No form of human communication is more basic than one person speaking—eye to eye, heart to heart—to an audience, of one or many. It predates Socrates and the Socratic dialogue as a means of exchanging ideas. Jesus taught by speaking on Galilean hillsides. Religious innovator Mary Baker Eddy eventually would make public speaking a universal demand in her movement's weekly testimony meetings. But it all began with one woman's desire to take a message of spiritual discovery into the marketplace of ideas.
Three–quarters of the way through the 19th century, Mary Baker Eddy's newly published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures challenged conventional questions—the nature of materialism; the meaning of human life; God's existence, essence, and accessibility; to name a few.
Science and Health plainly stated that the Comforter promised by Christ Jesus had come. The Science—the laws—of spiritual being had been embedded in the Bible all along. And now, a woman had discovered them.
