WHEN DID CHRISTIAN SCIENCE become a "Cause" for Mary Baker Eddy? As I considered this question, I quickly assumed that she began to label her discovery as a cause when her church was well established, when she had a substantial group of loyal students supporting her and assisting her. I decided to start my research on this by taking a chronological look through her correspondence—quite simply, I would see when the term was first used.
As is so often the case when searching through The Mary Baker Eddy Library collections, initial assumptions were way off the mark. I looked through her letters, and I kept going back, farther and farther. I finally stopped in January 1872, when I found the first mention of her science as a "cause" in a letter to the Editor of the Lynn Transcript. This was a little less than six years after a serious accident had led to the healing that had set her on a path of discovery and growth.
Looking at the archival documents, we can see that the early months of 1872 were a critical period for Mrs. Mary M. Glover (later Mary Baker Eddy). On January 13, one of the local papers, the Lynn Transcript, published a letter from Wallace W. Wright, who had studied "Moral Science" with Mrs. Glover. (She would adopt the term "Christian Science" several years later.) This began an intense exchange of letters between the two. It's a fascinating group of documents, and while Mary Baker Eddy expressed herself somewhat differently than in later years, her sense of commitment, and her pure Christianity, shine through.
