1898 was an extraordinarily fruitful year for Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science movement. It was the year in which the Christian Science Board of Lectureship and Board of Education were established, and the Committee on Publication begun; The Christian Science Publishing Society became a reality, and by the fall of 1898 it was publishing a new “weekly newspaper,” now known as the Christian Science Sentinel.
In the midst of all these monumental changes, another shift took place that was just as huge. It was in 1898 that a major change was made to the Christian Science Quarterly. The Bible Lesson-Sermon, the heart of the Quarterly and the heart of the Christian Science Sunday service, began to follow the configuration we know today—using 26 subjects developed by Mary Baker Eddy. This transformation began on July 1, 1898, with “God” as the first lesson in the new format. This was a major change—the biggest to the services since the establishment of the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as Pastor of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, three years earlier.
Before July 1898, the subjects for Sunday morning Bible Lesson-Sermons were taken from a periodical titled International Uniform Sunday-School Lessons (often referred to as “the International Series”). These were ecumenical lessons devised by a Protestant Sunday School Union for use in Sunday Schools in the United States, England, and other English-speaking countries. The lessons were short, and generally utilized no more than 10 or 20 Bible verses. They supported a deeper grasp of the chronology of the Old and New Testaments, and steered clear of religious beliefs or theologies. While this made the lessons appropriately nondenominational, the historical focus was not always uplifting. An additional challenge was that the International Lessons were not intended for reading aloud at a church service, yet the Bible Lesson Committee’s responsibility was to select correlative citations from Science and Health for the weekly Lesson-Sermons.
