"I know that my mission is for all the earth, not alone for my dear devoted followers in Christian Science. ... All my work, all my efforts, all my prayers and tears are for humanity, and the spread of peace and love among mankind" (Mary Baker Eddy, in a 1907 interview with The New York American).
On Monday evening, June 5, 2000, a special program was presented in the Extension of The Mother Church by the newly established Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity. The presentation explored Mary Baker Eddy's emergence from the private life of an unknown New England woman into the very public life of an author, publisher, and founder whose accomplishments and ideas had captured the attention of the world.
The program employed an array of source material, live interviews and electronic aids, and over the course of more than two hours, opened to the large audience (and to those watching live on the World Wide Web) an unprecedented number of Mary Baker Eddy's previously unpublished letters and manuscripts.
The source material included original archival documents in Mrs. Eddy's handwriting, researched historical data, and furniture and artifacts from several of Mrs. Eddy's homes. The electronic aspects included two videotapes on her life and legacy, live cameras projecting the archival material onto two large auditorium screens, and a "virtual" tour of the new Library by means of artists' sketches and architectural renderings.
Informative interviews were conducted with Mary Baker Eddy's three most recent biographers, Gillian Gill, Richard Nenneman, and Yvonne von Fettweis, and with two of the Library's advisors, Professors Ann Braude of Harvard Divinity school, and David Hufford of The Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. Also introduced were two of the Library's principal advisors, a former archivist of the United States, and historian and author . And some of Mary Baker Eddy's letters were thoughtfully and compassionately presented by playwright Horton Foote and his daughter, actress Hallie Foote, on a set that included original furniture from Mrs. Eddy's homes.
It was an evening rich in history and in the spirit of the woman whose lifelong work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, would be for future generations what Mrs. Eddy had been for her own—teacher, healer, friend, and pastor.
What follows are transcribed excerpts from the "Daughter of New England ..." program.
The presentation began with a welcome from a member of The Christian Science Board of Directors,
John Selover: This afternoon, many of you heard from The Christian Science Board of Directors about the background, impelling circumstances, and inspiration for the establishment of The Mary Baker Eddy Library of the Betterment of Humanity. We see the Library as a special place where schoolchildren, scholars, seekers of all denominations and professions, can discover and find comfort and hope in Mrs. Eddy's life and ideas. It is evangelical, but not in the sense of bringing people into Mrs. Eddy's Church; rather, in the sense of letting her ideas out, making them available and accessible.
The Library's statement of purpose embraces that ideal: "The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity is engaged in furthering the universal quest for spirituality and the science of being and their effect on health and human progress."
This evening we'll be taking a "virtual" tour of the new Library and letting the rich body of archival material—most of it previously unpublished—educate us about a period that witnessed Mrs. Eddy's emergence from "daughter of New England" to "citizen of the world."
Your guide for this presentation is not so "virtual"! He is
Stephen Danzansky: Tonight, we're going to take you on a journey through nearly three-fifths of Mary Baker Eddy's life as Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. Informed by her letters, diaries, notes, manuscripts, and other unpublished writings, we'll be looking at three decades: the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. These are interesting years, because they yield a wealth of information about Mrs. Eddy's emerging thought and about the tasks she completed, usually quite alone, in her endeavor to found or "provide a foundation for" what she had discovered. "Whoever opens the way in Christian Science," she writes in Science and Health, "is a pilgrim and stranger, marking out the path for generations yet unborn." Science and Health, p. 174.
At the turn of the century, a popular magazine, Human Life, described Mary Baker Eddy as "one of the most famous, interesting, and powerful women in America, if not the world." Headlines in the newspapers of the time confirmed that recognition.
But Mrs. Eddy had, in a very real sense, launched her public life four decades earlier. That was when she realized that what she had discovered about health and healing—about the relationship between the human mind, body, and spirituality—was not something she could keep to herself. She had been impelled to move beyond the attainment of her own physical comfort and spiritual self-enrichment to make public what she had found.
For nearly thirty years following that discovery, there was no church edifice and no church organization as we know it today. For many of those years, she was the only Board of Lectureship and Committee on Publication; she was the lone teacher, preacher, pastor, editor, practitioner, author. She gave well over 125 lectures and addresses, preached more than fifty sermons, changed residences sixty-three times, healed hundreds and hundreds of patients—some estimates are as high as three thousand. Yet, since many reported having been healed just by reading Science and Health, who knows how high that number really was!
To guide and inform our journey tonight, we'll be using some of the rich resources of The Mary Baker Eddy Library—both historical and living. These assets are not "virtual." They're for real. The archival material does exist, 500,000 pages of it, and you'll be seeing some of it live, right on this platform, through the lens of our television camera.
1860s
Stephen: Mrs. Eddy's career as Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science revealed an irrepressible pattern of activity that would be familiar to many scientific thinkers and explorers. She would research, write, practice, and proclaim. We'll see those four elements repeated over and over again during the three decades of her life we're examining tonight. Researching and studying, writing down her observations and revelations, practicing what she had learned, and once tested in practice, proclaiming what she had found to the receptive listener.
Even before the 1860s, Mary Baker Glover's search for healing usually became something more than a desire for physical relief. In the summer of 1849, when she traveled to Warner, New Hampshire, to be treated by an allopathic physician, she ended up studying allopathy during the months she was there. It wasn't sufficient for her to be just a patient, she needed to know the how's and why's of the healing process.
Research, write, practice, and proclaim. She was doing a good deal more of that during the 1860s as she accelerated her journey through, in her own words, "... the dim mazes of materia medica," seeking "knowledge from the different schools,—allopathy, homœopathy, hydropathy, electricity, and from various humbugs,—but without receiving satisfaction." Retrospection and Introspection, p. 33.
Mary Baker Eddy had been studying and experimenting with homeopathy for several years after achieving favorable results with it in the mid-1850s. In her copy of Jahr's manual, a practitioners' clinical guide on homeopathic medicine, she underlined, checked, and made an occasional note about what she was learning, and then attempted to practice it on others. In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy tells of healing one of her patients, a woman with edema, or as they called it then, "dropsy"—using sugar pills. Science and Health, p. 156. She later called that experience the first of two "falling apples" Michael Meehan, Mrs. Eddy and the Late Suit in Equity (1908), p. 161 .—discoveries or realizations about the mental nature of illness and its cure. The second falling apple was, of course, her discovery of Christian Science in 1866.
Between the two falling apples, however, there were some additional stops for her research, writing, practicing, and proclaiming, including a visit to Dr. Vail's Hydropathic Institute in Hill, New Hampshire, in June of 1862, and by fall of the same year, visits to Dr. Phineas P. Quimby, a mental healer whose treatment was rooted in mesmeric theory.
But while she was investigating these mind/body connections, Mary Baker Patterson was researching the Bible and, yes, writing, practicing, and proclaiming what she was learning. "As early as 1862," she writes in the Preface to Science and Health, "[the author] began to write down and give to friends the results of her Scriptural study, for the Bible was her sole teacher; but these compositions were crude,—the first steps of a child in the newly discovered world of Spirit." Science and Health, p. viii.
Now let's talk with two eminent scholars and advisors to the Library, and
David, we've just been hearing about Mary Baker Eddy's studies and experiments with forms of alternative medicine that existed at the time. Tell us something about what was going on in the 1860s in medicine.
David Hufford: Mary Baker Eddy's experience was understandable one for a thoughtful person who was trying to find health for herself and to help others get well: wandering, as she put it, through those "dimmazes"—an experimental journey.
Conventional medicine at the time did not have very much to offer. [Much of] what it did have to offer ... was rather dangerous in itself. The drugs were very harsh, with constituents like mercury in them. [The practice of] bleeding was still quite common. People believe that George Washington actually died from the bleedings that he received, not the cold that they were intended to cure.
So, medicine could be quite dangerous, and it is not surprising that, at that time, there was this great diversity of health practices that had grown up—the use of herbs (dietary reform had begun in the late 1830s with Grahamism), homeopathy, mind-cure, mesmerism. At the time, it would have been hard to call anything alternative medicine, because you would not have known exactly which was the regular one—there were so many different kinds.
But that landscape of medicine began to change late in [the sixties]. By the end of the 1870s, a new kind of medical reform was beginning. It started at [The] Johns Hopkins [University] in Baltimore with the importation of a laboratoryor science-centered view of medical education. It was moving toward a consolidation of the medical profession around a very specific single set of theories in material science. And you got a shift into this much narrower, less diverse, official view of what medical care would be like—with the understanding that, because of this change, disease would essentially be conquered.
Stephen: But David, today we're seeing an explosion, again, of these alternative medical practices. What is going on? Even spirituality is playing a big role today. What's happening?
David: Well, the expectation that standardizing medicine around this laboratory science model would eradicate disease did initially lead to some pretty remarkable accomplishments in medicine: antibiotics, steroids, developments in surgery. But time goes on. You come toward the end of the century. You get into the 1970s. You still have disease. Not necessarily all of the same diseases, but people are still getting sick. They are still dying. They are suffering. And you have a growing uncertainty about that initial promise of the eradication of disease. The costs in human and financial terms are going up, too.
But by the end of the 1970s, and certainly into the 1980s, what we call now complementary and alternative medicine were really flowering and increasing their hold on the public imagination.
Stephen: And the spiritual ingredient?
David: The spiritual ingredient is part of this shift. For many people one of the problems with regular medicine is materialism and its lack of the spiritual base. That is part of the appeal of alternative medicine; and it is what people find wrong with conventional medical practice.
So, for example, as medicine responds to this, more than half of the medical schools in the country now have courses in religion and health. There is an effort to respond there.
Everything is very much in flux right now. It makes sense with the [new] millennium. I would say that there have been [several] awakenings in the history of religion—spiritual awakenings, revivals. I think that we are right now in the midst of quite possibly the greatest spiritual awakening—certainly of modern times.
Stephen: I would like to refer to some notes dictated by Mary Baker Eddy to Calvin Frye, her personal secretary. Here's what Mr. Frye wrote down from her dictation:
Footsteps in the Discovery.
Homeopathy is the intermediate step from allopathy and matter to mind. Dr[.] Quimby's theory and practice was the intermediate step from animal magnetism[,] [s]piritualism, and matter to mind. But neither of these theories or practices were Christian Science. Homeopathy agrees that the drug heals the sick while the fact remains that the drug wholly disappears in some of their prescriptions wherewith the sick seem to be healed. ... Christian Science starts from neither of these grounds, it is predicated alone of Christ healing through Mind not matter ... yea Spirit [,] not matter [,] heals the sick. The Mother Church Collections, document A 10301 .
What does this record say to you about Mrs. Eddy's journey through nineteenth-century medicine?
David: Well, for one thing, she was clearly very familiar with the varieties of alternative medicine at the time. Particularly the ones that you might call vitalist, or energy medicine, or mind/body medicine. She was aware that you could get some remarkable results with them. But she also found them wanting.
First of all, they didn't offer complete healing—none of them held the secret to complete health, obviously. And second, even though they were not materialistic in the sense that conventional medicine was, neither were they spiritual, and that is really where Mrs. Eddy was headed.
She responded partly to that and partly to the reductive materialism of medicine. Which means that medical science, at the end of the nineteenth century and to a large extent through the twentieth century, viewed all things, including what we might call spiritual things, as reducible to material explanation. This, of course, was not acceptable to her either. In seeking a form of healing that would lead her to this discovery, she found something that was quite unique. It is a radical shift. It is very different from the other alternative medical practices that were out at the time, being wholly spiritual and firmly rooted in Christian scripture.
Stephen: Ann Braude, we have explored Mrs. Eddy's journey through the medical theories of the time. But at the same time, she was researching, writing, and expounding on the Bible. We see from the manuscripts, which we have here tonight and which you have examined, that she was taking copious notes on the Bible. What is the significance of a woman doing such things in the 1860s?
Ann Braude: Well, this was really a remarkable venture for a woman to undertake at [that] period. It was enormously moving for me, as an historian, to have the opportunity to go into the archives and see these documents. I had seen a transcript of the words, but it was not at all the same as handling the paper that she handled—seeing the words written in her hand. It really brought this document to life for me. And it helped me to get in touch with Mrs. Eddy the woman, struggling to interpret the Bible herself.
The Bible was read and appreciated and loved by women in the nineteenth century, as it is today. More women then, as now, attended churches and read the Bible. But they were barred from interpreting it, and they were barred from the theological schools and seminaries where men trained to be able to interpret the Bible—to become ministers, to be ordained, and to bring the Bible to their congregations. Women found other ways to express their religious ideas during this period.
Stephen: Could you give us an example?
Ann: I think that the best example would be Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was the author of the famous book that I am sure many of you have read, Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was one of twelve children of a famous evangelist, Lyman Beecher. They were sometimes called "the twelve apostles." All of the seven brothers became ministers, they all attended seminary, they were all ordained, some became professors of theology. But the father, Lyman, was really distressed that the child of his whom he considered to be the brightest, Harriet, was born a girl, because that meant that her substantial intelligence would not be able to be used in promoting the Christian law. Little did he know that many more people would read Uncle Tom's Cabin than [hear] any of her brothers' sermons. in that book she would find a way to talk about Christian faith that was more effective than many of those sermons, I'm sorry to say.
But Mary Baker Eddy was not satisfied with this indirect approach. She was not satisfied to present what she learned from the Bible in the form of poems, hymns, or fiction, all of which were considered legitimate for women to engage in at that time. She wanted to do something different, which was to engage the Bible directly, and to share what she learned from it with others.
Stephen: Ann, we have here tonight a number of Mary Baker Eddy's own Bibles, including the Baker family Bible. Tell us something about the role of the Bible in nineteenth-century America.
Ann: It is hard to overstate the role of the Bible in American religious history. You could really call the Bible the textbook of American Protestantism. It set the agenda for the Puritans' coming to New England, founding the New England colonies. They were really trying to set up a commonwealth that would realize everything that was taught in the Bible and allow society to be completely oriented by those teachings. They thought it was so important that everybody read the Bible that they established the first public schools. They created the most literate society to date at that time so that everyone could read the Bible.
The thrust of Protestantism is the notion of the priesthood of all believers—the [feeling] that everyone should engage the Bible themselves. This is what Mary Baker Eddy was doing in an even more elaborate form than most Christians were, and she wanted to take that original engagement with the Bible to other people.
Stephen: As a scholar at Harvard Divinity School, how would you characterize Mrs. Eddy's contribution to the advancement of religious thought in America?
Ann: Well, there are two things that I would really want to highlight in addition to her significance as an interpreter of the Bible, which we have already discussed. First is her role as a founder, as an institutional founder; because there were a lot of good ideas floating around in the nineteenth century, like the idea of a Mother-Father God. Many people had heard of this idea. It was popping up here and there in various conventional circles. But Mary Baker Eddy was the one who was able to start an institution that could perpetuate this idea into the twentieth century so that it could be accessible to us, to everyone today.
The other thing that I would point to in addition to her role as a founder and institution builders, is the idea that she made accessible to women in the nineteenth century that you are not your body. This was a period when women were really being told that biology was destiny, and that if you think too much—if, God forbid, you should go to college—it might draw too much blood toward your brain from your more important reproductive system. Now, like many nineteenth-century theories, this, I believe, has been proven untrue. In fact, I've just had a baby, so I am pretty sure that my Ph.D. did not annihilate those other possibilities. But this was a really important idea for women to have access to: that you are not limited to the prospects of your biological makeup; that there is much more to who you are and who you can be than what can be described by your anatomy.
1870s
Stephen: If the 1860s were a time of discovery, a time of research, writing, practice, and some proclaiming, the 1870s might be considered to be a time of definition. A time when Christian Science and its Discoverer were becoming clearer, finding their respective identities, and taking the names by which we know them today. Mary Baker Glover became Mary Baker Eddy on January 1, 1877, when she married Asa Gilbert Eddy. And Christian Science became the name for her discovery with the publication of the first edition of Science and Health in 1875. It had previously been referred to as "Moral Science."
Before the 1870s, the discovery that Mrs. Eddy named Christian Science was mostly in her consciousness—the product of her developing thought and her healing practice. That which she reduced to writing consisted only of a few manuscripts on the Scriptures—notes on the Gospel of Matthew and the book of Genesis. By the time Mrs. Eddy began teaching her system of healing to classes of students, though, she had written several more manuscripts, even then somehow sensing the need to put to paper her ideas and system of healing. She taught her first formal class in August 1870, in a small room on the second floor of 71 South Common Street, in Lynn, Massachusetts. By the end of that decade, Mrs. Eddy had been asked to be the pastor of the Church of Christ (Scientist), which in August of 1879 received a charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
What was it that transformed a class of five or six students with day jobs into a Church chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts just ten years later? At the solar center of this decade of definition was the emergence of Mrs. Eddy's principle work, what she was later to call the "textbook" of her discovery. " 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,' " she wrote in an 1884 Journal article in response to a question, "is a complete textbook of Christian Science; and its metaphysical method of healing is as lucid in presentation as can be possible under the necessity to express the metaphysical in physical terms. There is absolutely no additional secret outside of its teachings, or that gives one the power to heal; but it is essential that the student gain the spiritual understanding of the contents of this book, in order to heal." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 50.
Science and Health, she wrote in an 1881 letter to a friend, was "like a meteor of light or a clear coin taken from the old mine of my other works." The Mother Church Collections, document L13357 . That "meteor of light" was giving definition to both the discovery and to the Discoverer. Into the pages of that book, and into the pages of the nearly five hundred editions that she worked on for the rest of her life—over her remaining thirty-four years—Mrs. Eddy poured all that she was learning and proving about the Science of Christianity. And all that while being forced to move her residence twenty-two times and continuing to take her message to the public through lectures, classes, addresses, and sermons.
To examine the 1870s more closely, let's talk with three of Mrs. Eddy's biographers: who, along with wrote Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer; author of Mary Baker Eddy; and who wrote Persistent Pilgrim—the Life of Mary Baker Eddy.
Yvonne, I think it would be intersting to know just what Mrs. Eddy herself had to say about why she wrote Science and Health. What does your research tell us?
Yvonne von Fettweis: Well, Steve, there are two accounts in the archives, and a few published references. The first archival account, found in her handwriting on the flyleaf of one of her Bibles, reads:
Before writing Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures [,] I had asked God for weeks to tell me what next I should do and each day I opened the Bible for my answer[,] but did not receive it. But when I grew to receiving it[,] I opened again and the first verse I looked at was in Isaiah 30:8. The Mother Church Collections, Mary Baker Eddy Bible Collections, document AA9 . ["Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come forever and ever. ..."]
The second account can be found in the reminiscence of one of her students, Clara Shannon. Rob and I have that in our book. A physician by the name of Dr. Davis had wired Mrs. Eddy to please come take over one of his cases. The woman was suffering from pneumonia, and there was not much that he could do. So she came, and this doctor witnessed the instantaneous healing that Mrs. Eddy performed. Dr. Davis said to Mrs. Eddy, "How did you do it, what did you do?" And then he said, "Why don't you write it in a book, publish it, and give it to the world?" You'll notice in the Shannon account that Mrs. Eddy reference Jeremiah 30:2: "Thus speaketh the Lord God of Israel, saying, Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book." The Mother Church Collections, Reminiscence File .
Stephen: Are these conflicting accounts of what motivated her?
Yvonne: No. Let's look at what Mrs. Eddy called her discovery. She called it "Christian Science." So, as a devoted Christian, she would naturally turn to her Bible for guidance, for counsel, for inspiration, for impulsion. But there was another side to this woman. She also lived the life of a disciplined scientific thinker. So she would have responded very favorably to Dr. Davis's request that she put it down in a book and get it out there.
You know, physical healing was more than a personal phenomenon with Mrs. Eddy. What we are looking at here is a scientific search to affirm what she was discovering—what she had found in the way of the phenomenon of physical healing. Mary Baker Eddy was a remarkable healer. Just absolutely remarkable! In the 1870s, the period we are discussing, for instance, she healed people of deafness, enteritis, a little girl who had never talked, and a man who was hideously crippled—and these healings were instantaneous. One moment they were suffering, and the next moment they were perfectly well. She was looking to put it down, declare it, publish it, and get it out there so that others could benefit from it.
Stephen: Gillian Gill, speaking of that quote "go, ... note it in a book" ... that was easier said than done for a woman in that time, wasn't it?
Gillian Gill: You're so right. It is so difficult, as we sit here in this amazing building—seeing the walls that are inscribed with Mrs. Eddy's words from Science and Health, and looking at you, our audience, with her words written into your minds—to erase all of what's here and go back to 1872 when Mrs. Eddy had to sit down and start writing a book. It was an extraordinary move.
We have a woman who is in her fifties. First-time authorship is not easy for us now. Think how much harder it was for her then. We are, I think, a privileged group. Mrs. Eddy was not of a privileged group. She had just come through a very, very difficult time in her life. She was starting to get [back on] her feet. She had become a part of Lynn society. She had her students, she had been holding her classes. Things were starting to go better. She was earning a living, which in itself for a woman in her time was an achievement all of its own.
So, we have someone who has gotten into a precarious kind of balance here. Then, she decides that she is going to tip the balance. She is going to put it all in some kind of danger by withdrawing and writing a book.
It was a very, very tough decision. Yvonne has talked about turning to the Bible. She needed to find inspiration and guidance! She needed to look for strength, because this was a difficult moment. I think that this is a good example of Mrs. Eddy's leadership—an early example of Mrs. Eddy as the leader of what is a very embryonic movement at this point. I think she is saying, "What is my next step? I cannot simply continue in the groove I have made. I cannot plow the same furrow. I have to move ahead. I have to have the next stage; and my next stage has to be writing a book."
So she sits down in her cold, little, rented room, with her pen and her piece of cardboard on her lap. She does not even have her own rocking chair in place, or her own little table. She dips her pen into the inkwell and starts to write. And, as her biographer, I was so impressed with how little the cramped, difficult circumstances and the noise—she was so intensely sensitive to noise—did not impinge upon her. She was borne up on a flood of inspiration. She says this in a later reminiscence: "Such a flood tide of truth was lifted upon me at times that it was overwhelming and I have drawn a quick breath as my pen flew on feeling as it were submerged in the transfiguration of spiritual ideas [.]" The Mother Church Collections, document A10934 .
Stephen: But these obstacles she faced weren't just personal and financial, were they? This was a book on metaphysics by a woman.
Gillian: That's exactly right. I mean, you all know Science and Health. Think for yourself. This is not simply a personal record of healings. It is not simply an instructional manual on healing—if you can imagine such a thing. Mrs. Eddy dives straight from chapter one into metaphysics. She says that you have to have "Natural Science"—that is the title of the first chapter of the first edition of Science and Health—before we can come to physiology and heal it. So she moves right into metaphysics.
On the first page of that first chapter she says, "This proof we claim to have gained, and reduced to its statement in science that furnishes a key to the harmony of man, and reveals what destroys sickness, sin, and death." So, she is telling people that before you can heal, you have to understand the deep structures that God has laid down for us, and she is going to be our guide—I, Mary Glover. I mean, this was an extraordinary move. Professor Braude has already told us so eloquently how difficult it was for women to move, not into religious life, of course, but into the interpretation, the preaching, the leadership role. This was unheard of. Mrs. Eddy takes on this role. She moves in this direction, and she plans not just to preach, not just to write, but to publish her work as a book.
Stephen: Dick Nenneman, Gillian has given us some perspective on what it was like for a nineteenth-century woman to think important thoughts about religion and metaphysics, and then to have the nerve to write them in a book. Your recent biography of Mrs. Eddy, Persistent Pilgrim, focuses on her determination to get that message out. According to Webster, the word persist means to "go no resolutely despite obstacles, opposition, or warning." Apart from the gender-related issues in the 1870s that Gillian has spoken about, what were those obstacles, opposition, and warnings?
Dick Nenneman: Gillian has already spoken to the issue of the difficulty of a woman who has important ideas, particularly in the field of theology and healing, to get a hearing, let alone to get a book published. But I wonder if we have thought about the issue of loneliness. She was alone with her thoughts at this period. She had stopped teaching to work on her book, and she needed to be alone to find the right words to put into this book. Gillian has shared that wonderful quote about the floodtides of truth that came to her, but it did take her three years. I would say that there were many days when the floodtides did not seem to flow, but she kept working.
She needed to be alone, but this sense of loneliness had a price; and there were times when the lack of normal human companionship became almost too much—especially, perhaps, at holiday times.
I was very much moved by a letter I found during my research in the archives. It was one she wrote to Samuel Putnam Bancroft, who was an early student, on Thanksgiving Day, 1872. I would like to read you just the beginning of it:
Friend Bancroft,
They tell me this day is set apart for festivities, and rejoicing; but I have no evidence of this except the proclamation and gathering together of those who love one another. I am alone today, and shall probably not see a single student—family ties are broken never to be reunited in this world with me.
But what of those who have learned with me the Truth of Moral Science[;] where do they find their joys, where do they seek friendship and happiness? Shall I see one of them [t]o-day?... The Mother Church Collections, document V03043 .
Stephen: And so what was it, Dick, that impelled her on through all of this loneliness, and through the moves and so forth, in such an irrepressible way?
Dick: I think one can say that Mrs. Eddy had a sense of mission, a sense that her life had a unique purpose, and that is what kept her going. She stopped teaching in 1872, because she felt impelled to write. She had taught three classes of students. She had convinced herself that she could explain her method of healing successfully to others so that they could go and heal.
But she wanted to perpetuate this—to promulgate it in a way that would be faster and reach a wider group of people than she could from the little community of Lynn. If writing a book was a way to do that, and that was the next task, then so be it. She would get it done. But even then, it did not mean that it was an easy job.
Going back to Mr. Bancroft again, many years later he wrote a reminiscence. Remembering this earlier time, he wrote:
... Mrs. Eddy secluded herself for over three years for that purpose, depriving herself of all but the bare necessities of life as she wrote. I have known her when nearly crushed with sorrow, but she wrote on. I have known her when friend after friend deserted her, but she wrote on. Samuel Putnam Bancroft, Mrs. Eddy As I Knew Her in 1870 (Boston:Press of Geo. H. Ellis, 1923), p. 127 .
I'd also like us to look a little further ahead, to 1875, when Science and Health was finished. Mrs. Eddy did not have funds available to publish the book, and as the others have indicated, there was no publisher ready to step up and publish the book at his own expense. So she let two of her students finance the book for her. Then, when the book came out, she sent them out on the street to try to sell it. They went from door to door, trying to sell copies. Now if that is not persistence, I don't know what is.
She was persistent, yes, and without that persistence she could not have accomplished what she did. But persistence alone—persistence unaided—would not have done the trick. It was the inspiration Mrs. Eddy gained from her life-long study of the Bible and her daily communion with God that was the backbone from which these human qualities such as persistence gathered their amazing strength.
1880s
Stephen: It was during the 1880s that the Christian Science movement began to gather energy. And the startling fact was that there was still no church building and no church organization as we know it today, although church services were being held in rented halls in Boston. The mission of reinstating "primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing" Manual of The Mother Church, p. 17. was happening every day through public lectures—over eighty of which were given by Mrs. Eddy; through the pages of a new bi-monthly Journal of Christian Science; and at the first Christian Science Reading Room, which opened in the Hotel Boylston. It was also happening through the healing practice of over one thousand students being trained at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, and through the publishing and selling of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
It was during this time that Mrs. Eddy, having defined her discovery and her mission, emerged from being a daughter of New England into a being public citizen whose lifework was beginning to be felt around the world.
To capture some of the energy and drama of these times, we've asked playwright and his daughter, actress to present some of Mrs. Eddy's letters written during the 1880s.
Horton Foote: The first unpublished letter Hallie will read to you tonight was written by Mrs. Eddy during her trip to Washington, D.C., in 1882. She had traveled to the nation's capital with her husband, Asa Eddy, to investigate copyright laws regarding her writings, and to do some lecturing and teaching. Her letter is written to Clara Choate in Boston, one of her early students.
Hallie Foote:
Washington D.C.,
Feb 28 [1882]
My dear dear Student[.]
You are doing what God knows, and I know, and everybody else ought to know is more blessed and a greater blessing to the race than history has recorded before of one but myself at this period.
God bless you, I press you to my heart and can encourage you with the fact that I am making the way for students in this City of fashion and pride[.]
I have worked harder here than ever, 14 consecutive evenings I have lectured three hours every night besides what else I am about. Get to bed at 12, rist at 6, and work[.] I have a goodly number already enlisted in the work. "I need thee [,] O! [,] I need thee[;] every hour I need thee" ...
Good, good girl, how you are spreading the good news. I have been so absorbed in my work and trying between times to see something here to carry back of my journey in a secular sense as well, that I forget that I am getting empty in my portmonie but can hold out until I return[.] Then I hope to have a class and replenish my means.
... Give my love to all my dear Students and take a Benjamine portion yourself[.]
Even the same[.]
MBGE—... The Mother Church Collections, document L02499. "I need thee every hour" is a hymnwritten by Annie Sherwood Hawks in 1872, which today appears in the Christian Science Hymnal as No. 137 .
Horton: Before returning to Boston, the Eddys took a trip to Philadelphia, a city Mrs. Eddy had visited briefly during America's centennial celebration in 1876. Here, she would catch a glimpse of what the women's movement in that city was accomplishing. Again, to Clara Choate:
Hallie:
March 15 [1882]
My beloved Student, and fellow worker,
I was as usual delighted to hear from you and learn how the stately goings of metaphysics are being seen in Boston. Your own instrumentality in this advance is fully seen and gladly acknowledged by me. I never had anything to hinder in this glorious work but slothful, or sinful, students; and if I have one and especially half a doz [en] to work as becometh earnest wom[e]n and men in any righteous cause I shall never despair of triumph at last[.] It is glorious to see what the women alone are doing here for temperance, More than ever man has done.
This is the period of women, they are to move and to carry all the great moral and Christian reforms, I know it. Now darling, let us work as the industrious Suffragists are at work who are getting a hearing all over the land[.] Let us work as they do in love "prefer[r]ing one another". Let us work shoulder to shoulder each bearing their own part of the burdens and helping one another and then the puny kicks of mesmerism will give up the ghost before such union. ...
Lovingly ever[.]
MBGE The Mother Church Collections, document L04088 .
Horton: Mrs. Eddy also traveled to the Midwest during the 1880s. This portion of a letter to her friend and student Colonel E. J. Smith gives us a glimpse of her three-week stay in Chicago during May 1884.
Hallie:
Boston, June 25, 1884....
My dear student,
Your papers and letters arrived safely and I improve the first opportunity convenient to reply.
I would like to make friendship first, and business last instead of business first and friends and God last, but sometimes the pressure demands a little delay even from me.
I went in May to Chicago at the imperative call of people there and my own sense of the need. This great work had been started buy my students needed me to give it a right foundation and impulse in that city of ceaseless enterprise. So I went, and in three weeks taught a class of 25 pupils, lectured in Music Hall to a full house, got 20 subscriptions for my Journal, sold about thirty copies of Science and Health etc. In the class were three M.D.'s and two clergymen—one Methodist, the other [U]niversalist both good thinkers and scholarly[.] ...
In haste. Ever the same.
M B G Eddy The Mother Church Collections, document L02069 .
Horton: Reports regarding healing, and the circulation of Science and Health, were very well received by its author. In fact, records show that Mrs. Eddy took a keen interest in the distribution and sales of her book. She wrote to her student Caroline Noyes, in Chicago, in June 1884:
Hallie:
I am glad you are undertaking to circulate the book that is doing so much good. My students say the book does as much if not more towards healing than they can. The Mother Church Collections, document L05410 .
Horton: And to another, Ebenezer Foster, she wrote in June 1888:
Hallie:
The Spirit is all that is needed for us to find hearers and followers now. Christian Science has been heard, the book is the preacher. Science & Health is doing a million times more for the race of mortals than all of the students and their Teachers can ever do. Make way for it in every line that lays in your power[.] The Mother Church Collections, document L01777 .
Horton: During the 1880s, Mrs. Eddy poured her heart and soul into the writing and revising of Science and Health. She made three major revisions of her book during this decade—and countless minor changes and refinements. In her unpublished autobiography, entitled Footprints Fadeless, she tells of this.
Hallie:
In my revisions of Science and Health, its entire key-note has grown steadily clearer, and louder, and sweeter. Not a single vibration of its melodious strings has been lost. I have more and more clearly elucidated my subject as year after year has flown, until now its claims may not be misunderstood. Was Newton capable of satisfactorily stating the laws of gravitation when first he discovered that ponderous principle? Much less could I, at first, formulate and express the infinite Principle and the divine Laws of which God gave me the first faint gleam in my hour of physical agony and mental illumination. All true Christian Scientists realize, to some extent, my early honest struggles. The Mother Church Collections, document A10402 .
Horton: As the decade of the 1880s drew to a close, Mary Baker Eddy was turning her attention once again to another major revision of Science and Health—the fiftieth edition. So important was this work that She literally put everything aside to accomplish it. After her new edition was published in January 1891, she wrote to her student Captain Eastaman, in Boston:
Hallie:
Concord, Feb 15, 1891 Capt. Eastamen,
My much loved Student[.]
Your char[acteristic] letter at hand. Thank you for getting hungry to hear from me and so writing yourself. ... Oh! how good is God to bring back the wanderers to the door of His fold, and then, like the faithful Shepherd to pass them in under His rod. Yes, my revised edition of God's message to mortals is out at last. It has cost me almost $4000 and two years of hard work, and this is not all the cost no indeed—But now what has it incomed me? More than millions in bullion. It gives me a joy unspeakable to think of the good that I know it will accomplish.—The old editions did their work and did it well. But the new has a new task, it takes into its office that of Teacher as well as healer; it becomes a living power to uplift the whole human race. ... The Mother Church Collections, document L03475 .
2000
Stephen: Tonight we're looked at three decades of Mrs. Eddy's life, from 1860 to 1889. We saw a daughter of New England find her health, herself, and Christian Science—that child of her advancing thought and spiritual intuition—which she would nourish for the remainder of her earth life. And by the end of that life, she was indeed a citizen of the world.
It is legitimate, then, to ask, What of her legacy? How is Mary Baker Eddy being thought of today? We heard in the address from the Board of Directors this afternoon of the increasing interest in Mrs. Eddy among today's thinkers, including scholars, seekers of spirituality, and, of course, physicians looking to better understand mind/body connections and their relationship to prayer and spirituality. We heard about the corresponding call for lectures about Mrs. Eddy's life, a nearly twenty-fold increase over five years ago. And we heard about the hundreds of thousands of people who first met Mrs. Eddy from their tour through the traveling Seneca Falls exhibit on her life. We've been told about seminars on her life conducted by university women's studies programs and interdenominational organizations. And we welcome the honors and tributes bestowed on her by state legislatures and the National Women's Hall of Fame.
We have also seen an increase in the number of publications citing Mrs. Eddy outside the context of her contributions to theology and medicine. She was one of sixteen individuals selected by author Garry Wills in his 1994 book, Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders—case studies in leadership and organization. There's also a mention of Mary Baker Eddy as a periodical editor in a 1995 book titled Our Sister Editors. Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Ninteenth-Century American Women Editors. Recently we've seen several items on Mrs. Eddy's Business acumen, including articles in Investor's Business Daily and the Boston Business Journal. And a new book came out earlier this year in which the author, Jane Plitt, herself an entrepreneur, explains the impact of Mary Baker Eddy's ideas on a late nineteenth-century businesswoman who was a contemporary of Mrs. Eddy's. Jane R. Plitt, Martha Matilda Harper and the American Dream: How One Woman Changed the Face of Modern Business.
"Future ages must declare what the pioneer has accomplished," Mrs. Eddy wrote in the Preface to Science and Health. Science and Health, p. vii. And over the past two years, we've seen evidence of thinkers and thought leaders of our times declaring her accomplishments. Here are comments by two principal advisors to The Mary Baker Eddy Library: a former archivist of the United States, Don W. Wilson, Ph.D.; and historian and author, Allen Weinstein, Ph.D., President of The Center for Democracy, Washington, D.C.
Don Wilson: Mary Baker Eddy is certainly one of the most important figures of the late nineteenth century and in twentieth-century history. As archivist of the United States, I was responsible for preserving the heritage of the country through documents that speak of the history of statesment, the common man, judges—citizens of this country who contributed greatly.
Developing The Mary Baker Eddy Library with its focus on the life of a woman is somewhat unique. It is new. There are other smaller depositories around, [honoring] Susan B. Anthony and some of the other reform figures. But I think this is going to be a very significant step in reaching a knowledge base about women, particularly nineteenth-century women, who had to face very great odds in achieving new inroads into rights, and into accomplishments, and into publications, and into writing. I think it is very important to understand Mary Baker Eddy in that context. She does not fit any of those modes exclusively, and it is going to be interesting to learn why, and what drove her in certain areas. She is a multi-dimensional person who made many contributions.
It is not only important [to put] her in context with the nineteenth century, but [to trace] how her thoughts and legacy have grown in the twentieth century and now will take us into the twenty-first century. I think this is an important dimension of why we need to open this material and have it available, letting the interpretation emerge from the documentation itself—not just from her final public writings, but from her everyday writings and in the context of her life.
I am not a member of the Church, but I find that this is a fascinating subject and one that is worthy of scholarship, of learning. ... I think it is important, too, to recognize that Mary Baker Eddy was not only an important American figure but also an important world figure. And in that regard, it is important to have this material widely accessible for scholars and for interested members of the public [so that she can] take her appropriate place in the history of the world.
Allen Weinstein: Mrs. Eddy was a quintessential nineteenth-century figure. She plainly saw herself engaged in the frontline issues of her day, including slavery, women's issues, temperance, the Civil War, and a bunch of other areas. And yet [she was able to] return almost instantly to her primary concerns, which were, almost from the beginning, spiritual, and reflective of her own search for answers to the most puzzling questions of her lifetime and her life. But she had the ability to broaden—the ability, I think, almost at the beginning of her life, to see her vocation and her quest not as a narrowly local one, and not as one that was limited to her own group or her own class. But as one, if you will, with humanitarian implications that went well beyond even her country to the world.
I have certainly not read through the full sweep of Mrs. Eddy's correspondence, which would take a very long time indeed, or even the surrounding documentation. I have sampled it in the course of advising on the process of developing what I think will be one of the great libraries of the world, The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity.
Just the chance to look through some of this material has taught me and has educated me—not only about Mrs. Eddy but about her world and her times—in ways that I find very valuable. I cannot but believe that this Library will represent probably one of the few crucial institutions for the study of a full range of subjects, [including] the women herself, the Church, the world in which she developed, the history of medicine, the history of theology, the social history of the United States, the history of journalism—The Christian Science Monitor and other publications. These [offerings] will do the founders of this Library and all of those who support it extremely proud.
John Selover: We have truly seen that Mrs. Eddy is a citizen of the world. She transcends geography, time, and human history. Her unselfish and unswerving commitment is seen through her words, "All my work, all my efforts, all my prayers and tears are for humanity, and the spread of peace and love among mankind."
This Library will, with respect and in context, touch on the wide range of this remarkable woman's experience and ideas, and the blessings that flow from that contribution will be manifold.
A library is a place of wonder and reward. In a recent interview with The Boston Globe, author Malcolm Gladwell was asked what was the most valuable thing he owned. He reached into his pocked and held up his library card.
Your invitation to the formal opening of The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity in 2002 is your library card. Thank you for your interest, your attention, and your willingness to learn of this Library and to venture on its fulfillment—together.
A videotape of the Monday evening presentation will be mailed in early September to the household of every member of The Mother Church, and is available on request to any interested individual by calling 1-800-288-7090, ext. 3411, e-mailing clerk@csps.com, or writing to the officer of the Clerk, A-173, 175 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115-3195.
