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 is a small, organized teaching with a college, a handful of churches, a settled body of doctrine, and a precise founding history — and it should not be confused with the generic phrase “divine science” used in Hermetic alchemy or in scholastic theology for the knowledge of God. This Divine Science is the metaphysical church chartered in Denver in 1898, holding that God is the Omnipresence: the one and only presence and power, wholly good, the source of healing.

Nona Lovell Brooks (1861–1945), co-founder of Divine Science and pastor of the First Divine Science Church of Denver, photographed in 1914. — Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Two streams, one teaching

Divine Science was founded twice over, independently, before its two founders ever met. The order of events matters, because the movement’s own histories keep the two roots distinct and then describe their joining.

Malinda Elliott Cramer (1844–1906) of San Francisco, who fixed the name Divine Science in 1888 and founded the magazine Harmony. — Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first root is Malinda Elliott Cramer (1844–1906) of San Francisco. Raised a Quaker in Indiana — a formation that left its mark in her trust of inward illumination over outward authority — she had spent some twenty-five years in chronic invalidism. In 1885, after a sustained interval of prayer and meditation over her own condition, she reported a sudden interior realization of the wholeness and omnipresence of God, and recovered. She read the recovery not as a cure laid on from outside but as the consequence of seeing what was already the case. Within three years she was teaching and healing full time. In March 1888 she and her husband Frank chartered the Home College of Spiritual Science; two months later she renamed it the Home College of Divine Science, fixing the name the movement would carry. That same year, in August 1888, she founded and edited Harmony, among the first monthly metaphysical magazines in the United States, which carried her teaching across the country. Her course of instruction — primary, theological, and normal classes — was set out in Lessons in the Science of Infinite Spirit, and the Christ Method of Healing (1890), revised and reissued as Divine Science and Healing (1902). In 1892 she founded the International Divine Science Association in San Francisco, a cooperative body whose annual congresses through the 1890s gathered teachers from across the emerging metaphysical field; it was one of the institutional forerunners of the later national alliance.

The second root began in 1887 in Pueblo, Colorado, with three sisters: Nona Lovell Brooks (1861–1945), Fannie Brooks James, and Althea Brooks Small. Nona had suffered for years from ulcerated throat lesions. She and Althea enrolled in classes on spiritual healing and the omnipresence of God taught by Kate Bingham, an independent teacher of mental healing — and Nona reported being healed of the throat condition outright. The lineage behind those classes is worth tracing, because it is what ties the Denver stream into the wider New Thought family. Bingham had herself been cured, in Chicago, by Mabel MacCoy, a student of Emma Curtis Hopkins; Hopkins — once Mary Baker Eddy’s editor, afterward the “teacher of teachers” who from her Chicago seminary seeded Unity, the Homes of Truth, and much else — is the diffusing center from whom the Brooks sisters’ teaching descends at one remove. The Denver line thus runs Hopkins, to MacCoy, to Bingham, to the Brooks sisters; the San Francisco line runs through Cramer alone. As scholarly-consensus genealogy, this places Divine Science squarely within the post-Eddy, Hopkins-mediated wave of the movement, while preserving the tradition’s own insistence that Cramer reached the teaching by independent realization.

Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925), the Chicago “teacher of teachers” whose students seeded much of New Thought; the Denver line descends from her through Mabel MacCoy and Kate Bingham. — Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The two streams converged in 1889, when Cramer traveled to Denver and met the Brooks sisters in person. By the movement’s account, the two parties compared their teachings and found them the same; the sisters asked to adopt the name Divine Science, Cramer assented, and a lasting cooperation followed. From that point the histories treat the work as a single tradition with two headquarters.

Charter, ordination, church

The institutional fixtures fell into place at the end of the 1890s. In 1898 the College of Divine Science — the Colorado College of Divine Science — was chartered in Denver. On 1 December 1898, Cramer ordained Nona Brooks a minister in the Church of Divine Science, joining the two streams in a single line of authority. On 1 January 1899 the First Divine Science Church of Denver held its inaugural service, with Brooks as pastor — by the local record the first woman to hold a pulpit in Denver. Fannie James supplied much of the denomination’s early systematic doctrine, including the textbook Truth and Health; Nona Brooks would later write Mysteries (1924) and Short Lessons in Divine Science (1928), which became the movement’s standard primers.

The geography of the work then tilted decisively east. Malinda Cramer was caught in the San Francisco earthquake of 18 April 1906 and died later that year of injuries sustained in it; her San Francisco institutions did not survive her, and the Denver college and church became the permanent center of gravity. Under Brooks’s long leadership Divine Science consolidated as a Denver-based denomination, and in 1922 it affiliated with the International New Thought Alliance — the umbrella body that had by then drawn most of the independent metaphysical churches into loose federation. That women founded, taught, ordained, and led the denomination at every stage is not incidental. Divine Science belongs to a cohort — Hopkins, Cramer, the Brooks sisters, the authors of Unity’s foundational books, the founders of the Homes of Truth — that constitutes one of the most prominent female-led religious leaderships in any American current of its era, a pattern the historian Beryl Satter (1999) reads as central to the movement rather than marginal to it.

The Omnipresence

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. The denomination defines itself, in its own formularies, as an organized teaching concerning God and the manifestation of God in creation, and it states its foundation truth as the proposition that limitless Being, God, is good, is equally present everywhere, and is the all of everything. Nona Brooks compressed the practical upshot into a single claim: that the practice of the presence of God is the whole of Divine Science. Omnipresence is at once the supreme affirmation and the basic principle from which the rest is drawn.

From it the tradition draws the rest. If God is everywhere and is good, then sickness, lack, and evil have no standing in ultimate reality; in the movement’s teaching they are errors of a mind that has lost sight of its source, appearances with no substance behind them, and healing follows from correcting the thought — from realizing, rather than merely believing, one’s unbroken unity with the divine. Divine Science holds that the human being is in God, of God, and like God: omnipresence, rightly understood, is taken to include the person within the divine rather than to set the person at a distance from it. This is the movement’s self-understanding, attributed and dated as such; sickness-and-evil-as-error-of-mind is its doctrinal claim, not an adjudication of the nature of disease. Prayer in this register is less petition than affirmation: not a request addressed to a God who might or might not grant it, but a deliberate alignment of the mind with what is taken to be already and eternally true. The architecture of that practice — the disciplined turning of attention to the divine presence, the affirmative statement of being — is described here as meaning and structure, not as a method to be performed.

The note that distinguishes Divine Science within its family is its starting point. Where some New Thought currents begin from the power of mind over matter and reason toward God, Divine Science begins from God — from the Omnipresence as a metaphysical first principle — and derives the mind’s power and the unreality of evil as corollaries. Its register is theological before it is therapeutic. This gives the denomination a more contemplative cast than the prosperity-minded wing of New Thought, and aligns it, in the family resemblance, more closely with Unity and with the wider affirmation of a single good principle than with the law-of-attraction literature that grew alongside it.

Kin, not content

Divine Science shares its ground with the other bodies that grew from the same soil. Unity, founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in Kansas City in 1889, came likewise out of Emma Curtis Hopkins’s Chicago classes and remains the largest of the sibling churches; Religious Science, founded later by Ernest Holmes, completes the trio of major institutional inheritors. The family resemblance among them is close enough that the denominations have often cooperated — many under the International New Thought Alliance — while keeping their distinct lineages and founders. Christian Science is a different matter: a related but separate body, Mary Baker Eddy’s church, with its own scripture, governance, and trademark regime, institutionally distinct since 1875. Divine Science is kin to it through the shared Quimby ancestry and the Hopkins connection — Hopkins was Eddy’s student before she broke with her — but the two should never be conflated.

All these bodies trace, more or less directly, to the Maine clockmaker and mental healer Phineas Quimby, whose cures in Portland in the 1860s seeded a generation of teachers.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), the Maine clockmaker and mental healer regarded as the fountainhead of the mind-cure lineage. — From The New England Magazine (March 1888), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Quimby had begun as a practitioner of mesmerism — the animal-magnetism healing imported to New England in the 1830s — and abandoned trance technique when he concluded that his subjects’ cures tracked the patient’s belief rather than any magnetic fluid. That pivot, from magnetic fluid to corrected belief, is the hinge on which the whole mind-cure lineage turns. Quimby’s manuscripts circulated privately for half a century before their 1921 publication; his patient-disciples, chief among them Warren Felt Evans and, on a separate path, Mary Baker Eddy, carried the practice into print. New Thought is the broad name for the current that ran through Evans and Hopkins rather than through Eddy’s separate church.

Reading and reception

The historiography of the movement keeps two registers apart. The movement-internal narrative — Horatio Dresser’s A History of the New Thought Movement (1919) chief among the early accounts — is committed to Quimby as fountainhead and tells the story from inside the conviction. The critical scholarship places the whole field within a long American current that Catherine Albanese, in A Republic of Mind and Spirit (Yale, 2007), calls “metaphysical religion” — a stream running from colonial-era Hermetic and correspondential interests through Transcendentalism and Spiritualism into the mind-cure churches and onward to contemporary spiritual-but-not-religious self-identification. Charles Braden’s Spirits in Rebellion (1963) remains the foundational narrative history of New Thought; Beryl Satter’s Each Mind a Kingdom (1999) supplies the gender history within which Divine Science’s women founders sit; John Haller’s History of New Thought (2012) traces the Swedenborgian thread. The two registers cross-reference but should not be collapsed.

The intellectual debts are real and well attested. The reading of scripture in which the kingdom of God is an inward state, present and realizable now rather than deferred to the end of time, is common to the whole movement and shapes Divine Science’s practice of the presence. Behind that lies the idealism that Ralph Waldo Emerson made a native American idiom — the conviction that mind is prior to matter and that the soul has unmediated access to the divine — quoted across the New Thought canon. Behind Emerson, in turn, stands Emanuel Swedenborg, whose doctrine of correspondences — that every natural thing is the precise sensible expression of a spiritual reality, the visible cosmos a coherent language of the invisible one — gave the movement a way to read the material world as the outer face of spirit; Warren Felt Evans, the first systematizer of mind-cure, was a Swedenborgian minister before he was anything else, and the thread runs through him into the churches. Divine Science’s insistence on the omnipresence of a single good principle also runs close, in form, to the older idealist and Neoplatonic intuition — the One present whole at every point of its emanation — that descends through Platonism into Christian and esoteric mysticism alike; but New Thought reached that intuition by its own route, out of mesmeric healing and a plain American idiom, rather than by reading the Enneads. The same metaphysical air was breathed in those decades by Spiritualism and by Theosophy, which competed for the same metaphysically curious readership; Divine Science is distinct from both — it sought neither mediumistic contact with the dead nor an initiatory Eastern wisdom, but a present and practical realization of the divine.

Scholarship and texts

The primary record of Divine Science is small, coherent, and largely in the public domain. Cramer’s Divine Science and Healing (1902), the revised form of her 1890 lessons, is the founding doctrinal statement of the San Francisco stream and is freely available in digitized form (archived scan). The Denver stream’s standard primers — Nona Brooks’s Short Lessons in Divine Science (1928) and Mysteries (1924), and Fannie James’s Truth and Health — set out the Omnipresence teaching in classroom form; Brooks’s texts are hosted in full at the New Thought Library. For the contemporaneous popular register of the wider movement, Atkinson’s Thought Vibration (1906) is available in the Library. The scholarly apparatus is anchored by Albanese (2007) for the placement within metaphysical religion, Braden (1963) for the narrative history, Satter (1999) for the gender history, and Haller (2012) for the Swedenborgian genealogy; the movement-internal histories of Dresser (1919) and the denomination’s own publications supply the inside view, to be read as primary source rather than neutral chronicle.

Divine Science was small in numbers and large in reach. Its language of positive affirmation, of thought shaping circumstance, of a good God present at every point, 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

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