through mesmerism, as she believed that Mrs. Choate herself
wished to go to Chicago to teach. Mr. Frye had bought tickets
for Mrs. Eddy and himself when, on the very night before they
were to start, she fell ill. Next day she was not able to leave
the house, and many of her students were summoned to the
college to treat against Mrs. Choate.
This adverse treatment, now conducted with some system,
was an important feature of the daily life at the college. A
regular society was organised among Mrs. Eddy's most trusted
students and was called the "P. M." (Private Meeting). 1
This society met daily after breakfast in the morning and after
supper at night, gathered in Mrs. Eddy's parlour, and " took
up the enemy " in thought. Mrs. Eddy was not always present
at these sittings, but she usually gave out the line of treatment.
She would say, for example : " Treat Kennedy. Say to him :
4 Your sins have found you out. You are affected as you
wish to affect me. Your evil thought reacts upon you. You
are bilious, you are consumptive, you have liver trouble, you
have been poisoned by arsenic,' " etc. Mrs. Eddy further in
structed her practitioners that, when they were treating their
patients, they should first take up and combat the common
enemy, mesmerism, before they took up the patient's error.
The adverse treatments given by the students at the college
were usually conducted in perfect silence, and the participants
1 The sessions of this secret society later caused a good deal of discussion and
criticism. In the Christian Science Journal of September, 1888, Mrs. Eddy ad
mits that she " did organise a secret society known as the P. M.," but that its
workings were not " shocking or terrible."
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 305
sat with their eyes closed. 2 Miss Bartlett, a very devout
woman, as she sat in this silent circle, absorbed in her task,
her eyes closed, her head bowed, had a habit of idly passing
a side-comb again and again through her hair. Mrs. Eddy,
who, when she was there, always kept an eye on the circle,
on one of these occasions suddenly broke the stillness by a sar
castic remark to the effect that better work would be done
if less time were spent in hair-combing and more in combating
error. Miss Bartlett blushed as if she had been caught com
mitting a mortal sin.
But Mrs. Eddy's policy of sharp rebuke proved to be a wise
one. On the whole her students liked it, and on the whole they
needed it. Her business assistants and practitioners were, most
of them, young men whose years had need of direction. In
the nature of the case, they were generally young men without
a strong purpose and without very definite aims and ambitions.
Whether it was that Mrs. Eddy did not want men of determina
tion about her, or whether such men were not drawn to her and
her college, the fact remains that most of the men then in her
service were of the eminently biddable sort. Some of them,
before they came into Christian Science, had tried other voca
tions and had not been successful. Mrs. Eddy drew young
men of this type about her, not only because she could offer them
a good living, but because she was able to give them an im
petus, to charge them with energy and endow them with a cer
tain effectiveness which they did not have of themselves. Loyal
Christian Scientists point to this or that man who once worked
2 Calvin Frye, Arthur Buswell, Hanover P. Smith, Luther M. Marston, B. H.
Hammond, Mrs. Whiting, and Miss Julia Bartlett were at various times mem
bers of this circle.
306 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
under Mrs. Eddy and who afterward broke with her, explaining
that he was more successful and useful under her than he has
ever been since he went over to the enemy. In some instances
this is true. Many of her students never worked so well after
they withdrew from her compelling leadership, and their contact
with her remained the most vivid and important event in their
lives. Out of her abundant energy and determination Mrs.
Eddy has been able to nerve many a weak arm anjd to steel many
an irresolute will, and she has done much of her work with tools
which were temporarily given hardness and edge by the driving
personality behind them.
As the college grew and her classes increased in size, Mrs.
Eddy exacted, and for the most part obtained, the same absolute
obedience which she had demanded of the faithful in Lynn.
She had a custom of sending telegrams to students who had
left Boston, summoning them to report at the college imme
diately, and giving no explanation of the order. When they
arrived there, they sometimes found that she had merely been
experimenting to see how quickly they could reach her in case
of need. If they were prompt in this sort of drill, she seemed
pleased and reassured. On the Fourth of July, especially,
she demanded that all her students be subject to call, and
that none of the resident students leave Boston on that day.
She explained that on the Fourth " mortal mind was in ebulli
tion," and she feared animal magnetism more then than at any
other time.
In 1883 Mrs. Eddy brought an action against Edward J.
Arens for infringement of her copyright upon Science and
Health, and won the suit. Arens was forbidden to circulate
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 307
his book, to which there has already been a reference in
Chapter XV, and the copies which he had on hand were
ordered by the court to be destroyed. Mr. Arens' defence was
that Science and Health was not Mrs. Eddy's own work, but
that it had been taken largely from P. P. Quimby's manuscripts.
As none of Mr. Quimby's manuscripts had been published or
copyrighted, and as Mr. Arens did not have them in his
possession, the defendant's position was obviously untenable.
Although this decision had to do merely with the validity of
Mrs. Eddy's copyright, and did not touch upon the authorship
of the book, Mrs. Eddy chose to construe it as being a court
decision to the effect that she was the sole author of Science
and Health, and the founder and discoverer of Christian Sci
ence; and her construction cheered and encouraged her quite
as much, perhaps, as an actual decision to that effect would
have done. She afterward referred to this decision as her
" vindication in the United States court."
The years from 1882 to 1885 were years of rapid advance
ment for Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science. Although a list of
the members of the Christian Scientists' Association, made June
2, 1884, shows that but sixty-one persons then belonged to the
Association, many people were interested in Christian Science
who had not actually allied themselves with it, and Mrs. Eddy
was steadily gaining some sort of recognition for herself and
her teachings. She had now a considerable number of graduate
students who were in practice, and their success, as well as hers,
depended upon the growth of Christian Science and of the
college. They sent their patients to study under her, and
canvassed widely among their friends and acquaintances. Some
308 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
of these students went to distant places to practise, and did
the work of missionaries, encouraging their patients to go to
Boston and study under Mrs. Eddy. A degree from the Mas
sachusetts Metaphysical College meant, in most cases, a lucra
tive practice. In the West especially, where Boston is regarded
as the sum of all that is conservative, and where even the banks
consider it an advantage to have a Bostonian among their
directors, a degree from a Boston institution meant a great
deal, and the " Massachusetts Metaphysical College of Boston "
suggested an institution devoted to higher scholarship. A
combination of Boston and metaphysics seemed to leave little
to be desired in the way of learning, and many a Western stu
dent, after having " gone East to college," returned home to
find that, for the purpose of making a living and commanding
respect among his neighbours, a degree from the Massachusetts
Metaphysical College served him quite as well as a degree from
Harvard. Graduate students had lectured and practised in
Chicago, and when Mrs. Eddy taught a class there in the sum
mer of 1884, she inspired a sentiment which was ultimately to
build up a strong church.
The Christian Science Church was now conspicuous enough
to be the object of occasional attacks from conservative theo
logians. These attacks were neither frequent nor bitter,
indeed, they were usually humorous or mildly ironical, but
Mrs. Eddy made the most of them, and answered them with
promptness and fire, getting her replies published in the Boston
newspapers whenever it was possible to do so, and, when editors
proved intractable, resorting to her own periodical, the Chris
tian Science Journal. She realised the value of persecution,
w
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 309
even when it had to be helped along a little, and in the Journal
for April, 1885, she cries : " Must history repeat itself, and
religious intolerance, arrayed against the rights of man, again
deluge the earth in blood? " In the Journal we find that in
March of the same year, Mrs. Eddy was permitted to speak
at a religious meeting held at Tremont Temple, and there to
reply to a letter by the Rev. A. J. Gordon denouncing Christian
Science, and that she gloriously vindicated her church.
Mrs. Eddy was now president of the " Massachusetts Meta
physical College," editor of the Christian Science Journal,
president of the Christian Scientists' Association, and pastor
of the First Church of Christ (Scientist). To the latter office
her students had ordained her, without the aid of the clergy,
in 1881, and her official letters and press communications were
now usually signed " Reverend Mary Baker G. Eddy." Her
classes now numbered from fifteen to twenty-five students each.
The course of instruction took only three weeks, which, with a
class of twenty-five, would mean that Mrs. Eddy's fees for
that period of time amounted to $7,500. It is safe to say,
however, that at least one-fourth of her students were admitted
at a discount and paid only $200 each. Men and women of
intelligence and some experience of the world began to frequent
her college. Among these were Dr. J. W. Winkley, then a
Unitarian minister, who had a church at Revere; Mrs. Emma
Hopkins, Mrs. Ursula Gestefeld of Chicago; Mrs. Augusta
Stetson, then an elocutionist in Somerville, Boston ; Mrs. Ellen
Brown Linscott ; Mrs. Josephine Woodbury and her husband ;
the Rev. J. H. Wiggin, and the Rev. Frank E. Mason.
To understand the early growth of Christian Science in Bos-
310 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
ton, one must remember, first, that Boston was then, as it is
now, the stronghold of radical religious sects ; secondly, that,
while fundamentally Mrs. Eddy never changed at all, superfi
cially, she was continually changing for the better, and her
shrewdness, astuteness, and tact grew with every year of her life.
After her removal to Boston, she constantly learned from her
new associates, even to the extent of resolutely breaking herself
of certain ungrammatical habits of speech no mean achievement
for a woman above sixty. But the most important thing that
Mrs. Eddy learned was to admit to herself only her own
limitations. She began to submit her editorials, pamphlets,
and press communications to certain of her students for gram
matical censorship. She now granted interviews to strangers
and new students only when she felt at her best. She withdrew
herself from her followers somewhat, and built up a ceremonial
barrier which was not without its effect. In writing, she
acquired more and more facility as time went on. Her style
of expression remained vague, but that suited her purpose, and
her excessive floridity delighted many of her readers, and was
condoned by others as a survival of the old-fashioned flowery
manner of writing. Her letters of this date are better spelled
and punctuated, and are written in a firmer and more vigorous
hand, than those written when she was forty.
Mrs. Eddy now began to limit the number of her public
addresses, and she delivered her Sunday sermon before her
congregation at the Hawthorne rooms only when she felt that
she could rouse herself to that state of emotional exaltation
which it was her aim to produce in her hearers. Often as late
as Sunday morning, she would notify one of her students to
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
fill the pulpit. At other times, after she had appointed a
substitute, she would decide at the last minute to go herself, and,
after the audience at Hawthorne Hall had been waiting for
perhaps half an hour, Mrs. Eddy's carriage would swing into
Park Street, and she would alight amid a crowd of delighted
students, sweep rapidly up the aisle, ascend the rostrum, and
at once begin to deliver one of her most effective sermons ;
perhaps a discussion of how, in His resurrection, Christ made
the highest demonstration of the healing powers of Christian
Science, or perhaps a prophetic discourse upon a text of which
she was particularly fond, and which she always delivered with
astonishing conviction : " Upon this rock I will build my church,
and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
CHAPTER XVII
LITERARY ACTIVITIES MRS. EDDY AS AN EDITOR THE REV. MR.
WIGGIN BECOMES HER LITERARY ASSISTANT HIS PRIVATE
ESTIMATE OF MRS. EDDY AND CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
WHEN Mrs. Eddy reopened the Massachusetts Metaphysical
College after her husband's death in 1882 and, with half a
dozen of her students, settled down to her old routine of teach
ing, she soon began to plan for a monthly publication which
should be devoted to the interests of Christian Science. Quite
as willing to contribute to the Boston dailies as she had been
to enliven with prose and verse the columns of the more modest
weeklies of Lynn, Mrs. Eddy wrote a great many press notices
regarding her church and college, and it was Arthur Buswell's
business to take these about to the various newspaper offices
and attempt to place them. Editors, however, were often
prejudiced by Mrs. Eddy's involved style and extravagant
claims, and their unwillingness to print many of her contribu
tions suggested to Mr. Buswell and Mrs. Eddy the convenience
of having a periodical of their own.
On April 14, 1883, the Journal of Christian Science, a small
eight-page monthly, made its appearance, bearing the name
of Mary B. Glover Eddy as editor. The new magazine opened
with a " prospectus " which began as follows : " The ancient
Greek looked longingly for the Olympiad. The Chaldee
312
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 313
watched for the appearing of a star ; to him, no higher destiny
dawned upon the dome of being than that foreshadowed by
the signs in the heavens." Whether Mrs. Eddy meant to
imply that so the modern world waited for Christian Science,
the reader must conjecture, for she does not say so, nor does
she say anything about the purpose or policy of her journal.
The only sentence in the prospectus which could be construed
as having anything to do with her magazine is the following,
which would seem to indicate her intended policy as editor,
though this is not very clear:
While we entertain decided views as to the best method for elevating
the race physically, morally, and spiritually, and shall express these views
as duty demands, we shall claim no especial gifts from our divine origin,
or any supernatural power, etc.
The founding of the Journal was perhaps the most im
portant step Mrs. Eddy had taken since she came to Boston,
as it afterward proved one of the most effective means of
extending her influence and widening the boundaries of Chris
tian Science. In the beginning the magazine had but a handful
of subscribers, and the cost of printing it was not more than
thirty or forty dollars an issue. This sum was raised by vol
untary subscription, nearly all the Christian Scientists con
tributing money except Mrs. Eddy.
Although her subscription-list was small, Mrs. Eddy knew
what to do with her Journal. Copies found their way to remote
villages in Missouri and Arkansas, to lonely places in Nebraska
and Colorado, where people had much time for reflection, little
excitement, and a great need to believe in miracles. The meta
phor of the bread cast upon the waters is no adequate sugges-
314 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
tion of the result. Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science began
to be talked of far away in the mountains and in the prairie
villages. Lonely and discouraged people brooded over these
editorials which promised happiness to sorrow and success to
failure. The desperately ill had no quarrel with the artificial
rhetoric of these testimonials in which people declared that they
had been snatched from the brink of the grave.
Soon after the Journal was started, Mrs. Emma Hopkins,
an intelligent and sincere young woman, came to Boston to
assume the assistant editorship of the magazine. Mrs. Hop
kins had first met Mrs. Eddy at the house of one of her friends,
where Mrs. Eddy had been engaged to give a parlour lecture
on Christian Science. Mrs. Hopkins became deeply interested
in this new doctrine, and, although after her first meeting with
Mrs. Eddy she carried away an unfavourable impression, she
soon fell completely under the spell of that remarkable per
sonality; thought her handsome, stimulating, inspiring, and
very different from any woman she had ever known. She en
tered one of Mrs. Eddy's classes and went through the same
experience that sensitive students of an earlier date describe;
during the lectures she felt uplifted and carried beyond herself ;
and in describing the effect of Mrs. Eddy's words upon her
hearers, Mrs. Hopkins uses the same figure that we have heard
before in Lynn that of the wind stirring the wheat-field.
When Mrs. Hopkins became assistant editor of the Journal,
she went to live in Mrs. Eddy's house in Columbus Avenue,
where the editorial work was done. She remained there for
two years, until, worn out by Mrs. Eddy's tyranny and selfish
ness, and saddened by her own disillusionment, Mrs. Hopkins
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 315
left the house and never communicated with Mrs. Eddy again.
Mrs. Eddy afterward attacked her savagely in the Journal,
and applied to her the old terms of opprobrium.
In the fall of 1885 Mrs. Sarah H. Crosse succeeded Mrs.
Hopkins as assistant editor of the Journal, and she, in turn,
was succeeded by Frank Mason, who became both editor and
publisher about the end of 1888.
In its early years the Journal of Christian Science was almost
as much Mrs. Eddy as was the Massachusetts Metaphysical
College. At sixty-two Mrs. Eddy fell to playing editor with
the same zest with which she had entered upon the activities
of her church and college. She wrote much of the Journal
herself, and what she did not originate she selected and largely
rewrote, keeping a sharp eye on the articles and editorials
written by her assistants and revising them very thoroughly.
She was especially solicitous about the articles which dealt
with herself, and she was almost equally anxious that the
articles should deal with little else. The Journal of Christian
Science was then scarcely more than the monthly gazette of
Mrs. Eddy's doings the diary which chronicled her thoughts
and activities, and which minutely recorded the tributes of her
courtiers. She no longer had to get out a new edition of
Science and Health to give vent to her feelings about a newly
discovered mesmerist. Once a month she audited her accounts,
and the Journal was her clearing-house. Through its columns
the new favourite was exalted and the old relegated to his
place among the mesmerised. In one column we find, in large
type, a card of thanks for a twenty-one-pound turkey which
some one had sent for Mrs. Eddy's New Year's dinner; in
316 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
another a tirade upon animal magnetism ; and in still another
the following acknowledgment of Christmas gifts:
From Bradford Sherman, C. S., and his wife Mrs. Mattie Sherman, C. S.,
of Chicago, Wild Flowers of Colorado, a large elegantly bound and
embellished book, containing twenty-two paintings of the gorgeous flowers
of the Occident.
From Mrs. Hannah A. Larminie, C. S., of Chicago, a book with a
sweet, illustrated poem, and a very elegant pocket-handkerchief.
From Mrs. Mattie Williams, C. S., a large, fine photograph of her
beautiful home in Columbus, Wisconsin. On the piazaa are herself and
husband; on the grounds in front, her children with their bicycles.
MARY B. G, EDDY.*
This annual acknowledgment of Mrs. Eddy's Christmas gifts
in the Journal grew more formidable as the years went by.
In 1889 Mrs. Eddy listed her presents as follows:
LIST OF INDIVIDUAL OFFERINGS
Eider-down pillow, white satin with gold embroidery. Eider-down pillow,
blue silk, hand-painted, and fringed with lace. Pastel painting of Minne-
haha Falls, with silvered easel. Silver nut-pick set. Painted Sevres China
tea-set. Book, Beautiful Story, 576 pages, with steel engravings and
lithographs. The Dore Bible Gallery, embellished. Brussels-lace tie. Silken
sofa-scarf, inwrought with gold. Pansy bed, in water-colours, with bronze
frame. Stand for lemonade-set. Silver combination-set. Silk and lace
mat. Embroidered linen handkerchief, in silken sachet-holder. Chinese
jar. Silk-embroidered plush table-scarf. Connected reclining-pillows. Work
of art, White and Franconia Mountains. Transparent painting of Jacque
minots. Satin and lace pin-cushion. Barometer. Cabinet photograph-
holder. Perfumery. Large variety of books and poems. Face of the
Madonna, framed in oak and ivory. Moon-mirror, with silver setting, and
" the Man in the Moon." Hand-painted blotter. Embroidered linen hand
kerchiefs. Blue silk-embroidered shawl. Plush portemonnaie. Openwork
linen handkerchief. Charm slumber-robe. Bible Pearls of Promise. Large
white silk banner with silver fringe. Sachet bags. Two velvet table mats.
Silver holder for stereoscopic views. Two fat Kentucky turkeys. Hosts
of bouquets and Christmas cards.
The following year, 1890, her publisher, Mr. William G.
1 Christian Science Journal, January, 1886.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 317
Nixon, tried to persuade Mrs. Eddy to omit a detailed list
of her Christmas offerings, and she wrote him:
I requested you through Mr. Frye to reinstate my notice of my Christmas
gifts, for the reasons I herein name.
Students are constantly telling me how they felt the mental impression
this year to make me no present, and when they overcame it were strength
ened and blessed. For this reason viz., to discourage mental malpractice
and to encourage those who beat it I want that notice published.
Many of Mrs. Eddy's contributions to the Journal have
been collected and reprinted in the volume known as Miscel
laneous Writings. While even in the very latest edition of
Science and Health the flavour of Mrs. Eddy lingers on every
page, like a dominating strain of blood that cannot be bred out,
the book has been rearranged and retouched by so many hands
that the personal element has been greatly moderated. In
the old files of the Journal, however, we seem to get Mrs. Eddy
with singular directness and to come into very intimate contact
with her. When she is angry one can fairly hear the voice
behind the type, and when she bestows royal favours one can
see the smile at the other end of the copy. These contributions
were usually written in precipitate haste, and reached the de
spairing printer at the last possible moment, almost unin
telligible, full of inaccuracies and errors, and, except for an
occasional period, innocent of all punctuation. The copy-
reader or assistant editor did what he could at editing it as
he fed it to the compositors and the point is that he did not
do too much. In the columns of the Journal one gets Mrs.
Eddy's pages hot from her hand, as if they had not been
touched since the copyboy dashed with them out of the door of
571 Columbus Avenue. In her editorial function she is more
318 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
at ease than in her more strictly sacerdotal one, and in her
contributions to her paper she sounds all the stops of her in
strument. As she says, she " commands and countermands "
and " thunders to the sinner," but for happier occasions she
has a lighter tone, and she is by turns peppery and playful.
A student in Chicago offends, and Mrs. Eddy calls her a "suck
ling " and a " petty western editress." Her students send
her a watch at Christmastide, and she thanks, them for their
" timely " gift. They give her a fish-pond, and she asks them
to pond-er.
During the early years Mrs. Eddy opened each number of
the Journal with a crashing editorial, and, in addition to this,
she conducted, under her own name, a " Questions and Answers "
column, in which she met and settled queries like the following:
Has Mrs. Eddy lost her power to heal?
Has the sun forgotten to shine and the planets to revolve around it?
Who was it discovered, demonstrated and teaches Christian Science? etc.
Mrs. Eddy did not hesitate to answer personal criticism and
to reply to gossip in the columns of her paper. On one occa
sion she replies to the old story, which was forever cropping
up in Lynn, that she was addicted to the use of morphine.
She says that when a mesmerist was attempting to poison her,
she did take large doses of morphine to see whether she were
still susceptible to poison. " Years ago, when the mental mal
practice of poison was undertaken by a mesmerist, to thwart
that design, I experimented by taking some large doses of
morphine to watch the effect, and I say it with tearful thanks,
the drug had no effect upon me whatever, the hour had struck,
* if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.' " 2
3 Christian Science Journal, April, 1885.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 319
Several years later the Journal takes up some petty criti
cism which had been made regarding Mrs. Eddy's dress:
Such views of Christian Science are well illustrated in a little incident
that happened to the author of Science and Health a year or two ago,
when she was the active pastor of the Scientist church in Boston. She
had a custom of answering from the platform, questions that were
passed up in writing. On one occasion she found this inquiry, " How can
a Christian Scientist afford to wear diamonds and be clad in purple
velvet?" She stepped forward and answered, "This ring that I wear
was given me several years ago as a thank-offering from one I had brought
from death back to life; for a long time I could not wear it, but my
husband induced me to accustom myself by putting it on in the night, and
finally I came to see it only as a sign of recognition and gratitude of my
master, and to love it as such ; this purple velvet is ' purple,' but it is
velveteen that I paid one dollar and fifty cents for, and I have worn it
for several years, but it seems to be perpetually renewed, like the widow's
cruse." *
But the discussion of Mrs. Eddy and her affairs did not
end with her signed contributions. During the first five years
of the magazine's existence Mrs. Eddy was the theme of almost
every article, testimonial, and letter. There are poems to the
" bold innovator in the realms of thought," and scattered here
and there are miscellaneous extracts of which the following,
signed " Lily of Israel," will illustrate the drift and character :
PROPHECY
She existed from the beginning before all ages, and will not cease
to exist throughout all ages; it is she who shall create in Heaven a light
which shall never be extinguished; she shall rise in the midst of her
people, and she shall be blessed over all those who are blessed by God,
for she shall open the doors of the East, and the Desired of Nations shall
appear. 4
The " Healing Department " of the Journal, which held a
prominent place and was perhaps the strongest element in its
8 Christian Science Journal, February, 1889,
4 Christian Science Journal, May, 1885.
320 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
success, reports at length the alleged cures made by the prac
tising healers and, in many instances, by the mere reading of
Science and Health. While this department was of great value
in giving publicity to the claims of Christian Science its recital
of the details of illness and suffering make painful reading and
seem rather too intimately personal for quotation. A few of
the headings will indicate the nature of these communications:
" Liver Complaint of Long Standing Cured by flalf an Hour's
Talk " ; " Cancer on the Face, Badly Broken Out, Cured in
One Week " ; " Heart Trouble and Dropsy, with Great Swelling
of the Limbs, of Thirty Years' Standing, Cured in Two Treat
ments " ; " Bright's Disease and also Scrofulous Bunches on
the Neck Cured in Three Weeks " ; " Woman Had Twenty-nine
Surgical Operations " ; " Had Seventeen Physicians " ; " Cancer
and Lockjaw"; "Cured of Both Paralysis and Mormonism."
One amusing report states that " a girl nineteen years old
who was dumb and had never spoken, commenced talking after
her third treatment as if she was thinking aloud, and has talked
ever since." Among these notes on healing, the following, from
the Journal of October, 1887, deserves mention:
DOG AND RATTLESNAKE
DEAR JOURNAL: Our dog was bitten by a rattlesnake on the tongue
a short time ago, and the verdict, as is usual in such cases, was death;
but through the understanding of God's promise that we shall handle
serpents and not be harmed, if we but believe, I was able to demonstrate
over the belief in four days. The dog is now as well as ever.
MRS. M. E. DARNELL.
In the Journal of April, 1885, occurs an interesting para
graph regarding General Grant (then in his last illness), which
asserts that his physicians " are hastening him toward the
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 321
manifestations of the death symptoms they hold so definitely
in mind, with all the formulating speed they are capable of."
From 1883 to 1887 the Journal devotes considerable space
to mesmerism, although some of Mrs. Eddy's students besought
her to place less emphasis upon this doctrine. In the Journal
of October, 1885, she rebukes such conservative followers
sharply :
In my public works I lay bare the capacity, in belief, of animal magnet
ism, to break the Decalogue, to murder, steal, commit adultery, etc.
Those who deny my right or wisdom to expose its crimes, are either
participants in this evil, afraid of its supposed power or ignorant of it.
Those accusing me of covering this iniquity, are zealous, who, like Peter,
sleep when the Teacher bids them watch; and when the hour of trial comes
would cut off somebody's ears.
In 1887 a department devoted to Malicious Animal Magnet
ism becomes one of the regular features of the Journal, and
continues for some years. At the head of this department
regularly occurs the following quotation from Nehemiah : "Also
they have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their
pleasure, and we are in great distress" In this department
persons who believe that they have been injured in their business
or tormented in body and soul by mesmerists recount their
symptoms and struggles. One woman is tortured by a hatred
and distrust of Mrs. Eddy (it was by producing a distrust of
Mrs. Eddy that the mesmerists most frequently harried their
victims), and she suffers under this " belief " until she is treated
for it and cured by a fellow-Scientist. Another is tormented
by a desire to write, and the tempter whispers to her that she
" can write as good a book as Mrs. Eddy's." Mrs. Carrie
Snider, a prominent worker in the New York church, writes
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
at a length of five pages to describe how malicious mesmerism
killed her husband, Fremont Snider. He was, she says, under
the treatment of two healers whose minds were not in accord,
and the thought from one confused the thought from the other,
leaving him to die in the cross-fire. She was confident that if
he had left the treatment of his case with her, he would have
recovered. Even after a physician had pronounced him dead
and had sent for the coroner, Mrs. Snider treated her husband,
with some success, she says, adding that if she had had help
she could even then have saved him. 5
The history of the growth of the belief in malicious mesmerism,
as one may follow it in the early files of the Journal, is interest
ing and illuminating. Here one sees how this doctrine, which
was so singularly a temperamental product, born of a personal
hatred and developed to meet personal needs and to explain
personal caprices, begins to control the conduct and affections
of people whose natures and obligations were very different
from Mrs. Eddy's. So long as the belief in demonology was
a mere personal vagary of Mrs. Eddy's, explaining her quarrels,
affecting her spoons and pillows and telegrams, it was as harm
less as it was amusing. But as one reads the letters from per
sons who ascribe the estrangement of friends and even the death
of children to the ill-will of their neighbours and fellow-towns
men, one begins to feel the serious side of this doctrine. The
reader must possess very great hardihood indeed if he can
follow without sympathy one letter from Pierre, Dak., which
recounts the story of the death of two young children under
the treatment of their zealous mother.
5 Fremont D. Snider died of heart-disease, December 17, 1888.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 323
The mother was the wife of a banker in Pierre, a woman of
unusual force of character, who had been liberally educated in
Germany. Her husband was a young man of energy and
promise, and they were both extravagantly fond of their chil
dren. The wife took a course of lessons under a Christian
Science practitioner in Des Moines, la., and returned to her
home in Dakota a devout convert. One of her children, a little
boy four years old, fell ill; she treated him without the aid of
a physician, and he died. Some months later a second child,
a baby eleven months old, began to pine. She believed that
he was the victim of malicious animal magnetism, exercised
by the members of the Methodist Church which she had left
after becoming a Christian Scientist. She even believed that
the Methodists were praying for the child's death, and fled to
Des Moines with the baby, where he grew better; but when she
returned home he became worse again. The father was then
in New York on business, and the mother, on her own responsi
bility, undertook the case, telegraphing to E. J. Foster Eddy,
Mrs. Eddy's adopted son, for absent treatment for the child.
For ten days the misguided woman watched over her baby and
treated him against malicious mesmerism, which she believed
brought on the spasms and convulsions. She did not notify
her husband that the baby was dangerously ill until she tele
graphed word of its death, nine hours after death occurred;
and for those nine hours after the child had ceased to breathe
she treated and prayed over him, not permitting herself to
shed a tear or to " entertain the thought of death," confidently
expecting that his eyes would open again. This experience
and the subsequent indignation of the townspeople seem to have
324 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
been too much for a friend and fellow-citizen who was there
visiting at the house, and who assisted in treating the child,
for she writes Mrs. Eddy an imploring letter, asking, " Why
this termination?" and declaring: "We recognised no disease,
and as first symptoms would appear beliefs of paralysis,
spasms, fever, etc. we would realise the allness of God, and
they would disappear." But the letter itself must be given in
full. Its account of the sufferings of the baby and the terrible
fortitude of the mother sound like a passage from the earlier
and harsher chapters of religious history, which so often make
us wonder whether there is anything else in the world that can
be quite so cruel as the service of an ideal.
PIERRE, DAKOTA, Jan. 31, 1889.
Last September Mrs. N * took a course of lectures in Science in Des
Moines, and returned to her home here, and was the instrument of great
good. Many were healed physically who sought also the spiritual benefits.
Instead of working for the church, of which she had been a consistent
and active member, she gave all her time to Science. This stirred up the
error in the minds of the brothers and sisters, and caused the fiery
darts to be mentally hurled at her and they seemingly penetrated her
weakest point, her darling baby, eleven months old, who seemed in December
to be sinking under the blows. As Herod was seeking the young child's
life they thought it best to flee for a time from this mental atmosphere,
and went to Des Moines where he grew better. Mr. N being obliged
to go to New York, and Mrs. N hearing that mortal mind had got
hold of some of her patients determined to return to Pierre to look
after their spiritual welfare.
I returned with her, and almost all our time has been spent in reading
the Bible and " Science and Health " to those who were interested. Min
isters called upon us and denounced Science in the strongest terms; and
one Sunday every minister in the place preached against it, not knowing
they could " do nothing against the Truth." We continued working quietly
and speaking only to those who came to see us.
8 The name Is withheld In consideration for the family most Intimately con
cerned In this case. The Interested reader, however, may refer to the flies of
the Christian Science Journal, March, 1889, pages 637-639, where this letter
was originally printed and where the full name Is used.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 325
Finally little Edward seemingly succumbed to an attack, while we were
holding a meeting in the parlour. To all appearance he was gone, but
we knew it was animal magnetism, and treating him for it he revived.
We wrestled till daybreak and though there was little seeming improvement,
we realised that " God's will is done " and felt that the baby was healed.
During the ten days that followed, the wiles of the evil one appeared,
but they were overcome. Mrs. N telegraphed Dr. Foster Eddy for
help, and felt that help came. The telegraph operator here, not knowing
the influence of mortal mind, divulged the telegram, and this made the
battle harder. Again we telegraphed for help and again the cry went out
" They've sent for help." At least six times little Edward seemed to have
passed. We recognised it as another temptation, took up animal magnetism
and each time he rallied. Finally about 5:30 A.M. of Friday, Jan. 25th,
he passed on. I took him on my lap. Mrs. N and I realised it must
be the last temptation, hence the greatest. We had no fear and did not
admit he had passed on for several hours. We kept reading the promises
" according to thy faith," etc., and did not call an undertaker until evening.
When Mrs. N 's little Philip passed on a few months ago her faith
alone should have raised him. But this time her faith was coupled with
understanding and did not waver for a moment. Why this termination?
I wish we could have some light on the subject.
We recognised no disease, and as first symptoms would appear beliefs
of paralysis, spasms, fever, etc. we would realise the allness of God,
and they would disappear. It was a clear case of ignorant and malicious
magnetism. Why was it not mastered?
We are told that some church members have been praying that " God
would take the child " in order that the parents might see the error of
their way, and return not to God, but to the M. E. followers. Now
comes an unprecedented history. Saturday morning a great tumult arose.
The M. E. minister gathered a crowd around him on the street and
denounced this pernicious doctrine, till the people were infuriated, and
threatened mob law. A meeting was called at the public hall. The
conservative element succeeded, notwithstanding the excitement, in getting
a respectful committee appointed, and an order was served on myself
and another Scientist to meet this committee at the Court House at 4 P.M.
Mrs. N accompanied us and on the way we met the coroner, sheriff,
jury and two " Medicine men " who came to demand an inquest. All
returned with us to the house. The questions and the manner of the
M.D.'s were insulting in the extreme. Our answers were mostly from the
Bible.
All admitted the unblemished reputation of Mr. and Mrs. N , that
Mrs. N was a faithful, loving mother; but they could not tolerate
such a religious conviction. Then we all went to the Court House and a
326 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
committee told us that the sentiment of the community was (as in Acts
xiii. 50) that we leave town.
I said to the committee that I came to visit Mrs. N and not pro
fessionally; that she was in trouble and there was no power to drive me
out.
In the same number of the Journal is printed an extract
from a letter written by the mother herself, in which she main
tains that the baby's illness was not of a bodily nature, but was
clearly the effect of animal magnetism working directly upon
the brain:
Little Edward slept and ate well as a rule. He had no bowel affection,
as the papers have stated. All the attacks were in belief, in form of
brain trouble, and plainly from animal magnetism; the prayers of church
members and the whole thought of the place being expressed in the hope
that " God would remove the N s' child, so that they might come back
into the church." At two o'clock on the day that he passed, I sent for
Mr. N [the father], and in the evening of the same day I called the
undertaker. We buried the little boy ourselves, quietly, without any
minister present, being accompanied by a number who believe in Christian
Science because it has healed them.
Our trials have been severe, but we work to stand fast. We are
determined to demonstrate the nothingness of this seeming power.
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 chil
dren ; 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
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 327
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.
Whoever studies the old files of the Journal from 1883 to
1887 must note the rapid growth of Mrs. Eddy's sect during
those years. In the first number of the Journal, April, 1883,
appear the professional cards of fourteen authorised healers ;
in April, 1885, forty-three professional healers advertise in
this way ; and in the Journal of April, 1887, are the cards of
one hundred and ten Christian Science practitioners. In 1887
nineteen Christian Science " institutes " and " academies " are
advertised. The graduates of these schools usually went at
once into practice, although sometimes they first went to Boston
to take the normal course in Mrs. Eddy's college. These pre
paratory schools were located in various cities in California,
Nebraska, Colorado, Wisconsin, Ohio, Massachusetts, and New
York. In 1886 the National Christian Scientists' Association
was formed with representatives from almost every State in the
Union, which will be discussed in a later chapter.
In the Journal of 1887 and 1888 one notices certain articles
and editorials signed J. H. W., or Phare Pleigh, the initials and
pen-name of the Rev. James Henry Wiggin, who, in 1885,
became Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser. Mr. Wiggin was gradu
ated from the Meadville Theological Seminary in 1861, and
became a Unitarian minister. In 1875 he retired from the
active ministry and devoted himself to writing and editing.
An old friend of John Wilson, of the University Press, Mr.
Wiggin found plenty to do in proof-reading, revising, and
328 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
editing manuscripts, in annotating and making indices to theo
logical and scholarly works.
One day in August, 1885, Calvin Frye called at Mr. Wiggin's
office in the old Boston Music Hall, and introduced himself as
the secretary of a lady who had written a book, the manuscript
of which she wished Mr. Wiggin to revise, adding that she
also wished him to prepare an index for her work. A few days
later Mrs. Eddy herself came to see Mr. Wiggin, 7 bringing
with her a bulky package of manuscript which proved to be
a fresh version of that much-written book, Science and Health,
which she had just rewritten from the fourth edition, 1884.
She gave Mr. Wiggin to understand that, while the manuscript
was practically ready for the printer, it needed the touch of a
literary man. She agreed to his terms and withdrew. Mr.
Wiggin, who was just about to start away on his summer
vacation, put the package into his bag and took it up to the
mountains with him. When he examined the manuscript later,
he found that a revision of it was no holiday task. The faulty
spelling and punctuation could have been corrected readily
enough, as well as the incorrect historical references and the
misuse of words ; but the whole work was so involved, formless,
and contradictory that Mr. Wiggin put the manuscript away
and thought no more about it until he returned to Boston.
Then he saw Mrs. Eddy and told her that he could do nothing
by merely correcting her manuscript ; that to improve it he
would have largely to rewrite it. To his surprise, she willingly
consented to this. During the autumn of 1885 Mr. Wiggin
T For a graphic account of this first interview between Mrs.. Eddy and Mr.
Wiggin, the reader is referred to a pamphlet, How Reverend Wiggin Rewrote
Mrs. Eddy's Book, by Livingston Wright.
Photograph by A. V. Brown
THE REVEREND JAMES HENRY WIGGIN
Who was for four years Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser
329
occupied himself with this task, which Mrs. Eddy carefully
supervised to see that he did not in the least modify her views
and that her favourite phrases were allowed to stand.
Beginning with the first edition of the book (1875), and
going through the successive editions up to 1886, one sees
that what Mr. Wiggin did for Science and Health was to put
into intelligible English the ideas which Mrs. Eddy had so
befogged in the stating of them. Any one who reads a chapter,
a page, or even a paragraph of the 1884 edition, and compares
it with the same portion in the edition of 1886, will see the
more obvious part of Mr. Wiggin's work. Take, for example,
the following paragraph (1884 edition):
What is man? Brains, heart, blood, or the entire human structure?
If he is one or all of the component parts of the body, when you
amputate a limb, you have taken away a portion of man, and the surgeon
destroys manhood, and worms are the annihilators of man. But losing a
limb, or injuring structure, is sometimes the quickener of manliness; and
the unfortunate cripple presents more nobility than the statuesque outline,
whereby we find " a man's a man, for a' that."
Mr. Wiggin's revision of this passage reads:
What is man? Brains, heart, blood, the material structure? If he is
but a material body, when you amputate a limb, you must take away
a portion of the man; the surgeon can destroy manhood, and the worms
annihilate it. But the loss of a limb or injury to a tissue, is sometimes the
quickener of manliness, and the unfortunate cripple may present more of
it than the statuesque athlete, teaching us, by his very deprivations, that
" a man's a man, for a' that."
In the above example Mr. Wiggin's changes are only with
regard to composition, such as any theme-reader might suggest
in the work of an untrained student. But in many instances
he was able to be of even greater assistance to Mrs. Eddy by
330 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
helping her to give some sort of clearness and consistency to
her theology. In her chapter on the Atonement (1884) Mrs.
Eddy says:
The glorious spiritual signification of the life and not death of our
Master for he never died was laying down all of earth to instruct
his enemies the way to Heaven, showing in the most sublime and un
equivocal sense how Heaven is obtained. The blood of Jesus was not as
much offered on the cross as before those closing scenes of his earth mission.
The spiritual meaning of blood is offering sacrifice, and the efficacy of
his life offering was greater than that of his blood spilled' upon the cross.
It was the consecration of his whole being upon the altar of Love, a
deathless offering to Spirit. O, highest sense of human affections and
higher spiritual conceptions of our Infinite Father and Mother, show us
what is Love!
Mr. Wiggin's revision of this passage reads :
The material blood of Jesus was no more efficacious to cleanse from
sin, when it was shed upon the " accursed tree," than when it was flowing
in his veins as he went daily about his Father's business. His spiritual
flesh and blood were his Life; and they truly eat his flesh and drink his
blood, who partake of that Life. The spiritual meaning of blood is sacri
fice. The efficacy of Jesus' spirit-offering was infinitely greater than can
be expressed by our mortal sense of human life. His mission was fulfilled.
It reunited God and man by his career. His offering was Love's deathless
sacrifice; for in Jesus' experience the human element was gloriously ex
panded and absorbed into the divine.
Besides granting subjects to participles, antecedents to pro
nouns, introducing the subjunctive mode in conditions contrary
to fact, and giving consistency to the tenses of the verbs,
Mr. Wiggin largely rearranged the matter in each chapter and
gave the book its first comprehensible paragraphing. Out of
his wide reading he introduced many illustrative quotations
into the text (not always to its advantage), and used many more
as chapter-headings. He prevailed upon Mrs. Eddy to omit
a very libellous chapter on " mesmerists," and here and there
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 331
throughout the book expurgated some amusing absurdities.
Where Mrs. Eddy represents Huxley, Tyndall, and Agassiz as
Goliath, and Woman as David going forth to do battle with
them, Mr. Wiggin permits Woman to go on with her sling,
but suppresses the worthy professors, leaving her to encounter
Goliath in the shape of Materialism. It must be remembered
that Mr. Wiggin's edition was not made directly from the
1884 edition, but from a manuscript revision of it made by
Mrs. Eddy herself. However, when one recalls that the 1884
edition was the result of at least a fourth rewriting, it seems
improbable that Mrs. Eddy could have made much headway
as to English in her fifth rewriting, the manuscript from which
Mr. Wiggin worked.
This collaboration with Mr. Wiggin has sometimes been re
ferred to as discreditable to Mrs. Eddy chiefly from the fact,
doubtless, that, even in her business letters to her publishers,
she has persistently referred to Science and Health as " God's
book." There could have been no wish on Mrs. Eddy's part
to avoid labour, for she has worked at the book almost con
tinuously for half a lifetime. Excluding the chapter called
" Wayside Hints," which he wrote, Mr. Wiggin would have
been the last man in the world to claim any part in the real
authorship of Science and Health. The book has been re
written again and again since Mr. Wiggin's work upon it
stopped, and the editions which bear his revisions have been
considerably improved upon, especially in the arrangement of
the subject-matter. But the successive editions never began
to improve at all over the first one indeed, it may be said
that they grew worse rather than better until Mr. Wiggin
332 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
took hold of the book, and many passages of the work to-day
remain practically in the form into which he put them.
For four years Mr. Wiggin was employed in the capacity
of literary aid to Mrs. Eddy, doing editorial work upon the
Journal, and assisting her in the composition and proof-read
ing of three successive editions of Science and Health. Mrs.
Eddy paid him well, and, in addition to his salary, he got a
deal of entertainment out of his connection with Christian
Science. He even wrote an amusing pamphlet 8 defending the
new sect upon Biblical grounds. For Mr. Wiggin combined
the qualities of a humourist and a theologian. He was a
man of enormous bulk and stature and immense geniality. A
slight hesitation in his gait, resulting from near-sightedness,
sometimes caused his friends to liken him to Dr. Johnson. Ex
tremely courtly and polished in manner, Mr. Wiggin was not
only a scholar, but a man of fine tastes and of considerable
critical ability. He was a musical critic of no mean order and
an indefatigable concert-goer. He united a love of theology fl^
and theological disputations with an incongruous passion for the
theatre. But, as it never occurred to Mr. Wiggin that there
was anything unusual in delightedly pursuing the study of the
drama and church history at the same time, so it seldom per
plexed his friends or his fellow-clergymen.
For years after he had given up active pastorate duties, he
often supplied the pulpit of some other minister, and occasion
ally went back to one of his old parishes to preach, lecture, or
deliver a funeral sermon. His friendships with many of his old
parishioners continued until his death, and the most cordial
* Christian Science and the Bible, by Phare Pleigh.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 333
relations always existed between him and the members of the
Unitarian Association. He usually attended the Monday Min
isters' meeting at the Unitarian headquarters on Beacon Hill,
and would often go out with one or two fellow-preachers and
sit down to a lunch and a lengthy theological argument. Per
haps the same evening he would gather up several young news
paper men and go to an opening night at the theatre, pouring
forth between the acts such a stream of anecdote, discriminating
criticism, and reminiscence, that the young critics felt the
morning's " notice " of the performance growing beneath their
hands. After the last curtain Mr. Wiggin frequently went
back to the dressing-rooms to exchange stories and recollections
with the older performers and to give encouragement and sug
gestions to the younger ones. Mr. Wiggin's love of the theatre
came about very naturally: his uncle had been from boyhood
a friend of Charlotte Cushman's, whom the nephew himself
knew and concerning whom he once wrote a delightful paper
for The Coming Age.
Mr. Wiggin, with Edward Everett Hale, Professor William
J. Rolfe, and a score more, was one of the organisers of the
Playgoers' Club of Boston, before which he used often to lecture
upon the old days of the Boston Museum and the remarkable
stock work done there. Horace Lewis^^illiam Warren, Mrs.
John Drew, Adelaide Phillips, and ^^BSmith Russell were
among his many warm professional friends, and esteemed his
suggestions and criticisms. He was becomingly fond of the
comforts of the table, and delighted to gather a party of
young writers and actors about him at supper and entertain
them with stories of the great artists whom he had heard in
334 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
his youth. His conversation was rich in anecdote and humour,
and he belonged to the day when literary quotations were intro
duced unblushingly into friendly talk. Indeed, Mr. Wiggin
had his Shakespeare so well upon his tongue that he could
illuminate almost any question with a Shakespearean quotation.
He once wrote an account of how he heard Liszt, then a newly
made abbe, play at a sacred concert in Rome, and managed
quite unconsciously, it would seem to describe pretty much the
whole affair in language from Macbeth. An extraordinary
man, certainly, to be concerned in the shaping of Science and
Health. Mr. Wiggin himself never got over the humour of it.
It must not be supposed that he took his task lightly enough
to slight it. He was accustomed to do his hack work well,
and it became with him a genuine concern, as he often said,
" to keep Mrs. Eddy from making herself ridiculous." He was
glad to talk theology to any one, and he doubtless enjoyed
teaching a little to Mrs. Eddy. He used to tell, with enormous
glee, how Mrs. Eddy would sometimes receive his suggestions
by slyly remarking, " Mr. Wiggin, do you know, I sometimes
believe God speaks to me through you." It was when his
venerable patroness laughed that he liked her best, and with
him she sometimes enjoyed a joke in a pleasant and human
fashion. Among other services which he rendered her, Mr.
Wiggin once drew vB' Mrs. Eddy the outline of a sermon
upon the " city that heth foursquare," described in Revelation.
She delivered the sermon before her congregation January 24,
1886, with great success, though the Journal, in reporting the
occasion, says that the Rev. Mrs. Eddy laboured under some
disadvantage, as she had left her manuscript at home. Mr.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 335
Wiggin was present in the audience, and after the service the
huge man made his way up to the rostrum, where Mrs. Eddy
was surrounded by a crowd of delighted women. When Mrs.
Eddy saw him, her eyes began to twinkle, and, putting her
hand to her lips, she shot him a stage whisper : " How did
it go? "
When Mr. Wiggin persuaded her to omit the libellous por
tion of the chapter on Mesmerism from the 1886 edition of
Science and Health after the plates for the edition had been
made, Mrs. Eddy, at Mr. Wiggin's suggestion, cut this sermon
to the required length and, by inserting it, was able to send the
book to press without renumbering the remaining pages. The
chapter was called "Wayside Hints (Supplementary)," and
Mrs. Eddy put her seal upon it by inserting, under the subject
of " squareness," a tribute to her deceased husband : " We
need good square men everywhere. Such a man was my late
husband, Dr. Asa G. Eddy."
By the year 1890 Mrs. Eddy had begun to lose patience
with Mr. Wiggin and to charge him with not taking his work
seriously enough. In a letter to her publisher, Mr. William
G. Nixon, she complains that Mr. Wiggin's proof corrections
have a " most shocking flippancy," and the exasperation of
her letter seems to indicate that the worthy gentleman had
grown tired of assisting revelation:
62 N. STATE ST., CONCORD, N. H.
Aug. 28, 1890.
MY DEAR STUDENT:
The proofs which I received Aug. 27th, and returned to printer Aug. 28th,
are somewhere. I had not changed the marginal references in the copy
because I had before written to Mr. Wiggin to make fewer notations and
336 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
more appropriate ones. When he returned the first proofs a belief (but
don't name this to any one) prevented my examining them as I should
otherwise have done, and, to prevent delay, the proof was sent to the
printer.
The second proofs have the most shocking flippancy in notations. I
have corrected them, also made fewer of them, which will involve another
delay caused by Mr. Wiggin. He has before changed his own marginal
references which delayed the printing. Also he took back the word " can
not" throughout the entire proofs which he had before insisted upon
using thereby causing another delay. I write this to let you know how
things stand.
Yours truly,
MARY B. G. EDDY.
In a letter dated three months later Mrs. Eddy again com
plains that Mr. Wiggin is slow about getting in his proofs,
and says : " This is M.A.M. [Malicious Animal Magnetism]
and it governs Wiggin as it has done once before to prevent
the publishing of my work. ... I will take the proof-reading
out of Wiggin's hands."
On the whole, Mrs. Eddy seems to have got along amicably
with Mr. Wiggin. She liked him, greatly respected his scholar
ship, and was pleased to make use of his versatile talents.
He, on the other hand, assisted her with good nature, advised
her, and defended her with a sort of playful gallantry that
went with his generous make of mind and body. He was often
aghast at her makeshifts and amused by her persistence, while
he delighted in her ingenuity and admired her shrewdness. He
could find lines in his favourite Macbeth applicable even to
Mrs. Eddy, and he seems always heartily to have wished her
well. In a letter to an old college friend, dated December 14,
1889, Mr. Wiggin made an interesting criticism of Christian
Science and gave probably the most trenchant and suggestive
An illness.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 337
sketch of Mrs. Eddy that will ever be written. We have
no other picture of her done by so capable a hand, for no one
else among those closely associated with her ever studied her
with such an unprejudiced and tempered mind, or judged her
from a long and rich experience of books ?,nd men, enlightened
by a humour as irrepressible as it was kindly. Mr. Wiggin's
criticism follows :
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 unphilo-
sophically 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 eifect.
One of Mrs. Eddy's followers went so far as to say that if she saw
338 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
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 *. " 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
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 339
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 trust
worthiness 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 I "
You see, Mrs. Eddy is nobody's fool.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MATERIAL PROSPERITY OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE MRS.
EDDY GOES TO LIVE IN COMMONWEALTH AVENUE DISCON
TENT OF THE STUDENTS A RIVAL SCHOOL OF MENTAL
HEALING THE SCHISM OF 1888
Mary B. G. Eddy has worked out before us as on a blackboard every
point in the temptations and demonstrations or so-called miracles of
Jesus, showing us how to meet and overcome the one and how to perform
the other. Christian Science Journal, April, 1889.
THE first five years of Mrs. Eddy's life in Boston had been
years of almost uninterrupted progress. Her college had, by
1887, grown to be a source of very considerable income.
Her classes now numbered from thirty to fifty students each,
and a class was instructed and graduated within three weeks'
time. Although some students were received at a discount
and paid only two hundred dollars for their instruction, the
usual tuition fee was still three hundred dollars a husband
and wife being regarded as one student and paying but one fee.
The course, which was formerly the only one taught at Mrs.
Eddy's college, was now called the " primary course," and
she added what she termed a " normal course " (being a review
of the primary), a course in " metaphysical obstetrics," and
a course in " theology," in all of which she was the sole
instructor. If the student took all the courses offered, his
340
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 341
tuition fees amounted to eight hundred dollars. 1 By 1887
there was such a demand for Mrs. Eddy's instruction that
she could form as many classes a year as she felt able to
teach, and her classes netted her from five to ten thousand
dollars each. In 1883 Mrs. Eddy had founded her monthly
periodical, the Christian Science Journal, 2 of incalculable serv
ice in spreading her doctrines. In 1886 she had, with the
assistance of the Rev. James Henry Wiggin, got out a new
and much improved edition of Science and Health. Between
1880 and 1887 she had published four pamphlets: Christian
Healing, The People's God, Defence of Christian Science, and
a Historical Sketch of Metaphysical Healing. Promising
church organisations were being built up in New York, Chicago,
Denver, and in dozens of smaller cities.
Systematic efforts were now begun to raise money for a
permanent church building in Boston. The congregation had
outgrown its old quarters in Chickering Hall in Tremont Street,
and was 'having difficulty in obtaining a place for its services,
some of the larger halls refusing to rent to the Christian
Scientists. In the summer of 1886 the church had purchased
from Nathan Matthews a piece of land in Falmouth Street,
in a tenement district of the Back Bay, which it intended to
use for a building site. But the land was subject to a mortgage
of $8,763.50, and it was for the purpose of paying off this
mortgage that the Christian Scientists were holding fairs and
1 Primary Class, twelve lessons (afterward seven lessons) $300
Normal Class, six lessons 200
Class in Metaphysical Obstetrics, six lessons 100
Class in Theology, six lessons 200
Total $800
2 The magazine was first called The Journal of Christian Science, but the
title was soon changed to The Christian Science Journal.
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
concerts during the latter years of the '80's, and appealing
to every member of the church and to every student at the
college to set aside a weekly sum to be paid into the fund.
In the Christmas holidays of 1887 Mrs. Eddy moved from
her dwelling in Columbus Avenue to a more pretentious house
at 385 Commonwealth Avenue. The Christian Science Journal,
under the head " Material Change of Base," announced her
removal in the following enthusiastic language:
At Xmastide Rev. Mary B. Glover Eddy began to occupy the new
house which she has purchased on Commonwealth Avenue, No. 385. The
price is recorded in real estate transactions as $40,000. It is a large
house in the middle of the block and contains twenty rooms. . . . The
spot is very beautiful and the house has been finished and furnished under the
advice of a professional decorator. The locality is excellent. For the in
formation of friends not acquainted with Boston, it may be stated that Com
monwealth Avenue is the most fashionable in the city. Through the centre of
it runs a slim park with a central promenade, leaving a driveway on each
side of the main thoroughfare. Within a few yards of Mrs. Eddy's
mansion is the massive residence of his Excellency, Oliver Ames, the present
Governor of Massachusetts. To name the dwellers on this avenue would
be to name scores of Boston's wealthy and influential men. On Marlboro'
Street, which is the next toward the river, are many more families of
note; while everybody knows that Beacon Street, which is next in line,
claims the blue blood of Boston for its inheritance, especially on the
water side.
The fact that some of the members of Mrs. Eddy's own
Boston church began to murmur texts about the foxes having
holes and the birds of the air having nests, and that Mrs.
Crosse, the editor of the Journal, felt it necessary to print an
apologetic explanation of this notice, augured ill for the year
that was just beginning. A great discontent had been growing
in the Boston church, and for more than two years there had
been two factions in the organisation : those who were absolutely
HISTORY OP CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 34-8
loyal to Mrs. Eddy, and those who merely conformed who
believed in the principle she taught, but who, as she often put
it, " tried with one breath to credit the Message and discredit
the Messenger."
Both factions believed in the supremacy of mind over matter,
and in the healing principle which Mrs. Eddy taught. But
the loyal were those who believed:
In the Fall in Lynn and its subsequent revelation.
That the Bible and Science and Health are one book the
Sacred Scriptures.
That sin, disease, and death are non-existent and will finally
disappear under demonstration.
That Malicious Animal Magnetism can cause sickness, sin,
and death.
That Mrs. Eddy has interpreted the Motherhood, or feminine
idea of God, as Jesus Christ interpreted the masculine idea.
That the feminine idea of God is essentially higher than the
masculine.
The loyal disciples did not hesitate to make the claim that
Christian Science was the offspring of Mrs. Eddy's direct
communion with God, just as Jesus was the offspring of Mary's
communion, and that the result of this second immaculate con
ception was a book rather than a man, because this age was
" more mental " than that in which Jesus Christ lived and
taught. An article entitled " Immaculate Conception," in the
Journal of November, 1888, elaborates this idea at great
length :
Let us come in thought to another day, a day when woman shall commune
with God, the eternal Principle and only Creator, and bring forth the
344 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
spiritual idea. And what of her child? Man is spiritual, man is mental.
\Voman was the first in this day to recognise this and the other facts it
includes. As a result of her communion we have Christian Science.
You may ask why this child did not come in human form, as did the
child of old. Because that was not necessary. ... As this age is
more mental than former ages, so the appearance of the idea of Truth
is more mental.
From the first year of its establishment, the Christian Science
Journal insisted, as indeed Mrs. Eddy's own writings insist,
upon making for her a place among the characters of sacred
history. In November, 1885, we find the following outburst:
What a triumphant career is this for a woman! Can it be anything
less than the " tabernacle of God with men " the fulfilment of the vision
of the lonely seer on the Isle of Patmos the " wonder in heaven," deliver
ing the child which shall rule all nations? How dare we say to the con
trary, that she is God-sent to the world, as much as any character of
Sacred Writ?
Mrs. Eddy herself wrote that the following verse from
the Apocalypse " has special reference to the present age " : 3
" And there appeared a great wonder in heaven ; a woman
clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon
her head a crown of twelve stars." Mrs. Eddy says that the
child which this woman bore was Christian Science. In the
Mother Church at Boston there is a resplendent window repre
senting this star-crowned woman.
These comparisons did not stop with the Virgin Mary and
the star-crowned woman. Throughout the first ten years of
the Journal there is a running parallel between Mrs. Eddy and
Jesus Christ. This comparison was continually heard from
the pulpits of Christian Science churches. The Rev. George
B. Day, " M.A., C.S.B.," in a sermon delivered before the
8 Science and Health (1906), p. 560.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 345
Chicago church and afterward approvingly printed in the
Journal, declared that " Christian Science is the Gospel accord
ing to Woman." He went on to say:
We are witnessing the transfer of the gospel from male to female
trust. . . . Eighteen hundred years ago Paul declared that man was
the head of the woman; but now, in "Science and Health," it is asserted
that " woman is the highest form of man."
Mr. Day called his sermon " Sheep, Shepherd, and Shep
herdess," and he considered, in turn, the disciples, Christ, and
Mrs. Eddy.
The Christian Scientist held that Jesus, the man, was merely
a man ; that " the Christ " which dwelt within him was Divine
Mind, dwelling more or less in all of us, but manifested in a
superlative degree in Jesus and in Mrs. Eddy. In an unsigned
editorial in the Journal of April, 1889, called " Christian Science
and its Revelator," we are told that Jesus demonstrated over
sickness, sin, and death, but that his disciples did not compre
hend the principle of his miracles, since neither the Gospels
nor the Epistles explain them. It was left for Mrs. Eddy, in
Science and Health, to supplement the New Testament and
to furnish this explanation. " The Christ is only the name for
that state of consciousness which is the goal, the inevitable,
ultimate state of every mortal," and Mrs. Eddy has shown
mankind how to reach that state of consciousness. The writer
continues : " To-day Truth has come through the person of
a New England girl. . . . From the cradle she gave indications
of a divine mission and power which caused Tier mother to
* ponder them in her heart.' ' The writer further says of Mrs.
Eddy that she has done good to them that hated her, blessed
346 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
them that cursed her, and prayed for them that despitefully
used her; that she has been led as a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before his shearers is dumb, so she has opened
not her mouth.
It is because Eve was the first to admit her fault in the
garden of Eden, Mrs. Eddy says,* that a woman was permitted
to give birth to Jesus Christ, and that a woman was permitted
to write Science and Health and to reveal the spiritual origin
of man. It is because woman is more spiritual than man,
the Christian Science writers in the Journal explain, that a
woman perceived the nothingness of matter, though Jesus did
not, and that she was able to interpret the feminine idea of
God, which is essentially higher than the masculine. In answer
to an inquiry concerning the edition of the Bible upon
which Science and Health is based, the editor of the Journal
replied :
Would it not be too material a view to speak of " Science and Health "
being based upon any edition of the Bible? . . . The Chosen One,
always with God in the Mount, speaks face to face. In other words,
" Science and Health " is a first-hand revelation. When this statement
by the editor, Mr. Bailey, was criticised, he replied that he meant no
disparagement of the Bible, but that he considered ' the Bible and " Science
and Health " as one book the Sacred Scriptures.'
When Mrs. Eddy's following consisted of but a handful of
students, her divine assumption passed unnoticed; but, as time
went on, less credulous critics were heard from. She had
created a wide and lively interest in mind-healing, and many
people began to look into the subject. In 1882 Julius Dresser,
her old fellow-patient and pupil under Phineas Parkhurst
* Science and Health (1906), pages 533, 534.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 347
Quimby, returned from California, and began to practise
Quimby's method of mental healing in Boston.
With Mr. Dresser's return the " Quimby controversy " 5
began. In a letter to the Boston Post, February 24, 1883,
Mr. Dresser presented evidence which went a great way toward
proving that Mrs. Eddy got her principle of mind-healing from
his old teacher. He published the laudatory article upon
Quimby which Mrs. Eddy had written and printed in the Port
land Courier twenty-five years before. He republished Mrs.
Eddy's poem, " Lines upon the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby,
who Healed with the Truth that Christ Taught," as well as
the letter which Mrs. Eddy wrote him after her memorable
fall in Lynn.
To these unguarded utterances of that long-forgotten
woman, Mary M. Patterson, Mrs. Eddy replied by repudiating
her own effusions, prose and verse, and saying that if she ever
wrote them at all she was " mesmerised " when she did it ; that
Quimby was an ignorant mesmerist, etc.
In 1887 Mr. Dresser published his pamphlet, The True
History of Mental Science, in which he repeated his statements
in the Boston Post, and related his own experience with Mrs.
Eddy when she was a patient and he was a student of Dr.
Quimby in Portland. This pamphlet brought out comment
that was unfavourable to Mrs. Eddy, and stirred up her dis
affected students. Although Mrs. Eddy responded with fire
and spirit to her critics, 6 her controversy with Mr. Dresser
5 For a full account of this controversy see Chapters III, IV, and V.
8 Mr. Dresser, she says in her Journal, " has loosed from the leash his pet
poodle to alternately whine and bark at my heels," and she refers to a former
student who has endorsed Mr. Dresser's hook, as " that suckling litterateur,
Mr. Marston, whom I taught and whose life I saved three years ago, but who
now squeaks out an echo of Mr. Dresser's abuse."
348 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
set her less infatuate students to thinking. Many of them
decided to investigate the Quimby claim, and bought the works
of the Rev. Warren F. Evans, 7 who had been treated by Quimby
a year after Mrs. Eddy's first visit to Portland, who had
practised Quimby's method of healing both in New Hampshire
and in Massachusetts, and who had published two books upon
mental healing before the first edition of Science and Health
appeared The Mental Cure (1869) and Mental Medicine
(1872).
Dr. Evans' early works had a mildness of tone which strongly
appealed to such of Mrs. Eddy's students as were interested
in the principle of mental healing alone, and were somewhat
repelled by the garnishings which she had added to it. Evans
did not deny the existence of disease, much less of matter ;
he simply affirmed the power of mind. His work The Mental
Cure is little more than a study of the reactions of mental
states upon the organs of the body. After reading Dr. Evans,
7 The Rev. Warren Felt Evans, M.D., was born in Rockingham, Vt., December
23, 1817. He was educated at Chester Academy, Middlebury College, and Dart
mouth College. Later he was granted a diploma from a chartered board of
physicians of the Eclectic School, which entitled him to the degree M.D. Mr.
Evans left Dartmouth in the middle of his junior year and entered the ministry
of the Methodist Episcopal Church. For about twenty years he remained in
the ministry, holding ehaiges in various towns in New Hampshire and Massa
chusetts. He had been frail since his youth, and during the later years of
his ministry was ill much of the time. It was in those years of broken health
that he began to study the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, and came to believe
in the possibility of curing physical disease through " the power of a living
faith." About the year 1863 Dr. Evans went to Mr. Quimby for treatment.
He was able to grasp Quimby's theories almost immediately, and became so
much interested in Quimby's work that he soon returned to Portland upon a
second visit. Dr. Evans then told Mr. Quimby that he felt he could himself
practice Quimby's method of mind cure. Receiving cordial encouragement, he
returned to his home at Claremont, New Hampshire, and at once began to
practise. He later conducted a kind of mind-cure sanatorium, known as the
" Evans Home," at Salisbury, Mass. The later years of his life were chiefly
devoted to his literary work, and he published a number of books upon mental
healing. They were The Mental Cure (1869), Mental Medicine (1872), Soul
and Body (1875), The Divine Law of Cure (1881), The Primitive Mind Cure
(1885), and Esoteric Christianity (1886).
Dr. Evans died September 4, 1889. Personally he was devout and modest,
a thinker, and a reader, rather than a propagandist. His endeavour was to
prove that mind cure is one of the old rectifying forces of the world, and he
made no claim to discovery or to especial enlightenment. His great desire was
to arouse other people to thinking and writing upon the subject of metaphysical
healing.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 349
a number of Mrs. Eddy's strongest students quietly dropped
out of her Christian Scientists' Association and began to
investigate the subject of mental healing from another side,
helping to form the nucleus of what was later to become the
" New Thought " movement.
Mrs. Eddy at once saw the danger of liberal study and
investigation on the part of her students. As a direct rebuke
to those who had become interested in the writings of Dr.
Evans, she issued instructions to the members of the Christian
Scientists' Association that they should read no other works
upon mental healing than those written by herself, and she
printed in the Journal a set of rules to the effect that all
teachers of Christian Science should require that their students
read no literature upon the subject of mind cure but her own.
To prevent liberal discussion and possible " conspiracy," she
introduced a by-law that no two of the members of the Associa
tion should meet to discuss Christian Science or mental healing
without inviting all other members of the Association to be
present at their discussion. Her idea apparently was that one
of her personal representatives should always be on hand to
direct the discourse into safe channels. These restrictions
cost her the allegiance of thoughtful students like Dr. J. W.
Winkley and his wife.
Mrs. Eddy was now facing the gravest problem which had
confronted her since the founding of her church. How was
she to keep Christian Science from having a literature? How
was she to prevent all these people whom she had stirred and
had interested in metaphysical healing from writing books upon
it which might prove a satisfactory and become as popular
350 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
as her own? Mrs. Ursula Gestefeld of Chicago, who had been
a student in the class Mrs. Eddy taught in that city in April,
1884, and who was one of the most intelligent and able persons
ever associated with the Christian Science movement, in 1888
wrote a book which she called A Statement of Christian Science,
adding upon the title-page that it was " An Explanation of
Science and Health," and giving Mrs. Eddy all possible credit
as the originator of the basic ideas of her book. Mrs. Geste-
feld's work was an intelligent and intelligible presentation of
the fundamental ideas contained in Science and Health, without
Mrs. Eddy's disregard of logic and order, and free from her
confusing and tawdry rhetoric. Any natural scientist would
have welcomed such a clear and careful statement of his ideas.
But Mrs. Eddy branded Mrs. Gestefeld as a " mesmerist " of
the most dangerous variety, and had her expelled from the
Chicago church. The Journal declared that the " meta
physics " of Mrs. Gestefeld's book " crawled on its belly instead
of soaring in the upper air," and bade her beware, as " only
the pure in heart should see God." Mrs. Gestefeld then pub
lished a pamphlet, Jesuitism in Christian Science, in which she
explained her position and said that if Science and Health
merely contained Mrs. Eddy's personal impressions, if it were
a work of the fancy or imagination, then she had a right to
object to its being used as the basis of another book. But if
Mrs. Eddy's work announced the discovery of a principle and
a universal truth, she could no more keep other people from
writing and thinking upon it than she could keep people from
affirming that twice two are four. But, with Mrs. Eddy,
obtaining recognition for her truth was always secondary to
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 351
keeping it hers. Since she first began to teach her " Science,"
the story of her public life is simply the story of how she kept
her hold on it. The very way in which she had come by her
discovery made her always afraid of losing it, and she was
forever detecting some student in the act of making off with it.
Even in Lynn, she slept, as it were, with her hand on the cradle.
Later, when a Christian Science periodical was being printed
in German, Mrs. Eddy would not permit Science and Health
to be translated into that language, or into any other. She
was not a linguist, and, knowing that she would be unable to
pass upon the text of a translation, she feared to trust her
gospel to the shadings of a foreign tongue. How she has done
it let him declare who can, but she has absolutely sterilised
every source that might have produced Christian Science litera
ture, and to-day a loyal Christian Scientist would be as likely
to think of dynamiting the Mother Church as of writing a
book upon the theory or practice of Christian Science.
Dr. Evans' school if it is not misleading to call his patients
and sympathisers by so formal a name was a rival which
caused Mrs. Eddy a good deal of alarm. It drew from her
her more thoughtful students, and, though they were seldom
her most loyal and tractable followers, she realised their value
in giving her sect a certain standing in Boston. The Evans
following had hitherto been entirely without organisation ; they
were simply a group of people who were interested in the
metaphysical treatment of disease, each thinking in his own
way and working out his own problem. Now, however, they
began to meet together more systematically, to organise in
groups here and there, and to publish books and periodicals,
352 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
encouraging liberal discussion and investigation. In their new
activity they were doubtless influenced by Mrs. Eddy's stimulat
ing example. Whatever the more conservative school of mental
healers might have to say for themselves, or even for Mr.
Quimby, it was Mrs. Eddy who had brought mental healing
out of comparative obscurity, who had built up a strong organi
sation to advertise and push it, and who had sent out scores
of missionaries and healers to establish it. It was as a religion,
not as a way of thinking or a manner of living, that the new
idea could be made to take hold, and Mrs. Eddy had seen
this when the mental scientists had not. Indeed, had they
realised this fact, it is doubtful whether they would have taken
any earlier action, since they believed more in untrammelled
individual development than in organised effort.
Although Mrs. Eddy viewed with alarm this growing body
of independent writers and investigators, she had really very
little to fear from an unorganised body of theorists who, how
ever they might worst her in argument or distance her in
reasoning, were certainly not her equals in generalship. Mrs.
Eddy was a good fighter, and she knew it. In 1897 she wrote
from her peaceful retirement at Concord : " With tender tread,
thought sometimes walks in memory, through the dim corridors
of years, on to old battle-grounds, there sadly to survey the
fields of the slain and the enemy's losses." This from solitude
and the peace of age; but there was no tender treading in the
years when the battle was on. As soon as she saw signs of
activity and consolidation among the people who had been in
fluenced by Dr. Evans, Mrs. Eddy began vigorously to attack
them, realising that such an organisation as theirs must in-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 353
evitably draw recruits from the disssatisfied element in her own
church. By the beginning of 1888 there was discord even in
that inner circle of students who shared Mrs. Eddy's councils
and who were in daily attendance upon her at her new house
in Commonwealth Avenue. This growing unrest she attributed
solely to the mesmeric influence of the mental scientists. In
reality it arose from several causes.
Some of the students were disappointed in Mrs. Eddy per
sonally; some, like Mrs. Sarah Crosse (for several years editor
of the Journal), had lost faith in Mrs. Eddy after long service;
some, like Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Troupe, were displeased
with the arbitrary way in which she conducted the Christian
Scientists' Association ; others were dissatisfied with her instruc
tion in the obstetrical course which she had recently introduced
into her college. The first class in obstetrics was a large one,
and each member had paid one hundred dollars tuition. Of
the six lectures which Mrs. Eddy gave them, five were devoted
almost exclusively to a discussion of Malicious Animal Magnet
ism, and in the sixth she merely instructed them to " deny "
premature birth, abnormal presentation, hemorrhage, etc. 8
At the same time Mrs. Eddy fanned the fire of discontent
by announcing that she would no longer receive students for
the " normal " course who had not passed through her own
8 This course in obstetrics, as taken down by a student of that first class
from Mrs. Eddy's dictation, covers less than a page of letter-paper, and consists
of the "denials" that the practitioner is to use at the bedside of his patient.
The practitioner is first to take up in thought the subject of premature
birth, and to deny the possibility of such an occurrence in the case he Is
then treating.
He is to deny one by one some of the dangerous symptoms wnich may
attend childbirth. Mrs. Eddy takes these symptoms up at random and with
no consideration for their relation to each other.
It was her exceedingly informal and unsystematic treatment of tier subject
In her obstetrical course, as well as the fact that most _of the lectures were
devoted to the subject of Demonology, that causecl dissatisfaction among Mrs,
Eddv's students.
354 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
primary class. As many of her normal graduates were now
teaching primary classes in Christian Science, but not normal
classes, this ruling would have the effect of debarring students,
who wished to take more than a primary course, from any
institution but Mrs. Eddy's. Mrs. Eddy's primary classes
would be filled at the expense of the classes of her followers.
So generally was this order criticised, that Mrs. Eddy felt
obliged to modify it. ,
Mrs. Eddy, having faithfully taught her students how to
detect malicious animal magnetism in others, was now openly
charged with teaching and practising it herself. In Science
and Health, and in her classes, she had taught her students
how to make a vigorous defence against the black art of the mal-
practitioners, but she had always indignantly denied the charge
of being a mesmerist herself. The very accusation, the Journal
said, was due to the malicious work of Kennedy and Arens. 10
It seems, however, to have been Mrs. Eddy's action in the
Corner case which brought all this dissatisfaction to a head.
In the spring of 1888 Mrs. Abby H. Corner of West Medford,
Mass., a student of Mrs. Eddy's and a member of the Christian
Scientists' Association, attended her own daughter in childbirth,
with the result that the mother and baby died. Mrs. Corner
"They (the malpractitioners) know," she writes In Science and Health,
Vol. I, page 244, 1885 edition, " as well as we, it is morally impossible for
Science to produce sickness, but science makes sin punish itself. They should
have fear for their own lives in their attempts to kill us. God is Supreme, and
the penalties of their sins they cannot escape. Turning the attention of the
sick to us for the benefit they may receive from us, is another milder species
of malpractice that is not safe, for If we feel their sufferings, not knowing
the individual, we shall defend ourself, and the result is dangerous to the
intruder."
In Science and Health, page 174, 1884 edition, this warning is given: "In
warfare with error we attack with intent to kill, as the wounded or cornered
beast turns on its assailant."
10 " i never touched In thought personalities, though well aware that K. and
A. (Kennedy and Arens) of Boston, and some of their co-adjntors do mentally
attack people in this way, making them believe that she who exposes their
crimes (Mrs. Eddy) is doing it." Christian Science Journal, July, 1885.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 355
was prosecuted, but was finally acquitted on the ground that
her daughter's death had occurred from a hemorrhage which
might have been fatal even had a physician been present. The
case was widely discussed in the newspapers, and aroused a
great deal of indignation and animosity toward Christian Sci
ence. It seemed the time of all times for Christian Scientists
to stand together, and for the students of Mrs. Eddy's college
to meet the issue squarely. They did so all except Mrs. Eddy
and those whom she directly controlled. Hundreds of Mrs.
Eddy's students were then practising who knew no more about
obstetrics than the babes they helped into the world. Mrs.
Eddy's obstetrical course, which was a recent innovation, con
sisted of instructions to " deny " everything except the child
itself. Fifteen years before, students had gone out from her
classes in Lynn and had taken confinement cases, in which they
were said to be particularly successful. Mrs. Eddy had never
hinted, until she introduced her obstetrical course, that any
special preparation was needed in that branch of metaphysical
treatment. Mrs. Corner had acted not only according to the
custom of Mrs. Eddy's students, but according to Mrs. Eddy's
instructions for fifteen years past. Nevertheless, now that
there was actually a question of Christian Science and the
law, Mrs. Eddy completely withdrew her support from Mrs.
Corner, and had a statement denouncing her printed in the
Boston Herald. This article intimated that Mrs. Corner
had received no authority from the Metaphysical College to
attend confinement cases.
To THE EDITOR OF THE HEEALD: The lamentable case reported from
West Medford of the death of a mother and her infant at childbirth
356 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
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 Massa
chusetts 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. 11
The members of the Christian Scientists' Association, in
the main, felt that Christian Science practice Itself was being
tried before the courts in the person of Mrs. Corner, and lent
her their cordial support. Mrs. Corner had incurred an ex
pense of two hundred dollars in defending her case, and the
members of the Association wished to pay this out of the
Association funds, thus distributing the burden among the
flock. Mrs. Eddy objected to this, ruling that if the members
wished to aid Mrs. Corner financially, they could do so by
personal contribution. In the end, however, Mrs. Corner's
lawyer was paid from the Association treasury.
Mrs. Eddy's action, if not just, was politic. By repudiating
Mrs. Corner she averted any reproach which, as a result
of the scandal, might have attached to Christian Science prac
tice, and left Mrs. Corner to meet as best she could the con
sequences of the method she had been taught. But her students
regarded it as traitorous, and complained bitterly. They re
membered that while their teacher advocated the practice of
Christian Science in all cases, and taught them to believe they
were persecuted if interfered with by the law, she took ample
care to protect herself, by refusing to take patients for treat-
" Boston Herald, April 29, 1888. This notice was signed " Committee on
Publication, Christian Scientists' Association," but it was published without
the knowledge of the Association and has many of Mrs. Eddy's turns of phrase.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 357
ment, or even to be consulted on diseases. " We stand the
brunt and burden of Christian Science," they said, " and Mrs.
Eddy gets the money and the glory."
On June 6, 1888, the Christian Scientists' Association held
a stormy meeting in the old Tremont Temple. At this meeting
William B. Johnson was elected secretary of the Association,
Charles A. Troupe having refused to hold the office any longer
because, he said, attempts had been made to make him change
the records. At this meeting Mrs. Eddy's conduct in regard
to Mrs. Corner was severely criticised. Indeed, the discussion
became very personal, one of the members rising to state that
Mrs. Eddy had been seen in the act of pulling Mr. Frye about
by the hair of his head. Mrs. Eddy, who was present, re
marked: " There is Calvin Frye. "He has a good head of hair;
let him speak for himself." Mr. Frye, however, sitting in his
usual imperturbable silence, made no reply. Five weeks later
he sent out the following explanation in a stylograph letter,
dated July 14:
A student and a Free Mason gives out this report of the widow of a
Free Mason and his hitherto much honoured Teacher, Rev. Mary B. G.
Eddy, that in a fit of temper she pulled a handful of hair out of my
head.
About two years ago, I was having much to contend with from the
attacks of malicious mesmerism, by which the attempt was made to de
moralise me and through me to afflict Mrs. Eddy. While under one of
these attacks, my mind became almost a total blank. Mrs. Eddy was alone
with me at the time, and, calling to me loudly without a response, she saw
the necessity for prompt action and lifted my head by the forelock, and
called aloud to rouse me from the paralysed state into which I had
fallen, this had the desired effect, and I wakened to a sense of where
I was, my mind wandering, but I saw the danger from which she had
delivered me and which can never be produced again. This malpractice,
alias demonology, I have found out, and know that God is my refuge.
"When ye shall see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel
358 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand)
then let them which be in Judea, flee to the mountain," where I have found
my refuge.
Fraternally yours,
C. A. FETE.
At that meeting at Tremont Temple, Mrs. Eddy saw trouble
enough ahead. She caused the new secretary, Mr. Johnson, to
send out a general call to the Association to meet her at the
college June 14; but, meaning to have matters well arranged
before that, she sent telegrams to a few of her most zealous
partisans, asking them to meet at her house on June 9, five
days before the day set for the general meeting. The telegram
which she sent to New York read : " Come to the college Satur
day, June 9th. I will be there. I have a message from God
that will do you good." When Mrs. Eddy learned that word
of this first meeting had got out among the members of the
Association, she sent another telegram to New York, saying:
" The message will be delivered in Chicago. Go there." (The
annual convention of the National Association was to convene
in Chicago June 13, and Mrs. Eddy went there with Mr. John
son, Mr. Frye, and a number of her faithful students from
Boston.)
What the rebellious students wanted to do was simply to
leave the Christian Scientists' Association, but that was not so
easy as it might seem. There were two by-laws of the Associa
tion which were very formidable obstacles to withdrawal. They
read:
Resolved, That every one who wishes to withdraw without reason shall
be considered to have broken his oath.
Resolved, That breaking the Christian Scientists' oath is immorality.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 359
From time to time members had asked to have their names
withdrawn from the roll of membership, and for that reason
had been expelled for " immorality." This dissenting faction
had no mind to risk such dismissal, and, in the absence of Mrs.
Eddy, and of Mr. Johnson, the secretary, they resorted to
high-handed measures. Calling at Mr. Johnson's house, they
persuaded his wife to give them the Association books. These
they put in the hands of an attorney, and then told Mrs. Eddy
that the books would not be returned to Mr. Johnson until she
directed him to give them a letter of honourable dismissal from
the Association. Mrs. Eddy attempted to patch matters up,
and had Mr. Johnson send out to all the members a circular
letter, in which she asked them to meet her and state their
grievances. This letter reads, in part:
Our self-sacrificing Teacher, Mrs. Eddy, says: "... After learning
a little, even, of the good I have achieved and which has been demanded
and been associated with all of my movements since God commissioned
me to bring Christian Science into this world of iniquity, they will learn
how to estimate their [her movements] wisdom instead of traducing
them. ... At the first special meeting called in behalf of Mrs. Corner
I was absent, not because unready or unwilling to help her, but that she
needed no help, and I knew it. I was not at the second special meeting,
because it was impossible, if I got ready for the trip to Chicago; also I
wanted this conspiracy to come to the surface, and it has, and now is the
only time for us to meet in Christian love and adjust this great wrong
done to one [Mrs. Eddy] who has given all the best of her years to heal
and bless the whole human family."
The dissenters, however, stood firm; refused to go to the
Association meetings or to surrender the books. The matter
dragged on for about a year, until they finally received their
letters of dismissal, signed by Mrs. Eddy as president of the
Association, and William B. Johnson as clerk. Thirty-six
360 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
members withdrew at this time, at least a score of whom had
been among Mrs. Eddy's most promising practitioners and
efficient workers. As the entire membership of the Boston
church was considerably less than two hundred even before these
thirty-six withdrew, their going made a perceptible decrease
in the size of Mrs. Eddy's congregation.
CHAPTER XIX
MRS. EDDY RALLIES HER FORCES GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
IN THE WEST THE MAKING OF A HEALER THE APOTHEO
SIS OF MRS. EDDY
MRS. EDDY, publicly, made little of the fact that she was
losing support in Boston. " The late much ado about noth
ing," she writes in the Journal of September, 1888, " arose
solely from mental malicious practice, and the audible falsehood
designed to stir up strife between brethren, for the purpose
of placing Christian Science in the hands of aspirants for place
and power." In practice, however, she heeded the warning.
She braced up the course in " Metaphysical Obstetrics " in her
college by engaging the services of Ebenezer J. Foster, 1 who
held a degree of Doctor of Medicine, and who had taken a
course in Christian Science the previous autumn. Dr. Foster
was to act as Mrs. Eddy's " assistant in obstetrics." The course
was made longer and the tuition fee was doubled. " Doctor
Foster," read Mrs. Eddy's announcement in the Journal, " will
teach the anatomy and surgery of obstetrics, and I, its meta
physics. The combination of his knowledge of Christian Science
with his anatomical skill, renders him a desirable teacher in
this department of my college. In twenty years' practice he
has not had a single case of mortality at childbirth. . . . Stu-
1 Who later became her adopted son. See Chapter XX.
361
362 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
dents will receive the combined instruction of Mrs. Eddy and
Dr. Foster for $200 tuition." In every direction she strove
to strengthen her position, to regain her lost ground, and to
gather new followers. She reiterated her divine right of
supremacy, she asserted with greater emphasis her command
of the situation, and she declared with no uncertainty the
duties of Christian Scientists toward her, giving the Bible as
her authority. " Students will do well," says the Journal
(October, 1888) under the head, "Who Hath Ears to Hear,
let Him Hear," " to bear in mind the Master's warning : ' except
ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not
enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' This Scripture means prac
tically to each individual to-day all that it implies in its
relative bearing towards the Truth as Divine Science, and
towards its rightful Discoverer."
Christian Scientists were held even more rigidly than before
to the rule forbidding them to read any but Mrs. Eddy's
writings on mental healing. This war against heresy was
carried on too zealously at last, and when the Journal (October,
1890) admonished beginning students to lay aside the Bible
for Science and Health? it was felt even by Scientists that
this was going too far. The Journal also instructed Mrs.
Eddy's loyal students to burn all forbidden literature. " Burn
every scrap of ' Christian Science literature,' so-called," it
said, " except Science and Health, and the publications bearing
2 "A student," says the Journal, " In the tongue of the world called a
patient who says to a Scientist, ' I take so much comfort In reading my Bible,'
if guided wisely, will be answered, ' Let your Bible alone for three months or
more. Don't open it even, nor think of it, but dig night and day at Science
and Health.' "
In response to public criticism concerning these utterances, the Christian
Science publication committee met and unanimously voted that this sentiment
was " unauthorised, unwise, and not the thought of our committee."
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 363
the imprint of the Christian Science Publishing Society of
Boston."
This red-hot exhortation was brought out by the fact that
the dissenters of 1888 were now publishing periodicals, bring
ing out books, and carrying on their work of healing and teach
ing under the name of Christian Science, exactly as if Mrs.
Eddy did not exist. Most of them had adopted the policy of
non-resistance. They kept a neutral attitude toward Mrs.
Eddy, refused to discuss her or her church, and in their work
and public utterances they adhered to the rule of excluding
personalities and keeping close to principle. They no longer
recognised Mrs. Eddy's favourite doctrine of Malicious Animal
Magnetism, but dwelt much upon the affirmative principle of
Good. But they must have missed the inspiring presence and
influence of their old leader, for after a few years their publica
tions lagged and most of these " independents " either dropped
Christian Science definitely or joined the New Thought move
ment.
But, whether Mrs. Eddy realised it or not, sedition among
the Boston students no longer meant jeopardy to her or to her
cause. If there was disloyalty in Boston, hundreds of converts
in New England, the middle West, and the far West waited
but the word to rally to her support. Christian Science was
an established faith, and was no longer at the mercy of any
group of people. It had been established by those indefatigable
missionaries, the healers ; with Mrs. Eddy always behind them,
and their devotion to her holding them together, inspiring them
with one purpose, and enabling them to work for one end.
After Mrs. Eddy herself, the most remarkable thing about
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Christian Science is its rapid growth. When the National
Christian Science Association, formed at Mrs. Eddy's house
in Boston, January 29, 1886, was little more than a year old,
one hundred and eleven professional healers advertised in the
pages of the Christian Science Journal and twenty-one acade
mies and institutes taught Mrs. Eddy's doctrines.
In April, 1890, the Journal contained the professional cards
of two hundred and fifty healers, men and women who were
practising in all parts of the country, and nearly all of whom
were depending entirely upon their practice for a livelihood.
Thirty-three academies and institutes were then teaching Chris
tian Science. These " academies " were very unpretentious
simply a room in which the teacher met her classes. In some
institutes there were two teachers ; usually there was but one.
The " graduates " of these institutions sometimes went on to
Boston to take a normal course under Mrs. Eddy, but oftener
they went immediately into practice. By 1890 there were
twenty incorporated Christian Science churches which an
nounced their weekly services in the Journal and which met in
public halls and schoolhouses, while ninety societies not yet
organised into churches were holding their weekly meetings.
The first Christian Science church building was dedicated at
Oconto, Wis., in 1887.
When Mrs. Eddy established herself in Boston in 1882,
there was but one Christian Science Church, a feeble society
of less than fifty members, which had been already shattered
by dissensions and quarrels. It is certainly very evident that
such an astonishing growth in the space of eight years can be
accounted for only by the fact that Mrs. Eddy's religion gave
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 365
the people something they wanted, and that it was presented
to them in a direct and effective way. " Demonstrate, demon
strate," was Mrs. Eddy's watchword. " Heal the sick, raise
the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons." Thus read the
seal of Mrs. Eddy's college, and such were the instructions
she gave her students when she sent them out into the field.
She never took cases herself, but she made her students under
stand that they were to be proved by works, and by works
alone, and that if they were children of the new birth at all,
they must heal.
To appreciate the work of the healers, one must understand
something about their preparation. Many of the students who
left Mrs. Eddy's Metaphysical College and went out to prac
tise knew much less about physiology, anatomy, and hygiene
than the average grammar-school boy knows to-day. They
had not been taught how to tie an artery or to set a
broken bone, how to take a patient's temperature or how
to administer the simple antidotes for poisons. Spinsters
who had never even been present at a confinement went bravely
out to attend women in childbirth. The healers' instruction
had been after this manner:
Tumors, ulcers, tubercles, inflammation, pain, deformed joints, are all
dream shadows, dark images of mortal thought which will flee before
the light. 8
Have no fears that matter can ache, swell, and be inflamed. . . .
Your body would suffer no more from tension or wounds than would the
trunk of a tree which you gash, were it not for mortal mind. 4
A child can have worms if you say so, or any other malady, timorously
hidden in the beliefs, relative to his body, of those about him. 5
The treatment of insanity is especially interesting. . . . The argu-
Science and Health (1906), p. 418.
* Science and Health (1906), p. 393.
5 Science and Health (1906), p. 413.
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
ments to be used in curing insanity are the same as in other diseases:
namely, the impossibility that matter, brain, can control or derange the
mind, can suffer or cause suffering. 8
If a crisis occurs in your treatment, you must treat the patient less for
the disease and more for the mental fermentation. 7
When the unthinking lobster loses his claw, it grows again. If the
Science of Life were understood, it would be found that the senses of
Mind are never lost, and that matter has no sensation. Then the human
limb would be replaced as readily as the lobster's claw. 8
The healers were recruited from every walk of life school
teachers, milliners, dressmakers, music-teachers; elocutionists,
mothers of families, and young women who had been trained
to no vocation at all. Among the male practitioners they
were greatly in the minority there were even a few converts
from the regular schools of medicine, but their contributions
to the Journal are so disorderly and inexact, and in some cases
so illiterate, as to indicate that their success in the practice
of medicine was very questionable. In the first years of her
college, Mrs. Eddy's consulting physician in instrumental
surgery was, the reader will remember, Charles J. Eastman,
afterward imprisoned for criminal practice. There were, how
ever, among her early practitioners, honest and worthy men.
One of the most successful of these was Captain Joseph S.
Eastaman, for many years a leading Christian Science practi
tioner in Boston, and who is still practising in Cambridge.
When he went to Mrs. Eddy to lay before her the case of
his sick wife, Mr. Eastaman had been a sea-captain for twenty-
one years, having begun his apprenticeship to the sea when
he was thirteen, as cabin-boy on board an English brig. If
the old seaman soon became docile like the other men about
8 Science and Health (1906), p. 414.
''Science and Health (1906), p. 421.
8 Science and Health (1906), p. 489.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 367
Mrs. Eddy he had, at least, learned obedience in a hard and
manly school. The story of his life at sea, which he contributed
in several articles to the Christian Science Journal, is a vigor
ous and sturdy piece of narrative-writing, full of wrecks and
typhoons and adventures with cannibal tribes, which make his
subsequent career seem all the more remarkable. Concerning
his first meeting with Mrs. Eddy in 1884, and his conversion
to Christian Science, he writes at length. His last voyage,
from Peru home to Boston, was made for the purpose of joining
his invalid wife.
Upon my arrival [he says], I found her much lower than I had supposed,
and the consultation of physicians immediately secured only made it evident
that she could not live long. In anxiety and distress, I then added my
own knowledge of medicine of necessity considerable to have enabled me
for so many years to care properly for both passengers and crew. . . .
One evening, as I was sitting hopeless at my wife's bedside, a friend called
and asked, " Captain, why don't you get a Christian Scientist to treat
your wife ? "
The captain visited a healer, and learned for the first time
of the existence of Mrs. Eddy. He thought, " If the healer
can do so much, his teacher must heal instantly." In his
narrative the captain says:
So, like a drowning man grasping at a straw, with alternating hopes
and fears besieging me on the way, I went to the college. In answer to
my request for a personal interview, Mrs. Eddy kindly granted me an
extended audience, though to my appeal for help she made the gentle
announcement that she herself did not now take patients. At this my
heart failed utterly, for I felt that none less than the founder was equal
to the healing necessary in my case. As I was about to leave, she turned
to me and said with much earnestness, " Captain, why don't you heal
your wife yourself? " I stood spellbound. I did not know what to say
or think. Finally I stammered out, " How can I heal my wife? Have
I not procured the best medical aid ? What more can I do ? " Gently
she said, " Learn how to heal." Without hesitation I returned to the
368 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
parlour for particulars. It seemed to me that it must require years of
studying to learn Christian Science and she whom I was trying to save
would not long be here. But when I heard that the entire term required
but three weeks, I gathered courage. In twenty minutes more I had
arranged to enter a class.
The captain's wife was averse to his new plan. She was
unwilling that he should add this tuition fee of several hundred
dollars to the already heavy expenses of her long illness. More
over, she was afraid that this Christian Science was some new
kind of Spiritualism. But the captain never committed himself
half-way. In that first interview Mrs. Eddy had won him
completely. He had escaped typhoons and coral reefs and
cannibal kings, only to arrive at an adventure of the mind
which was vastly stranger. Into the class he went. He says :
The class included many highly cultured people, all more or less con
versant with the rudiments of Christian Science; while I, a sailor, with
only a seaman's knowledge of the world, and not the faintest inkling of
the field to be opened up before me, felt very much out of place there.
To that first and last and most important question " What is God ? " the
students replied variously. When the question came to me, I stammered
out, " God is all, with all and in all. Everything that is good and pure."
The teacher smiled encouragingly as my answers followed one another,
and I was encouraged to go on. Every day during the term questions were
asked and answers were made that puzzled me not a little. But to all
my own simple earnest queries the patient teacher replied clearly and
satisfactorily. The many laughs enjoyed by the class at my expense did
not trouble me, therefore, for my teacher knew that I would not profess
to understand when I did not. The simpler my questions, the more pains
she took to explain clearly.
How much was due to my own changed thought I cannot tell, but after
Christian Science was recognised in our home, even before I entered the
college, my wife began to recover. As soon as I understood the rudiments,
I began to treat her, and so quickly did she respond to the treatment
that she was able to avail herself of the kind invitation of the teacher to
accompany me to the final session.
The captain's conversion was a thorough one. He gave up
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 369
his little bit of grog to which he had never been much ad
dicted and his Havana cigars, of which he had been very fond.
He began to practise a little among his old friends ship
owners and sailors. After his wife had fully recovered he
began to look about for work, and decided to accept an offer
which had been made him by the Panama Railway Company.
I accordingly engaged passage to Aspinwall, but on the last day I was
reminded of a promise made my teacher. I at once wrote her of my
plans, asking if they were wise, and received immediate counsel not to go.
Packed and passage taken, here was a dilemma. Still, I was ready to be
rightly guided, and wrote again asking what I should do. The reply
came, " Take an office." This certainly was the last thing I should have
thought of doing, for I could see no way to clear my personal expenses,
much less meet the added rent of a central location. However, the time
had come, and the birthright in Christian Science required obedience, even
though it looked like throwing away time and means. I could not disobey,
so I set about office-hunting. At first I wished to take a place on trial,
but a voice kept telling me that I would do better to take a lease for at
least a year. And it was well I did, for mortal mind soon tried to drive
me away, and at times apparently only the obligation of the lease held
me firm.
Whatever unfortunate examples of the professional healer
one may have seen, one believes Captain Eastaman when he
says that in his practice of twenty-two years he has worked
harder than he ever did at stowing cargoes in the West India
service. His account of his cures is as straightforward and
convincing in its style as is his story of his life at sea. No
one who reads it can doubt that the captain actually believes he
cured a woman of five tumours on the neck, and a working-
man of cataract of both eyes.
The businesslike methods which have always been so con
spicuous in the operations of the Christian Science Church had
their effect in its early proselyting.
370 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
The healer had no Board of Missions back of him; he was
thrown entirely upon his own resources. His income and his
usefulness to Christian Science alike depended upon the number
of patients he could attract, interest, influence, and heal. While
this condition must have had its temptation for the healer
of not very rugged integrity, it was wonderfully advantageous
to the cause as a whole. Never, since religions were propa
gated by the sword, was a new faith advertised and spread in
such a systematic and effective manner. When the healer went
to a new town, he had first to create a demand for Christian
Science treatments, and, if he could demonstrate successfully
enough to make that demand, not only was his career assured,
but he had laid the foundation of a future Christian Science
church. The files of the Journal abound in letters from healers
which show exactly how this demand was created.
Take the case of Mrs. Ann M. Otis, a healer at Stanton,
Mich. She was called to Marquette to treat a young man
who was suffering from a heavy cold on his lungs. As his
father and brother had both died from " quick " consumption,
his mother and sisters were in frantic alarm and his friends
had already consigned him to go the way of his family. Under
Mrs. Otis' treatment he recovered. The cure was noised about
the town by his grateful relatives, and so many patients poured
in upon the healer that she had to remain there for weeks.
Wherever the new religion went, it had the advantage of
novelty. It was much talked about, was discussed at social
gatherings and in women's clubs. Josephine Tyter, a healer
at Richmond, Ind., writes in the Journal, September, 1888:
" It is one year next month since I came to Richmond. I
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 371
knew no one here, and no one knew me. Christian Science
they knew nothing of. People thought they did not want
it. I knew they did, but they could not see in dark
ness. The physicians paid but little attention to me at
first, but now they are thoroughly aroused. At the regular
meeting of the Tuesday Evening Literary Club, to which all
the high order of minds of Richmond are supposed to belong,
one of the physicians of this city read a paper on Christian
Science." Miss Tyter then relates her own success, enumerat
ing among her cures cases of the delusions of pregnancy,
nervous prostration, lung and brain fever. She says, " Have
had some fine cases of spinal curvature," and tells how she
brought one man " out of a plaster cast into Truth."
Mrs. A. M. Rigby, a school-teacher at Bloomington, 111.,
writes that her health, broken down by many years of service
in the schoolroom, was restored by Christian Science, and that
she then began to practise. When she had eighty cases, she
resigned from her school, and for two years she has had from
twenty-five to fifty new cases a month.
Emma A. Estes, a healer at Grandledge, Mich., writes ex
ultantly of her trip to Newark : " My stay of three days
lengthened into one of three weeks, and I was kept busy
every day. Had forty-nine patients, and found my work
greatly blessed. . . . Mother joins me in sending love, and
adds, ' May God bless dear Mrs. Eddy for her kindness to
my own little girl.' '
Mrs. Harriet N. Cordwell, Berlin Falls, N. H., writes that
she has but recently become a healer, has healed one case of
spinal trouble in sixteen absent treatments, a case of scrofula
372 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
in thirteen treatments, case of lame back (fifteen years' stand
ing), one treatment, etc.
L. W. P. writes from Piqua, Ohio, that over three hundred
cases were treated within five months by an incoming healer,
that four classes were organised for the study of Science and
Health, and a Christian Science Sunday-school organised
(July, 1890).
Ella B. Fluno, a healer then in Lexington, Ky,, writes that
she was painlessly delivered of a child, got up the next day
and did her housework, carried water from the well and walked
on the icy sidewalk in low slippers. She did not have the
blinds in her bedroom lowered, and the sun shone daily in the
baby's eyes, with no ill effects.
Some of these communications from healers are extremely
entertaining, attesting to the efficacy of Christian Science in
increasing the patient's worldly prosperity, and giving examples
of how " demonstration " may be made useful in despatching
housework. One woman writes:
My husband came from the stable one morning with word that a valued
four-year-old colt had got into the oats-bin, had been eating all night, and
was as " tight as a drum." I met the error's claim with an emphatic mental
denial. ... As soon as possible, though not immediately, I went to
the barn-yard, laid my hand on the horse's head, and said in an audible
voice: "You are God's horse; for all that is He made and pronounced
perfect. You cannot overeat, have colic, or be foundered, for there is
no power in material food to obstruct or interfere with the perfect health,
activity, and freedom of all that is real and spiritual." . . . Previous
to my treatment he stood with head down and short, rapid breathing.
At noon he was all right, and I am delighted to know how to realise for
the good of animals.
In the healer's effort to arouse interest and get business in
a new field there can be no doubt that he was sometimes over"
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 373
zealous and disregarded those uninspiring facts of which mortal
mind must still take account. The more conservative and
honest workers felt the bad effects of these extreme methods,
and in the Journal of June, 1892, one healer writes:
All healers have some instantaneous cures, but if we mention only these,
does it not imply that we have no lingering cases? I call to mind a lady
Scientist who wanted to make an impression in a new field where she
hoped to get business. After talking of the many wonderful cures which
she had effected, she added that she herself was cured in three treatments
of a lifelong malady. Now, while that was substantially correct, the
shadows of her belief [symptoms of her illness] were not wholly effaced
for over two years, and this was known to others in Science. Would it
not have been better had the Scientist qualified her statement as to the
time required?
Do not Scientists make a mistake in conveying the impression, or, what
is the same thing, letting an impression go uncorrected, that those in
Science are never sick, that they never have any ailments or troubles to
contend with? There is no Scientist who at all times is wholly exempt
from aches and pains or from trials of some kind. Neither pride of knowl
edge nor practice nor the good of the cause require that Scientists disguise
or withhold these facts.
The question of the compensation which it was proper for
the healer and teacher to receive was, from time to time, dis
cussed in the Journal. At the various institutes and academies
where Christian Science was taught, the charge for a term of
lessons was from one to two hundred dollars. The healer's
usual charge was a dollar a treatment, or daily treatments at
five dollars a week.
One healer writes, May, 1890: "To allow the patient to
decide the price would certainly be unselfish on the part of the
healer. But such laxity might allow selfishness with the pa
tient."
Another practitioner protests that the customary fee is too
little : " It is a low plane of thought," he says, " that goes
374s LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
through the community and itself erects a barrier against gen
erosity or even fair compensation. The Science is lowered in
the public estimation, the healer humiliated, if not weakened,
and the chances of success in doing good greatly lessened.
Selfishness still remains to imprison the patient unless his
thought, in this, as in other directions, be changed."
Mrs. Buswell, a healer at Beatrice, Neb., was once summoned
before the court under charge of practising medicine unlawfully.
She objected that her treatments were in the nature of a
religious exercise and did not come under the jurisdiction of
the medical laws of the state. When, upon question, she ad
mitted that she accepted money for these treatments, the
judge cited to her the reply of Peter to Simon the sorcerer:
" Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that
the gift of God may be purchased with money." But the Chris
tian Scientist's God is not at all the God of Christian theology.
He is, as Mrs. Eddy ceaselessly reiterates, Principle. There
was really no more irreverence in Mrs. Buswell's realising the
Allness of God for money than there would have been in her
realising the truth of a proposition of Euclid.
Every patient healed was practically a new Christian Scien
tist made. If he were to keep well he must do so by studying
Science and Health. The new converts always became imme
diately estranged from their old church associates, and very
often from their oldest friends. They met together at one
another's houses to discuss Christian Science and to hold serv
ices. These circles were, indeed, very much like that first one
which used to meet in Mrs. Damon's parlour in Lynn. As soon
as such groups of believers were able to do so, they formed a
HISTORY OP CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 375
society and held regular Sunday "services in a schoolhouse or
public hall. If this society grew and prospered, which it was
almost sure to do, it became an incorporated church. A Chris-
tion Science reading-room was often established, where Mrs.
Eddy's works and copies of the Journal might be obtained.
If a community happened to be slow in taking up the new
faith, the missionaries sometimes attributed public disasters to
the prevalence of Error over Truth. One worker in an un
toward field writes in the Journal of November, 1890:
The result of their closed eyes and ears has been demonstrated in a
startling railroad accident and sudden deaths in our midst. On the night
of the fourteenth a cloudburst caused a deluge o\ destruction of property in
the lower streets of this village and imperilled many lives. Just now is a
favourable time for work.
While the growth of Christian Science must be attributed
primarily to its stimulating influence upon the sick and dis
contented, the low vitality of the orthodox churches undoubtedly
facilitated its advance. Mrs. Eddy's teachings brought the
promise of material benefits to a practical people, and the
appeal of seeming newness to a people whose mental recreation
was a feverish pursuit of novelty. In the West, especially,
where every one was absorbed in a new and hard-won material
prosperity, the healer and teacher met with an immediate re
sponse. This religion had a message of cheer for the rugged
materialist as well as for the morbid invalid. It exalted health
and self-satisfaction and material prosperity high among the
moral virtues indeed, they were the evidences of right living,
the manifestations of a man's " at-oneness " with God. Chris
tian Science had no rebuke for riches ; it bade man think always
of life, of his own worthiness and security, just as the old re-
376 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
ligions had bidden him remember death and be mindful of his
unworthiness and insecurity. It contributed to the general
sense of self-satisfaction and well-being which already charac
terised a new and thrifty society.
Probably Mrs. Eddy herself was not aware of the headway
which her sect had made until she attended the third annual
convention of the National Christian Scientists' Association,
held at Chicago in June, 1888. Mrs. Eddy went on from
Boston, personally attended by Mr. Frye and Ebenczer J.
Foster, who was soon to become her son by adoption. Croud,
of Mrs. Eddy's Western followers here for the first time beheld
her, as they put it, " face to face," and she achieved a most
gratifying personal triumph.
This was the first and last annual convention Mrs. Eddy
ever attended, and a coup de theatre could scarcely have been
better planned. On the morning of June 13, Mrs. Eddy de
livered an address to an audience of more than three thousand
people, eight hundred of whom were Christian Science delegates.
When she stepped upon the platform the entire audience rose
and cheered her.
Her address, which is said to have thrilled every listener
and which was termed " pcntecostal," seems, at this distance,
rather below Mrs. Eddy's average. She closed with the follow
ing tribute to her church militant:
Christian Science and Christian Scientists will, must, have a history;
and if I could write the history in poor parody on Tennyson's grand verse,
it would read thus:
" Traitors to right of them,
M.D.'s to left of them,
Priestcraft in front of them,
Volleyed and thundered i
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 877
Into the jaws of hate,
Out through the door of love,
On to the blest above
Marched the one hundred."
Such sentiments as these wrought her audience to a feverish
pitch of excitement. A letter to the Boston Traveller, after
ward reprinted in the Christian Science Journal, thus described
the outburst of feeling which followed Mrs. Eddy's address:
The scenes that followed when she had censed speaking will long be
remembered by those who witnessed them. The people were In the presence
of the woman whose book hud healed them, and they knew it. Up they
came in crowds to her side, begging one hand-clasp, one look, one memorial
from her whose name was a power and a sacred thing in their homes.
Those whom she had never seen before invalids raised up by her book,
" Science and Health " attempted to hurriedly tell the wonderful story.
A mother who failed to get near her held high her babe to look on
their helper. Others touched the dress of their benefactor, not so much
as asking for more.
An aged woman, trembling with palsy, lifted her shaking hands at Mrs.
Kddy's feet, crying, "Help, help!" and the cry was answered. Many
sueh people were known to go away healed. Strong men turned aside to
hide Ic.-irs, as Hie people thronged to Mrs. Kddy willi blessings and thanks.
Meekly and almost silently, she received all this homage from the
multitude, until slie \v:is led away from the plaee, tlie throng hloeUing her
passage from the door to the carriage.
What wonder If the thoughts of those present went back to eighteen
hundred years ago, when the healing power was manifested through the
personal Jesus?
Can the cold critic, harsh opposer, or disbeliever in Christian Science call
up any other like picture through all these centuries?
What was the Pentecostal hour but this same dawning of God's allness
and oneness, and His supremacy manifested in gifts of healing and speaking,
"\vilh tongues"? Let history declare of Mary Eddy what were the
blessings and power which she brought.
It was while Mrs. Eddy was thus making material for legend
in Chicago that " conspiracy " was afoot in Boston, and the
enthusiastic writer just quoted was forced to take this into
378 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
account, and to add : " Is there no similarity between the past
and present records of Christ, Truth, entering into Jerusalem,
and the betrayal? Is the bloodthirsty tyranny of animal
magnetism the Veil of the Temple, which is to be rent from top
to bottom? "
CHAPTER XX
THE ADOPTION OF A SON MRS. EDDY ? S HOUSEHOLD AND THE
NEW FAVOURITE A CRISIS IN CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MRS.
EDDY IS DRIVEN FROM BOSTON BY " M.A.M."
IN 1888 George Washington Glover, Mrs. Eddy's long-
absent son, the child of her first marriage, came to spend a
winter in Boston. He brought with him from the West his
wife and four children, and took a house in Chelsea. Although
his relations with his mother at that time seem to have been
amicable, they were certainly not of a very close or confidential
nature. While Mr. Glover was in Boston his mother's business
affairs were still conducted by Mr. Frye, and the son was a
far from conspicuous figure in her daily life. He was not a
member of her household or of her church, and took no part
in her great religious enterprise. Mr. Glover and his family
were first publicly introduced to Mrs. Eddy's followers in
December, at a fair given by the Christian Scientists. On
this occasion the Glovers were cordially welcomed by Mrs.
Eddy's friends, and the resemblance of the daughter Mary
Baker Glover, to her grandmother was the subject of general
comment throughout the evening. At a late hour Mrs. Eddy
herself appeared to grace the fair, and when she entered the
hall the orchestra began to play Mendelssohn's wedding march,
to symbolise, so the Journal explains, Mrs. Eddy's " indis
soluble union with Truth."
379
380 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Mr. Glover's prolonged stay in Chelsea seems not to have
brought him and his mother any closer together, for, almost
immediately after his return to the West, Mrs. Eddy adopted
a son who was presumably more to her liking.
Ebenezer Johnson Foster was a man of forty-one when
Mrs. Eddy adopted him, and she herself was then in her sixty-
eighth year. Dr. Foster was a homoeopathic physician who had
been practising his profession at Waterbury Center, a little
mountain town in Vermont. Like most of Mrs. Eddy's dis
ciples, he had led a quiet, uneventful life until he came under
her influence. As a boy of fifteen he had enlisted in the Union
Army and had served for three years. Later he was gradu
ated from the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia.
Dr. Foster first heard of Christian Science through William
Clark, an old army comrade who believed that his health had
been restored through his study of Mrs. Eddy's book. Dr.
Foster decided to investigate this new system of healing, and,
in the autumn of 1887, when he went to Boston to pay a visit
to an old aunt, he called at Mrs. Eddy's house in Columbus
Avenue and an interview was granted. The first impressions
on both sides were very agreeable. Mrs. Eddy was more than
eager to enlist the sympathies of " the M.D.'s," as she termed
physicians, and she saw in Dr. Foster the tractable kind of
man she was always looking for. She lavished her most
gracious manner upon him, and he was led away captive in
the first interview. It seemed to Dr. Foster that Mrs. Eddy
was very like his own mother ; that she was full of gentleness and
sympathy and affection. She told him that she wished him to
become her student, and he entered her class the following day.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 381
After completing his course at Mrs. Eddy's Metaphysical
College, Dr. Foster returned to Waterbury Center and resumed
the practice of homoeopathy, experimenting more or less with
the Christian Science method of healing, and industriously
reading Science and Health. In the following May he received
an urgent letter from Mrs. Eddy requesting him to attend the
National Convention of the Christian Scientists' Association,
which was to meet at Chicago in June. Because of division
and discord in the Boston church, Mrs. Eddy, foreseeing serious
trouble, was strengthening her position by every possible means,
and was ascertaining, in one way and another, which of her
students could be depended upon in case of an emergency. Dr.
Foster was easily persuaded to go to Chicago. After the
convention adjourned and Mrs. Eddy returned to Boston, he
went to visit his brother in Wisconsin. There he soon received
a telegram from his teacher, bidding him come at once to
Boston. Before he could start, another telegram from her
told him not to come. Soon afterward he received a letter
urging him to come at once.
When Dr. Foster arrived at Mrs. Eddy's new house in Com
monwealth Avenue, July 4, 1888, he was at a loss to know just
why she had sent for him, except that the recent schism in the
Boston church, resulting in the withdrawal of thirty-six mem
bers, had left her short of active workers.
Mrs. Eddy soon made it known to him, however, that he
was to be a teacher in her college, and she duly installed him
as professor of obstetrics. 1 She took great comfort in Dr.
Foster's presence in the house and began to feel that from
1 See Chapter XIX.
382 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
him she might hope for the unquestioning obedience and per
petual adoration she was always seeking. She loved to amaze
and astonish ; when her students ceased to " wonder," she was
usually through with them. Each of her favourites gave her,
as it were, a new lease of life; with each one her interest in
everything quickened. The great outside audience meant very
little as compared with the pliant neophyte beside her chair
or across the table from her. It was when Mrs. Eddy was
weaving her spell about a new favourite that she was at her
best, and it was then that she most believed in herself. But
she could never stop with enchanting, merely. She must alto
gether absorb the new candidate; he must have nothing left
in him which was not from her. If she came upon one insoluble
atom hidden away anywhere in the marrow of his bones, she
experienced a revulsion and flung him contemptuously aside.
Dr. Foster had been in the house but a little while when
Mrs. Eddy told him she foresaw that the relation between them
must be a very close one. This announcement somewhat dis
concerted him, until she explained that it was her intention
to adopt him as her son. In her petition to the Court, Mrs.
Eddy stated that " said Foster is now associated with your
petitioner in business, home life, and life work, and she needs
such interested care and relationship." On the 5th of Novem
ber, 1888, accordingly, Dr. Foster's legal name became Ebenezer
J. Foster Eddy.
The new son was a small man with an affectionate disposition,
gentle, affable manners, and very small, well-kept hands. He
had certain qualities which Mrs. Eddy had always found de
sirable in those who were closely associated with her. He never
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 383
offered Mrs. Eddy advice, never interfered with her wishes,
never questioned her wisdom or demurred to her projects as
even Mr. Frye was sometimes known to do. He says to-day
that he cannot remember ever having crossed his adopted mother
in anything. If he had planned to go up to Waterbury Center
to visit his father, for instance, and Mrs. Eddy told him to
unpack his bag and stay at home, he did so without so much
as a question, and preserved a cheerful countenance.
When Foster Eddy settled himself in his new home at 385
Commonwealth Avenue, he found that not all of Mrs. Eddy's
friends were so kindly disposed toward him as was his mother.
At this time Miss Julia Bartlett, Captain Eastaman, Josephine
Woodbury, William B. Johnson, Mrs. Augusta Stetson, Frank
Mason, and Marcellus Munroe constituted a kind of executive
staff for Mrs. Eddy, and the new son felt confident that several
of these persons had attempted to prevent his adoption from
motives of self-interest. If Mrs. Eddy were going to adopt
any one, why not one of her trusted and tried rather than a
comparative stranger? From the day of his installation as
the son of the house, Foster Eddy felt that Mrs. Eddy's cabinet
was jealous of his influence over her, of her affection for him,
of his musical accomplishments and his winning manners, and
of his efforts to bring sunshine into his new home.
Mr. Frye went his silent, inscrutable way, keeping a wary
eye upon the new favourite. Frye was little about the house
in those days. When he was not doing his marketing he was
usually to be found in his own room, waiting for orders and
working at his accounts. Although he seems to have been
scrupulously honest, he was a poor bookkeeper. Mrs. Eddy
384 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
often took him to task harshly for this fault, and it was the
cause of many a scene between them. She now threatened
to take the accounts altogether out of his hands and give
them to her new son, but as often as she decided upon this step
she as often changed her mind, and in the end the books re
mained in the keeping of Mr. Frye. He probably knew that
Mrs. Eddy trusted him in so far as she could trust any one,
but that it was necessary for her to have grievances and to
break into thunder-storms about them. Every one had to take
his turn at standing up under these cataclysms of nerves ;
if it were not Mr. Frye, then it was some one else, and the
new son was soon having his occasional bad day like the
rest.
Mrs. Lydia Roaf, Mr. Frye's sister, was Mrs. Eddy's cook
at this time, but she and her brother had little to say to each
other. Miss Martha Morgan acted as housekeeper. She had
come from Maine to study under Mrs. Eddy and had stayed
to help with the housework. Foster Eddy's duties were mani
fold, but were chiefly in the nature of personal services to
Mrs. Eddy. He went about town on errands to her publishers
and printers ; addressed meetings which she could not attend ;
wrote some of her letters for her ; saw visitors when she was
indisposed ; sometimes took a drive with her ; kept her desk
in order; played and sang for her when she was in a pensive
mood. Mrs. Eddy liked her son to appear with some dis
tinction when he went out to represent her. In winter he usually
wore a long fur-lined coat, and Mrs. Eddy later bought him
a diamond solitaire for his little finger. Since he had to speak
occasionally in public, Mrs. Eddy sent him to the Boston School
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 385
of Oratory to learn the use of the voice. She called him
" Bennie " and he addressed her as " mother."
Dr. Foster Eddy was sometimes called upon to attend Mrs.
Eddy in her illnesses, and he, like the other members of the
household, spent his spare moments in treating her against
that old foe, malicious animal magnetism, which was always
infesting the house. He also made himself useful about the
house, and sometimes helped Miss Morgan with the dishes.
When Mrs. Eddy had a bad day, Dr. Foster's new home was
a difficult place to live in, but the storms were usually for
gotten in the smiles and calm which followed. Mrs. Eddy
could be the most agreeable of hostesses and of mothers when
she chose, and from the days when she told a young man of
Swampscott that if she could put on canvas her ideal of Jesus
Christ the face would look like his, she never underestimated
the human appetite for flattery. She could unblushingly refer
to the " touch of fairy fingers " or the " music of footfalls,"
and could deliver the most threadbare euphuisms with a smile
that warmed the heart of the recipient and covered him with
foolish happiness. After having fretted herself to sleep the
night before, she would sometimes arise in a mood almost beatific,
and would greet the object of yesterday's invective with a
benediction and a smile. In such a humour she would promise
the pardoned offender a larger place in her life and a greater
control of her affairs, telling him that he, more than any one
else, had understood the true meaning of her teachings and
the real significance of her life, and that she must perforce
look to him to carry on her great work after her. It was the
same old story that Mrs. Eddy had breathed to Spofford,
386 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Arens, and Buswell, each in his turn, but to the eager listener
it was always new.
By the spring of 1889 Mrs. Eddy had come to a crisis in her
affairs. In spite of the brave fight she was making against
those who had gone out from the church, and whom she chose
to consider her enemies, she began to show the wear and strain
of the eight preceding years. She had now reached the age
of sixty-eight, the trembling palsy which affected her head
and hands was growing more pronounced, and her fear of
mesmerism amounted to a mania. Yet now, more than ever
before, there was work for her to do. It was a critical moment
in the history of her church. The movement was spreading
rapidly, and new problems, incident to the growth of Christian
Science, were presenting themselves for solution. In nearly
every state the healers were coming into conflict with the
law and public opinion, and her followers everywhere needed
advice and direction. The " conspiracy " which had come to
light the year before had shown her that the Boston church
was not so completely under her control as she had believed,
and she determined that something should be done to insure
her domination of it in the future.
Mrs. Eddy had decided, too, to revise Science and Health,
and to get out a new edition. In Boston her work was subject
to continual interruption, and she was often irritated beyond
endurance by the people about her. Mrs. Woodbury and Mrs.
Stetson, in particular, had begun to wear upon her. Although
Mrs. Stetson's success in building up the church organisation
in New York made her indispensable, Mrs. Eddy distrusted her
and was annoyed as well as pleased at her progress. Soon
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 387
after Mrs. Eddy adopted Dr. Foster, Mrs. Stetson took a
young man from Maine, Carol Norton, to occupy a somewhat
similar position in her household, although she did not legally
adopt him. When Mrs. Eddy heard of this, she exclaimed
with vexation, " See how Stetson apes me ! " She also made
a new by-law forbidding " illegal adoption." 2
This was the situation when Mrs. Eddy suddenly left Boston,
driven from home, so she declared, by malicious mesmerism.
The fear of it had for a long time completely dominated her,
and it was now interfering seriously with her work in the college
and church. She spent her time in talking about it ; in treating
and fighting against it, and in discovering and thwarting
imaginary plots. She felt it reaching out to her, not only
from her enemies, but from her most trusted students and
friends. She believed she could see it in their faces. As she
once bitterly remarked to Mrs. Hopkins, " You are so full of
mesmerism that your eyes stick out like a boiled codfish's."
She had never loved any one so well that she could not, in
a moment of irritation, believe him guilty, not only of disloyalty,
but of theft, knavery, blackmail, or abominable corruption.
She could never feel sure of even the ordinary decencies of
conduct in her friends. All the suspicion, envy, and incontinent
distrust which so often blazed in Mrs. Eddy's eyes seemed
to have found a concrete and corporeal expression in this thing,
Mesmerism.
The delusion of persecution grew upon her, and she believed
that she was watched and spied upon. Her mail, her clothes,
2 Illegal Adoption. Sect. 3. No person shall be a member of this church who
claims a spiritually adopted child ; or a spiritually adopted husband or wife.
There must be legal adoption or legal marriage, which can be verified according
to the laws of our land. Church Manual, 1904.
388 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
her house, her friends, and even inanimate objects she thought
were infected with mesmerism and made hostile to her.
Throughout the winter and spring she complained continually
to her adopted son that Boston was so full of mesmerism that
it was choking her, and that she must escape from it. Her
one thought now was " flight " to get away from the Boston
Christian Scientists and to a place where she could prosecute
her work and carry out her plans without interference or in
terruption. She talked of going to Cincinnati or Pittsburgh,
but at last she threw deliberation to the winds and announced
one morning that she must go immediately somewhere, any
where.
Foster Eddy knew of a furnished house which was to be let
in Barre, Vt., and thither he conducted Mrs. Eddy, with Mr.
Frye and the women of the household Lydia Roaf was no
longer one of them, having fallen ill and gone home to die.
When Mrs. Eddy arrived at Barre, new troubles awaited her.
The town band customarily played of an evening in the square
before her house, and although she sent Mr. Frye out to
request the band boys to desist, they refused to do so. Conse
quently Mrs. Eddy packed up and returned to Boston. A
few months later she was up and away again, this time moving
into a furnished house at 62 State Street, Concord, N. H.
She found no peace here, and sent Dr. Foster out to look for
some place that should be a certain distance from the post-office,
telegraph-office, express-office, etc. She wanted to be well out
of reach of these, and yet be not too far from Boston. Dr.
Foster canvassed the suburbs of that city and found a de
sirable house and garden for sale in Roslindale. The owner
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 389
asked a price considerably above the market value, but Mrs.
Eddy paid it, declaring that mesmerism was again at work,
trying to keep her out of her own, and that she would have
the property at any price. Dr. Foster was sent back to
Commonwealth Avenue to pack her furniture and move it out
to Roslindale. The new house was scarcely settled when Mrs.
Eddy, believing that her neighbours were mesmerised, went
back to Concord. Here she lived again at No. 62 State Street,
until she moved into the house which she named Pleasant View,
and in which she lived until January, 198.
In retiring to Concord, Mrs. Eddy had no idea of loosing
her hold upon Christian Science, or of resigning her leadership.
It is very doubtful if, when she went away in the spring of
1889, she meant to leave Boston for good. After that date
she made alterations in her Commonwealth Avenue house, and
the fact that she had the walls of her own room there pulled
out and interlined with a substance which would deaden sound
and make the room absolutely quiet, seems to indicate that
she intended to return there to live. But in going from Boston,
Mrs. Eddy was acting, as always, upon the urgent need of the
moment. For the present it was imperative that she should
be free from the hot-bed of mesmerism in Boston, both for her
own peace of mind, and in order to do what was before her ; and
although her retirement to Concord proved most fortunate in
its general results, Mrs. Eddy, in going, was probably not
concerned at the moment with anything but her own security
and convenience. It was apparently not until she had left
the city and had become more inaccessible to her students and
followers, that she realised how greatly her administrative
390 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
life in Boston had taxed her strength. For years she had com
plained of the anguish of meeting people ; she believed that her
students, and even strangers, left the burden of their ills and
sorrows with her when they went out from her presence, and
she suffered excruciatingly from the nervous excitement pro
duced by even the most casual social intercourse. From this
time on her dread of crowds and her distress at meeting people
increased and she became gradually more and more inaccessible.
CHAPTER XXI
THE NEW POLICY MRS. EDDY RESIGNS FROM PULPIT AND JOURNAL
AND CLOSES HER COLLEGE DISORGANISATION OF THE
CHURCH AND ASSOCIATION RECONSTRUCTION ON A NEW
BASIS MRS. EDDY IN ABSOLUTE CONTROL AND POSSESSION
MRS. EDDY'S retreat from the centre of Christian Science
activities was the first step, as will be seen, in the new policy
toward which she was slowly feeling her way. From her point
of view it was wise to let Christian Science in Boston lie fallow
for a time; to allow the plots and counterplots of the factions
composing the remnant of her church to die out ; and to secure
for herself peace, and time to decide what next should be done.
There is no doubt that during her visit to Chicago the year
before, her eyes were opened to the strength of the general
movement of Christian Science, and that it was in the larger
field, and not in the local Boston church, that Mrs. Eddy now
saw her opportunity.
Mrs. Eddy retired from the editorship of the Christian Sci
ence Journal, May, 1889.
In announcing Mrs. Eddy's retirement, the Journal of that
date says:
... As our dear mother in God withdraws herself from our
midst, and goes up into the Mount for higher communings, to show us
and the generations to come the way to our true consciousness in God,
391
392 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
let us honour Him and keep silence; let us keep from her and settle
among ourselves or with God for ourselves, the small concerns for which
we have looked to her.
At about this time, Mrs. Eddy also gave up teaching. It
was with great reluctance that she closed her college, and here
again she felt her way to a final decision. The first plan was
that she merely give up active teaching, and remain president
of the institution, while her adopted son succeeded her as in
structor. She gave this arrangement a trial 1 , but soon an
nounced that, as the demand was for her own instruction ex
clusively, she would close the college altogether. In the late
summer of 1889 Mrs. Eddy again reconsidered, and announced
that General Erastus N. Bates of Cleveland would reopen the
college and conduct the classes. General Bates, who was a
healer and preacher in his own city, gave up his practice there
and came on to Boston to take up Mrs. Eddy's work. No
sooner had he begun than Mrs. Eddy again changed her mind,
and in less than a month after General Bates arrived she closed
the college, despite his earnest protest.
Mrs. Eddy next disorganised the Association. At her re
quest it was voted " to set aside the official organisation and
the constitution and by-laws of the Massachusetts Metaphysical
College Association, and to meet in the future as a voluntary
association of Christians to promote growth in spirituality."
The Journal, in its announcement, continues : " What was em
braced under the name of * business ' was thus dispensed with.
Nothing valuable of the purposes of the organisation had been
lost and a new realisation that all is mind and of union in love
had been gained." The effect of this disorganisation, the
Journal said, would be " to lift them from the material sensual
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 393
plane to that of voluntary association or love," and to eliminate
" rivalry, jealousy, envy, and stir of personality."
While she was moving about and experimenting, Mrs. Eddy
was also engaged in preparing the new edition of Science and
Health, which appeared in 1891; and her chief difficulty in
getting the book on the market was, as always, mesmerism.
She had fled from Boston to escape it, but it was ever on her
track and it throve in Concord as well as in Boston and Ver
mont and Roslindale. The ordinary delays which occur in the
best-regulated of pressrooms and binderies, she attributed di
rectly to the results of malicious animal magnetism, and that
eminently reliable and decorous establishment, the University
Press, was supposed to have been given over to the riotous
disorders of demonology. Mrs. Eddy set half a dozen of her
students to treating the pressmen and binders against errors
and delays, and wrote out an argument for them to use in
their treatments. The veteran printer, Mr. John Wilson him
self, she assigned, for especial treatment, to her son, E. J.
Foster Eddy. The letter in which Mrs. Eddy issued instruc
tions that the treatments upon the press were to begin, was
written to Dr. Foster Eddy, and reads as follows:
Jan. 13, 385 Commonwealth Avenue.
MY DEAREST OXE: Please to go at once to Miss Bartlett and give her
the directions inclosed. See Capt. Eastaman and give him the same.
After writing out sufficient copies, distribute them as follows:
To Capt. Eastaman, Miss Bartlett; for Mrs. Munroe; Press and Bindery,
for Mr. Johnson, Mr. Knapp, Mrs. Knapp.
You keep Mr. Wilson, the printer of Cambridge, under your care alone.
Also the Mr. Wilson, or proprietor, whoever he is, in Boston, who manages
the bindery, under your care only. You know they cannot be made sick
for printing and binding God's book, and you must show your faith by
works in this instance.
394 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Attached to this letter is a sheet of manuscript in Mrs.
Eddy's handwriting, which reads:
Argument
Nothing can hinder the book, Science and Health, from being published
immediately. The press and machinery that publish this book and all who
work on it in the press and bindery are safe in God's hands, they cannot
be and are not governed by hatred. They are governed, upheld and
prospered by Love and the book is coming out rapidly. When the book
goes to the bindery then stop the press aid and turn all their force there.
Tell each one that I say by no means take up the mesmerists or any
personality, but to have faith in God and this will do it all just as the
prayer asks.
Your personal work for the Wilsons must be done as I have taught
you, to help them, and not touch others.
If I or Mr. Frye write or telegraph to you then you must stop at once
the student's argument. You understand this, do you not?
The last sentence in Mrs. Eddy's instructions seems to imply
that it was possible to over-treat the pressroom, and that it
might be necessary to stop the treatments at any time. Just
what the results of over-treatment might be, it is difficult to
conjecture, but from another letter to Dr. Foster it is evident
that Mrs. Eddy thought the treatments had been too vigorous
and had thrown everything into confusion:
DEAREST:
I have just found what did (but did not) * produce a temporary tempest
here. It was the help you procured on the Press ! Never, never put
" new wine into old bottles."
Those persons named are utterly incapable of handling the Red Dragon."
They can command serpents but not the last species.
At once dismiss your help and confine your treatment to the Proprietor
Mr. W and electricity take no other personality into thought but the
ones employed at the Press.
All is God, Good there is no evil.
* Mrs. Eddy's contradictory statement means that the confusion was not
real because all is God and discord has no part in God. A " tempest " was
produced In " belief " but not in reality. The sentence is peculiarly illustrative
of her philosophy. One is (but is not) ill, exhausted, melancholy, etc., etc.
2 Mesmerism.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 895
It was in the early autumn of 1889 that Mrs. Eddy con
ceived the idea that malicious animal magnetism was interfering
with the proper conduct of the Christian Science Journal.
She sent one morning for Mr. William G. Nixon, publisher of
the Journal, and directed him to take the magazine and flee
with it at once into some other city; if he stayed in Boston
a month longer, she declared, mesmerism would wreck the
periodical. Mr. Nixon tried to explain to her the difficulties
of picking up a periodical and " fleeing " with it between pub
lication days, when no preparatory arrangements had been
made and no new location selected. But Mrs. Eddy was im
movable. In business disputes Mrs. Eddy had always one
argument which none of her associates could hope to equal : she
would draw up her shoulders, look her opponent in the eye,
and say, very slowly, " God has directed me in this matter.
Have you anything further to say?" Mr. Nixon naturally
wished to remain in Boston; he had brought his family there
from Dakota, and his contract with his printer was unex-
pired. But there was nothing to be gained by arguing with
Mrs. Eddy ; and there was no time to be lost if he was to find
a new location for his business in time to get out the next
month's Journal. He went to Philadelphia, where he at length
found a suitable office and a printer who would undertake to
get the magazine out on time. Just as he was about to close
the contract, he received a telegram from Mrs. Eddy telling
him to bring the Journal back to Boston at once.
In directing the Journal's policy, Mrs. Eddy was never afraid
to change her mind, and often repudiated to-day what she had
yesterday advanced as divine revelation. On one occasion
396 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
she wrote to Mr. Nixon that God had directed her to recom
mend a certain candidate for the editorship of the Journal:
385 Commonwealth Ave.
BOSTON, Sept. 30 1889
MY DEAR STUDENT
God our God has just told me who to recommend to you for the
Editor of C. S. Jour, but you are not to name me in this transaction.
It is Rev. Charles Macomber Smith D.D. 164 Summer St Somerville Mass.
He was healed by reading Science and Health and left a large salary
to preach Christian Science and then left that position for the hope
J. F. Bailey had held out to him of preaching for my Church but I
objected to taking him solely because his church had not been consulted
before giving him a call.
Get him sure but be very reticent let it not be known until he is engaged
or you will have a fuss about it.
Lovingly,
M. B. G. EDDY.
Mr. Nixon had not had time to act upon this letter when
he received another in which Mrs. Eddy explained that her
recommendation of Mr. Smith had been the result of mesmerism,
and not of divine inspiration:
CONCORD, N. H.
To MR. NIXON 62 State St.
MY DEAR STUDENT
I regret having named the one I did to you for Editor It is a mistake
he is not fit It was not God evidently that suggested that thought but
the person who suggests many things mentally but I have before been
able to discriminate I wrote too soon after it came to my thought He
has not been taught C. S. and I hear refuses to be taught by any one
but me. Love to wife
Ever Affectionately
M. B. G. EDDY.
In another letter she reprimands her publisher for not affix
ing the author's name whenever he refers to Science and Health
in the columns of the Journal, and for not printing the name
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 397
of that book always in small capitals. Mr. Nixon felt that the
Journal should be the magazine of Christian Science rather
than Mrs. Eddy's personal organ, and had rashly attempted
to persuade her that it would be more dignified in her to keep
her own name a little more in the background, especially when
so many of her enemies were asserting that Christian Science
was nothing but a glorification of Mrs. Eddy's " personality."
On this point she says to Mr. Nixon, in a letter dated June 30,
1890:
Those who are trying to frighten you over using my name at suitable
intervals and who are crying out personality are the very ones that persist
in their purpose to keep my personality before the public through abusing
it and to harness it to all the faults of other personalities and make it
responsible for them. But neither of these efforts disposes of personality
nor handle it on the rule our Master taught nor deal with mortal personality
scientifically.
In the same letter she reproves him for having omitted her
appellation of " Reverend " when referring to her in the Journal.
Among Mrs. Eddy's letters to her publisher, Mr. Nixon, is
this rather amusing one:
July 14 1890.
385 Commonwealth Ave.
MY DEAR STUDENT
Many thanks for your copy of Brotherham's translation of the New
Testament But I cannot see the merit in it that Mr. Bailey attaches
to it in his long notice in the Journal. The language is decaying as fast
as that of Irving's Pickwick Papers I prefer the common version for
all scriptural quotations to that.
Most truly and affectionately,
M. B. G. EDDY.
Having divested herself of her responsibilities as editor and
teacher, Mrs. Eddy further protected herself from the im-
398 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
portunities of her students by the publication in the Journal
of seven fixed rules, which announced that she was not to be con
sulted regarding the personal or church difficulties of her
followers. 3 Her next step was to disorganise the Boston
church. Upon this action the Journal of February, 1890,
comments as follows:
The dissolution of the visible organisation of the church is the sequence
and complement of that of the college corporation and association. The
college disappeared that the spirit of Christ might have freer course
among its students and all who come into the understanding of Divine
Science, the bonds of the church were thrown away so that its members
might assemble themselves together to " provoke one another to good works "
in the bond only of love.
After Mrs. Eddy disorganised it, the church continued to
hold regular services and, to all intents and purposes, went
on just as before with the one important exception that it held
no more business meetings and transacted no business. The
real reason for this disorganisation seems to have been just
that, for the time, Mrs. Eddy wanted no business transacted.
Her explanation that organisation was a detriment to spiritu
ality could scarcely have been more than a convenient pretext,
for at the same time that she put this check upon the Boston
NOTICE.
SEVEN FIXED RULES.
1. I shall not be consulted verbally, or through letters, as to whose adver
tisement shall or shall not appear in the Christian Science Journal.
2. I shall not be consulted verbally, or through letters, as to the matter
that should be published in the Journal and Christian Science Series.
3. I shall not be consulted verbally, or through letters, on marriage, divorce,
or family affairs of any kind.
4. I shall not be consulted verbally, or through letters, on the choice of
pastors for churches.
5. I shall not be consulted verbally, or through letters, on disaffections, If
there should be any between the students of Christian Scientists.
6. I shall not be consulted verbally, or through letters, on who shall be
admitted as members, or dropped from the membership of the Christian Science
Churches or Associations.
7. I am not to be consulted verbally, or through letters, on disease and the
treatment of the sick ; but I shall love all mankind and work for their
welfare.
MARY B. G. EDDY.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 399
church, her messages to the workers in the field continually
urged them to organise churches. It would seem that what
was hurtful to spirituality in Boston would be hurtful elsewhere ;
but the fact was that ever since the schism of 1888 Mrs. Eddy
had been dissatisfied with her Boston church, and she had de
cided to take it to pieces and make it over. A plan was form
ing in her mind, and putting a stop to all the business trans
actions of the church gave her time to feel her way toward its
accomplishment.
The Boston church was still homeless and held its meetings
in public halls. In 1886 its members had purchased a lot on
Falmouth Street where the original Mother Church now stands
with the intention of erecting upon it a church building.
They paid two thousand dollars down upon the date of purchase
and assumed a mortgage for the balance due. By December,
1888, the church had paid $5,800 upon the property, and
had reduced the mortgage to $4,963.50. Mrs. Eddy then
stepped in and, through her lawyer, secured an assignment of
the mortgage for the amount due upon it. Eight months later
she foreclosed and bought in the property herself through her
lawyer's brother. 4
In other words, Mrs. Eddy sold to herself the land upon
4 The exact steps of this transaction were as follows :
In 1886 the Boston church, through Its treasurer, William H. Bradley, had
purchased from Nathan Matthews the plot of ground upon which the Christian
Science church now stands, paying down $2,000 and assuming a mortgage for
$8,763.50. By December, 1888, the church had paid upon this land, in all,
$5,800, reducing the mortgage to $4,963.50. At this date Mrs. Eddy, through
her lawyer, Baxter B. Perry, later disbarred, secured an assignment of the
mortgage from Mr. Matthews for exactly the sum due upon the land. Although
this assignment occurred December 6, 1888, it was not recorded until August 6,
1880, this date being also the date of the recording of Mrs. Eddy's foreclosure
of the mortgage. The Suffolk County Register of Deeds shows that Baxter E.
Perry sold the Falmouth Street lot at a mortgage foreclosure sale held on
August 3, 1889, to his brother and law partner, George H. Perry, for the sum
of $5,000. George H. Perry then deeded the* land to Ira O. Knapp, for the sum
of $5,100, the additional $100 apparently forming Mr. Perry's fee for his part
in the transaction.
400 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
which she now held the mortgage, securing for $5,000 a piece
of real estate which three years before had sold for $10,763.50,
and which since then had almost doubled in value, and the
members of the Boston church had lost all equity in the property
upon which they had paid $5,800.
Since Mrs. Eddy intended ultimately to give this land back
to the church, why, the reader may ask, did she not come for
ward when the payments ran behind, and satisfy the mortgage,
leaving the property unincumbered in the hands of the organi
sation which had already paid on it more than half the purchase
price? The reason seems to have been that there were still
in that body persons of whom Mrs. Eddy did not feel sure;
members who might be elected to office, might have too active
a part in the church government, and might even incite a new
rebellion like that of 1888. Her plan now was to give this
building-site to the Boston church directors under such condi
tions as would forever do away with congregational self-gov
ernment, and would place the church wholly under the control
of such trustees as she should appoint.
Mrs. Eddy was aiming at (1) the entire personal ownership
of the site of the Boston church, (2) perpetual personal con
trol of the church which should be reared upon it, (3) making
the Boston church not merely a local church and the home
of the Boston congregation, but a church universal, the
" Mother Church " of Christian Science the world over, with
Mrs. Eddy installed as its visible head. And a seemingly in
significant real-estate transaction was actually the means of
accomplishing this important end.
Up to this time Mrs. Eddy's name had been kept out of the
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 401
various conveyances on the Falmouth Street property, and she
desired that it should not directly appear in future transactions.
She now had the land deeded to her student, Ira O. Knapp.
Mr. Knapp then conveyed the property to three trustees,
Alfred Lang, Marcellus Munroe, and William G. Nixon, who
were to hold it for the purpose of building a church thereon.
The trust deed by which the conveyance was made was of such
an unusual character that Mr. Nixon insisted upon having the
title examined before the trustees should place on the lot a build
ing paid for by Christian Scientists residing in all parts of the
United States. After examining it, the Massachusetts Title
Insurance Company refused to insure the title, and, in spite
of Mrs. Eddy's argument that " the title was from God, and
that no material title could affect God's temple," the three
trustees returned all the donations to the building fund which
they had received, and resigned. The property was now con
veyed by Mr. Knapp to Mrs. Eddy (who had in reality been
its owner all the while) for a consideration of one dollar, and
Mrs. Eddy began all over again.
On September 1, 1892, Mrs. Eddy conveyed this much-
bandied-about plot of ground to four new trustees: Ira O.
Knapp, William B. Johnson, Joseph S. Eastaman, and Stephen
A. Chase, who were pledged to erect upon the site, within five
years, a church building costing not less than $50,000. Among
the provisos of the trust deed were the following :
That in this church there should be no services "which
shall not be in strict harmony with the doctrines and practice
of Christian Science as taught and explained by Mary Baker
G. Eddy in the seventy-first edition of her book, entitled Science
402 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
and Health, which is soon to be issued, and in any subsequent
edition thereof "
That these trustees should be called the Board of Directors
and should constitute a perpetual body or corporation, fill
ing any vacancy in their body by election, and filling it
only with such an one as should be " a firm and consistent
believer in the doctrines of Christian Science as taught in a
book entitled Science and Health by Mary Baker G. Eddy,
beginning with," etc.
That this board should elect the pastor, speaker, or reader,
maintain public worship, and was " fully empowered to make
all necessary rules and regulations " for this purpose.
That " the omission or neglect on the part of said directors
to comply with any of the conditions herein named, shall con
stitute a breach thereof, and the title shall revert to the grantor,
Mary Baker G. Eddy, her heirs and assigns," etc.
That " Whenever said directors shall determine that it is
inexpedient to maintain preaching, reading or speaking in
said church in accordance with the terms of this deed, they
are authorised and required to reconvey forthwith said lot of
land with the building thereon, to Mary Baker G. Eddy, her
heirs and assigns forever, by a proper deed of conveyance."
At last, then, Mrs. Eddy had the Boston church where she
wanted it; an institution without congregational government,
controlled by four directors whom she should appoint and who
should elect their successors at her suggestion ; who were pledged
to see that the church taught only what was in the seventy-first
edition of Science and Health, and whatever Mrs. Eddy might
please to put into any subsequent edition ; and who, if they
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 403
did not comply with all these instructions, were bound to give
back the lot, and the building upon it, to Mrs. Eddy and to
her heirs forever. A Mother Church thus constructed would
have great possibilities.
But here an objection arose. A corporation must be formed,
and when Mrs. Eddy asked the State to grant her a new charter
for a new church body, the Commissioner of Corporations re
fused. His reason was that the original charter, granted in
1879, had never been annulled and was still in force. But Mrs.
Eddy had no intention of recognising the old church or its
charter ; if her new directors merely held the property in trust
for a church organisation, her end would be defeated. As
the deed of trust read, the directors were virtually to hold
the property in trust for Mrs. Eddy herself, to the end of
executing her wishes. There must be a way, Mrs. Eddy in
sisted, in which her trustees could hold the property without
recognising the existence of the chartered church body, so she
set her lawyers to work. " Guided by Divine Love," she said,
her attorneys found in the laws of Massachusetts a statute
whereby a body of donees might be considered a corporate
body for the purpose of taking and holding grants and dona
tions without the formal organisation of a church. 5 This old
statute once unearthed, Mrs. Eddy's plan was entirely worked
out: the Mother Church was now controlled absolutely by her
four directors ; the corporation consisted of her directors and
"In Section 1, Chapter 39, of the Massachusetts Public Statutes, It Is pro-
vldcd t lui t *
" The deacons, church wardens, or other similar officers of Church or religious
societies, and the trustees of the Methodist Episcopal churches appointed
according to the discipline and usages thereof, shall. If citizens of this Com
monwealth, be deemed bodies corporate for the purpose of taking and holding
In succession all grants and donations, whether of real or personal estate,
made either to them or their successors, or to their respective churches, or to
the poor of their churches."
404 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
not of the church body ; and the congregation had no more
voice in the management of the church than has the audience
in the management of a theatre.
The members of the Boston church were dazzled by Mrs.
Eddy's lavish gift, and very few of them had followed the
legerdemain by which the church had gone into Mrs. Eddy's
hands a free body and had come out a close corporation.
Mrs. Eddy announced her victory in a long communication
to the Journal, asserting, " He giveth his angels charge over
thee, to keep thee in all thy ways."
In reviewing this real-estate transaction in the Journal,
Mrs. Eddy said:
I had this desirable site transferred in a circuitous, novel way. . . .
I knew that to God's gift, foundation and superstructure, no one could
hold a wholly material title. The land and the church standing on it
must be conveyed through a type representing the true nature of the
gift; a type morally and spiritually inalienable, but materially questionable
even after the manner that all spiritual good comes to Christian Scientists
to the end of taxing their faith in God and their adherence to the
superiority of the claims of spirit over matter or merely legal titles. . . .
Our title to God's acres here will be safe and sound " when we can read
our titles clear " to heavenly mansions.
Mrs. Eddy now for the first time came out in the Journal
and made a personal appeal for money to build her church,
requesting that the contributions which Mr. Nixon and his
associates had returned to the donors be doubled and forwarded
to Boston. Her request had scarcely been printed when money
began to pour in upon the trustees ; the old contributions were
doubled and in many instances were increased threefold.
The official organisation of the Mother Church was .made
September 23, 1892, but no mention is made in the Journal
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 405
of such an occurrence until a year later. Then, on October 3,
1893, the first annual meeting of the Mother Church was held
in Chickering Hall. The clerk announced in his report that
" Since the meeting in which the church was formed, there have
been held seven special and four quarterly meetings. It is in
the records of those meetings that the history of the church
is contained, but its doings could not be profitably set forth m
a report of this kind."
This was the first open official meeting. Up to this time
few Christian Scientists knew that a meeting for the selection
of church officers had been held in the fall of 1892, but sup
posed that there was still no formal organisation of the body
other than the " voluntary association " which Mrs. Eddy had
advocated as a means to spiritual grace, and under which
the Massachusetts law allowed the trustees to receive funds.
Boston Christian Scientists had supposed that Mrs. Eddy did
not wish to organise her new church under the old charter be
cause, as she had stated, she felt that material organisation
was a hindrance to spiritual growth. But when her new church
began its operations, they were confronted by a solid formal
organisation which had been effected without the knowledge
or consent of the church body as a whole. In addition to the
usual church officers, Mrs. Eddy had chosen twelve charter
members, whose duty it was to ballot upon every candidate for
admission to the church and these twelve were the only persons
permitted to vote upon such candidates. All the original mem
bers, some of whom had been identified with the church for
twelve years, were considered as " candidates " for admission
to the new church, and were balloted upon by the twelve just
406 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
as were the new applicants. In this way Mrs. Eddy was en
abled carefully to select the personnel of her new church, and
to keep out of it such members of the old organisation as had
not been agreeable to her. Every candidate for admission to
the Mother Church is still balloted upon in this way.
The Boston church, built by the contributions of Christian
Scientists throughout the country, had now lost its local char
acter. With a membership of 1,502 drawn almost entirely
from the branch churches, it was now the head of all the churches
in the field, and at the head of the Boston church was Mrs.
Eddy, installed under the title of " Pastor Emeritus," and gov
erning through a subservient Board of Directors. No more was
heard now concerning the spiritual disadvantages of organisa
tion. Every one realised that in unity under Mrs. Eddy, and
in obedience, lay the road of progress. The old watchword,
" Mrs. Eddy and God make a majority," was revived.
" What," asked the Rev. D. A. Easton, pastor of the Mother
Church, in his Easter sermon, 1893, " what does membership
in the Mother Church mean? It signifies obedience. Mrs.
Eddy has invited Scientists everywhere to unite with the Mother
Church. To obey cheerfully and loyally marks a growth in
Science.
"Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die."
" Brethren," wrote Dr. Foster Eddy in the Journal, " this
is an epoch in the history of Christian Science. The year has
been a marked one to us. The chaff has been separated from
the wheat in a most marvellous manner." " We have come,"
he told Christian Scientists at the first annual meeting, " to
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 407
the time when all should listen to the voice of Love, and hearing
it, we should follow implicitly whether we understand or not,
and the way will be made plain."
" Experience, and above all, obedience, are the tests of
growth and understanding in Science," Mrs. Eddy wrote to
her students through the Journal.
Members of all the Christian Science churches in the field
began to apply for admission to the Mother Church ; it was an
expression of zeal and loyalty which all earnest believers were
eager to make. Mrs. Eddy's direct personal control of the
Boston church soon meant the direct personal control of a
membership reaching from Maine to California.
The Boston congregation, which had been meeting in public
halls for fifteen years, was at last to have a home, and the
building of the Mother Church was about to begin. It was
to be a memorial, as Mrs. Eddy said, " for her through whom
was revealed to you God's all-power, all-presence, and all-
science." An inscription across the front of the building was
to proclaim, as it does to-day, the name of Mrs. Eddy and the
title of her book. 6
The financial distress of 1894 caused a temporary check in
the growth of the building fund, and, to give the work a fresh
impetus, Mrs. Eddy made a personal appeal to fifty prominent
Christian Scientists, asking them to contribute $1,000 each.
Her request was instantly complied with. On May 21, 1894,
the corner-stone of the Mother Church was laid.
This Inscription reads: ft
"The First Church of Christ, Scientist, erected Anno Domini, 1894. A
testimonial to our beloved teacher, the Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy, discoverer
and founder of Christian Science ; author of Science and Health wnh Key to
the Scriptures; president of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, and the
first pastor of this denomination."
408 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
During the eighteen months that the Mother Church was
building, its membership, recruited from the churches in the
field, continued to increase. At the second annual business
meeting, held in Copley Hall, October 2, 1894, the clerk re
ported a total membership of 2,978 1,476 having been ad
mitted during the year.
The original Mother Church 7 is a solidly built structure
of gray granite, with a seating capacity of, 1,100. In its
equipment it is very like any other modern church of its size.
Its one unique feature is the " Mother Room," since 1903 called
the " room of our Pastor Emeritus." This room, consecrated
to Mrs. Eddy's personal use, is finished in rare woods, marble,
and onyx, and contains a superfluity of white-and-gold furni
ture. In the alcove are a stationary wash-stand and a folding-
bed in which Mrs. Eddy has slept once. All the plumbing
in this alcove is gold plated. A stained-glass window represents
Mrs. Eddy seated at her table in the old skylight room at Lynn,
engaged in searching the Scriptures ; through the open sky
light shines the star of Bethlehem, enveloping her in its rays.
Before this window hangs the Athenian lamp which was formerly
kept burning night and day.
This room was fitted up for Mrs. Eddy by the children of
Christian Scientists, who were organised into a society called
the " Busy Bees " and who maintained a fund for the purpose
of furnishing and caring for the Mother Room. After the
fittings of the room had been paid for, the children wished
to continue to express their affection for Mrs. Eddy, and their
7 The original Mother Church now forms the front of an entirely new
huilding. dedicated in 1906. The old church is still called the Mother Church,
while the new structure, although many times larger than the old, is called
the Annex.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 409
offerings were used to keep the room supplied with fresh flowers
and to maintain the Athenian lamp. Mrs. Eddy showed her
appreciation by dedicating to the " Busy Bees " her next book,
Pulpit and Press, a thin volume made up of newspaper articles
upon the Mother Church and interviews with Mrs. Eddy. This
book sold at $1.06 a copy, but Mrs. Eddy announced that each
of the 2,600 children who had contributed to her room should
have one copy each at half price, fifty cents, postage extra.
By this means the author secured an additional sale of 2,600
books, and the children had the advantage of the reduction
in price. With the possible exception of the dedication there
is certainly very little in this book of press clippings to tempt
a youthful reader.
Dedicatory services were held in the Mother Church, January
6, 1895. Four times the service was repeated to audiences
that filled the assembly-room, and an address from Mrs. Eddy
was read. When her little congregation used to meet in Haw
thorne Hall, Mrs. Eddy had usually been on hand to remind
them that the gates of hell should not prevail against her;
but at the dedication of her memorial church, with its member
ship of nearly three thousand, she was not present. Her ab
sence must be considered as an indication of her failing strength.
Afterward, indeed, she upon two occasions spoke from the
pulpit of her new church, but the days on which she could be
sure of herself were fewer than they used to be.
From this time on Mrs. Eddy was a name rather than a
person in Boston. Her presence there was no longer necessary
to her best interests. In obtaining absolute personal control
of the Mother Church, with its national membership, she had
410 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
ended her long struggle for possession. Before the reorganisa
tion of the Mother Church, Mrs. Eddy had still to bring
questions of church government before the church body ; she
had to conciliate, to persuade, to make concessions, and some
times to explain and justify her own conduct. In 1888 her
seceding students had even considered a plan to expel Mrs.
Eddy from her own church, and only by constant exertion had
she kept the organisation under her control. 'But from the
time the Boston church was reorganised, Mrs. Eddy's power
over it was absolute. She was the church. She wrote its by
laws, appointed its officers, selected its membership, and virtu
ally owned the church property. Its doctrines were her books
the church was committed to teach as the everlasting trutK
what she had written and whatever she might write in the future.
Mrs. Eddy was never again called upon to explain or to modify
her commands, and never again was there dissension or division
in her church. She had completely conquered her spiritual
kingdom. She had now but to go on revealing the alleged will
of God, and her church had but to go on obeying her.
CHAPTER XXII
LIFE AT PLEASANT VIEW MRS. EDDY PRODUCES MORE CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE LITERATURE FOSTER EDDY IS MADE PUBLISHER
OF THE TEXT-BOOK THE STORY OF HIS FALL FROM FAVOUR
RULE OF SERVICE
WHEN Mrs. Eddy retired to Concord, N. H., in the latter
part of 1889, her coming there was little noticed by the towns
folk. Her name, which was well enough known in Boston,
Chicago, and Denver, as yet meant almost nothing in the
capital of her native state, though her birthplace was scarcely
six miles from Concord. Mrs. Eddy lived quietly at 62 State
Street for nearly three years. She kept no horses then; she
occasionally went about the town on foot, but did not mingle
with the townspeople. There was a general impression in the
neighbourhood that she was a broken-down Boston spiritualist
who had " lost her power." Because, when the chill autumn
weather came on, she had her front piazza inclosed in heavy
sail-cloth and took her exercise there, it was supposed that she
was an invalid. Not until after the dedication of the Mother
Church, in Boston, 1895, did Concord people begin to feel an
interest in Mrs. Eddy and to speak of her as a public personage.
It was while Mrs. Eddy was living in State Street that she
bought the property now known as Pleasant View, and had
the modest farmhouse which stood there remodelled into the
411
LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
cheerful, jaunty structure which it is to-day. She added bow-
windows and verandas, built a porte-cochere at the front of the
house and a tower at the southeast corner. Pleasant View is
in Pleasant Street, about a mile and a half west of the centre
of the city.
The traditions of mystery and seclusion which of late years
have grown up about the place are hard to reconcile with its
cheerful aspect. The house stands upon a .little knoll, very
near the road; the drives and gateway are wide; there are no
high fences or shaded walks ; the trees are kept closely trimmed,
the turf neatly shaven, and the flower-beds are tidy and gay.
There is a fountain, and a boat-house, and a fish-pond with a
fine clump of willows. The tower rooms, which were occupied
by Mrs. Eddy, have large windows looking southward down a
narrow valley, at the end of which rise gentle green hills, one
above another, their sides covered with fields and woodland
which admirably distribute light and shadow. These hills,
besides being peaceful and pleasant to the eye, must have had
many associations for Mrs. Eddy, for among them lies the farm
upon which she was born and where she spent her childhood.
Every day for seventeen years Mrs. Eddy could look off toward
Bow and measure the distance she had travelled. Whatever an
architect or gardener might find to quarrel with at Pleasant
View, it was certainly a cheerful place for an old lady to live
in, and looked out over the gentlest and friendliest of landscapes.
After she moved into Pleasant View, Mrs. Eddy gradually
added more land to the estate, enlarged the stables, and built
a house for the gardener. She continued to live as simply and
methodically as before. She rose early, and after breakfast
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 413
usually walked about the fish-pond or paced the back veranda.
She invariably took a nap before dinner, which she had in the
middle of the day. Promptly at two o'clock she started upon
her daily drive. Mr. Frye still acted as her secretary and
companion, and Martha Morgan attended largely to the house
keeping. Later Mrs. Eddy sent for Miss Kate Shannon, a
music-teacher in Montreal; for Mrs. Laura Sargent, who is
still in attendance upon her, and for Mrs. Pamelia Leonard,
who died at her home in Brooklyn, January 8, 1908, under the
care of a physician. 1
All the members of her household lived as if they were exactly
as old and as much enfeebled as Mrs. Eddy. They rose early,
retired early ; never went out of the house except upon her
commissions ; never dined out, received visits, or went to Boston
for a holiday. And why should they, when they believed that
the most important things that had happened in the world for
at least eighteen hundred years were daily going on at Pleasant
View? They had built their hope upon the fundamental propo
sition that Mrs. Eddy was the inspired revelator of God ; that,
as the Journal expressed it, she had retired to Pleasant View
to " commune always with God in the mount." To be in the
house with Mrs. Eddy was the ultimate experience, and it
left them nothing more to wish for. Mrs. Eddy filled their
lives. Her breakfast, her nap, her correspondence, her visitors,
her clothes, even, were matters of the greatest importance.
Her faithful women especially delighted in dressing her hair,
1 A Christian Scientist of Brooklyn who knew the circumstances of the death
of Mrs. Leonard, has written to the author, since the appearance of this
history in McCIure's Magazine, to say, that although a physician was called
to see Mrs. Leonard before her death, this was done in order to comply with
the law requiring the signature of an attending physician to be attached to
the death certificate upon which the burial permit is issued ; and that Mrs.
Leonard never lost faith in Christian Science.
414 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
which since she left Boston she had ceased to colour, and which
was now soft and white. They used to talk among themselves
about her " final demonstration " in those days, the idea being
that she was husbanding her strength to perform some one final
wonder which would convince the world. Sometimes, in their
fireside speculations, they encouraged one another in the hope
that, when the time came, Mrs. Eddy would even demonstrate
over death. They seem to have expected that this last triumph
would come, not as a mere prolongation of life, but as a sort
of definite combat, a struggle from which she would rise trans
figured. 2 While Mrs. Eddy's triumph over death was never
an openly avowed belief of the church, it was the fearful hope
of many a devoted creature. These credulous and fervent souls
used to go upon pilgrimages to Concord, see the venerable
Mother through their tears when she addressed them briefly
from her balcony, and go away saying that she had the figure
of a girl, that her face was as full and smooth as the face of a
young woman.
As soon as Mrs. Eddy withdrew from secular life and became
inaccessible to the majority of her followers, legends began
to grow up about her. She realised this well enough, and, at
her request, her adopted son bought a notebook and set down
in it some of her wonderful sayings and doings. One of the
2 We may here print a letter to the New York Evening Journal, July 1, 1904,
signed by Mrs. Augusta E. Stetson, who organised the first Christian Science
church in New York :
" Any suggestion or question of a successor to Mrs. Eddy as the Leader of
the Christian Science movement is one that could not be entertained nor con
sidered by any loyal Christian Scientist. Mrs. Eddy is and ever will be the
only Leader of the Christian Science movement. There is no question among
loyal Christian Scientists as to her continuing to lead them on to the demonstra
tion of eternal life, through faith in God and the understanding of the law
of the spirit life in Christ Jesus, which sets us free from the law of sin and
death."
Whatever Mrs. Stetson may have meant by " eternal life," such declaratlona
were interpreted literally by simple-minded believers.
Q
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HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 415
stories he wrote down was that which Mrs. Eddy often used
to tell her household concerning the state of ecstasy in which
her own mother lived before Mrs. Eddy's birth. Mrs. Baker,
so the legend went, felt as if all the vital forces of the world
had united in her, and she knew that she was to bring forth a
prodigy. This story, of course, does not agree with the one
which Mrs. Eddy used to tell her early students in Lynn, of
how she had been born into the world an unwelcome child, and
how every man's hand had been against her, etc.
Although Mrs. Eddy was now a wealthy woman, she was
still prudent in the use of her money. Her home at Pleasant
View was comfortable but not luxurious. There was nothing
ostentatious about her manner of living, and she never spent
money lavishly, even upon herself. Her laces and jewels, even
the diamond cross which is conspicuous in many of her photo
graphs, were given to her by devoted students. The writer
has an amusing letter in which Mrs. Eddy thanks one of her
students for a piano, referring to the instrument as a " me
mento."
Mrs. Eddy's little economies are always interesting and
characteristic. On one occasion she summoned Dr. Foster's
old friend, William Clark of Barre, Vt., to come to Pleasant
View as gardener. She wearied of Clark in a little while, de
cided that he ought to be a teacher of Christian Science instead
of a gardener, and sent him away. While Clark had worked
on her place Mrs. Eddy had paid him gardener's wages, but
she felt that he ought to be reimbursed for the expense he had
incurred in moving to Concord and in quitting his former occu
pation. Accordingly, she called Dr. Foster into her study
416 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
and handed him three hundred dollars, telling him to offer the
money to Clark, but adding grimly, " It will prove a curse
to him if he takes it." Dr. Foster warned Clark to that effect,
and Clark, rather reluctantly, refused the money. Mrs. Eddy
had for some time been promising Dr. Foster a diamond ring
for his little finger, and then had looked over jewellers' cata
logues and discussed the sizes and prices of stones. In the end
Mrs. Eddy had decided upon a smaller stone than the one Dr.
Foster selected. He now took a hundred dollar's of the money
which had been offered to Clark in such a forbidding fashion,
added it to the appropriation made for his ring, and got the
diamond he wanted. The rest of the money Mrs. Eddy put
into a stained-glass window for the " Mother Room " in the
Boston church the window which represents Mrs. Eddy sitting
in the skylight room at Lynn and searching the Scriptures
beneath the rays of a star.
Mrs. Eddy's retirement did, as she had anticipated, give her
more time for literary pursuits. She was still busily writing
and rewriting Science and Health, as she had been doing for
twenty years. New editions of the book came out in 1891,
1894, and 1896. Loyal Scientists were then, as now, expected
to purchase each new edition (at $3.18 a volume), although
Mrs. Eddy refused to buy back their old editions at any price.
Since her followers lived by one book, it behooved them to have
the best edition of it, and Mrs. Eddy always pronounced the
new one the best. Often a new edition contained important
changes (such as permission to use morphia in cases of violent
pain), and after the 1891 edition was out, a Christian Scientist
who still regulated his life by the 1886 edition was living, spirit-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 417
ually, in the Dark Ages. As Foster Eddy wrote concerning
the 1891 edition:
Mother has never had time, until the last two years, to take the numerous
gems she has found in the deep mines of truth and polish them on Heaven's
emery wheel, arrange them in order, and give them a setting so that all
could behold and see their perfect purity. Now here they all are in this
new revised "Science and Health."
By the time the 1891 edition was exhausted, about one
hundred and fifty thousand copies of Science and Health had
been sold since the book was first published in 1875. This did
not mean that one hundred and fifty thousand persons owned
copies of the book, there are not half that many Christian
Scientists in the world to-day, but that every Christian Scien
tist owned several copies. The Journal told them that they
could not own too many.
Mrs. Eddy always displayed great ingenuity in stimulating
the demand for her books. In 1897, when she first published
her book Miscellaneous Writings, a volume of her collected
editorials from the Journal, she issued the following pro-
nunciamento :
Christian Scientists in the United States and Canada are hereby enjoined
not to teach a student of Christian Science for one year, commencing
March 14, 1897. " Miscellaneous Writings " is calculated to prepare the
minds of all true thinkers to understand the Christian Science text book
more correctly than a student can. The Bible, Science and Health with
Key to the Scriptures, and my other published works are the only proper
instructors for this hour. It shall be the duty of all Christian Scientists
to circulate and to sell as many of these books as they can.
If a member of the First Church of Christ Scientist shall fail to obey
this injunction it shall render him liable to lose his membership in this
church. MARY BAKER EDDY.'
3 Christian Science Journal, March, 1897.
418 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
There were at this time about fifty Christian Science acade
mies in operation, and hundreds of Mrs. Eddy's followers made
their living by teaching Christian Science. They were, with
out warning, directed to give up their means of support for
one year in order to increase the sale of Mrs. Eddy's new book,
and to sell the book, without commission, under penalty of
expulsion from the church. It is scarcely necessary to say
that they obeyed without a murmur.
Loyal Christian Scientists made an endeavour to buy not
only a copy of every new edition of Science and Health, but
of every book that Mrs. Eddy wrote. Mrs. Eddy discourages
general reading, and particularly the perusal of fiction. 4 She
has no tolerance for low-priced books. They " lower the in
tellectual standard to accommodate the purse " and " meet a
frivolous demand for amusement instead of instruction." For
her own books Mrs. Eddy has always demanded very high prices.
With her own audience she was, of course, without a rival.
Many of her followers read no books at all but hers.
In 1893 Mrs. Eddy published Christ and Christmas, an
illustrated poem which she afterward temporarily suppressed
because the pictures were displeasing to many people. One
picture represents Jesus Christ standing beside a big, black,
upholstered coffin, raising to life an emaciated woman. An
other represents a woman, strangely like Mrs. Eddy's author
ised photographs in appearance, standing at a bedside and
raising a prostrate form, while a great star burns above her
4 It is the tangled barbarisms of learning which we deplore, -the mere
dogma, the speculative theory, the nauseous fiction. Novels, remarkable only
for their exaggerated pictures, impossible ideals, and specimens of depravity,
fill our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments, etc. Science and
Health (1898), p. 91.
5 Ibid.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 419
head. In another, Christ is represented as hand in hand with
a woman who bears a tablet inscribed " Christian Science."
Mrs. Eddy wrote the text of this grim gift-book, and a fly-leaf
accredits the pictures to " Mary Baker G. Eddy and James F.
Gilman, artists."
In 1891 Mrs. Eddy published Retrospection and Introspec
tion, a volume of autobiographical sketches in which many of
the events of the author's life are highly idealised.
At Pleasant View the members of Mrs. Eddy's household led
a life vastly more peaceful than ever they had known in
Columbus or Commonwealth Avenues. But discipline was by no
means relaxed. Mr. Frye still had his bad quarter of an
hour when it was good for him. Mrs. Eddy " turned against "
the faithful Martha Morgan and packed her back to Maine.
She tired of Mrs. Anne M. Otis, whom she had called to build
up a Christian Science church in Concord, and sent her back
to the West. Eventually even her adopted son went the way
of all her favourites. There is no doubt that Mrs. Eddy
was fond of Foster, and that his personality was extremely
agreeable to her. She may even have dropped a tear upon
his death-warrant, but she signed it none the less. The story
of Foster's rise and decline is as follows :
At the close of 1892 Mr. William G. Nixon resigned his post
as Mrs. Eddy's publisher, and was succeeded by E. J. Foster
Eddy. Dr. Foster had had no experience whatever in publish
ing, but the position was a lucrative one and Mrs. Eddy desired
her son to have it. She saw, too, a way to increase her own
profits. Science and Health sold for $3.18 a copy. 6 The man-
The eighteen cents paid the postage. The book was, of course, usually
Ordered by mail.
420 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
ufacture of each book cost just forty-seven and a half cents.
Mrs. Eddy had been getting one dollar royalty upon every
copy sold and the publisher got the rest. When her adopted
son began to publish Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy worked
her royalty up to a dollar and a half a copy, since Dr. Foster
was readily persuaded that it was all in the family.
The sale of Mrs. Eddy's works was exceedingly profitable
to her and even more profitable to her publisher, since the market
for them was ready-made and there was never a dollar spent
in general advertising. Dr. Foster's accounts show that in the
year 1893 he paid Mrs. Eddy $11,692.79 in royalties; in 1894
her royalties amounted to $14,834.12; and in 1895 she received
from Dr. Foster $18,481.97, making a total profit of $45,008.88
for the three years. Needless to say, her annual royalties have
greatly increased since 1895, and have now reached a figure
which puts all other American authors to financial shame.
But from the day that Mrs. Eddy installed Dr. Foster as
her publisher, his years were numbered. The position was the
most remunerative she had to offer, and this new and substan
tial mark of her favour only increased the existing prejudice
against her son. Ever since Foster's adoption, jealousy had
rankled in the household. Mr. Frye had always watched him
with a stony and distrustful eye. Each had accused the other
of " mesmerising " Mrs. Eddy against him, and of using her
affection for his own advantage.
There was jealousy in Boston, as well as at Pleasant View.
Some of the workers there complained that Dr. Foster had been
made too prominent, and that he had more personal influence
than any one except Mrs. Eddy herself should have; others
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 421
asserted that he over-represented and misrepresented Mrs. Eddy.
After he became his mother's publisher, Dr. Foster had to
be in Boston much of the time, and stayed, when he was there,
at the Commonwealth Avenue house. In his absence from Con
cord, one charge after another was made against him to Mrs.
Eddy. Pressure was brought to bear upon her from this
quarter and from that, and she seems to have realised that her
favourite was marked for sacrifice. Dr. Foster relates that,
upon one occasion when they were alone together, his mother
drew him to the sofa and took his hand, saying despairingly,
" Bennie, if I ever ask you to go away from me, do not leave
me." She told him that she wanted him always near her, but
that " mesmerism " had come between them. Undoubtedly, Mrs.
Eddy herself had become somewhat alarmed when she realised
what authority she had placed in Dr. Foster's hands; it was
quite possible for her to trust him and to doubt him, to want
him and to plan his downfall at the same time. The letters
which she wrote him after she sent him away have not a candid
tone.
Stories kept coming to Mrs. Eddy to the effect that Dr.
Foster was short in his accounts, that he had conducted himself
improperly with a married woman who had done some work in
the publication-office, etc., etc. Finally, in the spring of 1896,
Mrs. Eddy took the publishing business away from her son
and transferred it to Joseph Armstrong, a Christian Scientist
who had formerly been a banker in Kansas. Foster Eddy was
now instructed to go to Philadelphia and build up a church.
There was already a Christian Science church in Philadelphia,
and when Dr. Foster arrived there he found that he had been
LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
discredited with the Philadelphia following by letters from
Boston. It was his mother's way not to tell him frankly that
she was through with him, though, after he reached his destina
tion, she dropped the old endearing appellations, and no longer
signed herself " Mother," but wrote to him in the following
tone:
DEAR DOCTOR, I have silenced every word of the slander started in
Boston about that woman by saying that I had not the, least idea of any
wrong conduct between you and her, for I know you are chaste. . . .
This silly stuff is dead. Always kindly yours.
MAEY BAKER EDDY.
Dr. Foster left Boston by water, and on the day he sailed
away Mrs. Eddy sent flowers to the boat, and a crowd of
Christian Scientists were at the wharf to see him off. But
as the adopted son stood by the deck-rail with his bouquet in
his hands, and watched the water widen between him and Bos
ton, he realised the import of this cordiality, and knew that,
through the crowd on the shore, his mother had waved him a
blithe and long adieu.
After Dr. Foster reached Philadelphia and found that Chris
tian Scientists there had been warned to have nothing to do
with him, he went back to Concord to lay his wrongs before
Mrs. Eddy. She granted him an audience in the house in which,
a few months before, he had been master, but cut short the
interview and went upstairs while he was speaking. 7 Dr. Foster
T After this Interview Mrs. Eddy wrote Dr. Foster the following letter, In
which she accuses him of " keeping his mind on her " and weakening her, as
she used to charge Spofford and Arens with doing :
" PLEASANT VIEW,
"Concord, N. H., March 17, 1897.
" DR. FOSTER EDDY My dear Benny : I was not 'falsely ' referring to
your mind on me. I am not or cannot be mistaken now in whose mind is on
me. My letter was dated the 8th of March. I shall not soon forget that time.
When you went to Phila. at my request I made everything ready for your
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 423
knew his mother well enough to realise that she was through
with him. He made no attempt to push his case or further
to practise Christian Science. He received no opportunity
to refute the charges made against him.
As Mrs. Eddy's son and personal representative, Dr. Foster
had been regarded as a sort of crown prince by Christian
Scientists. He had been the first president of the Mother
Church, had held Mrs. Eddy's highest offices, and had been
listened to as her mouthpiece. Ever since she had become in
accessible at Pleasant View, Dr. Foster had been the natural
recipient of the adulation that had formerly been hers. His
arrival at a Christian Science convention caused almost as much
excitement as if Mrs. Eddy herself had come. Wherever the
Doctor went in Boston, he was pretty sure to meet people who
greeted him with the greatest deference and an eager, anxious
smile. Even those who did not like him tried to please him,
success, even in the Church rules, Art. 8, Sec. 14, that nothing should impede
you. One of your first acts was to consult in your movements and
not to consult me before doing it.
" This laid the foundation of what followed. Had my letter that I sent
by you to that church been read in the Church of Philadelphia on March 14,
as I told you to have it, it would have saved you being kicked out of the
readership. You never named to me you intended to stop till Monday in
Boston. You conceal from me all you should tell and which I would save
you from doing and then when you get into difficulty come to me for help.
You had everything in your power whereby to control the situation. See
Church Manual, pp. 13, Sees. 3 and 16. Sec. 10, edition 5.
" But you were governed by hypnotism to work against me and yourself and
take me as your authority for so doing. Then turn all your papers of the
fight and the burden of its settlement on to me and yourself go on a pleasure
trip to Washington, and after all this tell me that you cared not for yourself
in the case but for me !
" The church has written me a loving letter with regrests [regrets] that
they had to do by you as they did.
" You say those with whom you now are love you. I hope this will continue
to be so. As ever, lovingly, MOTHER.
" N. B. I open this letter to speak briefly of the apochryphal gospel. I
read till disgusted and stopped. ' Hennas ' is an imaginary character, and
the ' old woman ' has no more relation to me than Pilate's wife ; both are
depicted as good representative characters for that time and under those
circumstances. They may or may not have been human beings.
" Such reading tends to foster the disease of moral insanity or idiocy that
the magic of Mohammedism and the hypnotism of our time are engendering.
" The ethics of the dialogues in that spurious book are excellent and that
makes the book dangerous lest they cause the stuff that accompanies them to
take form in thought as veritable characters and history, and even prophetic
which it is not. M. B. E."
424 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
because they believed that he could influence Mrs. Eddy for or
against any one*
Mrs. Eddy's word had made Foster, and her word unmade
him* From the moment the Christian Scientists understood that
he was no longer in favour with his mother, Dr. Foster was
ostracised. The people who had once crowded about him when
ever he appeared in public no longer recognised him when they
passed him in the street. When he approached a group of
Christian Scientists, they melted away. Legally, of course,
he was still Mrs. Eddy's adopted son, but she did not trouble
herself about that, apparently. She made no charge against
him, demanded no explanation, but erased him from her con
sciousness as if he were a coachman whom she had hired and
discharged. Dr. Foster travelled in the West and in Alaska
for a time, and then settled down at his old home at Waterbury
Center, Vt., where he now lives. Like the rest of Mrs. Eddy's
outworn favourites, he has been content to live very quietly
since his fall, and he has not even resumed the practice of medi
cine, for fear of further angering his adopted mother.
Mrs. Eddy's retirement in Concord meant no relaxation of
her vigilance over her church. Scarcely a day passed that
one of her executives did not board the train at Boston, take
the two hours' ride up the Merrimac, and present himself at
Pleasant View. The affairs of the Mother Church ran much
more smoothly with Mrs. Eddy out of the city. The hundred
little annoyances which had so often led her into indiscretions
were now kept from her. She planted and pulled up, built
and tore down, or, as she says, armed with pen and pruning-
hook, she commanded and countermanded, as tirelessly as ever ;
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 425
but now that she worked through other people, her plans were
not executed so rapidly, and she had time to change her mind
before her first decision was made public. It was now possible
for her executives to present questions to her with some care.
They kept Mrs. Eddy informed upon the affairs of the Boston
church and upon what went on in the field, but petty annoyances
they kept from her. Her inability to interfere hourly gave her
assistants an opportunity to execute her wishes temperately
and successfully. Mrs. Eddy, the " Discoverer and Founder
of Christian Science," was still in the field, through her execu
tives, as active and powerful as ever; while Mrs. Eddy, the
woman, with her disturbing personal idiosyncrasies, was safely
housed at Pleasant View, surrounded by devoted and sympa
thetic persons whose constant care it was to calm and soothe
her.
After she first took up her residence at Pleasant View, Mrs.
Eddy visited Boston four times, and on each occasion remained
in the city only a few hours. 8 In her retirement she has not
been cut off from such of her followers as she has wished to see.
By a by-law of the church, Mrs. Eddy is empowered to send for
any Christian Scientist, wherever he may be, and to bring him
to Pleasant View, to serve her for as long as twelve months, if
need be, in whatever capacity she may designate ; his recompense
8 The first of these was on April 1, 1895, when she came unannounced, bring
ing the members of her Concord household with her, and inspected, for the
first time, the newly completed Mother Church. She spent the night in the
building, occupying the folding-bed in the Mother Room, while her attendants
slept all night in the pews. The next month, on Sunday, May 26, Mrs. Eddy
went again to the Mother Church and spoke from the pulpit for twenty
minutes. Again, in February, 1896, she preached in the Mother Church, re
turning to Concord in a private car the same afternoon. She made her fourth
visit to Boston on Monday, June 5, 1899. She spent the night in her Com
monwealth Avenue house, then occupied by Septimus J. Hanna, the reader of
the Mother Church, and on Tuesday afternoon she appeared at the annual
meeting of the church, held in Tremont Temple. Mrs. Eddy addressed the
meeting briefly, and returned to Concord the same afternoon.
426 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
being twelve hundred dollars a year and his expenses. 9 Under
this rule, a bank president whose time is worth $50,000 a year
might be summoned to Pleasant View to serve for a hundred
dollars a month. But Mrs. Eddy is the last woman in the
world to make unreasonable demands of her influential fol
lowers, and no greater honour can befall a Christian Scientist
than to be thus summoned by his Leader. Such a call is looked
upon as a recognition of the recipient's progress in " Science,"
and as a rare opportunity for spiritual growth. Concerning
this service at Pleasant View, Mrs. Eddy wrote in the Christian
Science Sentinel of April 25, 1903.
SIGNIFICANT QUESTIONS
MARY BAKER O. EDDT
Who shall be greatest?
The great Master said: "He that is least in the kingdom of heaven"
that is, he who hath in his heart in the least the kingdom of heaven, the
reign of holiness, shall be greatest.
Who shall inherit the earth?
The meek who sit at the feet of Truth, bathing the human understanding
with tears of repentance, and washing it clean from the taints of self-
righteousness, hypocrisy, envy shall inherit the earth for wisdom is justi
fied of her children.
Who shall dwell in Thy Holy Hill?
He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the
truth in his heart.
Who shall be called to Pleasant View?
He who strives and attains who has the divine presumption to say:
"For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to
keep that which I have committed unto him against that day" (St. Paul).
t ,^ e x urcn , by-law in regard to this rule of service reads as follows :
At the written request of our Pastor Emeritus, Mrs. Eddy, for assistance,
the Board of Directors shall immediately notify the member of this church
whom she selects, to go within ten days to her and to remain if needed
twelve months consecutively, and it shall be the duty of this member to comply
therewith. Members who leave her in less time and when she needs them,
are liable to have their names dropped from the church." Church Manual, Art.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 427
It goes without saying that such a one was never called to Pleasant View
for penance or reformation; and I call none others, unless I mistake their
calling. No mesmerist, nor disloyal Christian Scientist is fit to come
hither, I have no use for such, and there cannot be found at Pleasant
View one of this sort. " For all that do these things are an abomination
unto the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth
drive them out from before thee." (Deuteronomy, 18.)
It is true that loyal Christian Scientists called to the home of the
Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, can acquire in one year the
Science that otherwise might cost them a half century. But this should
not be the incentive for going thither. Better far that Christian Scientists
go to help their helper, and thus lose all selfishness as she has lost it, and
thereby help themselves and the whole world, as she has done according to
this saying of Christ Jesus: "And whosoever doth not bear his cross and
come after me, cannot be my disciple."
CHAPTER XXIII
JOSEPHINE CURTIS WOODBURY AND THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL
BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF PEACE MRS. EDDY WITHDRAWS
HER SUPPORT " WAR IN HEAVEN "
MRS. EDDY'S absence from Boston made it possible for some
of her ambitious leaders there to exercise a stronger personal
influence than they could ever have done had she been at her
old headquarters in Commonwealth Avenue. This opportunity
was seized, and abused, so Mrs. Eddy thought, by one of her
most prominent aids, Josephine Curtis Woodbury.
Mrs. Woodbury had been associated with Mrs. Eddy since
1879, and had been one of her foremost healers and teachers.
She had written a great deal for the Journal, had preached
and lectured as far west as Denver, had organised classes and
church societies, and had conducted a Christian Science " acad
emy " at the Hotel Berkshire, in Boston.
Mrs. Woodbury was clever, self-confident, given to theatrical
display, ready with her tongue and pen, and she possessed an
amazing personal influence over her adherents. In short, she
was the only Christian Scientist in Boston who ever bade fair
to rival Mrs. Eddy in personal prominence. Like Mrs. Eddy,
she was ambitious, and delighted in leadership. She, too, could
send her students hither and yon, and keep them dancing
attendance upon her telegrams. Some of them lived in her
428
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 429
house and went to Maine with her in the summer; they sat
spellbound at her lectures, and put their time and goods at her
disposal.
Mrs. Woodbury's group of students and followers were, on
the whole, very different from the simple, rule-abiding Christian
Scientists who had been taught directly under Mrs. Eddy's
personal supervision. Mrs. Eddy's own people never got very
far away from her hard-and-fast business principles, while
Mrs. Woodbury's students were distinctly fanciful and senti
mental, and strove to add all manner of ornamentation to
Mrs. Eddy's stout homespun. There were two or three musi
cians among them, and a young illustrator and his handsome
wife, and most of them wrote verses. Some of Mrs. Woodbury's
students went abroad with her, and acquired the habit of inter
larding the regular Christian Science phraseology with a little
French. Mrs. Woodbury and her students lived in a kind of
miracle-play of their own ; had inspirations and revelations and
premonitions ; kept mental trysts ; saw portents and mystic
meanings in everything; and spoke of God as coming and
going, agreeing and disagreeing with them. Some of them
affected cell-like sleeping-chambers, with white walls, bare ex
cept for a picture of Christ. They longed for martyrdom,
and made adventures out of the most commonplace occurrences.
Mrs. Woodbury herself had this marvel-loving temperament.
Her room was lined with pictures of the Madonna. When she
went to Denver to lecture on Christian Science in 1887, her
train was caught in a blizzard ; in relating this experience, she
describes herself as " face to face with death." Her two
children fell into the water on the Nantasket coast; Mrs.
430 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Woodbury " treated " them, and they recovered. She writes
upon this incident a dramatic article entitled " Drowning
Overcome."
Mrs. Woodbury and her students thus succeeded in giving
to Mrs. Eddy's homely " Science " pieced together in dull
New England shoe towns and first taught to people who worked
with their hands an emotional colouring which was very dis
tasteful to Mrs. Eddy herself. Never was any .woman less the
religieuse. " Discovering and founding " Christian Science had
been her business, performed, in spite of all her flightiness, in
a businesslike manner, and her success was eminently a business
like success. With yearnings and questings and raptures,
Mrs. Eddy had little patience, and Mrs. Woodbury's romantic
school, with its spiritual alliances, annoyed her beyond ex
pression.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Woodbury's students inevitably found their
miracle. In June, 1890, Mrs. Woodbury gave birth to a son
whom her followers believed was the result of an " immaculate
conception," and an exemplification of Mrs. Eddy's theory of
" mental generation." Mrs. Woodbury named her child " The
Prince of Peace," and baptised him at Ocean Point, Me., in a
pool which she called " Bethsada." " While there," writes Mrs.
Woodbury, " occurred the thought of baptising little Prince
in a singularly beautiful salt pool, whose rocky bottom was
dry at low tide and overflowing at high tide, but especially
attractive at mid-tide, with its two feet of crystal water. A
crowd of people had assembled on the neighbouring bluffs, when
I brought him from our cottage not far away, and laid him
three times prayerfully in the pool and when he was lifted there-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 431
from, they joined in a spontaneously appropriate hymn of
praise."
Mrs. Woodbury would not permit the child, who was called
Prince for short, to address her husband as " father," but
insisted that he address Mr. Woodbury as " Frank " and herself
as " Birdie." The fact that he was a fine, healthy baby, and
was never ill, seemed to Mrs. Woodbury's disciples conclusive
evidence that he was the Divine principle of Christian Science
made manifest in the flesh. It was their pleasure to bring gifts
to Prince ; to discover in his behaviour indications of his spirit
ual nature; and they professed to believe that when he grew
to manhood he would enter upon his Divine ministry.
Six months before the birth of Prince, Mrs. Woodbury paid
a visit to Mrs. Eddy, and she seems to imply that the venerable
leader oracularly foretold the coming of her child. " In Jan
uary," writes Mrs. Woodbury, " I enjoyed a visit with my ever-
beloved Teacher, who gave comfort in these words, though at
the moment they were not received in their deeper import:
* Go home and be happy. Commit thy ways unto the Lord.
Trust him, and he will bring it to pass.' " This may have
suggested to the faithful the visit of Mary to Elizabeth; but
if there was any miracle-play of this sort in progress, Mrs.
Eddy had certainly no intention of playing Elizabeth to Mrs.
Woodbury's Mary. When word was brought her of the birth
of Mrs. Woodbury's " little Immanuel," as he was often called,
she was far from being convinced. " Child of light ! " she ex
claimed indignantly. " She knows it is an imp of Satan." In
the libel suit which Mrs. Woodbury later brought against her
Teacher, a letter to her from Mrs. Eddy was, read in court,
432 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
in which Mrs. Eddy said : " Those awful reports about you,
namely that your last child was illegitimate, etc. I again and
again tried to suppress that report ; also for what you tried to
make people believe ; namely, that that child was an immaculate
conception, . . . and you replied that it was incarnated with
the Devil."
Mrs. Eddy was the more vexed with Mrs. Woodbury because
she herself had undoubtedly taught that in the future, when
the world had attained a larger growth in Christian Science,
children would be conceived by communion with the Divine mind ;
but she probably had no idea that any one of her students,
ambitious to " demonstrate over material claims," would actually
attempt to put this theory into practice. She was wise enough,
moreover, to see that such extravagant claims would bring
Christian Science into disrepute, and she vigorously denounced
Mrs. Woodbury's zeal.
Besides her school in Boston, Mrs. Woodbury had a large
following in Maine, where she usually spent the summer. In
1896 Fred D. Chamberlain began a suit against her for the
alienation of his wife's affections his wife being a pupil of
Mrs. Woodbury's. At this time, the Boston Traveller, in dis
cussing Mr. Chamberlain's charge, took up the question of the
claims that were made for Mrs. Woodbury's son, Prince. The
Traveller asserted that some of Mrs. Woodbury's students had
been induced against their will to buy stock in an " air-engine "
which Mr. Woodbury was exploiting, and published interviews
with George Macomber and H. E. Jones, both of Augusta, Me.,
who stated that their wives had believed that Mrs. Woodbury's
child was immaculately conceived, had desired to make presents
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 433
to it, and had urged their husbands to buy stock in the air-
engine. The Traveller also made the statement that Evelyn
I. Rowe of Augusta had applied for a divorce from her husband
upon the ground of non-support, saying that he gave all his
earnings toward the education and support of Mrs. Woodbury's
son, Prince, whom Mr. Rowe believed to have been immaculately
conceived. After the publication of this, Mrs. Woodbury
promptly sued the Traveller for criminal libel, and lost her case.
All this notoriety brought matters to a crisis between Mrs.
Woodbury and Mrs. Eddy. Although Mrs. Eddy had found
Mrs. Woodbury very useful, she had long distrusted her dis
cretion, and had endeavoured in various ways to put a check
upon her. Mrs. Woodbury had first become a member of Mrs.
Eddy's church in 1886. When the Mother Church was re
organised, it was necessary, in order that Mrs. Eddy might
cull out such persons as were distasteful to her, for all the old
members to apply for admission and be voted upon, just as were
the new candidates. Mrs. Woodbury was admitted only upon
the condition that she would undergo a two years' probation,
and she had some difficulty in getting back even upon those
terms. Several months before her admission on probation, she
wrote to Mrs. Eddy, begging her to use her personal influence
in her behalf. To this petition Mrs. Eddy replied:
MRS. WOODBURY February 27, 1895.
DEAR STUDENT:
I have your letter asking my assistance in getting admission to the
church. I have made a rule, which has been published in our Journal
that I shall not be consulted on the applications for membership to this
church or dismissals from it. This responsibility must rest on the First
Members according to the rules of the church. Hence I return your letter
to you and the church.
434 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
May the love that must govern you and the church influence your
motives, is my fervent wish; But remember, dear student, that malicious
hypnotism is no excuse for sin. But God's grace is sufficient to govern
our lives and lead us to moral ends.
With love
MARY BAKER G. EDDY.
On April 8 Mrs. Eddy wrote to Mrs. Woodbury:
Now, dear student try one year not to tell a single falsehood, or to practise
one cheat, or to break the decalogue, and if you do this to the best of
your ability at the end of that year God will give you a place in our
church as sure as you are fit for it. This I know. Don't return evil for
evil, and you will have your reward.
April 17 Mrs. Eddy again wrote Mrs. Woodbury a warning
letter :
MY DEAR STUDENT: I am willing you should let them read my letter.
I forgot to mention this, hence my second line to you. Now mark what
I say. This is your last chance, and you will succeed in getting back, and
should. But this I warn you, to stop falsifying, and living unpurely in
thought, in vile schemes, in fraudulent money-getting, etc. I speak plainly
even as the need is.
I am not ignorant of your sins, and I am trying to have you in the
church for protection from those temptations, and to effect your full
reformation. Remember, the M. A. M., which you say in your letter causes
you to sin, is not idle, and will cause you to repeat them, and so turn
you again from the church, unless you pray God to keep you from falling
into the foul snare. In the consciousness that you and your students
are mentally speaking to me, I warn you this is forbidden by a strict
rule of the by-laws as well as by conscience.
MARY B. EDDY.
After her admission to the Mother Church, Mrs. Woodbury
did not go through her two years' probation. Her name was
dropped from the church roll in the fall of the first year, and
in the following spring (March 24, 1896) she was reinstated.
Ten days later she was, in the language of the directors, " for
ever excommunicated."
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 435
What Mrs. Eddy wished was that Mrs. Woodbury should
cease to identify herself in any way with Christian Science.
" How dare you," she wrote to Mrs. Woodbury in the spring
of 1896, " how dare you in the sight of God, and with your
character behind the curtain, and your students ready to lift
it on you, pursue the path perilous? " But Mrs. Woodbury
was not made of such yielding stuff as the men who had afore
time obliterated themselves at Mrs. Eddy's bidding. She in
sisted upon going to Mrs. Eddy's church even after the directors
refused to let her a pew, and after the little Prince of Peace
had been taken up by his jacket and put bodily out of the
Sunday-school.
Disgruntled Christian Scientists usually went off and started
a church of their own, and there were by this time almost as
many " reformed " varieties of Christian Science as there were
dissenters. Mrs. Gestefeld taught one kind in Chicago, Mrs.
Crosse another kind in Boston, Frank Mason another in Brook
lyn, Captain Sabin was soon to teach another in Washington,
while nearly all the students who had quarrelled with Mrs.
Eddy or broken away from her were teaching or practising
some variety of mind-cure. Mrs. Woodbury, accordingly, hired
a hall this seemed to be the only necessary preliminary in
those days and started a church of her own, to which her little
flock followed her. In the Legion of Honour rooms she
conducted services every Sunday morning. Sometimes she
preached, sometimes she lectured, and sometimes she read a
poem. When it was impossible for her to be there, her daughter,
Gwendolyn, supplied her pulpit.
In 1897 Mrs. Woodbury published a veiled account of her
436 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
differences with Mrs. Eddy in a pamphlet modestly entitled
War in Heaven. In this book her criticism of Mrs. Eddy
is courteous and respectful enough to suggest that she may
still have hoped for reinstatement. But Mrs. Eddy had by this
time become convinced that never, since the days of Kennedy,
had there been such a mesmerist as Mrs. Woodbury. Indeed,
Mrs. Eddy was not alone in accrediting Mrs. Woodbury with
a strange hypnotic power. Some of Mrs. Wpodbury's own
students were confident that if they displeased her she had power
to bring upon them sickness, insanity, and disaster. They
whispered tales about Robert W. Rowe of Augusta, Me., who
had disobeyed and died. Whether Mrs. Eddy really believed
that the woman was possessed of some diabolical power, or
whether she saw that Mrs. Woodbury's adventurous tempera
ment would bring ridicule upon Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy
was determined to be rid of her, and lost no opportunity to
discredit her. The two women had it back and forth for several
years, and in April, 1899, Mrs. Woodbury published in the
American Register, Paris, a poem which attacked Christian
Science and which ended with these significant lines:
Is the Dame that seemed august
A Doll stuffed with sawdust,
And must we believe that the Doll stuffed herself?
Mrs. Woodbury finally crossed the Rubicon by publishing in
the Arena, May, 1899, an exposure of Mrs. Eddy and her
methods.
In this attack Mrs. Woodbury satirically touched upon Mrs.
Eddy's conviction that she is the star-crowned woman of the
Apocalypse, and then took up the Quimby controversy, pro-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 437
ducing Mrs. Eddy's early letters and newspaper contributions
as evidence that she got her theory of mind-cure from Mr.
Quimby. She criticised the English of Science and Health;
ridiculed the Mother Room; insinuated that Mrs. Eddy had
illegally conferred degrees, and had been compelled to close
her college for that reason ; accused her of an inordinate greed
for money and of " trafficking in the temple." She declared
that Mrs. Eddy had been a medium, and that she was the victim
of demonophobia the fear of witchcraft. Mrs. Woodbury
stated that Mrs. Eddy claimed that she had cured the Prince
of Wales, now King Edward VII., of his serious illness in 1871,
and that to do so she had treated him through his royal mother,
as the Prince's life had been such that she could not approach
him directly. According to Mrs. Woodbury, Mrs. Eddy said
that she treated President Garfield after he was shot, and would
have succeeded in saving his life had not Kennedy and Arens
maliciously interfered to prevent her from making this convinc
ing demonstration.
It seems that in this article Mrs. Woodbury wished to explain
how she had been led to make such extraordinary claims regard
ing the birth of her son, Prince. She asserts that Mrs. Eddy
taught her women students that they might become mothers
by a supreme effort of their own minds, and that girls were
terrified by the doctrine that they might be made pregnant
through the influence of demons. Mrs. Woodbury had proba
bly repented her own efforts to give a concrete example of
Mrs. Eddy's theory of " mental generation," and she attacks
her on this point with peculiar bitterness. She quotes the fol
lowing passage from Science and Health:
438 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
The propagation of their species without the male element, by butterfly,
bee, and moth is a discovery corroborative of the Science of Mind, because
it shows that the origin and continuance of these insects rest on Principle,
apart from material conditions. 1 An egg never was the origin of a man,
and no seed ever produced a plant. . . . The belief that life can be
in matter, or soul in body, and that man springs from dust or from an
egg, is the brief record of mortal error. . . . The plant grows not
because of seed or soil.
Commenting upon this passage, Mrs. Woodbury says :
To what diabolical conclusions do such deductions lead? One may well
hesitate to touch this delicate topic in print, yet only thus can the
immoral possibilities and the utter lack of Divine inspiration in " Christian
Science " be shown.
The substance of certain instructions given by Mrs. Eddy in private
is as follows :
If Jesus was divinely conceived by the Holy Ghost or Spirit, without
a human father, Mary not having known her husband, then women may
become mothers by a supreme effort of their own minds, or through the
influence upon them of an Unholy Ghost, a malign spirit. Women of
unquestioned integrity, who have been Mrs. Eddy's students, testify that
she has so taught, and that by this teaching families have been broken
up; that thus maidens have been terrified out of their wits, and stimulated
into a frenzy resembling that of deluded French nuns, who believed them
selves brought into marital relations with the glorified Jesus, as veritably
the bridegroom of his church. Whatever her denials may be, such was
Mrs. Eddy's teaching while in her college; to which she added the oracular
declaration that it lay within her power to dissolve such motherhood by a
wave of her celestial rod.
The selfish celibacy of nuns and clergy, Christian or heathen, with con
sequent ecclesiastical interference in family life, have been, and are, mis
chief-breeding blunders, fatal alike to morals and health. One result
of this interference on the part of Mrs. Eddy is that Christian Science
families are notably childless.
Very tenacious is she of the paradoxical title carved on her Boston
church, " The Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science." Surely a
"Discoverer" cannot be the "Founder" of that which he has been under
the necessity of discovering; while a "Founder" would have no need
of discovering her own foundation. What she has really " discovered "
are ways and means of perverting and prostituting the science of healing
to her own ecclesiastical aggrandisement, and to the moral and physical
1 Science and Health (1886), page 472.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 439
depravity of her dupes. As she received this science from Dr. Quimby it
meant simply the healing of bodily ills through a lively reliance on the
wholeness and order of the Infinite Mind, as clearly perceived and prac
tically demonstrated by a simple and modest love of one's kind. What
she has " founded " is a commercial system, monumental in its proportions,
but already tottering to its fall.
This certainly was strong language from one who had taught
Christian Science for ten years, who had often been compared
to John, the beloved disciple, and who had leaned upon the
bosom of her Teacher. Mrs. Woodbury's article appeared the
1st of May, and during that same month her husband, Frank
Woodbury, died. This, to many of Mrs. Eddy's faithful re
tainers, seemed like a direct judgment upon the apostate.
Mrs. Woodbury might have known that Mrs. Eddy would
have the last word, and that it would be no gentle one. In
her annual message to the Mother Church, read before the con
gregation at the June communion service, a few weeks after
Mr. Woodbury's death, Mrs. Eddy indulged in certain vivid
rhetoric which Mrs. Woodbury and her friends believed referred
directly to Mrs. Woodbury ; to her efforts to get back into
the church ; to her alleged practice of malicious animal magnet
ism; and to her widowhood. The address was not only read
aloud in the church, but was published in the Christian Science
Sentinel and in the Boston Herald. Mrs. Woodbury, accord
ingly, brought a suit for criminal libel against Mrs. Eddy.
The case came to trial in the following June, when Boston
was full of Christian Scientists who had come to attend the
June communion. Mrs. Woodbury lost her suit because such
Christian Scientists as were summoned as witnesses testified that
they had not understood Mrs. Eddy's denunciation to refer
440 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
to Mrs. Woodbury in particular. One of the witnesses, however,
Mr. William G. Nixon, Mrs. Eddy's former publisher, stated
that he had understood that Mrs. Eddy meant Josephine Wood-
bury.
During the trial the courtroom was crowded with Christian
Scientists, and Mrs. Woodbury decided that they had effected
the outcome of the suit by concentrating their minds upon the
judge and witnesses, and by " treating " them in Mrs. Eddy's
behalf. She, accordingly, would not permit an appeal, but
abjured Christian Science and retired into private life; and
with Mrs. Woodbury's defeat perished the romantic movement
in Christian Science.
CHAPTER XXIV
MRS. EDDY ADOPTS THE TITLE OF " MOTHER " BEGINNING OP
THE CONCORD PILGRIMAGES MRS. EDDY HINTS AT HER
POLITICAL INFLUENCE THE BUILDING OF THE MOTHER
CHURCH EXTENSION
A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of our land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood. 1
Motto upon the cover of the Christian Science Sentinel.
AFTER the opening of the Mother Church in Boston, Chris
tian Science was generally recognised as an established religion.
The church had now a general membership of 1,500 and a
substantial house of worship ; and although the very foundation
and fabric of the church was a denial of the visible and material,
nothing served to give it recognition and standing like this
actual sign of its existence. At the World's Congress of Re
ligions in Chicago in 1893, Septimus J. Hanna, who was then
pastor of the Mother Church, read an address, composed of
selections from Mrs. Eddy's books, which attracted favourable
attention, and Mrs. Eddy, as the founder of the church, became
1 This verse is taken from Longfellow's Filomena, which was written as a
tribute to Florence Nightingale's work in the hospital at Scutari. In St.
Thomas' hospital in London there is a statuette of Florence Nightingale in
nurse's dress, holding in her hands a night lamp such as she used in making
her rounds in Scutari. Upon this statuette, which is called The Lady with
the Lamp, is inscribed Longfellow's verse.
The cover design of the Christian Science Sentinel contains a conventionalised
figure of a woman holding a Greek lamp. Under it is inscribed the motto
quoted above.
441
442 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
an object of public curiosity and interest. In 1895 she adopted
the title " Mother," 2 and instituted the Concord " pilgrimages "
which later became so conspicuous. By this time the church
membership had so increased that most of Mrs. Eddy's followers
had never seen their leader, and as Mrs. Eddy did not attend
the annual communion 3 of the general membership in the Mother
Church, she telegraphed an invitation, after the June com
munion in 1895, to the congregation, to call upon her at
Pleasant View. Accordingly, one hundred and eighty Christian
Scientists boarded the train at Boston and went up to Concord.
Mrs. Eddy threw her house open to them, received them in per
son, shook hands with each delegate, and conversed with many.
After the communion in 1897, twenty-five hundred enthusi
astic pilgrims crowded into the little New Hampshire capital.
Although the Scientists hired every available conveyance in Con
cord, there were not enough carriages to accommodate their
numbers, so hundreds of the pilgrims walked out Pleasant
Street to Mrs. Eddy's home.
Mrs. Eddy again received her votaries, greeted them cordially,
and made a long address. The Journal says that her manner
2 The Title of Mother. In the year 1895 loyal Scientists had given to the
author of their textbook, the Founder of Christian Science, the individual,
endearing term of Mother. Therefore, if a student of Christian Science shall
apply this title, either to herself or to others except as the term for kinship
according to the flesh, it shall be regarded by the church as an indication of
disrespect for their Pastor Emeritus, and unfltness to be a member of the
Mother Church. Church Manual, Article XXII, Section 1.
In 1003 Mrs. Eddy issued a new by-law, which stated that "owing to the
public misunderstanding of this name, it is the duty of Christian Scientists
to drop the word mother, and to substitute Leader." This action was taken
not long after Mark Twain, in the North American Reriew, had called at
tention to the title, cleverly ridiculing it. Mrs. Eddy and other Christian
Scientists replied to Twain's articles, but the shaft had touched a vulnerable
point and the title was dropped.
3 This communion was originally observed once each quarter and then twice
a year. Since 1899 it has been observed but once a year, on the second Sun
day in June. No " material " emblems, such as bread and wine, are offered,
and the communion is one of silent thought. On Monday the directors meet
and transact the business of the year, and on Tuesday the officers' reports are
read. As most members of the branch churches are also members of the
Mother Church, thousands of Christian Scientists from all over the United
States visit Boston at this time.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 443
upon this occasion was peculiar for its " utter freedom from
sensationalism or the Mesmeric effect that so many speakers
seem to exert," and adds that she was " calm and unimpassioned,
but strong and convincing." The Journal also states that
upon this occasion Mrs. Eddy wore " a royal purple silk dress
covered with black lace " and a " dainty bonnet." She wore
her diamond cross and the badge of the Daughters of the Revo
lution in diamonds and rubies.
In 1901 4 three thousand of the June communicants went
from Boston to Concord on three special trains. They were
not admitted to the house, but Mrs. Eddy appeared upon her
balcony for a moment and spoke to them, saying that they had
already heard from her in her message to the Mother Church,
and that she would pause but a moment to look into their dear
faces and then return to her " studio." The Journal comments
upon her " erect form and sprightly step," and says that she
wore " what might have been silk or satin, figured, and cut
en traine. Upon her white hair rested a bonnet with fluttering
blue and old gold trimmings."
The last of these pilgrimages occurred in 1904, when Mrs.
Eddy invited the pilgrims to come, not to Pleasant View but
to the new Christian Science church in Concord. Fifteen hun
dred of them gathered in front of the church and stood in
reverent silence as Mrs. Eddy's carriage approached. The
horses were stopped in front of the assemblage, and Mrs. Eddy
signalled the President of the Mother Church to approach
4 At the 1898 communion there was no invitation from Mrs. Eddy, but a
number of communicants went up to Concord to see her house and to see her
start out upon her daily drive. In June, 1899, Mrs. Eddy came to Boston and
briefly addressed the annual business meeting of the church. In 1W2
1903 there were no formal pilgrimages, although hundreds of Christian
Scientists went to Concord to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Eddy upon her drive.
444 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
her carriage. To him, as representing the church body, she
spoke her greeting. Her voice was very weak and she had aged
visibly since her last official appearance. This was her last
meeting with the general congregation of her church.
The yearning which these people felt toward Mrs. Eddy,
and their rapture at beholding her, can only be described by
one of the pilgrims. In the Journal, June, 1899, Miss Martha
Sutton Thompson writes to describe a visit, which she made
in January of that year to the meeting of the Christian Science
Board of Education in Boston. She says :
When I decided to attend I also hoped to see our Mother. ... I
saw that if I allowed the thought that I must see her personally to
transcend the desire to obey and grow into the likeness of her teachings,
this mistake would obscure my understanding of both the Revelator and
the Revelation. After the members of the Board had retired they re
appeared upon the rostrum and my heart beat quickly with the thought
" perhaps she has come." But no, it was to read her message. . . .
She said God was with us and to give her love to all the class. It was so
precious to get it directly from her.
The following day five of us made the journey to Concord, drove out
to Pleasant View, and met her face to face on her daily drive. She
seemed watching to greet us, for when she caught sight of our faces
she instantly half rose with expectant face, bowing, smiling, and waving
her hand to each of us. Then as she went out of our sight, kissed her
hand to all.
I will not attempt to describe the Leader, nor can I say what this
brief glimpse was and is to me. I can only say I wept and the tears
start every time I think of it. Why do I weep? I think it is because I
want to be like her and they are tears of repentance. I realise better
now what it was that made Mary Magdalen weep when she came into the
presence of the Nazarene.
After the pilgrimages were discouraged, there was no way
in which her devoted disciples could ever see Mrs. Eddy. They
used, indeed, like Miss Thompson, to go to Concord and linger
about the highways to catch a glimpse of her as she drove by,
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 445
until she rebuked them in a new by-law in the Church Manual:
" Thou Shalt not Steal. Sect. 15. Neither a Christian Scien
tist, his student or his patient, nor a member of the Mother
Church shall daily and continuously haunt Mrs. Eddy's drive
by meeting her once or more every day when she goes out on
penalty of being disciplined and dealt with justly by her
church," etc.
Mrs. Eddy did her last public teaching in the Christian
Science Hall in Concord, November 21 and 22, 1898. There
were sixty-one persons in this class, several from Canada, one
from England, and one from Scotland, and Mrs. Eddy refused
to accept any remuneration for her instruction. The first lesson
lasted about two hours, the second nearly four. " Only two
lessons," says the Journal, " but such lessons ! Only those who
have sat under this wondrous teaching can form a conjecture
of what these classes were." " We mention," the Journal con
tinues, " a sweet incident and one which deeply touched the
Mother's heart. Upon her return from class she found beside
her plate at dinner table a lovely white rose with the card of
a young lady student accompanying on which she chastely re
ferred to the last couplet of the fourth stanza of that sweet
poem from the Mother's pen, * Love.'
" Thou to whose power our hope we give
Free us from human strife.
Fed by Thy love divine we live
For Love alone is Life," etc.
Mrs. Eddy now achieved publicity in a good many ways,
and to such publications as afforded her space and appreciation
she was able to grant reciprocal favours. The Granite
446 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Monthly, a little magazine published at Concord, N. H., printed
Mrs. Eddy's poem, " Easter Morn," and a highly laudatory
article upon her. Mrs. Eddy responded in the Christian Science
Journal with a request that all Christian Scientists subscribe
to the Granite Monthly, which they promptly did. Colonel
Oliver C. Sabin, a politician in Washington, D. C., was editor
of a purely political publication, the Washington News Letter.
A Congressman one day attacked Christian Science in a speech.
Colonel Sabin, whose paper was just then making things un
pleasant for that particular Congressman, wrote an editorial
in defence of Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy inserted a card
in the Journal requesting all Christian Scientists to subscribe
to the News Letter. This brought Colonel Sabin such a revenue
that he dropped politics altogether and turned his political
paper into a religious periodical. 5 Mr. James T. White, pub
lisher of the National Encyclopedia of American Biography,
gave Mrs. Eddy a generous place in his encyclopaedia and wrote
a poem to her. Mrs. Eddy requested, through the Journal,
that all Christian Scientists buy Mr. White's volume of verse
for Christmas presents, and the Christian Science Publication
Society marketed Mr. White's verses. Mrs. Eddy made a point
of being on good terms with the Concord papers ; she furnished
them with many columns of copy, and the editors came to
realise that her presence in Concord brought a great deal of
money into the town. From 1898 to 1901 the files of the
Journal echo increasing material prosperity, and show that
both Mrs. Eddy and her church were much more taken account
8 Colonel Sabin's popularity with Mrs. Eddy and her followers was short
lived. Some months later, Sabin repudiated Mrs. Eddy's leadership and started
an Independent healing movement, and Mrs. Eddy at once withdrew her
support and that of all Christian Scientists.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 447
of than formerly. Articles by Mrs. Eddy are quoted from vari
ous newspapers whose editors had requested her to express her
views upon the war with Spain, the Puritan Thanksgiving, etc.
In the autumn of 1901 Mrs. Eddy wrote an article on the
death of President McKinley. Commenting upon this article,
Harper's Weekly said : " Among others who have spoken [on
President McKinley's death] was Mrs. Eddy, the Mother of
Christian Science. She issued two utterances which were read
in her churches. . . . Both of these discourses are seemly and
kind, but they are materially different from the writings of
any one else. Reciting the praises of the dead President, Mrs.
Eddy says : ' May his history waken a tone of truth that shall
reverberate, renew euphony, emphasise human power and bear
its banner into the vast forever.' No one else said anything
like that. Mother Eddy's style is a personal asset. Her sen
tences usually have the considerable literary merit of being
unexpected."
Of this editorial the Journal says, with a candour almost
incredible : " We take pleasure in republishing from that old-
established and valuable publication, Harper's Weekly, the
following merited tribute to Mrs. Eddy's utterances," etc.
Then follows the editorial quoted above.
In the winter of 1898 Christian Science received great pub
licity through the death, under Christian Science treatment,
of the American journalist and novelist, Harold Frederic, in
England. Mr. Frederic's readers were not, as a rule, people
who knew much about Christian Science, and his taking off
brought the new cult to the attention of thousands of people
for the first time.
448 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
In December, 1898, the Earl of Dunmore, a peer of the
Scottish Realm, and his Countess, came to Boston to study
Christian Science. They were received by Mrs. Eddy at Pleas
ant View, and Lady Dunmore was present at the June com
munion, 1899. According to the Journal, Lady Dunmore's
son, Lord Fincastle, left his regiment in India and came to
Boston to join his mother in this service, and then returned
immediately to his military duties. Lady Mildred Murray,
daughter of the Countess, also came to America to attend the
annual communion. A pew was reserved upon the first floor
of the church for this titled family, although the Journal ex
plains that " the reservation of a pew for the Countess of
Dunmore and her family was wholly a matter of international
courtesy, and not in any sense a tribute to their rank."
In these prosperous years the Rev. Irving C. Tomlinson, in
commenting in the Journal upon Brander Matthews' statement
that English seemed destined to become the world-language,
says : " It may be that Prof. Matthews has written better than
he knew. Science and Health is fast reaching all parts of the
world; and as our text-book may never be translated into a
foreign tongue, may it not be expected to fulfil the prophet's
hope, ' Then will I turn to the people a pure language,' " etc.
In January, 1901, Mrs. Eddy called her directors together
and charged them to send expressions of sympathy to the
British government and to King Edward upon the death of
the Queen.
Truly the days of the Lynn shoemakers and the little Broad
Street tenement were far gone by, and it must have seemed
to Mrs. Eddy that she was living in one of those New York
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 449
Ledger romances which had so delighted her in those humbler
times. Even a less spirited woman than she would have ex
panded under all this notoriety, and Mrs. Eddy, as always,
caught the spirit of the play. A letter written to her son,
George Glover, April 27, 1898, conveys some idea of how
Mrs. Eddy appeared to herself at this time :
PLEASANT VIEW, CONCORD, N. H., April 27, 1898.
DEAR Sox: Yours of latest date came duly. That which you cannot
write I understand, and will say, I am reported as dying, wholly decriped
and useless, etc. Now one of these reports is just as true as the others
are. My life is as pure as that of the angels. God has lifted me up to
my work, and if it was not pure it would not bring forth good fruits. The
Bible says the tree is known by its fruit.
But I need not say this to a Christian Scientist, who knows it. I thank
you for any interest you may feel in your mother. I am alone in the
world, more lone than a solitary star. Although it is duly estimated by
business characters and learned scholars that I lead and am obeyed by
300,000 people at this date. The most distinguished newspapers ask me to
write on the most important subjects. Lords and ladies, carles, princes
and marquises and marchionesses from abroad write to me in the most
complimentary manner. Hoke Smith declares I am the most illustrious
woman on the continent those are his exact words. Our senators and
members of Congress call on me for counsel. But what of all this? I
am not made the least proud by it or a particle happier for it. I am
working for a higher purpose.
Now what of my circumstances? I name first my home, which of all
places on earth is the one in which to find peace and enjoyment. But my
home is simply a house and a beautiful landscape. There is not one
in it that I love only as I love everybody. I have no congeniality with
my help inside of my house; they are no companions and scarcely fit to
be my help.
I adopted a son hoping he would take Mr. Frye's place as my book
keeper and man of all work that belongs to man. But my trial of him
has proved another disappointment. His books could not be audited they
were so incorrect, etc., etc. Mr. Frye is the most disagreeable man that
can be found, but this he is, namely (if there is one on earth), an honest
man, as all will tell you who deal with him. At first mesmerism swayed
him, but he learned through my forbearance to govern himself. He is a
man that would not steal, commit adultery, or fornication, or break one
450 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
of the Ten Commandments. I have now done, but I could write a volume
on what I have touched upon.
One thing is the severest wound of all, namely, the want of education
among those nearest to me in kin. I would gladly give every dollar
I possess to have one or two and three that are nearest to me on earth
possess a thorough education. If you had been educated as I intend to
have you, to-day you could, would, be made President of the United States.
Mary's letters to me are so mis-spelled that I blush to read them.
You pronounce your words so wrongly and then she spells them accord
ingly. I am even yet too proud to have you come among my society and
alas ! mispronounce your words as you do ; but for this thing I should
be honoured by your good manners and I love you. With love to all
MARY BAKER EDDY.
P. S. My letter is so short I add a postscript. I have tried about one
dozen bookkeepers and had to give them all up, either for dishonesty,
or incapacity. I have not had my books audited for five years, and Mr.
Ladd, who is famous for this, audited them last week, and gives me his
certificate that they are all right except in some places not quite plain, and
he showed Frye how to correct that. Then he, Frye gave me a check for
that amount before I knew about it.
The slight mistake occurred four years ago and he could not remember
about the things. But Mr. Ladd told me that he knew it was only not set
down in a coherent way for in other parts of the book he could trace
where it was put down in all probability, but not orderly. When I can
get a Christian, as I know he is, and a woman that can fill his place I shall
do it. But I have no time to receive company, to call on others, or to go
out of my house only to drive. Am always driven with work for others,
but nobody to help me even to get help such as I would choose.
Again,
MOTHER.
The idea of her own possible political power was evidently
rather pleasing to Mrs. Eddy, for in a letter to the editor
of the Concord Monitor, October 2, 1897, she had already sug
gested it. " It would seem," she writes, " as if Christian Sci
ence were engirdling the earth. London lords and ladies throng
to learn its teachings, it is in the White House of our national
capital, in Windsor Castle, England, and the leading minds in
almost every Christian land are adopting its essential theo-
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 451
logical points. ... As it is, if you were a candidate for the
Presidency, mayhap I could give you one hundred thousand
votes for the chair in Washington, D. C." While Mrs. Eddy
was working out her larger policy she did not forget the little
things. The manufacture of Christian Science jewelry was at
one time a thriving business, conducted by the J. C. Derby
Company of Concord. Christian Science emblems and Mrs.
Eddy's " favourite flower " were made up into cuff-buttons,
rings, brooches, watches, and pendants, varying in price from
$325 to $2.50. The sale of the Christian Science teaspoons
was especially profitable. The " Mother spoon," an ordinary
silver spoon, sold for $5.00. Mrs. Eddy's portrait was em
bossed upon it, a picture of Pleasant View, Mrs. Eddy's signa
ture, and the motto, " Not Matter but Mind Satisfieth." Mrs.
Eddy stimulated the sale of this spoon by inserting the follow
ing request in the Journal : 6
On each of these most beautiful spoons is a motto in has relief that
every person on earth needs to hold in thought. Mother requests that
Christian Scientists shall not ask to be informed what this motto is, but
each Scientist shall purchase at least one spoon, and those who can afford
it, one dozen spoons, that their families may read this motto at every
meal, and their guests be made partakers of its simple truth.
MARY BAKER G. EDDY.
The above-named spoons are sold by the Christian Science Souvenir
Company, Concord, N. H., and will soon be on sale at the Christian
Science reading rooms throughout the country.
Mrs. Eddy's picture was another fruitful source of revenue.
The copyright for this is still owned by the Derby Company.
This portrait is known as the " authorised " photograph of Mrs.
Eddy. It was sold for years as a genuine photograph of Mrs.
'February, 1899.
452 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY
Eddy, but it is admitted now at Christian Science salesrooms
that this picture is a " composite." The cheapest sells for one
dollar. When they were ready for sale, in May, 1899, Mrs.
Eddy, in the Journal of that date, announced :
It is with pleasure I certify that after months of incessant toil and
at great expense Mr. Henry P. Moore, and Mr. J. C. Derby of Concord,
N. H., have brought out a likeness of me far superior to the one they
offered for sale last November. The portrait they have now perfected
I cordially endorse. Also I declare their sole right to the making and
exclusive sale of the duplicates of said portrait.
I simply ask that those who love me purchase this portrait.
MARY BAKER EDDY.
The material prosperity of the Mother Church continued and
the congregation soon outgrew the original building. At the
June communion in 1902 ten thousand Christian Scientists were
present. In the business meeting which followed they pledged
themselves, " with startling grace," as Mrs. Eddy put it, to
raise two million dollars, or any part of that sum which should
be needed, to build an annex.
In the late spring of 1906 the enormous addition to the
Mother Church the " excelsior extension," as Mrs. Eddy calls
it was completed, and it was dedicated at the annual com
munion, June 10, of that year. The original building was in
the form of a cross, so Mrs. Eddy had the new addition built
with a dome to represent a crown. The auditorium is capable
of holding five thousand people; the walls are decorated with
texts signed " Jesus, the Christ " and " Mary Baker G. Eddy "
these names standing side by side.
CHAPTER XXV
GEORGE WASHINGTON GLOVER MRS. EDDY ? S SON BRINGS AN
ACTION AGAINST LEADING CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS WITH
DRAWAL OF THE SUIT MRS. EDDY MOVES FROM CONCORD,
N. H., TO NEWTON, MASS.
AMONG the mistakes of Mrs. Eddy's early life must be
accounted her indifference to her only child, George Washing
ton Glover. Mrs. Eddy's first husband died six months after
their marriage, and the son was not born until three months
after his father's death. When he was a baby, living with
Mrs. Glover in his aunt's house, his mother's indifference to
him was such as to cause comment in her family and indignation
on the part of her father, Mark Baker. 1 The symptoms of
serious nervous disorder so conspicuous in Mrs. Eddy's young
womanhood the exaggerated hysteria, the anaesthesia, the
mania for being rocked and swung are sometimes accompa-
ned by a lack of maternal feeling, and the absence of it in Mrs.
Eddy must be considered, like her lack of the sense of smell,
a defect of constitution rather than a vice of character.
After he went West with the Cheneys in 1857, George Glover
did not see his mother again until 1879. He was then living
in Minnesota, a man of thirty-five, when he received a telegram
from Mrs. Eddy, dated from Lynn, and asking him to meet
1 For a full account of Mrs. Eddy's separation from her son, see Chapter II.
453
454 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
her immediately in Cincinnati. This was the time when Mrs.
Eddy believed that mesmerism was overwhelming her in Lynn ;
that every stranger she met in the streets, and even inanimate
objects, were hostile to her, and that she must " flee " from
the hypnotists (Kennedy and Spofford) to save her cause and
her life. Unable to find any trace of his mother in Cincinnati,
George Glover telegraphed to the Chief of Police in Lynn.
Some days later he received another telegram from his mother,
directing him to meet her in Boston. He went to Boston, and
found that Mrs. Eddy and her husband, Asa G. Eddy, had
left Lynn for a time and were staying in Boston at the house
of Mrs. Clara Choate. Glover remained in Boston for some
time and then returned to his home in the West.
George Glover's longest stay in Boston was in 1888, when
he brought his family and spent the winter in Chelsea. His
relations with his mother were then of a friendly but very
formal nature. In the autumn, when he first proposed going
to Boston, his plan was to spend a few months with his mother.
Mrs. Eddy, however, wrote him that she had no room for him
in her house and positively forbade him to come. Mrs. Eddy's
letter reads as follows:
Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
Rev. Mary B. G. Eddy, President.
No. 571 Columbus ave.
BOSTON, Oct. 31, 1887
DEAR GEORGE: Yours received. I am surprised that you think of coming
to visit me when I live in a schoolhouse and have no room that I can let
even a boarder into.
I use the whole of my rooms and am at work in them more or less
all the time.
Besides this I have all I can meet without receiving company. I must
have quiet in my house, and it will not be pleasant for you in Boston
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 455
the Choates are doing all they can by falsehood, and public shames, such
as advertising a college of her own within a few doors of mine when she
is a disgraceful woman and known to be, I am going to give up my lease
when this class is over, and cannot pay your board nor give you a single
dollar now. I am alone, and you never would come to me when I called
for you, and now I cannot have you come.
1 want quiet and Christian life alone with God, when I can find intervals
for a little rest. You are not what I had hoped to find you, and I am
changed. The world, the flesh and evil I am at war with, and if any one
comes to me it must be to help me and not to hinder me in this warfare.
If you will stay away from me until I get through with my public labour
then I will send for you and hope to then have a home to take you to.
As it now is, I have none, and you will injure me by coming to Boston
at this time more than I have room to state in a letter. I asked you to
come to me when my husband died and I so much needed some one to
help me. You refused to come then in my great needs, and I then gave
up ever thinking of you in that line. Now I have a clerk 2 who is a pure-
minded Christian, and two girls to assist me in the college. These are
all that I can have under this roof.
If you come after getting this letter I shall feel you have no regard
for my interest or feelings, which I hope not to be obliged to feel.
Boston is the last place in the world for you or your family. When I
retire from business and into private life, then I can receive you if you
are reformed, but not otherwise. I say this to you, not to any one else.
I would not injure you any more than myself. As ever sincerely,
M. B. G. EDDY.
After Mrs. Eddy retired to Pleasant View, neither her son
nor his family were permitted to visit her, and, when they came
East, they experienced a good deal of difficulty in seeing her
at all. Mr. Glover believed that his letters to his mother were
sometimes answered by Mr. Frye, and that some of his letters
never reached his mother at all. Mr. Glover states that he
finally sent his mother a letter by express, with instructions
to the Concord agent that it was to be delivered to her in
person, and to no one else. He was notified that Mrs. Eddy
could not receive the letter except through her secretary, Calvin
Frye.
2 Calvin Frye.
456 LIFE OP MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
January 2, 1907, Mr. Glover and his daughter, Mary Baker
Glover, were permitted to have a brief interview with Mrs. Eddy
at Pleasant View. Mr. Glover states that he was shocked at his
mother's physical condition and alarmed by the rambling in
coherent nature of her conversation. In talking to him she
made the old charges and the old complaints : " people " had
been stealing her " things " ( as she used to say they did in
Lynn); people wanted to kill her; two carriage horses had
been presented to her which, had she driven behind them, would
have run away and injured her they had been sent, she
thought, for that especial purpose.
After this interview Mr. Glover and his daughter went to
Washington, D. C., to ask legal advice from ex-Senator William
E. Chandler. While there Mr. Glover received the following
letter from his mother:
PLEASANT VIEW, CONCORD, N. H., Jan. 11, 1907.
MY DEAR SON: The enemy to Christian Science is by the wickedest
powers of hypnotism trying to do me all the harm possible by acting on
the minds of people to make them lie about me and my family. In view
of all this I herein and hereby ask this favour of you. I have done for
you what I could, and never to my recollection have I asked but once
before this a favour of my only child. Will you send to me by express
all the letters of mine that I have written to you? This will be a great
comfort to your mother if you do it. Send all ALL of them. Be sure of
that. If you will do this for me I will make you and Mary some presents
of value, I assure you. Let no one but Mary and your lawyer, Mr. Wilson,
know what I herein write to Mary and you. With love,
MOTHER, M. B. G. EDDY.
Mr. Glover refused to give up his letters, and on March 1,
1907, he began, by himself and others as next friends, an action
in Mrs. Eddy's behalf against ten prominent Christian Scien
tists, among whom were Calvin Frye, Alfred Farlow, and the
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 457
officers of the Mother Church in Boston. This action was
brought in the Superior Court of New Hampshire. Mr. Glover
asked for an adjudication that Mrs. Eddy was incompetent,
through age and failing faculties, to manage her estate; that
a receiver of her property be appointed; and that the various
defendants named be required to account for alleged misuse
of her property. Six days later Mrs. Eddy met this action
by declaring a trusteeship for the control of her estate. The
trustees named were responsible men, gave bond for $500,000,
and their trusteeship was to last during Mrs. Eddy's lifetime.
In August Mr. Glover withdrew his suit.
This action brought by her son, which undoubtedly caused
Mrs. Eddy a great deal of annoyance, was another result of
those indirect methods to which she has always clung so per
sistently. When her son appealed to her for financial aid, she
chose, instead of meeting him with a candid refusal, to tell
him that she was not allowed to use her own money as she
wished, that Mr. Frye made her account for every penny, etc.,
etc. Mr. Glover made the mistake of taking his mother at
her word. He brought his suit upon the supposition that his
mother was the victim of designing persons who controlled her
affairs without consulting her, against her wish, and to their
own advantage a hypothesis which his attorneys entirely failed
to establish.
This lawsuit disclosed one interesting fact, namely, that
while in 1893 securities of Mrs. Eddy amounting to $100,000
were brought to Concord, and in January, 1899, she had $236,-
200, and while in 1907 she had about a million dollars' worth
of taxable property, Mrs. Eddy in 1901 returned a signed
458 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
statement to the assessors at Concord that the value of her
taxable property amounted to about $19,000. This statement
was sworn to year after year by Mr. Frye.
About a month after Mr. Glover's suit was withdrawn, Mrs.
Eddy purchased, through Robert Walker, a Christian Scientist
real-estate agent in Chicago, the old Lawrence mansion in
Newton, a suburb of Boston. The house was remodelled and
enlarged in great haste and at a cost which must almost have
equalled the original purchase price, $100,000. All the
arrangements were conducted with secrecy, and very few Chris
tian Scientists knew that it was Mrs. Eddy's intention to occupy
this house until she was there in person.
On Sunday, January 26, 1908, at two o'clock in the after
noon, Mrs. Eddy, attended by nearly a score of her followers,
boarded a special train at Concord. Extraordinary precau
tions were taken to prevent accidents. A pilot-engine pre
ceded the locomotive which drew Mrs. Eddy's special train,
and the train was followed by a third engine to prevent the
possibility of a rear-end collision. Dr. Alpheus B. Merrill, a
second cousin of Mrs. Eddy and a practising physician of
Concord, was of her party. Mrs. Eddy's face was heavily
veiled when she took the train at Concord and when she alighted
at Chestnut Hill station. Her carriage arrived at the Law
rence house late in the afternoon, and she was lifted out and
carried into the house by one of her male attendants.
Mrs. Eddy's new residence is a fine old stone mansion which
has been enlarged without injury to its original dignity. The
grounds cover an area of about twelve acres and are well
wooded. The house now contains about twenty-five rooms.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 459
There is an electric elevator adjoining Mrs. Eddy's private
apartments and two large vaults have been built into the house.
Since her arrival at Chestnut Hill, Mrs. Eddy, upon one of
her daily drives, saw for the first time the new building which
completes the Mother Church and which, like the original mod
est structure, is a memorial to her.
There are many reasons why Mrs. Eddy may have decided
to leave Concord. But the extreme haste with which her new
residence was got ready for her a body of several hundred
labourers was kept busy upon it all day, and another shift,
equally large, worked all night by the aid of arc-lights sug
gests that, even if practical considerations brought about Mrs.
Eddy's change of residence, her extreme impatience may have
resulted from a more personal motive. It is very probable that
Mrs. Eddy left Concord for the same reason that she left
Boston years ago : because she felt that malicious animal mag
netism was becoming too strong for her there. The action
brought by her son in Concord the previous summer she attrib
uted entirely to the work of mesmerists who were supposed to
be in control of her son's mind. Mrs. Eddy always believed that
this strange miasma of evil had a curious tendency to become
localised: that certain streets, mail-boxes, telegraph-offices,
vehicles, could be totally suborned by these invisible currents
of hatred and ill-will that had their source in the minds of her
enemies and continually encircled her. She believed that in this
way an entire neighbourhood could be made inimical to her,
and it is quite possible that, after the recent litigation in Con
cord, she felt that the place had become saturated with mesmer
ism and that she would never again find peace there.
CHAPTER XXVI
TRAINING THE VINE HOW MRS. EDDY HAS ORGANISED HER
CHURCH HER MANAGEMENT AND DISCIPLINE THE
CHURCH MANUAL RECENT MODIFICATIONS IN CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE PRACTICE MEMBERSHIP OF THE CHURCH PRAC
TICAL RESULTS OF MRS. EDDY'S LIFE-WORK
THE years since 1892 Mrs. Eddy has spent in training her
church in the way she desires it to go, in making it more and
more her own, and in issuing by-law after by-law to restrict
her followers in their church privileges and to guide them in
their daily walk. Mrs. Eddy, one must remember, was fifty
years of age before she knew what she wanted to do; sixty
when she bethought herself of the most effective way to do it,
by founding a church, and seventy when she achieved her
greatest triumph the reorganisation and personal control of
the Mother Church. But she did not stop there. Between her
seventieth and eightieth year, and even up to the present time,
she has displayed remarkable ingenuity in disciplining her
church and its leaders, and resourcefulness and energy in the
prosecution of her plans.
Mrs. Eddy's system of church government was not devised
in a month or a year, but grew, by-law on by-law, to meet
new emergencies and situations. To attain the end she desired
it was necessary to keep fifty or sixty thousand people working
460
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 461
as if the church were the first obj ect in their lives ; to encourage
hundreds of these to adopt church-work as their profession
and make it their only chance of worldly success; and yet to
hold all this devotion and energy in subservience to Mrs. Eddy
herself and to prevent any one of these healers, or preachers,
or teachers from attaining any marked personal prominence and
from acquiring a personal following. The church was to have
all the vigour of spontaneous growth, but was to grow only as
Mrs. Eddy permitted and to confine itself to the trellis she
had built for it.
Naturally, the first danger lay in the pastors of her branch
churches. Mrs. Stetson and Mrs. Laura Lathrop had built
up strong churches in New York; Mrs. Ewing was pastor of
a flourishing church in Chicago ; Mrs. Leonard of another in
Brooklyn ; Mrs. Williams in Buffalo ; Mrs. Steward in Toronto ;
Mr. Norcross in Denver. These pastors naturally became
leaders among the Christian Scientists in their respective com
munities, and came to be regarded as persons authorised to
expound Science and Health and the doctrines of Christian
Science. Such a state of things Mrs. Eddy considered danger
ous, not only because of the personal influence the pastor might
acquire over his flock, but because a pastor might, even without
intending to do so, give a personal colour to his interpretation
of her words. In his sermon he might expand her texts and
improvise upon her themes until gradually his hearers would
come to accept his own opinions for Mrs. Eddy's. The church
in Toronto might come to emphasise doctrines which the church
in Denver did not; here was a possible beginning of differing
denominations.
462 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
So, as Mrs. Eddy splendidly puts it, " In 1895 I ordained
the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,
as the Pastor, on this planet, of all the churches of the Chris
tian Science Denomination." In the Journal of April, 1895,
she announced, without previous warning, that there were to be
no more preachers ; that each church should have, instead, a
First and a Second Reader, and that the Sunday sermon was
to consist of extracts from the Bible and from Science and
Health, read to the congregation. In the beginning the First
Reader read from the Bible and the Second Reader from Mrs.
Eddy's book. But this Mrs. Eddy soon changed. The First
Reader now reads from Science and Health, and the Second
reads those passages of the Bible which Mrs. Eddy selects as
correlative. This service, Mrs. Eddy declares, was " authorised
by Christ." 1
When Mrs. Eddy issued this injunction, every Christian
Science preacher promptly and silently obeyed it. Many of
them kissed the rod. L. P. Norcross, one of the deposed pastors,
wrote humbly in the August Journal:
Did any one expect such a revelation, such a new departure would be
given? No, not in the way it came A former pastor of the
Mother Church once remarked that the day would dawn when the current
methods of preaching and worship would disappear, but he could not
discern how. . . . Such disclosures are too high for us to perceive.
To One alone did the message come.
Mrs. Eddy had no grudge against her pastors, and many of
1 In a notice to the churches, 1897, Mrs. Eddy says :
" The Bible and the Christian Science text-book are our only preachers. We
shall now read scriptural texts and their co-relative passages from our text
book these comprise our sermon. The canonical writings, together with
the word of our text-book, corroborating and explaining the Bible texts in their
denominational, spiritual import and application to all ages, past, present, and
future, constitute a sermon undivorced from truth, uncontaminated or fettered
by human hypotheses and Authorised by Christ."
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 463
them were made Readers in the churches which they had built
and in which they had formerly preached.
The " Reader " is well hedged in with by-laws and his
duties and limitations are clearly defined:
He is to read parts of Science and Health aloud at every
service.
He cannot read from a manuscript or from a transcribed
copy, but must read from the book itself.
He is, Mrs. Eddy says, to be " well read and well educated,"
but he shall at no time make any remarks explanatory of the
passages which he reads.
Before commencing to read from Mrs. Eddy's book " he
shall distinctly announce its full title and give the author's
name."
A Reader must not be a leader in the church. Besides these
restrictions there is a by-law which provides that Mrs. Eddy
can, without explanation, remove any reader at any time that
she sees fit to do so. 2
In the same number of the Journal in which she dismissed
her pastors and substituted Readers, Mrs. Eddy stated, in
an open letter, that her students would find in that issue " the
completion, as I now think, of the Divine directions sent out
to the churches." But it was not the completion. By the
summer of 1902 Septimus J. Hanna, First Reader of the Mother
Church in Boston, had become, without the liberty to preach
or to " make remarks," so influential that Mrs. Eddy made a
new ruling that the Reader's term of office should be limited
2 For the text of these by-laws see Christian Science Manual (1904), Articles
IV and XXIII.
464 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
to three years, 3 and, Mr. Hanna's term then being up, he was
put into the lecture field. The highest dignity, then, that any
Christian Scientist could hope for was to be chosen as Reader
for three years at a comfortable salary.
Why, it has often been asked, did the more influential pastors
people with a large personal following, like Mrs. Stetson
consent to resign their pulpits in the first place and afterward
to be stripped of privilege after privilege? J3ome of them, of
course, submitted because they believed that Mrs. Eddy pos
sessed " Divine Wisdom " ; others because they remembered what
had happened to dissenters before them. Of all those who had
broken away from Mrs. Eddy's authority, not one had attained
to anything like her success or material prosperity, while many
had followed wandering fires and had come to nothing. Chris
tian Science leaders had staked their fortunes upon the hypothe
sis that Mrs. Eddy possessed " divine wisdom " ; it was as ex
pounders of this wisdom that they had obtained their influence
and built up their churches. To rebel against the authority
of Mrs. Eddy's wisdom would be to discredit themselves ; to
discredit Mrs. Eddy's wisdom would have been to destroy their
whole foundation. To claim an understanding and an inspira
tion equal to Mrs. Eddy's would have been to cheapen and
invalidate everything that gave Christian Science an advantage
over other religions. Had they once denied the Revelation
and the Revelator upon which their church was founded, the
whole structure would have fallen in upon them. If Mrs. Eddy's
Mrs. Eddy stated In regard to this ruling that it was to have immediate
effect only in the Mother Church, adding : " Doubtless the churches adopting
this by-law will discriminate its adaptability to their conditions. But if now
Is not the time the branch churches can wait for the favoured moment to act
on this subject."
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 465
Intelligence were not divine in one case, who would be able to
say that it was in another? If they could not accept Mrs.
Eddy's wisdom when she said " there shall be no pastors," how
could they persuade other people to accept it when she said
" there is no matter " ? It was clear, even to those who writhed
under the restrictions imposed upon them, that they must stand
or fall with Mrs. Eddy's Wisdom, and that to disobey it was
to compromise their own careers. Even in the matter of get
ting on in the world, it was better to be a doorkeeper in
the Mother Church than to dwell in the tents of the " mental
healers. "
Probably it was harder for Mrs. Stetson to retire from
the pastorship than for any one else. Mrs. Stetson had gone
to New York when Christian Science was practically unknown
there, and from poor and small beginnings had built up a rich
and powerful church. But, when the command came, she
stepped out of the pulpit she had built. She is to-day probably
the most influential person, after Mrs. Eddy, in the Christian
Science body. In 1907 the New York World published several
interviews with persons who asserted that they believed Mrs.
Eddy to be controlled by a clique of Christian Scientists who
were acting for Mrs. Stetson's interests. In June Mrs. Stetson
wrote Mrs. Eddy a letter which was printed in the Christian
Science Sentinel and which read in part:
BOSTOX, Mass., June 9, 1907.
MY PRECIOUS LEADER: I am glad I know that I am in the hands of
God, not of men. These reports are only the revival of a lie which I have
not heard for a long time. It is a renewed attack upon me and my loyal
students, to turn me from following in the footsteps of Christ by making
another attempt to dishearten me and make me weary of the struggle to
demonstrate my trust in God to deliver me from the " accuser of our
466 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
brethren." It is a diabolical attempt to separate me from you, as my
Leader and Teacher. . . .
Oh, Dearest, it is such a lie! No one who knows us can believe this.
It is vicarious atonement. Has the enemy no more argument to use, that
it has to go back to this? It is exhausting its resources and I hope the
end is near. You know my love for you, beloved; and my students love
you as their Leader and Teacher; they follow your teachings and lean on
the " sustaining infinite." They who refuse to accept you as God's mes
senger, or ignore the message which you bring, will not get up by some
other way, but will come short of salvation. . . .
Dearly beloved, we are not ascending out of sense as fast as we desire,
but we are trusting in God to put off the false and put on the Christ.
This lie cannot disturb you nor me. I love you and my students love you,
and we never touch you with such a thought as is mentioned.
Lovingly your child,
AUGUSTA E. STETSON.
But Mrs. Stetson's protestations of loyalty availed her noth
ing. She was more than ever kept under surveillance by Mrs.
Eddy's directors, and when at last, in December, 1908, it be
came known that Mrs. Stetson had formed elaborate plans to
extend her church system in New York, Mrs. Eddy was acutely
alarmed. Mrs. Stetson, with her church behind her, had, with
out consulting Mrs. Eddy it would seem, completed her plans for
building a magnificent new church on Riverside Drive, New
York. This church, so it was announced, was to " rival in
beauty of architecture any other religious structure in Amer
ica," and it was to be built by Mrs. Stetson, and managed by
her and an advisory board. Although Mrs. Stetson explained
that the proposed new church would be organised regularly
a a branch of the Mother Church in Boston and in accordance
with the regulations laid down by Mrs. Eddy in the Church
Manual, it was evident that Mrs. Eddy regarded the plan as
a scheme of Mrs. Stetson's to rival the great Boston temple and
to build up a church system of her own.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 467
Mrs. Eddy lost not a moment in condemning the project.
Her daily newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor of Boston,
and her church organ, the Christian Science Sentinel, which
reach the entire Christian Science membership, announced edi
torially that Mrs. Eddy was not pleased " with what purport
to be plans of First Church of Christ Scientist of New York
City, for she learned of this proposed rival to the Mother
Church for the first time, from the daily press." " Three lead
ing facts," continued the editorial, " remain immortal in the
history of Christian Science, namely :
1. This Science is already established, and it has the support of all
true Christian Scientists throughout the world.
2. Any competition or any rivalry in Christian Science is abnormal, and
will expose and explode itself.
3. Any attempt at rivalry or superiority in Christian Science is un
christian; therefore it is unscientific. The great Teacher said: " As ye would
that men should do to you, do ye."
Thoughtful Christian Scientists are profoundly grateful to their beloved
Leader, Mrs. Eddy, because in her far-seeing wisdom she has ordained
The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass., already famous
for originating reforms, as The Mother Church of Christian Science, and
all other churches in the denomination as branches of the parent Vine.
Says the Church Manual: " In its relation to other Christian Science
churches, in its by-laws and self-government, The Mother Church stands
alone; it occupies a postion that no other church can fill" (Art. xxiii.,
Sec. 3). It is a fact of general observation that in proportion as branch
churches adhere loyally to The Mother Church, and obey implicitly its
by-laws, they bear abundant fruit in healing the sick and sinful.
Machinery was set in motion at headquarters to restrain and
repress Mrs. Stetson's activities. In the summer of 1909 a
new by-law was issued. It provided that teachers and practi
tioners could no longer maintain offices or rooms in the churches,
in the reading-rooms, or in rooms connected therewith. It was
468 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
known by those who understood the situation that this ruling
was aimed directly at Mrs. Stetson. With other healers of her
congregation she had maintained handsome offices in the First
Church in New York, where she healed patients, instructed
classes and individuals, and daily met her friends and co-workers.
Mrs. Stetson obeyed this by-law. She merely retreated to her
house, which adjoins her church and is connected with it by a
covered passage, and conducted her work as before.
Mrs. Eddy, however, was not to be thus easily defeated.
She was determined that Mrs. Stetson, whom she considered as
an open rival, should be removed as such, and that her circle
should be broken up. During the summer and early autumn
of 1909 Mrs. Stetson was brought before the Mother Church
directors in Boston and closely questioned, and many of her
students were also examined before this court-martial. It was
decided that Mrs. Stetson must be disciplined, and she was
officially deprived of her rank as a healer and as a teacher.
She was forbidden to teach or practise Christian Science until
she had proved her fitness for such work. She was, therefore,
placed on a three years' probation, at the conclusion of which,
if her conduct has been exemplary and if she has met Mrs.
Eddy's requirements as to loyalty, she may, if Mrs. Eddy sees
fit, again be permitted to teach and practise. The reasons
given by the directors for reducing Mrs. Stetson were : erroneous
teaching of Christian Science; the exercise of undue influence
over her students, which tended to hinder their moral and spirit
ual growth; turning the attention of her students to herself
and away from Divine principle; teaching and practising con
trary to Science and Health; and finally, that " Mrs. Stetson
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 469
attempts to control^ and to injure persons by mental means,
this being utterly contrary to the teachings of Christian
Science."
It is interesting to note that, in dealing with the case of Mrs.
Stetson, Mrs. Eddy once again resorted to the faithful weapon
which had never failed her in all her executions of the past
tlie time-worn charge of mental malpractice.
Her pastors having been satisfactorily dealt with, the next
danger Mrs. Eddy saw lay in her teachers and " academies."
Mrs. Eddy had found, of course, that a great many Christian
Scientists wished to make their living out of their new religion ;
that possibility, indeed, was one of the most effective advantages
which Christian Science had to offer over other religions. In
the early days of the church, while Mrs. Eddy was still in
structing classes in Christian Science at her ." college," teach
ing was a much more remunerative business than healing. Mrs.
Eddy charged each student $300 for a primary course of seven
lessons, and the various Christian Science " institutes " and
" academies " about the country charged from $100 to $200
per student. So long as Mrs. Eddy was herself teaching and
never took patients, she could not well forbid other teachers
to do likewise. But after she retired to Concord, she took
the teachers in hand. Mrs. Eddy knew that Christian Science
was propagated and that converts were made, not through doc
trine, but through cures. She had found that out in the be
ginning, when Richard Kennedy's cures brought her her first
success. She knew, too, that teaching Christian Science was a
much easier profession than healing by it, and that the teacher
risked no encounter with the law. Since teaching was both
470 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
easier and more remunerative it would be natural for teachers
to multiply at the sacrifice of the healers, and Mrs. Eddy dis
couraged this by cutting down the teacher's fee, and limiting
the number of pupils which one teacher might instruct in a year.
By 1904 Mrs. Eddy had got the teacher's fee down to fifty
dollars per student, and a teacher was not permitted to teach
more than thirty students a year. From 1903 to 1906 all
teaching was suspended under the by-law " Healing better than
teaching."
In the fall of 1895 Mrs. Eddy issued her instructions to the
churches in the form of a volume entitled the Church Manual
of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass. The
by-laws herein contained, she says, " were impelled by a power
not one's own, were written at different dates, as occasion re
quired." This book is among Mrs. Eddy's copyrighted works,
and has now been through more than forty editions. Some
of the by-laws in the earlier editions are perplexing.
We find that " Careless comparison or irreverent reference
to Christ Jesus, is abnormal in a Christian Scientist and pro
hibited." It is probable that no Christian church had ever
before found it necessary to make such a prohibition.
The Manual, however, is chiefly interesting as an exposition
of Mrs. Eddy's method of church government and as an in
ventory of her personal prerogatives. Never was a title more
misleadingly modest than Mrs. Eddy's title of " Pastor Emer
itus " of the Mother Church.
Next to Mrs. Eddy in authority is the Board of Directors,
who were chosen by Mrs. Eddy and who are subject to her in
* Church Manual (llth ed.), Article XXXII.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 471
all their official acts. Any one of these directors can at any
time be dismissed upon Mrs. Eddy's request, and the vacancy
can be filled only by a candidate whom she has approved. All
the church business is transacted by these directors, no other
members of the church may be present at the business meetings,
and at any time Mrs. Eddy's request will remove them. The
members of this board are pledged to secrecy ; they " shall
neither report the discussions of this Board, nor those with
Mrs. Eddy." 5
These directors are Mrs. Eddy's executive self, created by
her and committed to silence. Their chief duties are to elect
to office whomsoever Mrs. Eddy appoints, and to hold their
peace.
The President of the church is annually elected by the
directors, the election being subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval.
The First and Second Readers are elected every third year
by the directors, subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval, but she can
remove a Reader either from the Mother Church or from any
of the branch churches whenever she sees fit and without ex
planation. 7
The Clerk and Treasurer of the church are elected once a
year by the directors, subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval. 8
Executive Members: Prior to 1903 these were known as
First Members. They shall not be less than fifty in number,
nor more than one hundred. They must have certain qualifica
tions (such as residing within five hundred miles of Boston), and
they must hold a meeting once a year and special meetings at
6 Church Manual (43d ed.), Article I, Sec. 5.
"Ibid. (43d ed.), Article I, Sec. 2.
1 1bid. (43d ed.), Article I, Sec. 4. Ibid, (llth ed.), Article XXIII, Sec. 2.
s IUd. (43d ed.), Article I, Sec. 3.
472 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Mrs. Eddy's call. They have no powers and MO duties 9 and
they are not allowed to be present at the business meetings
of the church. The manner of their election is unusual. The
by-laws state that a member can be made an Executive Member
only after a letter is received by the directors from Mrs. Eddy
requesting them to make said persons Executive Members ; and
then, " they shall be elected by the unanimous vote of the Board
of Directors." 10
This " executive " board is a form only, and membership on
it is merely a mark of Mrs. Eddy's personal favour. To her
followers, however, this is sufficient reason for its existence, and
they are proud to be called members of it.
Although Mrs. Eddy has made a by-law which says that the
branch churches shall have " local self-government," she gives
special instructions in the Manual as to what the branch churches
may or may not do. The Church Manual is closely followed
by all the branch churches, and as practically all the members
of the branch churches are also members of the Mother Church,
it is the duty of each to obey all the requirements of the Manual.
A branch church can only be organised by a member of the
Mother Church. 11
A branch church may not use the article " the " in its title.
Only the Mother Church may employ it. 12
No conference of branch churches shall be held except the
annual conference at the Mother Church. 13
9 Formerly the Executive Members were permitted to fix the salaries of the
Readers, but in the last edition of the Manual this privilege has been with
drawn.
10 Church Manual (43d ed.), Article VI.
11 Ibid. (1904), Article XXVIII.
"Ibid. (1904), Article XXVIII.
13 Ibid. (1904), Article XXVIII.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 473
A branch church may not have other church branches, nor
shall it be organised with Executive Members. 1 *
Communion time for the branch churches is fixed by the
Manual. 15
In laying its corner-stone, a branch church must not permit
a " large gathering of people." 16
The services of the branch churches are definitely prescribed;
they are to consist of music, Mrs. Eddy's prayer, and -oral
readings from Science and Health and the Bible.
Mrs. Eddy may appoint or remove without explanation
the Readers of the branch churches at any time. 17
The branch churches may never have comments or remarks
made by their Readers, either upon passages from Science and
Health or from the Bible. 18
The branch churches may have lectures only by lecturers
whom Mrs. Eddy has appointed in the usual way through the
" vote " of her Board of Directors. 19 And the lecture must
have passed censorship. 20
After listening to such a lecture, the members of the branch
churches are not permitted to give a reception or to meet for
social intercourse. Mrs. Eddy tells them to " depart in quiet
thought." 21 It seems probable that this by-law was devised
for the spiritual good of the lecturer. If feted or made much
of after his discourse he might easily become puffed up with
pride of place.
1 Church Manual (1904), Article XXVIII.
5 Ibid. (lf)04). Article XXVIII.
6 Ibid. (1004), Article XXVIII.
1 Ibid, (llth ed.), Article XXIII.
8 Ibid. (43d ed.), Article IV.
9 Ibid. (43d ed.), Article XXXIV.
20 Ibid. (43d ed.), Article XXXIV.
21 Ibid. (43d ed.), Article XXXIV.
474 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Services in the branch churches, as in the Mother Church,
are limited to the Sunday morning and evening readings from
the Bible and Science and Health, the Wednesday. evening ex
perience meetings, and to the communion service. (In the
Mother Church this occurs but once a year, in the branch
churches twice.) There is no baptismal service, 22 no marriage
or burial service, and weddings and funerals are never con
ducted in any of the Christian Science churches.
Included in the Mother Church organisation are the Publi
cation Committee, the Christian Science Publishing Society, the
Board of Lectureship, the Board of Missionaries, and the
Board of Education, all under Mrs. Eddy's personal control.
The manager of the Publication Committee, at present Mr.
Alfred Farlow, is " elected " annually by the Board of Direct
ors under Mrs. Eddy's instructions. His salary is to be not
less than $5,000 a year. This Publication Committee is a press
bureau, consisting of a manager with headquarters in Boston
and of various branch committees throughout the field. It is the
duty of a member of this committee, wherever he resides, to reply
promptly through the press to any criticism of Christian Sci
ence or of Mrs. Eddy which may be made in his part of the
country, and to insert in the newspapers of his territory as
much matter favourable to Christian Science as they will print.
In replying to criticism this bureau will, if necessary, pay the
regular advertising rate for the publication of their statements.
The members of this committee, after having written and pub
lished their articles in defence of Christian Science, are also
2i When the Boston church was holding its services in Chickering Hall, Mrs.
Eddy baptised a class of children. No water was used in the ceremony. This
was the only baptismal service ever held in a Christian Science church.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 475
responsible, says the Manual, " for having the papers contain
ing these articles circulated in large quantities." This press
agency has been extremely effective in pushing the interests of
Christian Science, in keeping it before the public, and in building
up a desirable legendry around Mrs. Eddy.
The Christian Science Publishing Society is conducted for
the purpose of publishing and marketing Mrs. Eddy's works
and the three Christian Science periodicals, the Christian Science
Journal, the Christian Science Sentinel, and Der Christian Sci
ence Herald. It is managed and controlled by a Board of
Trustees appointed by Mrs. Eddy, and the net profits of the
business are turned over semi-annually to the treasurer of the
Mother Church. The manager and editors are appointed for
one year only, and must be elected or reflected by a vote of
the directors and " the consent of the Pastor Emeritus, given
in her own handAvriting." The Manual also states that a person
who is not accepted by Mrs. Eddy as suitable shall in no manner
be connected with publishing her books or editing her peri
odicals.
Until 1898 any Christian Scientist could give public talks
or lectures upon the doctrines of his faith, but in January of
that year Mrs. Eddy withdrew this privilege. She appointed
a Board of Lectureship, carefully selecting each member and
assigning each to a certain district. In this work she placed
several of her most influential men, among whom was Septimus
J. Hanna. As itinerant lecturers these men could not very
well build up a dangerously strong personal following, and they
could very ably set forth the Christian Science doctrines. These
lecturers are elected annually, subject to Mrs. Eddy's approval.
476 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Their representative lectures must be censored by the clerk of
the Mother Church. The Manual stipulates that these lectures
must " bear testimony to the facts pertaining to the life of
the Pastor Emeritus."
Seven missionaries are elected annually by the Board of
Directors, and their duties are to fill vacancies in pulpits and
to " correctly propagate " Christian Science wherever it is most
needed.
The Board of Education consists of three members, the
President, Vice-President, and a teacher. Mrs. Eddy is the
permanent President unless, says the Manual, she sees fit to
" resign over her own signature." The Vice-President and
teacher are elected from time to time, " subject to the approval
of the Pastor Emeritus."
It is not easy to become a member of the Mother Church.
The applicant for admission must read nothing upon meta
physics or religion except Mrs. Eddy's books and the Bible,
and his application must be countersigned by one of Mrs. Eddy's
loyal students, who is made responsible for the candidate's
sincerity. There are many things for which the new member
may be expelled after he is once admitted into the church.
He may not haunt the roads upon which Mrs. Eddy drives. He
may not discuss, lecture upon, or debate upon Christian Science
in public without permission from one of her representatives.
He must not be a " leader " in the church and must never be
called one. He may read only the Bible and Mrs. Eddy's
books for religious instruction. He shall not " vilify " the
Pastor Emeritus. He must go to Mrs. Eddy's home and
serve her in person for one year if she requires it of him. He
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 477
may not permit his children to believe in Santa Claus Mrs.
Eddy abolished Santa Claus by proclamation in 1904. He may
not read or quote from Mrs. Eddy's books without first naming
the author. Mrs. Eddy says, in explanation of this by-law:
" To pour into the ears of listeners the sacred revelations of
Christian Science indiscriminately, or without characterising
their origin and thus distinguishing them from the writings of
authors who think at random on this subject, is to lose some
weight in the scale of right thinking." 23
A Christian Scientist " shall neither buy, sell nor circulate
Christian Science literature which is not correct in its state
ment," etc., Mrs. Eddy, of course, determining whether or not
the statement is correct. He " shall not patronise a publishing
house or bookstore that has for sale obnoxious books."
A Christian Scientist may not belong to any club or society,
which excludes either sex, Free Masons excepted, outside the
Mother Church. Mrs. Eddy says that church organisations
are ample for him. 24
It is indicative of Mrs. Eddy's influence over her followers
that when this by-law was issued, less than twenty inquiries
(so her secretary announced) were received at Pleasant View.
Men resigned from their political, business, and social clubs,
women from their literary and patriotic organisations, without
a murmur and without a question.
No hymns may be sung in the Mother Church unless they
have been approved by Mrs. Eddy, and Mrs. Eddy's hymns
must be sung at stated intervals. " If a solo singer in the
28 Church Manual (llth ed.), Article XV.
2t lbid. (43d ed.), Article XXVI.
478 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
Mother Church shall either neglect or refuse to sing alone a
hymn written by our Leader and Pastor Emeritus, as often
as once each month, and oftener if the Directors so direct, a
meeting shall be called and the salary of this singer shall be
stopped."
Above all these lesser by-laws Mrs. Eddy holds one in which
her supreme authority rests. A mesmerist or " mental mal-
practitioner " is to be excommunicated, and " if the author of
Science and Health shall bear witness to the offence of mental
malpractice, it shall be considered sufficient evidence thereof."
The accused can make no defence, and has no appeal. In the
matter of hypnotism, Mrs. Eddy's mere word is enough. She
has, she says, an unerring instinct by which she can detect
hypnotism in any creature :
I possess a spiritual sense of what the malicious mental practitioner
is mentally arguing which cannot be deceived; I can discern in the human
mind thoughts, motives, and purposes; and neither mental arguments nor
psychic power can affect this spiritual insight. 26
Of late years Mrs. Eddy has shown a disposition to so modify
the practice of Christian Science healing as not to conflict with
the laws. Christian Scientists formerly treated all diseases,
without regard to legal restrictions. But experience has shown
Mrs. Eddy that an evasion of the law is regarded by the public
as a defiance of the law, and forms a serious obstacle to the
spread of Christian Science. It also has involved Christian
Scientists constantly in lawsuits.
In March, 1901, Mrs. Eddy announced in the Journal that
* Church Manual (43d ed.). Article XXII. Sec. 4.
28 Christian Science History, by Mary B. G. Eddy (1st ed.), p. 16.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 479
thereafter Christian Scientists must submit to vaccination, and
report cases of contagion as required by law.
A year later the teaching and practice of obstetrics was
dropped by order of Mrs. Eddy, who gave as the reason,
" Obstetrics is not Science, and will not be taught." This was
after obstetrics had been taught and practised as " Science "
for thirty-two years.
An important change of practice was instituted when, in
December, 1902, the Journal announced : " Mrs. Eddy advises,
until the public thought becomes better acquainted with Chris
tian Science, that Christian Scientists decline to doctor infec
tious or contagious diseases." On the same subject Mrs. Eddy
wrote : " Christian Scientists should be influenced by their own
judgment in the taking of a case of malignant disease, they
should consider well their ability to cope with the case and
not overlook the fact that there are those lying in wait to catch
them in their sayings ; neither should they forget that in their
practice, whether successful or not, they are not especially pro
tected by law."
Christian Scientists are now permitted to consult with medical
practitioners in certain cases. A by-law provides that, " if a
member of this church has a patient that he does not heal ; and
whose case he cannot lawfully diagnose, he may consult with
an M.D. on the anatomy involved. And it shall be the privilege
of a Christian Scientist to confer with an M.D. on ontology,
or the Science of Being."
Christian Scientists are no longer allowed to use the titles,
" Reverend," or " Doctor," unless they have received these
titles under the laws of the state.
480 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
A practitioner is not permitted to sue a patient to recover
payment for his services, and he is required to " reasonably
reduce " his fee in chronic cases, and in cases where he has not
effected a cure.
The result of Mrs. Eddy's planning and training and pruning
is that she has built up the largest and most powerful organisa
tion ever founded by any woman in America. Probably no
other woman so handicapped so limited in intellect, so un
certain in conduct, so tortured by hatred and hampered by petty
animosities has ever risen from a state of helplessness and
dependence to a position of such power and authority. All
that Christian Science comprises to-day the Mother Church,
branch churches, healers, teachers. Readers, boards, committees,
societies are as completely under Mrs. Eddy's control as if
she were their temporal as well as their spiritual ruler. The
growth of her power has been extensive as well as inten
sive.
In June, 1907, the membership of the Mother Church, accord
ing to the Secretary's report, was 43,876. The membership
of the branch churches amounted to 42,846. As members
of the branch churches are almost invariably members of the
Mother Church as well, there cannot be more than 60,000 Chris
tian Scientists in the world to-day, and the number is probably
nearer 50,000.
In June, 1907, there were in all 710 branch churches. Fifty-
eight of these are in foreign countries : twenty-five in the Do
minion of Canada, fourteen in Great Britain, two in Ireland,
four in Australia, one in South Africa, eight in Mexico, two
in Germany, one in Holland, and one in France. There are
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 481
also 295 Christian Science societies, not yet incorporated Into
churches, thirty of which are in foreign countries. 27
In reading these figures one must bear in mind the fact
that thirty years ago the only Christian Science church in the
world was struggling to pay its rent in Boston.
An effective element in the growth of the church is the fact
that a considerable proportion of Christian Scientists make their
living by their religion, and their worldly fortunes as well as
their spiritual comfort are in their church; they must prosper
or decline with Christian Science, and they prosecute the cause
of their church with all their energies and with entire singleness
of purpose. The perfect system under which the church is
organised provides for the constant advertising, by the Publi
cation Committee, of the religion, of the church, and of Mrs.
Eddy; and this has been perhaps the greatest factor in the
growth of the church. There is an impression to-day that the
Christian Science church numbers its members by hundreds of
thousands ; and this impression was created and is continued
by the exaggerated statements of Mrs. Eddy herself, and of
her leading church officers, and by the insistent work of the
Publication Committees.
Christian Science itself presents, superficially, an old and
well-worn truth, besides much that is fallacious and absurd;
and the secret of its popularity lies in the fact, not that it has
played tricks with metaphysical platitudes, but that it has
adapted them to the buoyant spirit of the times.
in
in AustraliarT"i l n"cMna?To5' in EJngiandTViiT Ireland, 9 in Scotland, 7 in
France 15 in Germany, 4 in Holland, 1 in India. 1 in Italy, 1 in the Philippine
Islands, 1 in Russia, 1 in South America, 7 in Switzerland.
482 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
What Mrs. Eddy has accomplished has been due solely to
her own compelling personality. She has never been a dreamer
of dreams or a seer of visions, and she has not the mind for
deep and searching investigation into any problem. Her genius
has been of the eminently practical kind, which can meet and
overcome unfavourable conditions by sheer force of energy, and
in Mrs. Eddy's case this potency has been accompanied by a
remarkable shrewdness, which has had its part in determining
her career. Her problem has been, not to work out the theory
of mental healing, but to popularise it, and having popularised
it, to maintain a personal monopoly of its principle; and the
history of Christian Science shows how near she has come to
doing this.
Not until Mrs. Eddy met Quimby had she ever known any
serious purpose, and although she was superbly equipped by
nature to blaze the way for new and bizarre ideas, and was
ah?ays the first to take up with such irregular and passing
notions as mesmerism, clairvoyance, writing-mediumship, etc.,
she had never produced an original idea on her own account.
With Quimby came her opportunity, and once given an
actual purpose, Mrs. Eddy, with her unequalled zeal for
not letting go of a thing, was at once upon the highroad to
success.
For herself, she has won what has always seemed to her most
valuable, and what has been from the beginning a crying
necessity of her nature: personal ease, an exalted position, and
the right to exact homage from the multitude.
For Quimby, she has, and mainly by reason of her ingratitude
toward her old benefactor, secured public attention to his theory
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 483
of mental healing. Through Dr. Warren F. Evans and Mr.
and Mrs. Julius A. Dresser the Quimby idea, 28 previous to
the Christian Science interpretation of it, had been slowly and
laboriously coming into a limited practice ; but with the entrance
of Mrs. Eddy into the field, with her extravagant claims of
miraculous revelation and her violent methods of procedure, the
whole movement received a tremendous impetus ; and uncon
sciously and very much against her will, she has been the most
effective agent in promoting Quimbyism as well as Eddyism.
For, although it has been one of Mrs. Eddy's chief cares to
stem the progress of the rival school, and to raise an impassable
barrier between her own cult and that of all other mental healers,
it has not disturbed the fact that for practical purposes,
Eddyism is simply Quimbyism, overlaid with superstition and
ignorance ; and the future of Mrs. Eddy's school depends
largely upon the willingness of her followers to continue their
self-deception on this point, which is the chief requirement of
her religion.
Whatever there is of value to the world in Mrs. Eddy's
system, lies in the practicality of its healing methods, and the
foregoing chapters have shown that Mrs. Eddy realises this,
2 The reader who is interested in Quimby's teaching and healing is referred
to The True History of Mental Science, by Julius A. Dresser, published by
George H. Ellis, 272 Congress Street, Boston.
Dr Warren F. Evans, in his book, Mental Medicine, published three years
before the first edition of Science and Health, said : Disease being in its root
a wrong belief, change that belief and we cure the disease. By faith we are
thus made whole. There is a law here which the world will sometime under
stand and use in the cure of the diseases that afflict mankind. The late Dr.
Quimby. of Portland, one of the most successful healers of this or any age,
embraced this view of the nature of disease, and by a long succession of the
most remarkable cures, effected by psychopathic remedies, at the same time
proved the truth of the theory and the efficiency of that mode of treatment.
Had he lived in a remote age or country, the wonderful facts which occurred in
his practice would now have been deemed either mythical or miraculous,
seemed to reproduce the wonders of Gospel history. But all this was only
an exhibition of the force of suggestion, or the action of the law of faith,
over a patient in the impressible condition."
484 LIFE OF MARY BAKER G. EDDY AND
for she has not only constantly stimulated the healing depart
ment of her church, but, year by year, she has restrained and
modified its practice, until to-day Christian Science is scarcely
more radical in its methods than are the regular schools of
her best hated enemy, materia medica. Physicians have been
forced to take into account, more and more, in their dealings
with the sick, the condition of the patient's mind, and to use
it as a co-operative force with their medical .treatment ; and
in America this is largely owing to the stir made by Mrs. Eddy's
healers in the sick world. In Europe this result has been ob
tained, not through mystery and revelation and quackery, but
in the course of regular scientific study and experiment, and
in the schools of the foremost European neurologists, psychical
treatment for certain disorders has been for many years a
recognised and established method.
There is now in America a benevolent attempt on the part
of certain churches to introduce a kind of reformed Christian
Science, and to establish " clinics " where sick cases may be
diagnosed by regular school physicians, while the pastors in
charge of the clinics administer the psychical treatment in an
effort to aid in the cure. They aim, at these clinics, to conduct
the treatment on as scientific a basis as is possible, and their
failures as well as their successful cures are honestly recorded.
These church movements are an indirect outcome of Mrs. Eddy's
activities. Her own congregations are built up at the expense
of those of the orthodox churches, and it is largely as a means
of self-preservation, as well as owing to a laudable desire to
increase the benefits of mental healing, that these churches are
taking up the practical side of Christian Science, and are
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE 485
trying to make it " regular " and to conform to what is known
of psychological causes and effects.
These various efforts to investigate the source and workings
of an elusive healing principle are not without their value,
even if the actual practice is more often based upon enthusiasm
than upon any exact knowledge. They serve to emphasise
both the benefits of psychical treatment and the harm which
may rise from its ignorant or exclusive application in radical
cases. But, from the nature of the subject, it is certain that
the permanent value of suggestive therapeutics will ultimately
be determined, not by the inexperienced or the overzealous in
any walk of life, but through the slow and patient experiments
of medical science; and this, too, will be the final test of the
value of Mrs. Eddy's life-work.
APPENDIX A
IN Mrs. Eddy's autobiography, Retrospection and Intro
spection, she gives the following story of her ancestry :
My ancestors, according to the flesh, were from both Scotland and Eng
land, my great-grandfather on my father's side being John McNeil of
Edinburgh. His wife, my great-grandmother, was Marion Moor, and her
family is said to have been in some way related to Hannah More, the
pious and popular authoress of a century ago. John and Marion Moor
McNeil had a daughter who perpetuated her mother's name. This second
Marion McNeil was married to an Englishman named Joseph Baker, and so
became my paternal grandmother. Joseph Baker and his wife, Marion
McNeil, came to America seeking freedom to worship God, though they
could scarcely have crossed the Atlantic more than a score of years prior
to the Revolutionary period. A relative of my grandfather Baker was Gen
eral Henry Knox, of Revolutionary fame. In the line of my grandmother
Baker's family was the late Sir John McNeil, a Scotch knight who was
prominent in British politics and at one time held the position of ambas
sador to Persia.
The statements made by Mrs. Eddy concerning her connection
with the McNeil family of Scotland having been published in
a way that brought them to the attention of that family in
Scotland, drew a denial from the granddaughter of the real
Sir John MacNeill. In the Ladies' Home Journal for Novem
ber, 1903, there appeared an article entitled " Mrs. Eddy as
She Really Is," introduced by an editorial note which stated:
" The writing of this article and the making of illustrations
on the opposite page were done with the special permission of
Mrs. Eddy, and both pages having been seen by her in proof,
received her full approval." In the course of this article, it is
486
APPENDIX A 487
said: "Among Mrs. Eddy's ancestors was Sir John McNeill,
a Scotch knight prominent in British politics, and ambassador to
Persia. Her great-grandfather was the Right Honourable Sir
John McNeill of Edinburgh, Scotland. Mrs. Eddy is the only
survivor of her father's family, which bore the coat-of-arms
of the ancient McNeills. The motto is Vincere aut mori
(conquer or die). Surrounding the shield and enclosed in a
heavy wreath is the motto of the Order of the Bath, tria juncta
in uno (three joined in one)." Soon after this was published
it was challenged by a granddaughter of Sir John MacNeill,
Mrs. Florence Macalister of Aberdeen, Scotland, who wrote
to Mrs. Eddy correcting her statement, and caused a correction
to be published in London Truth. She says :
I am the only married grandchild of the late Right Honourable Sir
John MacNeill, G.C.B., of Edinburgh, " who was prominent in British
politics and Ambassador to Persia," and Mrs. Eddy is certainly not my
daughter.
My mother, Margaret Ferooza MacNeill, was the only child of his who
reached maturity, though he was three times married; she married my
father, Duncan Stewart, R.N., now captain, retired, and died in 1871. Of
her six children, one died unmarried, three years ago; five survive, of whom
four are unmarried.
I am the wife of Commander N. G. Macalister, R.N., who is at present
inspecting officer of coast guard for Aberdeen division.
I wrote to the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal who published Mrs.
Eddy's statement, asking him to publish a correction, and I sent a copy
of the letter to Mrs. Eddy herself. She did not reply at all, and he excused
himself from publishing it on the ground that the correction could not
appear for five months.
In March, 1904, after the publication of Mrs. Macalister's
correction had been copied widely in American papers, Mrs.
Eddy caused a paragraph to be inserted in the Christian Science
Sentinel, saying that writers of her genealogy had been accus-
488 APPENDIX A
tomed to connect her with the Sir John MacNeill family, and
it was supposed she had a right to use the MacNeill coat-of-
arms. She notified genealogical writers not to do so thereafter.
Mrs. Eddy, however, continues to use the MacNeill coat-of-
arms, which is engraved upon her stationery and impressed
upon her seal. She defended her continued use of the coat-of-
arms in a widely-published statement, issued in January, 1907,
as follows:
The facts regarding the McNeill coat-of-arms are as follows: Fannie
McNeill, President Pierce's niece, afterward Mrs. Judge Potter, presented
to me my coat-of-arms, saying that it was taken in connection with her
own family coat-of-arms. I never doubted the veracity of the gift.
Mrs. Macalister, in a recent letter, writes : " I have been
amused to find that Mrs. Eddy still uses my grandfather's coat-
of-arms on her notepaper, including the motto of the Bath,
which even his son, had he left one, would have had no right
to use, as the G.C.B. was for life only."
APPENDIX B
ANDREW JACKSON DAVIS was born August 11, 1826, in Bloom
ing Grove, Orange County, N. Y. He grew up in poverty and
ignorance, and at seventeen he had received about five months'
schooling and had learned to read, write, and do simple sums
in arithmetic. He was of average intelligence and had no tastes
or ambitions out of the ordinary. In the year 1843, he first
heard of animal magnetism, and he was himself magnetised
repeatedly by William Levingston, a tailor in Poughkeepsie,
where Davis then lived. Davis showed surprising clairvoyant
powers while in the magnetic state, and soon he, with Levingston
as magnetiser, was using his clairvoyant ability to diagnose cases
of sickness and to prescribe remedies. By degrees what he called
his " scientific " insight was developed, and soon, his biographer
says, " there was no science the general principles and much
of minutiae of which he did not seem to comprehend while in
his abnormal state."
On March 7, 1844, Davis fell into a magnetic or " superior "
condition without the assistance of the magnetic process, and
for two days he was " insensible to external things." He wan
dered in the Catskill Mountains, and while there he received,
" interiorly," information of his future mission.
The following year he went to New York and commenced
to lecture, while in the clairvoyant state, Dr. S. S. Lyon of
489
490 APPENDIX B
Bridgeport, Conn., acting as his magnetiser. The last of these
lectures was delivered on January 25, 1847. The lectures were
published in a book entitled, The Principles of Nature, Her
Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. Davis continued
to lecture, and to write voluminously. His written works con
sist of thirty-six volumes, nearly all of which, it is claimed,
were produced while the author was in a state of clairvoyance.
The chief of these are his first books, the Divine Revelations
(1847), and The Great Harmonia (1850). In these Davis
gives a history of the universe, the formation of the earth, the
origin of man, and the gradual development of present civilisa
tion. In his first volume he gives a " Key " to the principles
of nature, and relates the " true " version of sacred history, cor
recting and explaining the Old and New Testaments as he
goes along. He gives his interior impressions of the real
scheme of the material universe and of the spiritual world, and
the relations between the two.
Davis called this " revealed " system " The Harmonial Philos
ophy," and developed it at length in the six volumes of The
Great Harmonia. In many points Davis's philosophy of life
and his theory of disease resemble Quimby's, and much of the
terminology is the same. (When Davis began to lecture and
to write, Quimby had for several years been practising and
teaching but, so far as known, Davis had never met Quimby.)
For example, Davis states : " There is but one Principle, one
united attribute of Goodness and Truth." This he calls the
" unchangeable, eternal Positive Mind," which " fills all nega
tive substances. Worlds, their forces, their physical existences,
with their life and forces, are all negative to this Positive Mind.
APPENDIX B 491
This is the great Positive Power." He compares his system
to a wheel, the centre of which " is a Focus for the universal
diffusion of knowledge, Truth, and the one unchangeable Prin
ciple." " Truth," he states, " is positive Principle ; error is a
negative principle, and as Truth is positive and eternal, it must
subdue error, which is only temporal and artificial."
This Positive Mind he also calls Divine Intelligence, the First
Cause, etc. He says : " Power, Wisdom, Goodness, Justice,
Mercy, Truth, are the gradual developments of an eternal and
internal Principle, constituting the Divine, original Essence ! "
Disease, in the Davis philosophy, is not a part of the " Great
Harmonia." His conclusions as to disease are:
" That disease is discord; and that this disease originates
in a want of equilibrium in the circulation of the spiritual
Principle throughout the organism.
" That the spiritual Principle is an organisation of refined
and sublimated materials; consequently, being material, it is
susceptible to material influences.
" That those physical developments which are called diseases,
are simply evidences of constitutional or spiritual disturbances ;
and consequently, that there is but one ' disease,' having in
numerable symptoms."
The mission of the physician, Davis says, is not to the body,
" for the body is but a subordinate portion of the individual."
" Disease is an effect, not a cause." " Disease is an evil to
be prevented; it is an effect to be overcome. Physicians are
designed to minister to the spiritual principle." " Man is a
Unit," he says again. " It is not true that he has a body
to be cured of disease separate from his mind."
492 APPENDIX B
To dispel disease and to promote individual health and happi
ness, Davis says, the Divine Principle working through Nature
has provided certain remedial agents. These agents are
" Dress, Food, Water, Air, Light, Electricity, and Magnetism."
" Vital magnetism and electricity," he writes, " are the divine
elements of spiritual nourishment, and are the mediums through
which the spirit acts upon the body ; and to restore harmony
or health, the prime-moving principle in the body must be
addressed by and through identical mediums or elements."
He also says : " By self-magnetisation, or by the magnetic
or spiritual action of the influence of one individual upon
another . . . the human soul can rise superior to every species
of discord, and thus subdue and expel disease."
Davis believed that Christ employed animal magnetism in
making cures. " It is clear, at least to the interiorly-en
lightened mind, that Christ cast out diseases, Satans, or devils,
by the exercise of that spiritual power, which, in our century,
has unfortunately been termed ' Animal Magnetism.' '
In applying his principle practically to the care of the sick,
he recommends a cheerful, hopeful spirit on the part of the
patient, strict attention to diet and temperature, and regular,
simple habits. Occasionally, as for rheumatism, he prescribes
a kind of beverage and gives instructions how to prepare it.
" The patient is requested to remember," he writes, " that I
recommend a reconciliation with Nature, and not medicines, to
accomplish his cure."
Like Mrs. Eddy, Davis had not much respect for learning.
" Book-learning," he writes, " is mainly ephemeral and useless ;
but Wisdom which unfolds from out the depths of intuition, is
APPENDIX B 493
everlasting and more valuable than seas of diamonds." He
taught that true wisdom comes only through spiritual or in
terior vision, and that the evidence of the senses is not always
trustworthy.
Some time after the publication of his first books, Davis
joined the Spiritualistic movement and became well known as
a leader in that sect, travelling and lecturing extensively.
APPENDIX C
THERE is no fundamental similarity between Christian Science
and Shakerism, but there are significant resemblances. Ann
Lee's main contribution to religious theories or pretensions
was the idea that God is both masculine and feminine. She,
herself, claimed to be the " female principle of God," and the
Shakers believed and taught that she was the " female Christ."
Mrs. Eddy also teaches the femininity of God, and Christian
Scientists have claimed that she is the " feminine principle
of Deity." The Shakers asserted for Ann Lee that she was
greater than Christ. Mrs. Eddy has said that her revelation
of Christian Science was " higher, clearer, and more perma
nent," l than that given eighteen centuries ago. The Shakers
prayed always to " Our Father and Mother which are in
Heaven," while Mrs. Eddy has " spiritually interpreted " the
Lord's Prayer, making it read : " Our Father-Mother God."
The Shakers proclaimed Ann Lee to be the woman of the
Apocalypse, calling her the " God-anointed Woman," and the
" Holy Comforter." In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy has
called the attention of her followers to the significance of the
chapter in Revelation on the woman of the Apocalypse ind
its " relation to the present age," suggesting that the woman
represents the founder of Christian Science. Christian Science,
Mrs. Eddy teaches, is the " Holy Comforter." In the original
1 A statement in a personal letter.
494
APPENDIX C 495
Mother Church in Boston is a stained-glass window, showing
the woman of the Apocalypse clothed in the sun and crowned
with twelve stars. It is titled " The Woman God Crowned,"
and above it is a representation of the book Science and Health.
Shakers always called Ann Lee " Mother " ; Christian Scientists
formerly thus addressed Mrs. Eddy. Mother Ann, like Mother
Eddy, declared that she had the gift of healing. She also
believed that she took upon herself the sins and sufferings of
others ; in the early days, Mrs. Eddy had the same idea. The
Shakers believed that Mother Ann had spiritual illumination
the mind that saw things as they were; that the rest of the
world was deceived ; that the evidence of the senses, used against
her, might mislead ; this is a prevailing idea in regard to
Mrs. Eddy among Christian Scientists. Ann Lee governed
largely through fear; her followers believed that, with her
mental powers, she could inflict torment upon them in this
world. In the early Christian Science days, if not now, " mali
cious animal magnetism " as Mrs. Eddy named this power
of mentally working evil on others was an orthodox doctrine.
The Shakers called their establishment " The Church of
Christ " ; Mrs. Eddy used the same name, adding the word
" Scientist." They called the original foundation the " Mother
Church " ; Mrs. Eddy so designated her first Boston building.
Ann Lee forbade audible prayer, teaching that it " exposed
the desires " ; Mrs. Eddy opposes audible prayer, which may
" utter desires which are not real." Finally, Ann Lee en
joined celibacy. Mrs. 'Eddy teaches that celibacy is a more
spiritual state than marriage ; she permits the marriage relation
merely as " expedient," " suffer it to be so now."
