MARY BAKER EDDY LOVED her country, the United States, and revered the "heroes and heroines" who sacrified to establish its democratic ideals and religious liberty. Yet her 1886 Fourth of July Independence Day comments, which began with patriotism, quickly came to focus in on the critical needs of the Christian Science movement. "Never was there a more solemn and imperious call than God makes to us all, right here," she told the congregation at Chickering Hall in Boston, "for fervent devotion and an absolute consecration to the greatest and holiest of all causes." Then she followed with a stunning declaration: "The hour is come. The great battle of Armageddon is upon us. The powers of evil are leagued together in secret conspiracy against the Lord and against His Christ, as expressed and operative in Christian Science" (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 177).
How could a newborn church, without even an ordained ministry or an edifice to call its own, have been caught up in Armageddon, the final apocalyptic conflict between good and evil prophesied in Revelation? The fact is, Mrs. Eddy's book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and the Comforter it gave the world, had started a revolution! As Mrs. Eddy would explain to her students at their 1888 national convention in Chicago, "Christian Science and the senses are at war. It is a revolutionary struggle" (Mis., p. 101). Comparing this conflict to two previous wars for liberty in the United States, the Revolutionary War for national independence and the Civil War to free the slaves, she pinpointed the enemy as the forces of matter and evil that opposed humanity's liberation from sin, sickness, and death. Yes, the medical and theological establishment had been anything but friendly to Christian Science. But ultimately the enemy was something much more fundamental: the "false evidence" of the five physical senses, which was doomed to fall before the "absolute and final" evidence of Spirit, of divine Science (Mis., p. 99).
Among Christian Scientists of the day, this "enemy" manifested itself as the self-absorption that sometimes made them want human comforts, more than the Comforter. They loved the healings and prosperity Christian Science brought them, but too often shrank from the spiritual commitment they needed to become selfless healers and to share the Comforter with humanity. They were sometimes oblivious to the enormity of the conflict they were engaged in—and to the magnitude of Christian Science itself. On the very day Mrs. Eddy spoke about "the greatest and holiest of all causes," she also wrote to her student Ursula Gestefeld, explaining that the new church would survive only "If all are willing to put self under the feet of Love, and when the fatal question of who shall be greatest comes up, as even of old, answer it for themselves as Christ did[:] He that would be greatest let him be your servant ..." (LI5662, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library). Sadly, Gestefeld didn't grasp Mrs. Eddy's point, and eventually left Christian Science for the "mind-cure" movement.
