There is, however, another stage in this long line of development which
needs to be considered since it supplies a double point of departure;
once for the most outstanding healing cult in our time--Christian
Science--and once for the greatly enlarged use of suggestion in modern
medical practice, and that is mesmerism and "animal magnetism."
_Mesmerism a Point of Departure for Modern Healing Cults_
Paracelsus[17] may be taken as a starting point just here. He is known
in the history of medicine "for the impetus he gave to the development
of pharmaceutical chemistry, but he was also the author of a visionary
and theosophic system of philosophy." He believed in the influence of
the stars upon men, but he enlarged upon the old astrologic faiths. "He
believed the human body was endowed with a double magnetism, one portion
attracted to itself the planets and was nourished by them, the result of
which was the mental powers, the other portion attracted and
disintegrated the elements, from which process resulted the body." His
world, therefore, was a world of competitive attractions. He believed
the well had an influence over the sick through magnetism and used the
magnet in his practice.
[Footnote 17: A German-Swiss physician and alchemist, b. 1493, d. 1541.
These quotations, partly from authorities on faith healing and partly
from the history of Spiritualism, illustrate the underground connection
in this whole region.]
"This dual theory of magnetic cures, that of the magnetic influence of
men on men and of the magnet on man, was prevalent for over a century."
"It is, then, upon these ideas--the radiation from all things, but
especially the stars, magnets and human bodies, of a force which would
act in all things else, and which was in each case directed by the
indwelling spirit, together with the conception of a perpetual contact
between reciprocal and opposing forces--that the mysticism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly depends."[18]
[Footnote 18: Podmore, "Modern Spiritualism," Vol. I, p. 45. I am in
debt also to Cutten for general information and some quoted paragraphs.]
These ideas were adopted by a group of men who are now only names for
us. The phenomena of magnetism fascinated them and supplied them
analogies. There is, they thought, an all-prevailing magnetic influence
which binds together not only celestial and terrestrial bodies, but all
living things. Life and death were for them simply the registry of the
ebbing and flowing of these immaterial tides and they ended by
conceiving a vital fluid which could be communicated from person to
person and in the communication of which the sick could be healed--the
driftwood of their lore has come down to us on the tides of time; we
still speak of magnetic personalities--and they sought in various ways
to control and communicate these mysterious forces.
One of them invented steel plates which he applied to the body as a cure
for disease. He taught his system to Mesmer who made, however, one
marked advance upon the technique of his predecessors and gave his name
to his methods; he produced his results through physical contacts and
passes. But he shared with his predecessors and stated with that compact
clearness of which the French language is so capable even when dealing
with obscure matters, that there is a "fluid so universally diffused and
connected as to leave nowhere any void, whose subtlety is beyond any
comparison and which by its nature is capable of receiving, propagating
and communicating all impressions of movement.... This reciprocal action
is subject to mechanical laws at present unknown."[19] This fluid in its
action governs the earth and stars and human action.
[Footnote 19: Price's "Historique de facts relatifs du Magnetisme
Animal," quoted by Podmore.]
He originated the phrase "Animal Magnetism" and was, though he did not
know it, the originator of hypnotism; until well within our own time
mesmerism was the accepted name for this whole complex group of
phenomena. The medical faculties examined his claims but were not
willing to approve them, but this made no difference in Mesmer's
popularity. He had so great a following as to be unable to deal with
them personally. He deputed his powers to assistants, arranged a most
elaborate apparatus and surrounded his whole procedure with a dramatic
setting of stained glass, mirrored and scented rooms and mysterious
music. The result of it all naturally, as far as his patients were
concerned, was marked excitements and hysterias. They had often to be
put into padded rooms. And yet the result of all this murky confusion
was said to be numbers of marked cures. He was investigated by the
French government and two commissions presented their reports, neither
of which was favourable. Imagination, not magnetism, they said,
accounted for the results. His popularity wore away markedly when he
undertook to explain his method and reveal his secrets. He left Paris in
1815 and lapsed into obscurity.
_The Scientific Investigation of Mesmerism in France_
As has been said, there are two lines of development growing out of
Mesmer and his methods. Ten years after Mesmer left Paris Alexandre
Bertrand pointed out that after the elimination of errors due to fraud
or mal-observation, the results which Mesmer and his associates had
produced were due not to animal magnetism, but to expectation induced by
suggestion and intensified by the peculiar setting which Mesmer had
contrived for his so-called treatments. The schools of medicine were
slow to follow out Bertrand's discovery and it was not until something
like twenty years later, through the studies of Braid, that hypnotism
began to be taken seriously.
But once the matter was brought broadly before them, the doctors began
to follow it through. Charcot, in the Salpetriere, used hypnotic
suggestion for the correction of abnormal mental and nervous states. The
psychologists took up the matter and hypnotic suggestion has come to be
not only a legitimate subject for the investigation of the student and
an accepted method in correction of abnormal mental states, but as it
were a window through which we are beginning to see deeply into
unsuspected depths and intricacies of personality.
Modern faith healing cults, however, have not come to us down this line,
though the studies of Bertrand, Braid, Charcot, Du Bois and their
associates supply the interpretative principles for any real
understanding of them. Mesmerism naturally appealed to the type of mind
most easily attracted by the bizarre and the mysterious. There are
always amongst us the credulous and curious who find little enough
either to awe or inspire them in the broad sweep of law, or in such
facts as lie open to the light of reason. Such as these are impatient of
discipline, eager to free themselves from the sequence of cause and
effect; they are impressed by the occult powers and seek short cuts to
health, or goodness, or wisdom. They delight to build up, out of their
own inner consciousness, systems which have little contact with reality
and which, through their very tenuousness, are as incapable of disproof
as through their disengagement from normal experience they are capable
of verification. They are the people of what the alienist calls the
"idee fixe." Everything for them centers about one idea; they have one
key and one only to the marvellous complexity of life. Such a temper as
this naturally disassociates them from reality and makes them
contemptuous of contradictory experiences.
_Mesmerism is Carried to America; Phineas Quimby an Important Link in a
Long Chain_
America has been far too rich in such a temper as this and it was never
more so than in the forties and the fifties of the last century.
Mesmerism crossed the ocean and while Braid and later Bernheim and
Charcot were following it through on sound, psychological lines and
bringing to bear upon it great insight and scientific discipline, it
fell here into the hands of charlatans and adventurers. Phineas
Parkhurst Quimby, best known for his connection with Mary Baker Eddy,
hardly deserves the name of charlatan, though he was dangerously near
being just that. He belonged to the border-land regions in thought and
propaganda and he did give to the whole complex movement which we have
been considering a direction which has played a relatively great part in
its later development. He had a shrewd mind which ranged over wide
regions; he is a pretty typical example of the half-disciplined,
forceful and original personality which has played so large a part in
American life. The New England of his time--Quimby was born in New
Hampshire and spent his life in Maine--was giving itself whole-heartedly
to a mysticism bounded on the one side (its higher and more
representative side) by Emerson and the transcendentalists and on the
other by healers, prophets of strange creeds and dreamers of Utopias.
Phrenology, mind reading, animal magnetism, clairvoyance, all had their
prophets.
Quimby belongs to this succession. His education was meagre, he did not
even know how to spell according to the dictionary or punctuate
according to the grammar.[20] He had his own peculiar use of words--a
use by which Mary Baker Eddy was doubtless greatly influenced. He had
marked mechanical ability and a real passion for facts. He was an
original thinker, little in debt to books for his ideas though he was
undoubtedly influenced by the temper of his environment to which
reference has already been made. He had a speculative, but not a trained
interest in religion and dealt freely with the orthodoxy of his time
constrained by no loyalty to the accepted faith and no critical
knowledge of its content. "Truth" and "Science" were characteristic
words for him and he shared his speculations and conclusions freely with
his disciples.
[Footnote 20: What is here said of Quimby is condensed from Dresser's
"The Quimby Manuscripts."]
_Quimby is Led to Define Sickness as Wrong Belief_
In his early thirties he was supposed to be dying of consumption and
suffered much from excessive medication. He recovered through an
emotional crisis but does not seem to have followed out the possible
suggestion of his recovery. He turned instead to mesmerism and travelled
about with one Lucius Burkmer over whom he had strong hypnotic
influence. When hypnotized Burkmer (or Burkman) claimed the power to
look as through a window into the bodies of Quimby's patients and
discover, often with illuminating detail, their condition; a good many
reputed cures followed. The testimonials to these cures and to the
strange powers of Burkmer are themselves an arresting testimony to the
lengths people go in the face of what they do not understand. "I have
good reason to believe that he can discern the internal structure of an
animal body and if there be anything morbid or defective therein detect
and explain it.... He can go from point to point without passing through
intermediate space. He passes from Belfast [Maine] to Washington or from
the earth to the moon ... swifter than light, by a single act of
volition."[21]
[Footnote 21: "The Quimby Manuscripts," p. 38.]
Quimby had too alert an intelligence to rest content with the merely
occult. He came to believe that Burkmer only saw what the patient
thought, could do no more than describe the patient's idea of his own
state, or else report the "common allopathic belief about the disease in
question," and the cure, he was persuaded, was not in the medicine
prescribed but in "the confidence of the doctor or medium." (Note that
Quimby here associates the cures produced by the medical faculty and his
own cures in one sweeping generalization.) What he was really dealing
with then was "belief." It might be the belief of the doctor or the
patient or the belief of his friends--but sickness was only "belief."
This also was a sweeping generalization but it becomes intelligible as
we follow the process by which Quimby reached his conclusions and it
helps us to understand the significance of Belief as one of the key
words of Christian Science. Quimby was led to identify sickness and
wrong beliefs through this analysis of mesmeric diagnosis and health and
right belief through his own experiences as a healer. He had no training
to help him to an understanding of the real facts which lay behind the
belief in sickness. He became a skillful diagnostician of states of mind
and a healer of such diseases as could be so treated. But he knew,
scientifically, no more of what lay behind it all than a ploughman may
know of what lies beneath the furrows he turns.
_Quimby Develops His Theories_
Mrs. Eddy took over the catch-words of his system and its loose
assumptions, and a reasonably careful comparison of the Quimby
manuscripts and "Science and Health" shows not only Mrs. Eddy's
fundamental and never honestly acknowledged and finally categorically
denied indebtedness to Quimby, but the confusion which Quimby's rather
striking and original philosophy suffered at her hands. Beginning with
his persuasion that health and sickness are phases of belief Quimby
discarded mesmerism altogether and addressed himself to the minds of his
patients. He had doubtless a keen intuitive knowledge of human nature
and its morbid fancies and he was dealing generally with neurotic
temperaments over which he exercised a strong and helpful power of
suggestion. His explanation of disease--that it is a wrong
belief--becomes grotesque enough when he comes down to detail. This, for
example, is his diagnosis of Bronchitis--"You listen or eat this belief
or wisdom [evidently that Bronchitis is real] as you would eat your
meals. It sets rather hard upon your stomach; this disturbs the error of
your body and a cloud appears in the sky.... The elements of the body of
your belief are shaken, earth is lit up by the fire of your error, the
heat rises, the heaven or mind grows dark ... the lightning of hot
flashes shoot to all parts of the solar system of your belief. At last
the winds or chills strike the earth or surface of the body, a cold
clammy sensation passes over you. This changes the heat into a sort of
watery substance which works its way into the channels and pores to the
head and stomach."[22]
[Footnote 22: "Quimby Manuscripts," p. 118.]
This is Quimby at his worst but beneath it is the germ of the method and
philosophy which have attained so luxurious a growth--the explaining,
that is, of disease in terms of wrong belief. Inevitably in the
elaboration of all this Quimby reached out to include religion and
theology and even created his own distinctive metaphysics. He
distinguished between the mind and spirit; he must of course discover in
personality a power superior to fluctuating mental attitudes. He called
his system a science since he was trying to reduce it to a system and
discover its laws. He found a parallel to what he was doing in the
narratives of healing in the Christian Gospels and claimed Christ as the
founder of his science.[23]
[Footnote 23: _Ibid._, p. 185.]
All belief opposed to his was "error"; "Truth" was naturally opposed to
error. He subordinates the testimony of the senses to the necessities of
his system; he defines God variously as Wisdom, as Truth, possibly as
Principle though his use of the word Principle is far more intelligible
than Mrs. Eddy's.[24] He increasingly identifies his system and the
teachings of Jesus and ends by calling it "Christian Science."[25]
[Footnote 24: "The Quimby Manuscripts," p. 309.]
[Footnote 25: _Ibid._, p. 388.]
In substance in the more than 400 closely printed pages of the Quimby
manuscripts as now edited we discover either the substance or the
suggestion of all that Mrs. Eddy later elaborated. Now all this,
confused as it is, brings us to the threshold of a distinct advance in
mental and faith healing.
_Mary Baker Eddy Comes Under Quimby's Influence_
Practically faith and mental healing had depended, till Quimby took it
up, upon persons or objects. The saint or the healer worked through
personal contact; the shrine must be visited, the relic be touched. Such
a system was naturally dependent upon accidents of person or place; it
would not be widely extended nor continued nor made the basis of
self-treatment. But if what lay behind the whole complex group of
phenomena could be systematized and given real power of popular appeal
through its association with religion it would possess a kind of
continuing independence, conditioned only by the willingness of people
to be persuaded of the truth of its philosophy or to answer to its
religious appeal. It would then become a mental and spiritual
discipline to be written into books and taught by the initiated. As far
as it could be associated with religion it would become the basis of a
cult and it would have an immense field.
All difficult or chronic or obscure illnesses would offer an opportunity
to its propagandists, and the necessary obscurities and irrationalities
of such a system would simply be, for the minds to which it would
naturally appeal, added elements of power. Any system which has sickness
for its field and credulity for its reinforcement and a specious show of
half truth for its philosophic form and religion to give its sanction
and authority is assured, to begin with, of a really great following.
Its very weaknesses will be its strength. It will work best as it is
neither clear nor simple--though it must make a show of being both. And
if, in addition, there is somewhere at the heart of it force and truth
enough to produce a certain number of cures it will go on. What it fails
to do will be forgotten or ignored in the face of what it really does
do.
Now Quimby, through his own native force and such a combination of
circumstances as occurs only once in long periods of time, stood upon
the threshold of just such a revolution in the history of faith and
mental healing as this. He anticipated the method and supplied the
material, but he either did not or could not popularize it. He was not
selfish enough to monopolize it, not shrewd enough to commercialize it,
and, maybe, not fanatic enough to make it a cult. He was more interested
in his own speculations than in making converts and without one of those
accidents which become turning points in a movement nothing would have
probably come of his work save its somewhat vague and loose continuance
in the thought and teaching of a small group. (It is doubtful if New
Thought, which as we shall see grew out of his work through his
association with the Dressers, would have come to much without the
stimulus of Christian Science against which it reacted.) Some one was
needed to give the whole nebulous system organization and driving force
and above all to make a cult of it.
_Outstanding Events of Her Life: Her Early Girlhood_
Mary Baker Eddy did just this and Christian Science is the result. It is
idle to calculate the vanished alternatives of life but in all
probability she never would have done it without Quimby. She and her
followers would do far better to honestly recognize this indebtedness.
It would now make little difference with either the position of their
leader or the force of their system but it would take a pretty keen
weapon out of the hands of their critics and give them the added
strength which thoroughgoing honesty always gives to any cause. There
is, on the other hand, little likelihood that Quimby's persuasions would
ever have carried beyond the man himself if he had not found in Mrs.
Eddy so creative a disciple.
The outstanding facts of Mary Baker Eddy's life are too well known to
need much retelling here. The story of her life and the history of
Christian Science as told by Georgine Milmine in _McClure's Magazine_
during the years of 1907-8 is final. It is based upon thorough
investigation, original documents and an exhaustive analysis of facts.
The facts brought out in the various litigations in which Mrs. Eddy and
the church have been involved confirm both the statements and
conclusions of this really distinctive work. The official life by Sibyl
Wilbur (whose real name seems to be O'Brien) is so coloured as to be
substantially undependable. It touches lightly or omits altogether those
passages in Mrs. Eddy's life which do not fit in with the picture which
Mrs. Eddy herself and the church desire to be perpetuated.
Mrs. Eddy was descended from a shrewd, industrious and strongly
characterized New England stock. Her father was strongly set in his
ways, narrow and intense in his religious faith. Mary Baker was a
nervous, high-strung girl, unusually attractive in personal appearance,
proud, precocious, self-conscious, masterful. She was subject to
hysterical attacks which issued in states of almost suspended animation.
Her family feared these attacks and to prevent them humoured her in
every way. In due time she joined the Tilton Congregational Church. She
says herself that she was twelve years old at the time, but the records
of the church make her seventeen. The range of her education is debated.
Mrs. Eddy herself claims a rather ambitious curriculum. "My father," she
says, "was taught to believe that my brain was too large for my body and
so kept me out of school, but I gained book knowledge with far less
labour than is usually requisite. At ten years of age I was familiar
with Lindley Murray's Grammar, as with the Westminster Catechism and
the latter I had to repeat every Sunday. My favourite studies were
Natural Philosophy, logic and moral science. From my brother Albert I
received lessons in the ancient tongues, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. After
my discovery of Christian Science most of the knowledge I gleaned from
school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined that
grammar was eclipsed. Etymology was divine history, voicing the idea of
God in man's origin and signification. Syntax was spiritual order and
unity. Prosody the song of angels and no earthly or inglorious
theme."[26]
[Footnote 26: "Retrospection and Introspection," 1909.]
_Her Education: Shaping Influences_
It is not fair to apply critical methods to one who confesses that most
of the knowledge she had gleaned from school books vanished like a
dream, but there is much in Mrs. Eddy's writing to bear out her
statement. Those who knew her as a girl report her as irregular in
attendance upon school, inattentive during its sessions and far from
knowing either Greek or Latin or Hebrew. "According to these schoolmates
Mary Baker completed her education when she had finished Smith's Grammar
and reached Long Division in Arithmetic." The official biography makes
much of an intellectual friendship between the Rev. Enoch Corser, then
pastor of the Tilton Congregational Church, and Mary Baker. "They
discussed subjects too deep to be attractive to other members of the
family. Walking up and down in the garden, this fine old-school
clergyman and the young poetess as she was coming to be called, threshed
out the old philosophic speculations without rancour or irritation."[27]
[Footnote 27: "The Life of Mary Baker Eddy," Sibyl Wilbur, 4th edition.
Christian Science Publishing Company.]
There is little reason to doubt her real interest in the pretty rigid
Calvinistic theology of her time. Indeed, we could not understand her
final line of religious development without taking that into
consideration. Milmine suggests other forces which would naturally have
influenced a sensitive and curious girl; for example, the current
interest in animal magnetism, a subject which dominated certain aspects
of her thinking to the end. Milmine suggests also that she may have been
considerably influenced by the peculiar beliefs of the Shakers who had a
colony near Tilton. The Shakers regarded Ann Lee, their founder, as the
female principle of God and greater than Christ. They prayed always to
"Our Father and Mother which art in heaven." They called Ann Lee the
woman of the Apocalypse, the God-anointed woman. For her followers she
was Mother Ann, as Mary Baker was later Mother Eddy. Ann Lee declared
that she had the gift of healing. The Shakers also made much of a
spiritual illumination which had the right of way over the testimony of
the senses. The Shakers called their establishment the Church of Christ
and the original foundation the Mother Church. The Shakers forbade
audible prayer and enjoined celibacy. There are parallels enough here to
sustain Milmine's contention that Mary Baker was at least largely
influenced by suggestions from her peculiar group of neighbours.
_Her Unhappy Fortunes. She is Cured by Quimby. An Unacknowledged Debt_
Mary Baker married George Washington Glover at the age of twenty-two.
She was soon left a widow and her only son was born after his father's
death. The story of the years which follow is unhappy. She was poor,
dependent upon relatives whose patience she tried and whose hospitality
was from time to time exhausted. Her attacks of hysteria continued and
grew more violent. Her father sometimes rocked her to sleep like a
child. The Tiltons built a cradle for her which is one of the traditions
of this unhappy period of her life. She tried mesmerism and clairvoyance
and heard rappings at night.
She married again, this time a Dr. Daniel Patterson, a travelling
dentist. He never made a success of anything. They were miserably poor
and his marriage was no more successful than most of his other
enterprises. He was captured, though as a civilian, during the Civil War
and spent one or two years in a southern prison. Futile efforts were
made at a reconciliation and in 1873 Mrs. Patterson obtained a divorce
on the grounds of desertion. Meanwhile she had been separated from her
son, of whom she afterward saw so little that he grew up, married and
made his own way entirely apart from his mother.
In 1861 Mrs. Patterson's physical condition was so desperate that she
appealed to Quimby. Her husband had had some interest in homeopathy and
she was doubtless influenced by the then peculiar theories of the
homeopathic school. (Indeed she claimed to be a homeopathic practitioner
without a diploma.) She had had experience enough with drugs to make her
impatient and suspicious of current methods of orthodox medication.
Under Quimby's treatment she was physically reborn and apparently
spiritually as well. It is necessary to dwell upon all these well-known
details to understand what follows and the directions which her mind now
took. Milmine's analysis is here penetrating and conclusive. She had
always been in revolt against her environment. Her marriages had been
unhappy; motherhood had brought her nothing; she had been poor and
dependent; her strong will and self-assertive personality had been
turned back upon herself.
She had found no satisfaction in the rigid theologies of the time. She
had sought help from accepted religion and religion had had nothing to
give her. We have to read between the lines and especially to evaluate
all this period in the light of "Science and Health" itself to
reconstruct the movement of her inner life, but beyond a doubt her
thought had played about the almost tragic discrepancy between her own
experiences and the love and goodness of God. She had known pain and
unhappiness in acute forms and had found nothing in what she had been
taught ample enough to resolve her doubts or establish her faith.
She found in Quimby's philosophy a leading which she eagerly followed.
Now for the first time she is really set free from herself. A truer
sense of dramatic values would have led Mrs. Eddy herself to have made
more of the unhappy period which began to come to an end with her visit
to Quimby and would lead her disciples now to acknowledge it more
honestly. It is a strong background against which to set what follows
and give colour by contrast to her later life. The twice-born from Saul
of Tarsus to John Bunyan have dwelt much upon their sins and sorrows,
seeking thereby more greatly to exalt the grace of God by which they had
been saved. Mary Baker Eddy came strongly to be persuaded that she had
saved herself and consequently not only greatly underestimated her debt
to Quimby, but emptied her own experiences of dramatic contrasts to make
them, as she supposed, more consistent, and her disciples have followed
her.
As a matter of fact, though her life as a whole is not an outstanding
asset for Christian Science and is likely to grow less so, one must
recognize the force of a conviction which changed the neurotic Mrs.
Patterson of the fifties and sixties into the masterful and successful
woman of the eighties and nineties. She belongs also to the fellowship
of the twice-born and instead of minimizing the change those who seek to
understand her, as well as those who seek to exalt her, would do well to
make more of it. She did that herself to begin with. No master ever had
for a time a more grateful disciple. She haunted Quimby's house, read
his manuscripts, wrote letters for the paper, "dropped into verse" and
through her extravagance "brought ridicule upon Quimby and herself."
Quimby died in 1866, accompanied to his last resting place by a tribute
in verse from his grateful pupil. Mrs. Eddy had at the time apparently
no thought of continuing his work except in a most modest way. She wrote
Julius Dresser who had come under Quimby's influence, suggesting that he
would step forward into the place vacated. "I believe you would do a
vast amount of good and are more capable of occupying his place than any
other I know of."[28] She asked Dresser's help in recovering from a fall
which she had just had on the ice and which had so injured her, as she
supposed, to make her the helpless cripple that she was before she met
Quimby. This fall is worth dwelling upon for a bit, for it really marks
a turning place in Mrs. Eddy's life. In her letter to Dresser she says
that the physician attending "said I have taken the last step I ever
should, but in two days I got out of my bed alone and will walk."[29]
Sometime later in a letter to the _Boston Post_ Mrs. Eddy said, "We
recovered in a moment of time from a severe accident considered fatal by
the regular physicians." There is a considerable difference between two
days and a moment of time and the expression of a determination to walk
in the Dresser letter and the testimony to an instantaneous cure in the
_Boston Post_ letter. Dr. Cushing, the physician who attended Mrs. Eddy
at the time, gives still a third account. He treated her, he says, over
a period of almost two weeks and left her practically recovered. He also
attended her in a professional capacity still later and offers all this
in a sworn statement on the basis of his record books. There is a very
considerable advantage in a philosophy which makes thought the only
reality, for, given changing thought and a complacent recollection,
facts may easily become either plastic or wholly negligible.
[Footnote 28: "A History of the New Thought Movement," Dresser, p. 110.]
[Footnote 29: _Ibid._]
_She Develops Quimby's Teachings Along Lines of Her Own_
The real significance of this much debated but otherwise unimportant
episode is that it seems to have thrown Mrs. Eddy upon her own
resources, for now that Quimby was dead she begins to develop what she
had received from him through both experience and teaching along lines
of her own. She had found a formula for the resolution of problems, both
physical and mental, which had hag-ridden her for years. She had a
natural mental keenness, a speculative mind, a practical shrewdness (the
gift of her New England ancestors) and an ample field. The theology, the
medical science and indeed the philosophy or psychology of the New
England of the sixties contributed strongly, through their limitations,
to the growth of bizarre systems which had in them elements of truth. We
shall need to come back to this again in any evaluation of Christian
Science as a whole, but we cannot understand the rapid development of
the movement of which Christian Science was just one aspect without
taking all this into consideration.
Medicine itself has been greatly revolutionized within the last fifty
years. While Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy was finding her unhappy
way through border-land regions into a cloudy light, Louis Pasteur,
sitting, in the phrase of Huxley, "as humbly as a little child before
the facts of life," was making those investigations in bacteriology
which were to be, in some ways, the greatest contribution of the
nineteenth century to the well-being of humanity. He was following
patiently the action of microscopic organisms, especially in their
relation to health, discovering the secret of contagion and infection,
outlining methods of defense against the attacks of these invisible
armies, finding the true basis for inoculation, extending its operation,
robbing hospitals of their terrors and surrounding surgery with
safeguards heretofore undreamt of, literally performing miracles (in his
control of swine plague and the like), and for the want of another
subject preparing to experiment upon himself for the prevention of
hydrophobia, and in doing it all in the most simple and humble way,
naively unconscious of his own fame and living from first to last in a
noble and comparative poverty which contrasts dramatically with the
material well-being for which Mrs. Eddy was so eager. Nothing of this
had ever come into Mrs. Eddy's field or those whom she addressed. With
all the aid which the modern physician has at his control, diagnosis is
still a difficult matter, physicians confess it themselves. There is
still, with all the resource of modern medical science, a residuum of
hopeless and obscure cases which baffle the physician. That residuum was
very much larger fifty years ago than it is now.
_She Begins to Teach and to Heal_
The typical Protestant religious experience, as we have seen, was not
great enough to contain all the facts of life. The molten passion of an
earlier Calvinism had hardened down into rigidities which exalted the
power of God at the cost of human helplessness. There was no adequate
recognition among the devout of the sweep of law. Everything that
happened was a special Providence and it was hard enough to fit the
trying facts of life into an understanding of Divine Love when there was
apparently so much in life in opposition to Divine Love.
A very great deal of the ferment of the time was just the endeavour to
find some way out of all this and the group of which Mrs. Eddy was a
part were really the first to try to find their way out except as roads
of escape which were, on the whole, not ample enough had been sought by
the theological liberalism of the time of which Unitarianism was the
most respectable and accepted form. There are, as has been said, curious
underground connections through all this region. We find homeopathy,
spiritualism, transcendentalism, theological liberalism and faith
healing all tied up in one bundle.
The line which Mrs. Eddy now came to follow is, on the whole, clear
enough. She becomes in her turn teacher and healer, giving her own
impress and colour to what she called the science she taught, claiming
it more and more as her own and not only forgetting, but denying as she
went on, her indebtedness to any one else. The whole thing gradually
became in her mind a distinct revelation for which the ages had been
waiting and this revelation theory is really the key to the
contradictions and positive dishonesties which underlie the authorized
account of the genesis of Christian Science. She associated herself with
one of the more promising of her pupils who announced himself as Dr.
Kennedy, with Mrs. Eddy somewhat in the background. Kennedy was the
agent, Mrs. Eddy supplied him with the material of what was a mixed
method of teaching and healing. She had always been desperately poor;
now for the first time she had a respectable bank account.
There were corresponding changes in her personality and even her
physique. She began to give lessons, safeguarding her instructions from
the very first in such ways as to make them uncommonly profitable. Her
pupils paid $100 for the course and agreed also to give her a percentage
of the income from their practice. In the course of litigation which
afterward follows, the courts pronounced that they did not find in her
course of instruction anything which could be "in any way of value in
fitting the defendant as a competent and successful practitioner of any
intelligible art or method of healing the sick." The court, therefore,
was of the opinion that "consideration for the agreement had wholly
failed." In a sense the court was mistaken. Mrs. Eddy was giving her
disciples something which, whether it fitted them to be competent and
successful practitioners of any intelligible art or method of healing
the sick, or no, was of great financial advantage both to them and to
their teacher. She afterward raised her tuition fee to $300 and stated
that God had shown her in multitudinous ways the wisdom of this
decision.
_Early Phases of Christian Science_
Everything was, to begin with, a matter of personal relationship between
Mrs. Eddy and her students. They constitute a closely related group, the
pupils themselves extravagant in their gratitude to their teacher. There
were, of course, schisms, jealousies, recriminations, litigation, but
none the less, the movement went on. The first attempt at organization
was made at Lynn in 1875. A hall was rented, meetings were held in the
evening, the society was known as the "Christian Scientists" and as an
organization Christian Science came into the world. The first edition of
"Science and Health" was also published in 1875. There was difficulty in
finding a publisher; those who assisted Mrs. Eddy financially were
losers in the enterprise. They were never reimbursed, though "Science
and Health" afterward became the most remunerative single publication in
the world. Two years later Mrs. Glover (for after her divorce from
Patterson she had taken her earlier married name) married Gilbert Eddy
and so took the name by which she is best known to the world.
There is much in this period of Mrs. Eddy's life to indicate that she
had not yet reached an inner serenity of faith. She was never able to
free herself from a perverted belief in animal magnetism or mesmerism
which showed itself in fear rather than faith. She believed herself
persecuted and if she did not believe in witchcraft she believed in
something curiously like it. Indeed, to Mrs. Eddy belonged the rather
curious distinction of having instigated the last trial for witchcraft
in the United States and with a fitting sense of historic propriety she
staged it at Salem. The judge dismissed the case, saying that it was not
within the power of the Court to control the defendant's mind. The case
was appealed, the appeal waived and the whole matter rests as a curious
instance in the records of the Salem court.
Mrs. Eddy does not appear as the plaintiff in the case. The complainant
is one of her students, but Mrs. Eddy was behind the complaint, the real
reason for which is apparently that the defendant had refused to pay
tuition and royalty on his practice and was interfering with the work of
the group of which Mrs. Eddy was leader. The incident has value only as
showing the lengths to which the mind may be led once it has detached
itself from the steadying influences of experience-tested reality. It is
interesting also to note that in one way and another Mrs. Eddy and her
church have been involved in more litigation than any other religious
teacher or religious movement of the time.
_She Writes "Science and Health" and Completes the Organization of Her
Church_
Nothing apparently came of the first tentative organization in 1875. The
first incorporated Church of Christ Scientist was chartered in 1879 with
twenty-six charter members and Boston as its seat. Meetings of this
church were held, to begin with, in Lynn and Boston, but Lynn was not
friendly to the new enterprise and the Boston group became the center of
further growth. Mrs. Eddy left Lynn finally in 1882 and during all the
next period the history of Christian Science is the history of the
Mother Church in Boston and of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
Mrs. Eddy suffered no dissent, her pupils either followed or left her.
She was the controlling force in the whole movement. She began to
surround herself with a certain mystery and delighted in theatrical
effects. She had written and rewritten "Science and Health" until it
began to take final form. The _Journal of Christian Science_ became the
official organ of Mrs. Eddy's movement as "Science and Health" was its
gospel.
The movement reached beyond Boston and New England and invaded the West.
It was now so outstanding as to create general public interest. The
churches began to take notice of it and indeed, whatever has been for
the last twenty years characteristic of Christian Science was then
actively in action. What follows is the familiar story of Mrs. Eddy's
own personal movements, her withdrawal to Concord, her growing
detachment from the movement which she nevertheless ruled with an iron
hand, the final organization of the church itself along lines wholly
dictated by its leader, the deepening of public interest in the movement
itself, Mrs. Eddy's removal from Concord to Newton and her death. She
left behind her the strongest and most driving organization built up by
any religious leader of her time. Of all those, who since the Wesleys
have inaugurated and carried through a distinct religious movement, only
Alexander Campbell is in the same class with Mrs. Eddy and Campbell had
behind him the traditional force of the Protestantism to which he gave
only a slightly new direction and colouring. Mrs. Eddy's contributions
are far more distinct and radical.
We need, then, to turn from her life, upon whose lights and shadows,
inconsistencies and intricacies, we have touched all too lightly, to
seek in "Science and Health" and the later development of Christian
Science at once the secret of the power of the movement and its
significance for our time.
V