We get around 100 questions each week in The Mary Baker Eddy Library's Research Room. Most of these are about Mrs. Eddy and the history of Christian Science, and some are about documents that claim to be by Mrs. Eddy or prominent early Christian Scientists.
Readers want to know if a document is truly by the person whose name is on it. Many of these articles/essays/letters have been passed around for years, and we're happy to share what we've found out about their authorship.
One of the most "famous" of these is an article titled "A Treatment for Every Day." It's generally presented as written by Mrs. Eddy and taken from an 1883 issue of the Journal. Usually not a week goes by without our getting questions about it. People often contact us after searching high and low in issues of the Journal from 1883. So here's some of what we've found:
In the form in which it usually circulates, "Treatment" (which begins, "Every time you declare you are perfect in God, there goes through the body a health-giving power ...") is a compilation of several distinct parts, taken from different sources. The first paragraphs, for example, are from an article by L. J. Nusbaum that was printed in the Journal in 1889 (not 1883!) and then reprinted as a "tract" (a short leaflet) by The Christian Science Publishing Society.
The middle portion of "Treatment" sometimes circulates as a separate document titled "God's Spiritual Household." We haven't yet been able to discover who wrote it, but we're convinced the author isn't Mrs. Eddy. Why? For one thing, there are no letters or other manuscripts in our collection of about 28,000 authentic documents by Mrs. Eddy in which the contents are identical to or even similar to this portion of the article. And the writing style differs from Mrs. Eddy's.
Well, so far it looks like "A Treatment for Every Day" is not by Mrs. Eddy, and if you'd asked us about it even a few years ago, that is the answer we'd have given you. But an interesting thing about historical research is that our knowledge base changes; we find more information, and we modify our conclusions.
Toward the end of "Treatment," there's a prayer that includes these words: "Oh Love, take me in. Give me one mind, one consciousness and enable me to love my neighbor as myself." If we restrict our search just to documents by Mrs. Eddy, this prayer doesn't show up. However, there are a couple of letters in the collection written by Alfred and Anna Baker that we've found do shed some light on the origin of this prayer. (The Bakers were Christian Scientists who lived in Concord, New Hampshire, for part of the time Mrs. Eddy lived there.) On January 1, 1898, Alfred wrote to Mrs. Eddy to thank her for a prayer she had sent him that included the words, "Love just take me in" (L16967, Alfred Baker to Mary Baker Eddy, January 1, 1898, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library). And on October 31, 1899, Anna wrote to Principia College founder Mary Kimball Morgan and mentioned that Mrs. Eddy had once given Alfred this prayer: "Oh Love, just take me in. Oh Love, give me one Mind, no other consciousness, and make me love my neighbor as myself" (V03415, Anna Baker to Mary Kimball Morgan, October 31, 1899, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection). So it seems likely that Mrs. Eddy may well have written the gist of this portion of "A Treatment for Every Day."
If you'd like a copy of our complete analysis of "Treatment," or copies of letters we've quoted here, please contact us at research@mbelibrary.org or 617-450-7218.
Questions about the authenticity of documents are only one type of the many questions that come our way in the Research Room. Over the coming months we'll share more of our explorations into other topics.
