Six weeks after her book Science and Health was published in 1875, Mary Baker Eddy noted, "I have just received from Harvard University a polite card of thanks for the Book I gave the library of that College." L12666, Mary Baker Eddy to Helen M. Blood, December 14, 1875, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity . It was perhaps more than promotional common sense that impelled Mrs. Eddy to move her book through academia's doors. For a book she would later dedicate to "honest seekers for Truth," Science and Health, p. xii. the academic environment—magnet to seekers and strivers, idealists and pragmatists, pure researchers and entrepreneurs-in-training—was a natural venue for connecting students and faculty with a body of revolutionary ideas.
That gift first edition is now kept in the rare book collections of Harvard's Houghton Library. One of the prime aims of an innovation that lay decades down the line from Mrs. Eddy's bestowal of that gift—Christian Science organizations on university and college campuses—would be to ensure that Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures would be more than a rare book, or a book rarely seen, on college campuses.
To thrive, and to benefit humanity, and ideas presented in the book needed to join the mainstreams of research, study, and everybody dorm and hallway conversation. If leaven rests alongside the dough, or in a sealed container, there's no expansion, no change. And Mrs. Eddy expected her book to stir—to challenge and change—the way people thought about life and God. In a chapter on those university core subjects, "Science, Theology, Medicine," she wrote, "The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind." Ibid., p. 162.
