This series of articles focuses on the healings brought about by Mary Baker Eddy through her reliance on God. These healings began in her childhood and continued throughout her life. Some of them have not been published previously.
Mary Baker Eddy wrote of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "The textbook of Christian Science maintains primitive Christianity, shows how to demonstrate it, and throughout is logical in premise and in conclusion. Can Scientists adhere to it, establish their practice of healing on its basis, become successful healers and models of good morals, and yet the book itself be absurd and unscientific? Is not the tree known by its fruit?" The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 111
Mary Baker Eddy:
a lifetime of healing
As evidenced by her correspondence, Mrs. Eddy was especially concerned about the need for effective Christian healing. To this end she was continually working to make clearer her textbook on the Science of Christ-healing. At the end of January 1902, the 226th edition of Science and Health was issued. Readers familiar with the book could immediately see it was a major revision. Mrs. Eddy, assisted by two of her students, Edward A. Kimball and William P McKenzie, had spent many months working on it. She significantly rearranged the chapters, putting them in the order that they have today, and she added a new final chapter, "Fruitage," a compilation of healings from the pages of The Christian Science Journal and the Christian Science Sentinel. What ties these healings together is that they were all accomplished solely through the reading of Science and Health. Mrs. Eddy also reviewed the marginal headings in the book and rewrote some of them. For the origin and further background of the marginal headings, see the editorial "Science and Health: textbook for self-improvement" in the September 1993 issue of The Christian Science Journal And she told Kimball and McKenzie to make sure that all Scriptural quotations in the book were according to the King James Version. Another new feature she added was line numbering.
Mrs. Eddy devoted herself throughout 1902 to reading through the new revision page by page. Whereas the 1902 reading was for the purpose of making corrections, Science and Health xii:20-22 refers to her reading the textbook in 1907 specifically for the purpose of "elucidat [ing] her idealism." As a result, she corrected and standardized the capitalization of words relating to God, removed repetitious sentences and paragraphs, and added a little new material. In a letter to Albert F. Conant, who was compiling the Concordance, Mrs. Eddy wrote in the spring of 1903:
My "last changes of Science and Health" may
continue so long as I read the book! but I will
stop now and you may finish the Concordance
immediately. Church History document: 1,08403, Church History department of The Mother Church
Revising Science and Health was just one of many continuing assignments Mrs. Eddy gave herself. As she wrote to a friend, "My whole time is employed in the work for humanity." Church History document: L4299 To two students who had given her a copy of Wycliffe's translation of the New Testament, she wrote:
To-day it is a marvel to me that God chose me
for this mission, and that my life-work was the
theme of ancient prophecy and I the scribe of His
infinite way of Salvation! O may He keep me
at the feet of Christ, cleansing the human understanding and bathing it with my tears; wiping it
with the hairs of my head, the shreds of my un
derstanding that God "numbered" to make men
wise unto salvation. Church History document: F00246
Mrs. Eddy saw salvation as the scientific understanding and demonstration of God's supremacy, which heals sin and sickness. Time and again during this period, she was writing to her followers of the great need for quick, effective healing work. She wrote to her cousin, Alfred Baker, a former doctor turned Christian Scientist:
The sick need you and you can do great good
by healing. The Cause needs healers a million times more than teachers. The best healer is the best Scientist and will take the place that God has for all to take. Church History document: V00274
To the Editor of the Journal and Sentinel:
I started this great work and woke the people by demonstration, not words but works. Our periodicals must have more Testimonials in them. ... Healing is the best sermon, healing is the best lecture, and the entire demonstration of C[hristian] S[cience]. The sinner and sick healed are our best witnesses. Church History document: L03057
To a Boston student:
... I retain my conviction that the greatest need that our Cause has is better healers. Those of experience, Christian character, and ability are more needed, much more, to fill this appointment in proof of C.S. than to build up churches. Church History document: 1.15516
To a Christian Science practitioner:
Unless we have better healers, and more of this work than any other, is done, our Cause will not "stand and having done all stand."
Demonstration is the whole of Christian Science, nothing else proves it, nothing else will save it and continue it with us. God has said this—and Christ Jesus has proved it. Church History document: L08352
And to a teacher of Christian Science:
... healing the sick and reforming the sinner demonstrate Christian Science, and nothing else can, does.
Beloved child, will you not address yourself to gaining this height of holiness? Nothing is so much needed for your own happiness and distinguishment, and for the success of our Cause, and for the glory of leading on and up the human race, as this one demonstration. By it I got the attention of the world, my words and writings, sermons and students, or adherents, could not, did not, do it. But my wonderful healing did it. Church History document: H00071
Mrs. Eddy's healing work was still "wonderful," as a worker in her home recounted. A circus performer with an eye injury, whom Mrs. Eddy had seen at the 1901 New Hampshire State Fair, later paid a visit to her:
One day, a man whom she had seen jump from a great height called to see her. He had on
dark goggles. She asked him if he were not afraid when he took that leap. He explained to her that if he were to become afraid the jump was too high, he would be killed. After talking to him in a most heavenly way for some time, one could see by the expression of his face how enlightened he was mentally. Then she began again, and talked to him about his lack of fear, he still asserting that he had no fear when jumping—he knew he could do it. She said to him, "Why not apply the same rule to your eyes?" One, he told her had been destroyed through an accident, the other was all right, but he wore the dark goggles to hide the bad eye. They were sitting in the library and as she talked to him I could see and feel that his fear was removed, and his thought was full of hope and joy, although he did not then realise the blessing he had received. A day or two afterwards the cabman who drove him to the station reported there that he had two perfect eyes when he reached the station. Clara Shannon reminiscences, Church History
At the end of June 1903, Mrs. Eddy invited those who had attended The Mother Church's Annual Meeting in Boston to visit her home in New Hampshire. About ten thousand came to Concord and heard her speak briefly from the balcony of her Pleasant View home. A number of healings occurred at this gathering: a man was healed of smoking, a woman of exhaustion, and a boy who was crippled was healed. Another wonderful healing happened during Mrs. Eddy's carriage drive after her talk. An account of this appears in the reminiscences of Lottie Clark, a Christian Science nurse:
... I was in a seven passenger car going to Hyde Park, Boston to a [Christian Science] lecture. Soon after we started the woman in the front seat turned around and said she wished to tell us of a woman who lived in Concord, New Hampshire. This Concord woman was paralyzed on one side, she had not a penny in the world, and her home was so unhappy she felt she could no longer live in it. So she decided to leave home and never return. As she left her yard she looked up the street and saw a large concourse of people. Out of curiosity she followed them, they were the ten thousand on their way to Pleasant View. When they arrived this woman was on the outskirts of the crowd, so far away that she did not even hear the sound of Mrs. Eddy's voice when she spoke. When Mrs. Eddy turned around and returned to the
house[,to] this woman ['s] helplessness, hopelessness, and despair was added this fresh disappointment at not hearing what she knew must have been a very important message to have attracted that size crowd. She turned around with tears flowing freely down her face to return to Concord. As she walked along she came to a vacant lot, she crossed this lot to the street on the other side, and there she stood weeping bitterly, her face drenched with tears when she saw a team of horses coming. She stood idly watching them and as they approached she recognized the woman in the carriage to be the same one who had spoken from the balcony, so she waited to see her at close range. As the carriage passed Mrs. Eddy leaned forward and looked at her. No word was spoken, but the woman was instantly healed. She returned to her home and found the home condition healed. This was the end of the story. We all sat spellbound and overwhelmed at the wonderful healings of Mrs. Eddy. All was quiet for a while, then the woman who sat beside me spoke up and said very quietly, "And I was that woman, and I have lived happily in my home ever since." Then she added, "Never before nor since have I seen the love and compassion in any human face that I saw in Mrs. Eddy's when she leaned forward and looked at me." Lottie Clark reminiscences, Church History
As Mrs. Eddy wrote to one of her students a year later, "Faith in and the spiritual understanding of the allness of divine Love heals." Church History document: L04273. Another portion of this letter was published in the Sentinel, September 19, 1936, p. 50
At the time Mrs. Eddy spoke from her balcony, she had been at work three months on revising the Manual of The Mother Church. She finished this at the end of July, and it was issued on September 5, 1903. The twenty-ninth edition of the Church Manual contained seventeen new By-Laws, amendments to 122 existing ones, and the deletion of twenty old Rules. Mrs. Eddy also revised the church "Tenets" and "Historical Sketch." A week after its publication, she provided an article entitled "Mental Digestion" for the Christian Science Sentinel about this new Manual. She ended this article with an extraordinary statement: "Of this I am sure, that each Rule and By-law in this Manual will increase the spirituality of him who obeys it, invigorate his capacity to heal the sick, to comfort such as mourn, and to awaken the sinner." Sentinel, September 12, 1903, p. 24. Reprinted in Miscellany, pp. 229-230 In Mrs. Eddy's eyes, the Manual was much more than a compilation of Rules to operate her Church in an orderly manner. She intended it also to be, just as importantly, a guidebook that, when understood and obeyed, made its students better Christian healers. Like Science and Health, the Manual was to be applied to all aspects of one's daily life.
In 1904 Mrs. Eddy twice wrote to her Church's Board of Directors about the great importance of healing work by Christian Scientists. In May she told them:
I have just saved the life of one of my students and treated him only once. The demonstration of what I have taught them heals the sick. Church History document: L00383
And in August she wrote:
As I understand it, God has His cause demonstrated in healing the sick.... Explain to those who write, that less teaching and more healing is best for our Cause, and for the students; fewer reports of new churches and more testimonials of our cures, argue more for the progress of Christian Science. Church History document: L01365
Nothing was more important to Mrs. Eddy than doing God's will. To her, healing was the highest activity anyone could aspire to, and she devoted herself through her books and her Church to do all that could be done to promote and extend this activity to all mankind.
Note: Last month in this series, we said that Clara Shannon had gone to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Buswell. This should have read the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ezra M. Buswell.
