Divine Science

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Divine Science is one of the principal denominations of New Thought, the American metaphysical religious movement that took shape in the closing decades of the nineteenth century around the conviction that mind and right understanding heal the body and order the life. It emerged from two centers at once. In San Francisco, Malinda Cramer reported a recovery from long illness in 1885 that she attributed to a sudden inner realization, and began teaching what she called Divine Science soon after. In Denver, the three Brooks sisters — Nona Brooks, Fannie Brooks James, and Althea Brooks Small — came to a parallel teaching through their own healing and study; the two streams recognized their kinship and converged, and the College of Divine Science was chartered in Denver in 1898.

The teaching turns on a single principle the movement names the Omnipresence: that God is not one being among others but the only presence and the only power, wholly good, present at every point of creation without remainder. From this, adherents drew the rest. If God is everywhere and is good, then sickness, lack, and evil have no standing in ultimate reality; they are held to be errors of a mind that has lost sight of its source, and healing follows from correcting the thought — from realizing, rather than merely believing, one’s unbroken unity with the divine. Prayer in this register is less petition than affirmation: a deliberate alignment of the mind with what is taken to be already true.

Divine Science shares this ground with the other bodies that grew from the same soil — Unity, Religious Science, and the wider New Thought field — and the family resemblance is close enough that the denominations have often cooperated while keeping their distinct lineages. All of them trace, more or less directly, to the Maine clockmaker and mental healer Phineas Quimby, whose cures in the 1860s seeded a generation of teachers. Scholarship places the whole movement within a long American current of “metaphysical religion,” and notes its debts to Emersonian idealism, to Swedenborg, and to a reading of scripture in which the kingdom of God is an inward state. Its emphasis on the omnipresence of a single good principle also runs close, in form, to older idealist and Neoplatonic intuitions, though New Thought reached them by its own route and in its own plain American idiom.

The movement was small in numbers and large in reach. Its language of positive affirmation, of thought shaping circumstance, passed well beyond the churches that taught it and into the broad vocabulary of self-help and popular spirituality, where much of it survives detached from any congregation. The Denver college and a scattering of Divine Science churches continue. The institution stayed modest; the idea did not.

→ In the library: Atkinson — Thought Vibration (1906), a contemporaneous New Thought text