Mary Baker Eddy

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Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Ann Morse Baker, known as Mary Baker Eddy (July 16, 1821 - December 3, 1910) was the pioneer of a system of prayer-based healing that lead her to found the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879. She was the author of its fundamental doctrinal textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which has sold more than 10 million copies. She is also the founder of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, founder of a publishing house, and founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper The Christian Science Monitor.

Mary Baker Eddy overcame years of ill health and great personal struggle to make an indelible mark on American society. She made her discovery of Christian Science at a time when women could not vote and were generally barred from pulpits, seminaries, and the medical profession.

In 1995 Eddy was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame and in 1998 she was named one of the 25 “most significant religious figures for Americans in the 20th Century” by the PBS program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.[1]

Life and Family

Mary Baker Eddy, the youngest of the six children of Abigail Ambrose and Mark Baker was born near Concord, New Hampshire in the town of Bow. She spent most of her childhood suffering from a variety of childhood diseases. Her poor health was reportedly related to a spinal weakness that caused spasmodic seizures, followed by prostration, which resulted in a complete nervous collapse. It is referred to as chronic invalidism.

Both her parents were descendants of members of the Congregational Church. Raised with Puritan values, daily Bible reading, and talk of God's healing power, she spent many years looking for healing.

One of Mary Baker’s brothers was Albert Baker, a graduate of Dartmouth College, who studied law with Franklin Pierce (who later became President of the United States), and was admitted to the bar in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Albert helped home-school her in moral science, natural philosophy, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew grammar.

The Baker family moved to Tilton when Mary was fifteen and she then attended the private school of Professor H. Dyer Sanborn. Under his instruction and the guidance of the Rev. Enoch Corser, pastor of the Tilton Congregational Church, she began to develop her intellectual and spiritual maturity.

Marriages

In 1843 Mary Baker married George Washington Glover, her thirty-three-year-old brother-in-law. She was twenty-two. George Glover's sister had married Mary's eldest brother, Samuel, in 1831. Originally from Concord, New Hampshire, Glover had established a business in Charleston, South Carolina.

About a year after their marriage, while on a business trip to Wilmington, N. C., her husband contracted yellow fever and died in about nine days. Mrs. Glover returned to her father's home. She gave birth to a boy not long after her return, and she named him after her husband, George Washington Glover.

Mary Baker Glover suffered a prolonged illness following childbirth. Her son's custody become a major issue when her mother died in 1849. In 1850 her father married Elizabeth Patterson Duncan. Her father made it clear that the boy wasn't welcome and he stayed with a series of different relatives. Later her sister, Abigail Tilton, offered her a home, but with the stipulation that her son George was not welcome. She felt she couldn't take care of her ill sister and the young boy. As a result George W. Glover was sent to live in North Groton, New Hampshire, forty miles away from his mother. He lived with the family's former servant, Mahala, who had married a farmer, Russell Cheney. She wrote the poem "The Mother at Parting with her Child" soon afterwards.

In 1853, Mary married Daniel Patterson, a relative of her father’s second wife. Mary's father warned Patterson about his daughter's invalidism, but he chose not to heed the advice. She had hoped Patterson would take her son in, but he also decided he wanted no part of him. Although the couple lived near the Cheneys in North Groton in 1855, George Glover's adopted family took the boy with them when they moved to Minnesota in 1856. George Glover did not see his mother again for twenty-three years.

The marriage to Patterson proved unhappy, and the couple separated after 13 years, when Daniel deserted her. Seven years later, she sought and obtained a divorce on the grounds of his adultery.

In 1877 Mary Baker Glover was married for the third time to Mr. Asa G. Eddy, who had been sent to her for treatment. She had healed him, had taken him through one of her classes, and placed many of her affairs in his charge. He died in 1882, reportedly of heart disease.

Her spiritual journey

From the age of eight Eddy began having spiritual experiences when she heard her name being called by an unseen voice. In her teens she boldly rebelled against Calvinist doctrines like predestination as she was being admitted as a member of the her parents Congregationalist church.

Poor health began to afflict her during her adolescence and as she became an adult and married she experimented with allopathic medicine and alternative therapies, particularly with homeopathy. Following her first husband's sudden death she developed an interest in mesmerism (hypnosis), animal magnetism, spiritualism and clairvoyance. She also continued her study of the Bible with an intense focus on the healing powers of Jesus.

In 1862 Eddy received treatment from mental healer, P.P. Quimby[2]in Portland, Maine, and was cured quickly. Though her health tended to fluctuate, she maintained a devoted relationship with him and his ideas until he died in 1866. His influence would shape her belief of Christian Science as she integrated her own Christian faith with Quimby's ideas.

A crucial turning point in Eddy's life occurred one month after Quimby died. A severe fall on an icy sidewalk left her in critical condition. Unable to call on Quimby she asked for her Bible and, while reading an account of Jesus' healing, found herself suddenly well.

She spent the next nine years in intensive scriptural study, healing activity, and teaching. In 1875 she published Science and Health. In this book she stated her belief in the "science" behind Jesus' healing method.

Founding the Church

When the existing Christian churches did not embrace her beliefs, Eddy decided to start her own church. In 1879 she secured a charter for the Church of Christ, Scientist, established "to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing." Two years later, she founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, where she taught her classes until 1889, when she closed the institution to focus on a major revision of Science and Health, which became Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Eddy proved effective at teaching hundreds of students, most of them women, to go out across the nation as Christian Science practitioners, organizing societies and recruiting more practitioners. She retained her charter to the College and reopened it in 1899.

In 1888, a reading room for her writings and other publications opened in Boston. In 1894, Boston-area Christian Scientists moved into the first church building (The Mother Church), built under Mrs. Eddy's direction. In 1895 she published a church manual, establishing guidelines that are followed to this day.

During the formative stages the church saw many rivalries, scandals, and dissident movements. One such example was the dispute between Mary Baker Eddy and Edward J. Arens, her former student, and Julius Dresser, who along with his wife and son, disputed Eddy's originality. The main accusation against Eddy was that she plagiarized Quimby's works. Eddy also found herself the subject of severe criticism from such notables as Mark Twain[3] and Willa Cather[4]. She would later explain that the phenomena of self-will used by Quimby to heal was distinct from the spiritual understanding she used for healing.

In 1884 Eddy spent a month in Chicago, initiating the westward expansion of her church. In 1888 she again visited Chicago, this time to attend the National Christian Scientist Association where she made an address at the Central Music Hall before an audience of about four thousand. A year later she addressed an audience in Steinway Hall, New York, but thereafter withdrew more and more from public appearances.

Publishing arms of church

In 1883 the Journal of Christian Science was first published. It later became The Christian Science Journal with Eddy as the editor and publisher. It was also published in German as Der Herold der Christian Science. She also founded the Christian Science Sentinel; The Christian Science Quarterly (which contained the weekly Christian Science Lesson-Sermons); and The Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper that went on to win seven Pulitzer Prizes.

In 1908, just two years before her death, Eddy started The Christian Science Monitor because she felt that the "yellow journalism" of the American press was unfairly prejudicial against her faith. Its object and journalistic ethic established by her was "to injure no man, but to bless all mankind." The Monitor provides an independent voice in journalism, and, though published by The Christian Science Publishing Society, it is not a religious periodical. The newspaper reports national and international news, with related features and commentary.

Later life

From 1892 to 1908 Eddy resided at Pleasant View, a house situated on the outskirts of Concord, New Hampshire. It was here that Eddy spent her time fine-tuning the organization of the Christian Science church, supervising the various means she had founded for placing her discovery before the public, writing occasional messages to the church, revising her writings to make her meaning clearer, receiving visitors from all parts of the world whither her teachings had penetrated, keeping in close touch with her pupils who were occupying positions of trust, but ever withdrawing more and more from a merely personal sense of herself on the part of others, and discouraging any personal adulation which the beneficiaries of Christian Science might be inclined to place upon her.

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and its branches in 80 countries. In 1908, at the age of 87, she founded The Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper devoted to balance. She also founded the Christian Science Journal in 1883, a monthly magazine focused chiefly on the church audience; the Christian Science Sentinel in 1898, a weekly religious periodical written for a more general public audience, and the Herald of Christian Science, a religious magazine with editions in non-English languages, for children, and in English-Braille.

Mary Baker Eddy established the publishing company in 1898, for the sake of others, which was the reason for founding "The Christian Science Monitor," in 1908. For over 90 years "Science and Health", as a best seller, has been translated in over 17 languages and Women's National Book Assoc. chose it as a very best book by women, picked out of over 75 books, works or words having the effect and impact of changing our world, and making it a better place. Remarkably, during the 20th century, sold over one million copies. She had shown from early on a love for poetry, which later manifested itself in the writing of those hymns found in the Christian Science Hymnal which are treasured by Christian Scientists today for their comforting and healing effects.

The Longyears

Mrs. Mary Beecher Longyear was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1851, the daughter of Samuel Peck and Caroline (Walker) Beecher. Her father was a member of the well-known Beecher[5] family of New England

The Mary Baker Eddy library for the Betterment of Humanity, opened to the public, with access to thousands of documents and artifacts.


In 1921 on the 100th anniversary of Mary Baker Eddy's death, a 100 ton, 11 foot high granite pyramid was dedicated on the site of her birthplace in Bow, Massachusetts. A gift from the Masons (the only other religious society church members are permitted to join), it was later dynamited by order of the Mother Church Board of Directors who feared that, Mary Baker Eddy's home in Pleasant View which they also demolished, it was becoming a place of pilgrimage.

Eddy spent the majority of her life in perfecting the organization of the church and in clarifying and deepening her understanding of Christian Science. Her work manifested in large part through two books, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures and the Church Manual. Each volume went through numerojus editions, including several major revisions, during her lifetime. The texts were frozen at her death and remanin as the authoritative documents for the Church. Also, after Eddy died, leadership in the Church passed to the five-person Board of Dierectors of the Mother Church in Boston, Massachusetts. They oversaw the production of standard editions of Eddy's writings, to this day the only ones used throughout the church.

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Peel, Robert Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery ISBN 0875100856, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial ISBN 0875101186, and Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority ISBN 0030567092. (1966-1971)
  • Gill, Gillian, Mary Baker Eddy, Perseus Books Group (1999) ISBN 0738202274
  • Gottschalk, Stephen, Rolling Away the Stone, Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism, Indiana University Press (2006) ISBN 0253346738
  • Eddy, Mary Baker, Mary Baker Eddy, Speaking for Herself, Writings of Mary Baker Eddy (2002) ISBN 0879522755
  • Cather, Willa and Milmine, Georgiana The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science University of Nebraska Press (1993) ISBN 0803214537
  • Grekel, Doris and Grekel, Morris, The Discovery of the Science of Man: (1821-1888), ISBN 189310723X, The Founding of Christian Science: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy 1888-1900, ISBN 1893107248, and The Forever Leader: (1901-1910) ISBN 0964580381.
  • Dittemore, John V. Bates, Ernest Sutherland, Mary Baker Eddy - The Truth and the Tradition, Knopf (1932)
  • Zweig, Stefan, Mental Healers Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Ungar Publishing Co. (1962) ISBN 0804429952
  • Faser, Caroline, God's Perfect Child:Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, Owl Books (2000) ISBN 0805044310

Quotes

"True prayer is not asking God for love; it is learning to love, and to include all mankind in one affection."

"Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven."

"The time for thinkers has come. Truth, independent of doctrines and time-honored systems, knocks at the portal of humanity."

"Whatever enslaves man is opposed to the divine government. Truth makes man free."

"To talk the right and live the wrong is foolish deceit, doing one's self the most harm."

"Moral conditions will be found always harmonious and health-giving."

"We should master fear, instead of cultivating it."

Works


Point of Interest

  • Longyear Museum
  • Mary Baker Eddy Historic House
  • Massachusetts Metaphysical College with a complete list of students of Eddy
  • Septimus J. Hanna student of Eddy and vice-president of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College
  • William R. Rathvon student of Eddy, early Christian Scientist and lone person to leave an audio recording of his hearing Lincoln's Gettysburg Address at the age of nine.
  • Bliss Knapp childhood friend of Eddy's whose father was one of the first Directors of Eddy's church. Bliss was a somewhat controversial Christian Scientist.

External links

Credits

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