Christian Science

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In February 1866, in Lynn, Massachusetts, Mary Patterson — not yet Mary Baker Eddy — fell on an icy sidewalk and was carried home with what she took to be a fatal injury. Three days later she rose from her bed healed, and traced the recovery to a passage she had been reading in the ninth chapter of Matthew, the account of Jesus healing the man sick of the palsy. She did not read the cure as a private miracle granted to her. She read it as the disclosure of a law: the same law that governed every healing in the Gospels, a principle she held to be demonstrable, teachable, and exact rather than miraculous. From that reading she built a religion, and dated its discovery to that week. The settled record is firmer about what came after than about what happened in the room, but the movement she founded has always located its origin there — in a recovery construed as the grasp of a divine science.

Christian Science is the American religious movement that grew from that claim: that reality is wholly spiritual, that God is the only true substance, and that matter, sickness, and death belong to a mistaken way of seeing rather than to anything that genuinely exists. Its best-known practice follows directly. Where most churches pray for the sick, the Christian Scientist prays to correct the false belief that anyone is sick at all, and the church has historically treated such prayer as a replacement for medicine rather than a supplement to it. The practice is not the addition of religion to a body of medical fact; it is the denial that the medical fact is the deepest fact in play.

The structure of the real

The teaching rests on a strict idealism stated in plain, almost mathematical terms. God is infinite Mind — perfect, good, the sole reality — and the visible world of matter, with its illness and its evil and its dying, has no real existence. What presents itself as a sick body, a hostile circumstance, or a mortal end is the product of what Eddy named mortal mind: a kind of collective error, a way of believing in a creation that God never made. Sin, sickness, and death are not powers to be defeated so much as illusions to be seen through. Salvation and healing are therefore the same act — the displacement of error by an understanding of what is in fact already the case. To heal is to repent of a false belief about being; to be saved is to recognize a wholeness that was never actually lost.

This is laid out most compactly in the chapter “Recapitulation,” in a paragraph the church calls the scientific statement of being and reads aloud at every Sunday service: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual.” The lines are not offered as devotional poetry. They are offered as a series of propositions, in the conviction that to grasp them rightly is to be changed in body as well as in mind.

Christian Scientists are emphatic that this is not mind acting on matter in the ordinary way, and not the willed optimism of positive thinking. To them the healing is not the mind defeating the body but the recognition of a spiritual reality that was always whole — a correction of vision, not an exertion of force. That distinction is exactly what they use to separate themselves from the looser New Thought family that grew from neighboring soil: Unity, Divine Science, the Religious Science of Ernest Holmes, and the broad American “mind-cure” milieu that ran from Emerson’s Transcendentalism into the prosperity literature of the twentieth century. Christian Science disowns that milieu and is disowned by it; the two share a mesmeric ancestry and a vocabulary, but the church regards New Thought’s mind-over-matter formula as a misreading of its own deeper claim, and New Thought regards the church’s exclusivity and its refusal of medicine as a closing of what should be an open practice. Both the kinship and the breach are real, and the church has insisted on the breach.

The textbook

The system’s authority is textual. Eddy first published Science and Health in Boston in 1875, under her then-name Mary Baker Glover, in a small print run from a publisher she had to organize for the purpose. Its full title later became Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the “Key” being her own spiritual gloss on Genesis and the Apocalypse. She revised it without rest for the next thirty-five years — through hundreds of editions and a near-total rewrite with the help of the retired clergyman James Henry Wiggin in 1885 — so that the book is less a finished document than a lifelong act of refinement, fixed only at her death in 1910. Eddy ordained the Bible and Science and Health together as the church’s pastor: no preacher interprets from a pulpit, and in their place two lay Readers recite a weekly Lesson-Sermon of designated passages from the two books. Eddy called the pairing the dual and impersonal pastor, and the arrangement is doctrinally load-bearing — it removes the clergyman as a channel of authority and substitutes the texts themselves, read verbatim, identical in every branch on a given Sunday across the world.

The church

Eddy built an institution as deliberate as her metaphysics. The Church of Christ, Scientist, was organized in Boston in 1879, with Eddy as its ordained pastor; she chartered the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881 to train practitioners, and dissolved it in 1889 at the height of its enrollment to clear the ground for a reorganization. In 1892 she reconstituted the body as The First Church of Christ, Scientist — the Mother Church — and bound the whole denomination to it through the Manual of the Mother Church, the constitution she first issued in 1895 and continued to revise. The Manual is unusually specific and unusually rigid: it fixes the order of service, the conduct of branch churches, the listing of practitioners, the requirement that each church maintain a reading room, and the governance of the entire structure by a self-perpetuating five-member Board of Directors. It also contains by-laws, known in law as estoppel clauses, that required Eddy’s own consent for certain acts — provisions that, after her death, left the Directors administering a constitution whose author could no longer sign off on it, and from that tension much of the church’s later internal history flows. What Eddy assembled was a centralized polity unusual among American Protestant bodies: branch churches that are democratic in form but doctrinally locked to a single textbook and a single governing board in Boston.

The Quimby dispute

The question of where the system came from has shadowed it from the start. In the early 1860s, before her fall, Eddy — then Mary Patterson — had been a patient of Phineas Quimby, a clockmaker from Belfast, Maine, who had abandoned the trance technique of mesmerism for a method of cure by corrected belief, and who treated her in Portland for chronic illness. She praised him warmly during his life. After his death in 1866, and as her own system took shape, critics began to argue that Christian Science was Quimby’s invention in Christian dress. The charge was pressed publicly by Julius Dresser in 1887, amplified by a hostile McClure’s magazine serial in 1907, and seemingly documented by the posthumous publication of The Quimby Manuscripts in 1921. Eddy insisted, with increasing force, that her teaching was her own and its source the Scriptures — that whatever Quimby had practiced was mental suggestion, while what she had discovered was a divine Principle she alone had reduced to science. Modern scholarship has not settled it so much as reframed it: Robert Peel’s sympathetic three-volume biography and Gillian Gill’s critical 1998 study both find clear debts of vocabulary but treat the absolute-idealist Christian metaphysics of Science and Health as substantially Eddy’s own synthesis, and Gill in particular argues that the assumption a woman must have taken her ideas from a man has rigged the debate from the beginning. The contest is genuine and it is reported here, not adjudicated.

Footprint and conflict

The movement’s public reach has always outrun its size. The church declines to publish membership figures — the Manual forbids it — and the last year it released statistics, 1936, recorded nearly 270,000 American adherents, likely the peak. Every measure that can be counted since has fallen: the practitioners and teachers listed in the Christian Science Journal dropped from roughly five thousand in 1971 to a little over a thousand, and the number of churches from about eighteen hundred toward a thousand. Yet the institutions Eddy founded have proved durable out of proportion to the congregation. In 1908, at eighty-seven, she launched The Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper conceived as an antidote to sensationalism, which became one of the most respected papers in the United States and has won seven Pulitzer Prizes — its religious content confined to a single daily article, its journalism otherwise secular and admired well outside the church. The reading rooms the Manual mandated remain a fixture of American main streets, quiet storefronts where the textbook and the Bible can be read or bought.

The hardest pressure on the church has come where its metaphysics meets the law. If matter and sickness are unreal and prayer is the proper treatment, then medicine is not merely unnecessary but a kind of apostasy — and that conviction, applied to children too young to choose it, has produced a recurring line of prosecutions. In Massachusetts, the parents of two-year-old Robyn Twitchell, who died of a treatable bowel obstruction in 1986, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1990; in Minnesota, the death of eleven-year-old Ian Lundman from untreated diabetes in 1989 led to a civil verdict against a practitioner and a nurse. The church had earlier lobbied successfully for religious-exemption statutes — Massachusetts passed one in 1971 — that shielded spiritual treatment from neglect charges, but courts repeatedly held that such exemptions did not license a parent to let a child die. The question of where a citizen’s freedom of religious practice ends and the state’s duty to a child begins is not one this movement settled, and it is reported, not resolved.

Even the textbook became a legal battleground. A 1971 Act of Congress, Private Law 92-60, granted the Board of Directors an extended copyright on all editions of Science and Health; in 1985 a federal court struck it down, and in 1987 the D.C. Circuit affirmed in United Christian Scientists v. Christian Science Board of Directors, holding that singling out one church’s scripture for special protection violated the Establishment Clause — the only copyright statute ever found unconstitutional. Science and Health has been in the public domain since.

Texts, archives, and scholarship

The primary literature is fully available and well documented. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures exists in two states the historian needs to keep distinct: the rough first edition of 1875, published under the name Mary Baker Glover, and the author-revised final text fixed in 1910 — both now in the public domain, the latter despite the failed 1971 copyright extension. The church maintains the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston, which holds her papers and publishes documentary research on her life and on the development of the textbook itself; the Manual of the Mother Church and the back issues of the Christian Science Journal and Sentinel round out the movement’s own record.

The contested Quimby material was first put into print as The Quimby Manuscripts, edited by Horatio W. Dresser (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1921), the document around which the authorship debate has turned ever since. On the critical side, the standard biographies are Robert Peel’s three-volume Mary Baker Eddy (1966–1977), written from inside the tradition but with archival rigor, and Gillian Gill’s Mary Baker Eddy (Perseus, 1998), the leading independent reassessment. Stephen Gottschalk’s The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (1973) remains the best account of the movement’s doctrine and its place in nineteenth-century Protestantism, and Stuart Knee’s Christian Science in the Age of Mary Baker Eddy (Greenwood, 1994) treats its institutional history. For the wider field, Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit (Yale, 2007) situates Christian Science within the long stream of American metaphysical religion — alongside, but firmly distinguished from, the New Thought churches, Spiritualism, and the Swedenborgian idealism that fed the same cultural soil. (The verbal echo in its name notwithstanding, the movement has nothing in common with the unrelated Moorish Science Temple of Noble Drew Ali, an African-American new religion of the same era; the shared word “science” is coincidence, not lineage.) For the medical-refusal record, the legal scholarship and the documentary case histories assembled by child-advocacy organizations such as Massachusetts Citizens for Children supply the cases and the statutes; the church’s own apologetic literature on healing supplies the other side.

What the church offers, in its own account, is not a coping technique but a claim about the structure of the real — and it has staked its conduct, and its conflicts, on meaning it.

→ In the library: Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich (1910), a New Thought text from the adjacent current Christian Science disowns

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