Hermann Hering was healed of a longstanding illness through Christian Science, and in the late 1890s he left his academic career to devote his life to prayer-based healing. He later became a teacher of Christian Science healing. Hering had been a professor of electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He once described himself as having been " 'born and raised' in a printing office" in Philadelphia, where he learned the basics of book manufacturing from his brother.
When Prof. Hering was asked by Mrs. Eddy to serve as First Reader of The Mother Church, he replied that he was but "a child in this great movement." Yet he was willing to "leave this all to the Infinite Wisdom," and served from 1902 to 1905. He later was First Reader at the church in Concord, New Hampshire, where Mrs. Eddy lived.
During his terms as Reader, Hering and Mary Baker Eddy carried on a steady correspondence. Hering reported frequently on the week's services, on specific healings that had been related at Wednesday testimony meetings (often by people who had been cured during a service), about the newcomers coming to services from surrounding Boston neighborhoods, and on a few occasions he listed typographical errors that he'd found in the latest edition of Science and Health. It's clear in Mrs. Eddy's letters that she felt she'd found in Hermann Hering someone who could read the Bible and Science and Health with an intelligence that was informed and warmed by his humble Christianity.
