This article is based on a talk given at the 1985 Christian Science University and College Organizations Meeting held in Boston. The theme of the meeting was "Individual spirituality and the future of mankind."
We're all familiar with a sentence on the very first page of Science and Health: "The time for thinkers has come."Science and Health, p. vii. Mrs. Eddy surely didn't mean to confine the word thinkers to "intellectuals," though intellectual liveliness is certainly one of the elements of good thinking. So what do we mean by thinkers?
Let's take a quick and, of necessity, surface look at Mrs. Eddy's life. In our mind's eye perhaps we see her as she was in the famous balcony picture taken in 1903: a white-haired lady with a Victorian bonnet and a little ermine cape—a sweet, gentle, motherly person. There's little in that image to suggest that one is looking at one of the boldest thinkers of all history, what one might call a spiritual revolutionary. How are we to account for the fact that this woman—who had started life as a farm girl with a rather informal education—was now asking her thousands of followers to give deep thought to the question that appears every six months in the Christian Science Quarterly: "Is the Universe, Including Man, Evolved by Atomic Force?" And this was some years before the emergence of relativity theory, quantum physics, microbiology, and genetic engineering!
