When in 1867 Mary Baker Eddy first began to take pupils in order to teach them the Science of Christ, she taught from the Bible and she also turned these students to the Scriptures. Today, the Christian Science Quarterly Weekly Bible Lessons, whose topics she chose, fulfill a major role in helping anyone who studies them stay close to the Bible and explore its healing spiritual meaning. This series offers some brief notes on the evolution of these Lessons.
1885 The Christian Science Sunday Schools, at that time mainly adult classes, were using an interdenominational Bible-study publication called The Pilgrim Quarterly For Senior Classes. Prepared by the Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society, it was promoted on its masthead as "an aid to the study of the International Sunday-school Lessons" used in Protestant churches.
The "International Sunday-school Lessons" comprised a system of Bible study that had developed over many years. It is generally agreed that it had its origins in England in the 1780s with the effort to reach the poor, the uneducated, and the criminal. By 1827, a great variety of publishers (including the American Sunday School Union) were producing a wide assortment of Bible lesson books designed to lead readers, over a period of several years, through a study of the entire Bible.
