Eddy, Mary Baker (1821-1910)

Founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, the organizational center of the Christian Science movement. She was born on July 16, 1821, in Bow, New Hampshire. She grew up a member of the Congregational Church. She married George W. Glover in 1843, but he died suddenly the next year, though not before one child was born. In 1853 she married Daniel Patters. For a while the health problems that had plagued her off and on for many years receded, but they eventually returned. While her husband was away during the Civil War she visited a water cure sanitorium. She then heard about mental healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and eventually went to visit him in Maine.

Learning and applying Quimby's ideas about the mind as the key to health, Eddy found some real relief from her health problems, but she also discovered that soon after leaving his presence her symptoms returned. Then in 1866 she slipped and fell on the ice and for three days was largely immobile. During this period she read the Bible, and the truth about healing, that "God is all," the only reality, came to her. As a result, she was healed immediately.

She spent a period developing her new insight and working with individuals. In 1870 she put her ideas in a booklet, The Science of Man, which she used while writing her textbook, Science and Health, which appeared in 1875. By 1876 she had trained enough students as practitioners to warrant organizing the Christian Science Association as a fellowship and professional organization. Three years later she founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, and in 1881 she organized the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston. Her work blossomed, and The Journal of Christian Science was begun in 1883.

The 1880s were a time of expansion, but also of controversy. Eddy was especially upset with students who taught personal variations on her system or separated from her organization and continued to function as practitioners of either Christian Scientists or under other names. One of her most promising students, Emma Curtis Hopkins, left in 1884 and eventually became the founder of what has become known as New Thought. In 1889 Eddy dissolved most of the structures she had founded and in 1892 reorganized her followers under a new church structure headed by herself. The organization was anchored by the First Church of Christ Scientist, the mother church in Boston, of which Eddy was pastor. The mother church chartered local congregations whose leaders had to be members in good standing with the mother church.

In the 1890s a major controversy erupted involving a lawsuit charging that Eddy had simply plagiarized the work of Phineas Quimby. The suit was settled in her favor, but unfortunately Quimby's mostly unpublished papers were not available in court, and Annetta and Julius Dresser, both former Quimby students, and their son Horatio Dresser perpetuated the idea that Eddy would have lost had the material been available.

Eddy's church had spread to every section of United States and Canada by the time of her death on December 3, 1910. She left behind a church manual, published in 1908, to guide the administration of the organization, which is now headed by a self-perpetuating board of directors.

Sources:

Beasley, Norman. The Cross and the Crown. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952.

Eddy, Mary Baker. Church Manual of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass. Boston: Trustees Under the Will of Mary Baker Eddy, 1908.

——. Poetical Works. Boston: Trustees Under the Will of Mary Baker Eddy, 1936.

——. Prose Works. Boston: Trustees Under the Will of Mary Baker Eddy, 1925.

——. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Boston: Trustees Under the Will of Mary Baker Eddy, 1906.

Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy. 3 vols. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971.