Mary Baker Eddy. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC- USZ ).

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1 Mary Baker Eddy. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC- USZ ). Eddy, Mary Baker (16 July Dec. 1910), founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, and of Christian Science as a method of healing, was born near Concord, New Hampshire, the daughter of Mark Baker and Abigail Ambrose. Historians are generally agreed that Eddy's father was a volatile, ambitious, and theologically rigid Calvinist and that her mother was a self-effacing woman devoted to home, family, and a gentler form of religious piety. Eddy was admitted to membership in the Congregational church at Sanbornton Bridge, New Hampshire, in 1838 in spite of her rejection of predestination and her inability to pinpoint an experience of conversion. Her family's devotional life emphasized prayer, Bible reading, church attendance, study of the Westminster Catechism, and intense theological discussion and provided her with a kind of informal theological education. Eddy's secular education was irregular, although not atypical for her time, gender, class, and rural location. She attended one-room district schools beginning at age five and in 1842 attended Sanbornton Academy. Between the ages of nine and thirteen, she was tutored in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek by her brother, a student at Dartmouth College. Eddy's education was frequently interrupted by physical illness and emotional anxiety. Historians' interpretations of her afflictions vary from neutral or sympathetic description to speculation that the symptoms signaled a neurotic need for attention. Whatever the causes, physical and emotional illness constituted a central, formative, and ongoing influence on Eddy's life, and she described herself even as a child connecting physical well-being with an understanding of God as loving and compassionate rather than angry and judging. Eddy married George Washington Glover in 1843 and moved with him to Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina, where Glover died of yellow fever six months after the wedding. Pregnant and without financial resources, she returned to Sanbornton Bridge to live with her family. She gave birth to George Washington Glover II, her only child, in the fall of With significant assistance Eddy was able to care for her son until 1851 when he went to live with Mahala and Russell Cheney, who moved with him to Minnesota in Eddy heard from him for the first time in 1861 but did not see him again until By the time Eddy married Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist, in 1853, she had spent more than six years financially dependent on the various relatives with whom she lived. Her ill health persisted, but she was able to earn a little money by writing columns, letters, and poetry for local newspapers, work she had done sporadically since before her first marriage. The years with Patterson were characterized by financial instability, moves from town to town, and Patterson's frequent absences, including time spent in 1862 as a

2 prisoner of the Confederates. Eddy was separated from Patterson in 1866 and divorced him in Eddy's continuing search for good health led her to homeopathic physicians and then in 1862 to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a mesmeric healer in Portland, Maine. Quimby's efforts afforded her periodic if not permanent relief until his death in January Less than a month later Eddy suffered spinal injuries after a fall on the ice. Her subsequent healing while reading an account of one of Jesus' healings became a pivotal event in her own life and in the unfolding of Christian Science as a healing system and a church. She experienced the healing as a discovery, a sudden insight into the nature of God and reality and claimed that it gave her "the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon." The extent to which Eddy incorporated Quimby's ideas about healing into her own method has been a persistent source of conflict in the history of Christian Science. It seems clear that Eddy was influenced by Quimby's ideas about the mental causes of illness and health, a concept she had already encountered in homeopathy, but she would come to develop her own distinctive healing system, much more theological in nature than Quimby's. Eddy departed from Quimby's assumption that the healer takes on the suffering of the patient and eventually rejected physical manipulations such as head rubbing that were common to mesmerism. Over the next nine years, Eddy endured poverty and dependence on the charity of others to provide her with a home. She engaged in healing work, pondered in writing her understanding of healing and its relationship to the Bible, and taught classes to small groups of students. In 1870 she and Richard Kennedy, a nineteen-year-old student who worked in a box factory, formed a two-year teacher-practitioner partnership in Lynn, Massachusetts. In 1872 she broke with Kennedy completely, due in part to disagreement over Eddy's determination to abolish any kind of physical contact from her healing method. In 1875 the first edition of Science and Health was published by the newly formed Christian Science Publishing Company, financially underwritten by two of Eddy's students. That same year Eddy bought a house at 8 Broad Street in Lynn, Massachusetts. Eddy continued to revise Science and Health, the textbook of Christian Science used in conjunction with the Bible, throughout the rest of her life. Between 1875 and 1892 Eddy continued to work at defining her own distinct method of healing, as well as a theology to undergird it, and a church structure to support it. Her radical statement about reality--that spirit is real and that matter is ultimately an illusion-- required new understandings of God, the world, and humankind. Eddy was attempting in broad terms to respond to the age-old question of theodicy: why is there suffering and what, if anything, does God have to do with it? Her denial of God as creator of the material universe absolved God from responsibility for human suffering without abandoning her Calvinist conviction of God's sovereignty. She intended Christian Science healing to be a scientific demonstration of the all-ness of God and the nonexistence of evil and matter rather than as an end in itself. She did not deny that "mortal man" experienced suffering, only that God created or permitted it. Both suffering

3 and sin would lose their power, she was convinced, if women and men abandoned their reliance on the physical senses and gave themselves over to correcting the cosmic misunderstanding that matter has any basis in ultimate reality. The writings Eddy published during this time, including fifty revised editions of Science and Health, gave evidence of her efforts to distinguish Christian Science as a new religious movement in American culture: Christian Healing (1880), The People's God (1883), Historical Sketches of Metaphysical Healing (1885), Defence of Christian Science (1885), Christian Science: No and Yes (1887), Rudiments and Rules of Divine Science (1887), Unity of Good and Unreality of Evil (1888), and Retrospection and Introspection (1891), an autobiographical work. During these same years Eddy and several students formed the Church of Christ, Scientist (1879), began and dissolved the Massachusetts Metaphysical College ( ), founded the Journal of Christian Science (1883), and started and disbanded the National Christian Scientist Association ( ). In 1885 Eddy gave an address on Christian Science at Tremont Temple in Boston in response to clerical attacks on her teachings. The address lasted only ten minutes, but historian Stephen Gottschalk (1973) cites it as marking the conspicuous emergence of Christian Science into American religious life. By the mid-1880s, Christian Science had begun to attract increasing numbers of converts, mostly from Congregationalism and Methodism. By summer 1884 there was enough interest in Christian Science in Chicago to warrant Eddy's teaching a course there. In 1889 Eddy disorganized the church for a period of three years in order to restructure the entire organization. These years of development and at least moderate success were marred by personal difficulties, may of them having to do with issues of doctrine and authority: lawsuits, acrimonious breaks with former students, and challenges to the originality of her teachings. Biographer Robert Peel (1971) refers to them as "the years of trial." Daniel H. Spofford, Edward J. Arens, Clara Choate, Emma Curtis Hopkins, and Ursula N. Gestefeld were all students who became disaffected from Eddy and developed their own rival healing practices. Arens, for example, accused Eddy in 1883 of borrowing material without attribution from Quimby after she brought suit against him (Arens) for plagiarizing from Science and Health. In 1881 a group of formerly devoted students in Lynn departed from Christian Science, citing their inability to continue under Eddy's temperamental leadership. Within weeks the remaining students ordained her pastor of the Church of Christ, Scientist, and she moved to Boston. In 1888 more than thirty students in Boston withdrew from the Christian Scientists Association in protest of Eddy's failure to defend a Christian Science practitioner whose daughter and grandchild died in childbirth while she was attending them. That same year Eddy legally adopted Ebenezer J. Foster, a 41-year-old homeopathic physician, who studied with her and served for several years as her personal spokesperson. That mostly troubled relationship ended in 1897 with Foster Eddy's expulsion from the Christian Science church in Philadelphia and banishment from Eddy's home. A notable exception to the pattern of unhappy students was Eddy's marriage in 1877 to Asa Gilbert Eddy, a sewing machine salesman who had become her student in The marriage lasted until his death in 1882.

4 In the final eighteen years of her life Eddy expended immense energy devising and maintaining an organization for Christian Science. She considered complex bureaucracy and hierarchy manifestations of the material understanding of reality she opposed but was well aware that Christian Science needed a system of governance with sufficient authority to hold an emerging religion together and perpetuate her own interpretation of Christian Science healing and theology. The Manual of the Mother Church (1895), like Science and Health, revised and added to many times before Eddy's death, became and still is the repository of Christian Science polity. It codified the reorganization begun in 1892 and ensured that Eddy could maintain distance from the everyday operations of the church without losing her overall authority. Under its provisions the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, became the seat of authority. All other churches were to be branches of the mother church, although they maintained congregational autonomy. The Manual designated a five-person, self-perpetuating board of directors subject to the authority of the Manual to govern the church, but, according to most interpretations, the board was not to be understood as Eddy's successor. In 1893, the same year that Christian Scientists participated in the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago and also held a separate Congress there, work was begun on the building of the mother church on land deeded by Eddy to the board in Eddy, who since 1889 had lived sequestered in Concord, New Hampshire, set the date for the first service in December 1894 and indicated that from then on the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures would be the pastor of the mother church. This move eliminated the need for personal preaching and the risk that such preaching might distort the teachings of Christian Science. Eddy visited the mother church for the first time in April 1895 and accepted the title of pastor emeritus. Eddy enjoyed obvious success and fame during the last two decades of her life. Christian Science membership increased, branch churches were being organized across the country, and Eddy continued to write and publish, producing Miscellaneous Writings (1897) and Poems (1910). The first issue of the Christian Science Weekly (changed to Sentinel in 1899) appeared in 1898, the same year Eddy taught her last class at Concord. Sibyl Wilbur's sympathetic account of Eddy's life was published by the Christian Science Publishing Society in 1907, and in 1908 The Christian Science Monitor was founded. These years, nonetheless, were not easy. Mark Twain wrote hostile articles in Cosmopolitan and the North American Review as well as a book, Christian Science (1907), ridiculing both Eddy and Christian Science healing. In Georgine Milmine wrote a series of negative articles for McClure's Magazine that were issued in book form in And Eddy still suffered physical pain and anxiety. The more severe attacks seemed related to conflicts and crises in Christian Science and to fears that she was a victim of Malicious Animal Magnetism, the negative influence of one mind on another. MAM, as it was called, had been a subject of concern for many years in Eddy's suspicions about what had caused Asa Gilbert Eddy's death and in her difficulties with various students, rivals, and critics. Problems likewise persisted with students, two in particular. Josephine Woodbury was dismissed from Christian Science forever in 1895 after a tempestuous history with the movement beginning in She filed a libel suit in 1899 that was finally concluded in Eddy's favor in Controversy with Augusta Stetson, for many years first reader of the First Church of Christ Scientist, New York

5 City, and one of Eddy's most capable students, occurred over accusations of distortion of Christian Science teachings and Stetson's increasing independence. Their one-time close relationship probably accounts for the extended pattern of reprimands and reconciliations. Stetson was excommunicated for good in 1910, although she professed personal loyalty to Eddy long after Eddy had died. In 1907 Eddy's son, George Glover, his daughter, and a Baker cousin petitioned, supposedly on Eddy's behalf, for control of her affairs from ten Christian Science associates, including Calvin Frye, her secretary and manager of her household. This "next friends" petition was turned down when those appointed by the court to interview Eddy found her obviously competent. In January 1908 Eddy moved to Chestnut Hill near Brookline, Massachusetts, where she died. She left an organization well able to proceed without her presence but at the same time structured to perpetuate her theological authority and personal charisma. Controversies over the sources of Eddy's teachings, the unpredictability of her temperament and volatility of her relationships, the causes of her physical and mental suffering, and the nature of her authority as understood variously by Christian Scientists have tended to obscure her broader role as a woman and as a theologian. As a woman who founded a religion, Eddy is a rare phenomenon. Her life and work provide important insights into the significance of gender in religion and the ways that women have been both present and absent in American religious history. Her use of the term "Mother- Father God" was at least a foreshadowing of later attempts to link particular models of God with the relative status of women. The church Eddy founded has attracted a disproportionate number of women throughout its history and has offered them opportunities for leadership as teachers and practitioners. As a lay person who developed a distinct theological and healing system, described by Gottschalk (1973) as Christian but not Protestant, Eddy gave evidence of an unusual creativity with theological concepts and combined this facility with an astuteness about matters of organization. Her combining of radically spiritual metaphysics, uniquely interpreted Christian theology, and pragmatism was certainly a response to the theological issues of the nineteenth century brought on in great part by the growing influence of science rather than religion as the arbiter of truth. She produced one of the few indigenous American religious movements to survive more than one hundred years, and the method of healing she developed persists as an alternative, although often a controversial one, to traditional medicine. By Mary Farrell Bednarowski Citation: Mary Farrell Bednarowski. "Eddy, Mary Baker"; American National Biography Online Feb Access Date: Mon Nov 13 18:31:17 CST 2006 Copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy.