The founding of The Mother Church and the development of its Manual are more than past history. They bring to light the spiritual design for the whole future development of the Christian Science movement. To see this is to feel the power of the spiritual vision that enabled Mary Baker Eddy to found her Church on a timeless basis and foresee the needs that would confront it in the future. This four-part series, by the author and biographer Robert Peel, is based on his extensive historical research. It provides factual answers to distortions and misrepresentations currently circulating, which would work to destroy The Mother Church and frustrate its Founder's divinely inspired purpose.
Is it true, as some have claimed, that the Discoverer of Christian Science was reluctantly pushed into forming The Mother Church by the clamorous desire of her followers for a human organization? Nothing could be further from the truth.See first article of series, in the June Journal. The initiative, as well as the demonstration, was decisively hers. Her rejoicing in the steps taken in 1892 to establish The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston is evident in all that she wrote at that period.
Two months before the formal act of organization, she wrote in a personal memorandum that she had been trying to have others carry out God's plans in the matter of church building instead of being involved in it herself. But they had met with no success, and she now saw why. It was because they apparently were unable to hear and obey God's voice unless it came to them through her, so she must take up the task and direct the matter to its conclusion.Archives of The Mother Church.
Two weeks after the Church had been formed, she wrote to one of her students, "Every organization, every educational measure civil and religious, I have founded in Christian Science on a purely original plan—for God, not man, has suggested it to me."Quoted in Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), p. 34. This is plain speaking. It leaves no room for the assertions of those who say that in founding The Mother Church she was only temporizing with her students' conventional sense of the need for religious organization.
Because of recent claims to that effect, it is worth recalling that the founding process had been going on ever since Mrs. Eddy took her first student in 1866. Then came the Christian Scientist Association in 1876, The Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879, and the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881. Even when she was led in 1889 to dissolve all three of these organizations in the form in which they then existed, she kept them alive in a rudimentary form, ready for further development if and when that should become clearly desirable.
In all this she felt the hand of God leading her. If the Christ-idea was to find institutional embodiment in this age, it could only be through a mentality attentive at every step to the promptings of Spirit. No cost in personal stress would be too great. At one point in the 1880's Mrs. Eddy had asked her followers, "Can a mother tell her child one tithe of the agonies that gave that child birth?" and then had gone on to ask, "Do the children of this period dream of the spiritual Mother's sore travail, through the long night, that has opened their eyes to the light of Christian Science?"Miscellaneous Writings, p. 253. Both questions apply quite as much to the founding as to the discovery of Christian Science.
Most Christian Scientists are probably familiar with already published accounts of the chief events leading up to the founding in 1892: how twelve of our Leader's most trusted students met on August 29, at her request, to learn of her appointment of a new "Christian Science Board of Directors"; how, three days later, the Directors signed a Deed of Trust drawn up by her, which required them as "a perpetual body" to erect on the land deeded to them a Church to be known as The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, and to maintain regular services therein; and how, on September 23, at her request, the same students who had met on August 29 voted themselves and twenty additional students "First Members" of the Church, thereby bringing The Mother Church as such into active existence.
This cluster of obscure incidents may not of itself sound impressive, but the possibility opened up by it was. Christianity had always valued small beginnings. Even the kingdom of heaven had been compared by the Founder of Christianity to "a grain of mustard seed . . . which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof."Matt. 13:31,32.
After Christian Science churches everywhere became branches of The Mother Church, the emerging pattern of development became clearer. The possibility of dual membership in a branch church and The Mother Church reinforced the new relationship. As early as October 1892, Mrs. Eddy approved a letter to go out to Christian Science teachers inviting them and their qualified students to apply for membership in the reconstituted organization. The letter's opening sentence, which is obviously the nucleus of the later statement of purpose that appears today on page 19 of the Manual of The Mother Church, expressed a profound hope and intention: "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, is designed to be built on the rock of Christ, on Truth and Love, and to be a church universal, a church militant that shall reflect the church triumphant."Archives.
Today, more than seventy years after the completion of Mrs. Eddy's work as Founder, the grand design for the Church is a good deal more apparent than in 1892 when the shaping process was far from complete. Yet the early steps still need better understanding. Especially now, when those who would do away with The Mother Church or reduce it to a local Boston organization are rewriting history by plucking early statements by Mrs. Eddy out of their historical context in an effort to make it appear that her founding of The Mother Church was merely a concession to the needs of her own times.
One argument is that the 1879 Church was an entirely different one from the 1892 Church, each serving a different purpose and each destined for dissolution after a very limited period of existence.
Mrs. Eddy herself has indicated that the Church of Christ, Scientist, has had a continuous existence since 1879, Message to The Mother Church for 1900 1:9-15. moving forward under spiritual impulsion through various phases of organization, disorganization, and reorganization toward its final form as The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, with its branches throughout the world.
This means that the two distinctive founding purposes for the 1879 organization and the 1892 reorganization as given on pages 17 and 19 of the Church Manual are equally essential and are complementary to each other. Neither supersedes or cancels the other. Both are vital to carrying forward the mission of the Church, which cannot be separated from either the deep-rooted Christianity of Mrs. Eddy's discovery or its increasing application as universal, scientific Truth.
In other words, behind the outward history of the Church's development lies the intrinsic unity of Christianity and Science so splendidly summed up in the words of Science and Health: "Christ's Christianity is the chain of scientific being reappearing in all ages, maintaining its obvious correspondence with the Scriptures and uniting all periods in the design of God."Science and Health, p. 271.
To all Christians, the daily happenings in the archetypal life of Jesus—his journeyings, conversations, healings, no less than his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension—were encompassed by that great design of God. So, in their measure, all the practical details connected with the formation of The Mother Church fell within the design for Christian Science that was gradually disclosing itself to Mrs. Eddy. She learned by doing. Some of the most mundane tasks that were forced on her by the need of the moment brought to her the very inspiration that moved the Church closer to its designated purpose of "healing and saving the world from sin and death"Man., p. 19.— not just the individual Christian Scientist or even the local community, but the world.
For instance, a great deal of her immediate attention throughout 1892 was focused on what she felt to be the urgent need to spur her Boston officers to put up a church building in Boston's Back Bay that would visibly represent The Mother Church to the public. It was this apparently local problem that led to one of the most important organizational aspects of the evolving Church: the recognition of the legal right of the Board of Directors to proceed with building the Church while the membership as a whole remained an unincorporated religious association, thus opening the way for a later departure altogether from the congregational form of government that would have been wholly inappropriate for a worldwide membership.
While apparently immersed in the details of the immediate situation, Mrs. Eddy was making her way forward not by blueprint but by spiritual intuition. This was admirably perceived by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in a 1924 decision which incidentally recognized the significance of her constituting the new Board of Directors before she formed the new membership. The decision read in part:
"Her views in 1892 apparently were in a state of transition, development or evolution. She had not then completely formulated the precise form of ecclesiastical organization best adapted in her mind to carry out her conception of a church. She was studying that problem but had not reached a conclusion. She desired to give a tract of land for the purpose of erecting a church edifice. She made an unmistakable declaration that the grantees in her deed of September 1, 1892, should constitute a corporation under the name 'Christian Science Board of Directors,' in accordance with the terms of the contemporaneous statute governing religious societies."Dittemore v. Dickey, 249 Mass. 95, 144 NE 57 (1924).
Mrs. Eddy valued this Massachusetts statute, but nothing suggests that she saw it as more than the best practical way of accomplishing the immediate end she had in view. She had been willing to seek a new charter or try any other legal means that would enable her church officers to proceed with building the church edifice whose time she knew to have come. But she also felt it highly important to have the hand of civil law lie as lightly as possible on the new church organization, and the statute in question served that purpose admirably. Seventy years later a change of one word in the law lifted the only restriction that it had arbitrarily laid on the choice of new members to fill vacancies in the Board of Directors, thus removing the last restraint on Mrs. Eddy's wish to have the Church be a truly universal one."The Manual and the Church Universal," Journal, October 1976, p. 574.
Some Christian Scientists have been disturbed by this change in a statute that they suppose Mrs. Eddy to have considered inspired in every detail. But her approach to human law was always practical; she respected it, made use of it so far as it would support the activity of divine law, but welcomed any change that would remove arbitrary constraints on religious freedom. Writing in 1892 about some of her legal difficulties in connection with the ownership of the land for the anticipated church building in Boston, she made clear the metaphysical basis on which the whole project must rest:
"The foundation on which our church was to be built had to be rescued from the grasp of legal power, and now it must be put back into the arms of Love, if we would not be found fighting against God."Mis., p. 140.
This has a larger bearing on the whole issue of church building. It was typical of Mrs. Eddy's spiritual radicalism that she used the laying of the cornerstone of The Mother Church Edifice as an occasion for reminding her followers of the temporal character—as well as the human indispensability—of church organization. "The Church, more than any other institution," she wrote in her address for the modest ceremony on that occasion, "at present is the cement of society, and it should be the bulwark of civil and religious liberty. But the time cometh when the religious element, or Church of Christ, shall exist alone in the affections, and need no organization to express it. Till then, this form of godliness seems as requisite to manifest its spirit, as individuality to express Soul and substance."Ibid., pp. 144-145.
Nowhere was this form of godliness more evident than in Mrs. Eddy's individual demonstration of spiritual wisdom in shaping the Church she would leave to her followers. For the last eighteen years of her life she would pour out endless love, thought, prayer, and detailed care on this "child" of her revelation. Her work as Founder is no more to be discarded or disregarded today than her mission as Discoverer of Christian Science. For any who think of themselves as Christian Scientists but turn away from the very concept of an organized "mother" church, the lament of Christ Jesus stands as a compassionate reminder: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"Matt. 23:37.
Next month: The structure of The Mother Church
