Brad Stock is a special assistant for research in the office of The Christian Science Board of Directors. His article contains previously unpublished material about Mary Baker Eddy's pioneering work in the field of spiritual healing.
Before her discovery of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy spent years exploring the relationship between mind and body. She concluded that all health is produced by the divine Mind, God, and that the body is governed harmoniously through obedience to Mind, through reliance on Truth, a reliance which extends far beyond mere belief, culminating in an absolute faith and scientific understanding—"the knowledge of God." Mary Baker Eddy, Retrospection and Introspection, p. 31. See also Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, p. 107.
From childhood, Mrs. Eddy had caught glimpses of the spiritual fact of God's healing presence. She had healed others and been healed herself through prayer and a natural reliance on God. Thus, she knew firsthand the immediacy and relevance of God's love. But she did not find in the church of her youth a permanent cure for her chronic ills, nor was she able to cure her neighbors or loved ones consistently. Consequently, young Mary and her family turned for her well-being to the curative systems of their day. Mary soon found that she became "a slave to prevailing theories" Church History document: V00801. Church History department of The Mother Church. of health care, although her ills were not cured. The inability of materia medica to heal her, combined with her sincere desire to understand "divine things," caused her "to seek diligently for the knowledge of God as the one great and ever-present relief from human woe." Ret., p. 31.
