EDDY, MARY BAKER 1821-1910

Founder of the church of christ, scientist

Youth

Mary Baker Eddy, the founder, matriarch, and "pastor emeritus" of the Church of Christ, Scientist (more commonly known as Christian Science), was born in 1821 on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire, the youngest of six children of Mark and Abigail Baker. She was a sickly child who suffered from an unknown nervous disorder that sent her into hysterical seizures. The result of her poor health was a spotty education, though she did study Hebrew, Greek, and Latin with her older brother Albert. She had a traditional religious upbringing that led her into membership of the Congregational Church in Sanbornton Bridge, New Hampshire (now Tilton), where the family had moved during her childhood. At the age of twenty-one Mary Baker married George Washington Glover, a builder who moved to Charleston, South Carolina. The marriage was the beginning of a long period of difficulty for the frail young woman. Glover died of illness within months of the marriage, leaving a pregnant, impoverished wife to be supported by a local Masonic lodge. She returned home in 1844 and gave birth to her only son, George.

Desperate Years

In New Hampshire she taught school periodically but essentially had no means of support except her family. Years passed in inertia. She gave up her son, then four years old, to a former nurse who had married and moved away. Her contact with George through the years would be infrequent and strained. Mary Glover's health continued to decline, with continuing nervous problems and depression, but in 1853, ten years after her first husband's death, she married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a homeopath and dentist. The couple lived in several small villages in New Hampshire for nine years before Patterson, on a visit to the Civil War battlefield of Bull Run, was taken prisoner by Confederate forces and sent to a prison camp. Mrs. Patterson was forced to return to her family, living as an invalid. She was thirty-two years old, but the turning point in her life was just ahead.

Quimby

In 1862 Mary Patterson consulted with Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a mental healer from Portland, Maine. Within three weeks she had regained her health and proclaimed so in a letter to the Portland Courier. Quimby became her physician, her guiding light, and a profound influence on what would become Christian Science. Quimby died in 1866, the same year that Mary Patterson separated from Daniel Patterson, who had been released from his captivity and returned home. Quimby's death left her feeling desolate, in need of a new source of strength and inspiration.

Science and Health

That inspiration came sooner than anyone could have expected. Within weeks of Quimby's death, Eddy (the name she took when she married Asa Gilbert Eddy in 1877) sustained a back injury in a fall on ice. Laid up in bed, she took to reading the Bible assiduously, and "on the third day," by her account, the Scriptures opened up to her a revelation. Her cure was instantaneous, and her next task was to elaborate the principles by which her healing had taken place. During the next decade, prolonged introspection and prolific writing culminated in Science and Health(1875), which joined the Bible as the bedrock of Christian Science beliefs. Those beliefs centered on illness and healing and included her famous tenet that physical matter is illusory. It followed that physical illness must also be an illusion, what she regarded as the result of mistaken belief. All that truly existed in the universe was Mind, and the secret to Wellness was to discipline the individual mind to bring it into harmony with the infinite Mind as it had been revealed through the example of Jesus Christ. Throughout her life Eddy would continue to revise and expand Science and Health, including adding A Key to the Scriptures, which guided its readers to the Christian Science principles Eddy found expressed in the Bible. By the time of her death in 1910, subsequent editions of the book had sold about four hundred thousand copies.

Building a Church

The thirty-five years of Eddy's life following the publication of Science and Health were spent first in spreading her church and then strengthening it internally from the seclusion of her private home. The first formal organization of her students came in 1876 when they took the name of the Christian Scientists' Association, and full religious establishment came soon after with the chartering of the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879. The next few years saw a remarkable spread and growth in the church, so that by 1886 a national association was founded to coordinate the activities of all member congregations. In the meantime Eddy founded her Massachusetts Metaphysical College for the training of Christian Science practitioners in 1881. By 1889 she had retired from the day-to-day operations of the church and moved into a home in Concord, New Hampshire, which she named Pleasant View, but she did not cease her efforts to stabilize the church's institutional structures. One step in this direction was the 1892 abolition of the national association, in favor of a small board of directors who would have control in all matters of property, doctrine, and the training of practitioners. Through them and through a continuing stream of publications, Eddy's voice would continue to be heard and heeded in Christian Science until her death.

Not New Thought

Despite her church's remarkable growth, Eddy's twilight years saw their share of dissent and struggle as well. She continued to deny allegations that her teachings were merely a reworking of Quimby's, insisting that her revelation had been unique and original. Her church also suffered defections, even among her most prominent students, to the New Thought movement, which took its doctrines from another disciple of Quimby's, Warren Felt Evans. New Thought followers also believed in the power of mind over matter and focused on healing illness by restoring harmony between the human mind and the divine mind. Eddy had an authoritarian streak that alienated many students, and in her declining years she developed a reputation for eccentricity that verged on paranoia. Later editions of Science and Health began to explore the notion of "malicious animal magnetism," a mental force that could be projected onto others to blunt their healing powers and possibly even cause them physical harm. Firmly believing that she had enemies who wished her harm, Eddy allegedly gathered groups of her students around her when she traveled to form a physical shield against any projection of this "m.a.m." and engaged others to ward off such projections through prayer. In 1906 rumors of her death prompted a frail Eddy to summon nine reporters to her home for an interview so she could set the public record straight on that and other issues. Eddy and the religion she founded remain controversial, but her life certainly reveals a singular woman with an extraordinary drive to promulgate the truth she felt had been revealed to her, the vision of reality and Wellness contained in the notion of "Divine Science."

Source:

Robert David Thomas, "With Bleeding Footsteps": Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership (New York: Knopf, 1994).

Mary Baker Eddy

The American founder of the Christian Science Church, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) showed a unique understanding of the relationship between religion and health, which resulted in one of the era's most influential religious books, "Science and Health."

Mary Baker was born July 16, 1821, at Bow, N.H. A delicate and nervous temperament led to long periods of sickness in her early years, and chronic ill health made her weak and infirm during much of her adult life. In 1843 she married George Washington Glover, but he soon died and she returned home, where she had her only child. She married Daniel Patterson, a traveling dentist, in 1853; however, his frequent trips and her invalidism led to a separation by 1866 and a divorce several years later. In 1877 she married Asa Gilbert Eddy.

In her quest for health, she had visited Dr. Phineas P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, in 1862, and found that his nonmedical principles cured her. She absorbed his system and became a disciple. In 1866 she claimed to have been completely cured of injuries suffered in a fall by what she called "Christian science." By 1870 she was teaching her new-found science in collaboration with practitioners who did the healing. Her key ideas were published in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875).

This book and Mary Baker Eddy's forceful personality attracted numerous followers, and on Aug. 23, 1879, the Church of Christ, Scientist, was chartered. Asa Eddy helped organize the movement. Mrs. Eddy chartered the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881, where she taught her beliefs. Asa Eddy died in 1882, and the next year Mrs. Eddy began to publish the Journal of Christian Science.

Her fame spread, support grew, and Mrs. Eddy became wealthy. But dissensions divided the Church, and in 1889 "Mother Eddy" moved to Concord, N.H., apparently withdrawing from leadership. In seclusion, however, she restructured the Church organization: the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston was established on Sept. 23, 1892, as the mother church. Mrs. Eddy was its head, and all other churches were subject to its jurisdiction. Though internal quarrels diminished, they continued to the end of her life. Partly to guarantee a trustworthy newspaper for the movement, Mrs. Eddy began publishing the Christian Science Monitor in 1908. That year she moved to Chestnut Hill near Boston, where she died on Dec. 3, 1910.

Further Reading

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875 and later editions) is the most important of Mrs. Eddy's writings. Sibyl Wilbur, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (1908), is the laudatory official biography. A friendly but more scholarly study is Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy (2 vols., 1966-1971). Critical accounts are Edwin F. Dakin, Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind (1929), and Ernest S. Bates and John V. Dittemore, Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (1932). □

Eddy, Mary Baker (1821–1910) US founder of Christian Science (1879). She claimed to have rediscovered the secret of primitive Christian healing after an instantaneous recovery from serious injury. She expounded her system in Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures (1875).

Eddy, Mary Baker. See Christian Science.