Imagine yourself for a moment in the Original Mother Church at the Sunday service on May 26, 1895. Midway during the service, Mary Baker Eddy unexpectedly enters at the rear entrance of the auditorium. She walks down to the platform. As one biographer says in recounting the incident, a solo gives the congregation "time to settle down again."See Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), p. 77. Mrs. Eddy then rises and speaks to the congregation for about twenty minutes—simply, earnestly, and very memorably—of the need for repentance and overcoming sin.
Reminiscences of those present show the deep impression this appearance made on the congregation. A sociologist might say this was a typical example of the effect of a "charismatic" leader on impressionable followers. But for the working Christian Scientists there, just as for those who might read accounts of the incident, something deeper was at work.
What was it? What gave Mrs. Eddy such authority? What continues to give her that authority for Christian Scientists today?
