The satirist believed Eddy was fleecing the masses. That uniformity, reinforced by zealous, and profitable institutions, infuriated Mark Twain. Moreover, as Professor Anne Braude notes in Radical Spirits, “Where spiritualists emphasized personal spiritual knowledge, Christian Scientists emphasized doctrinal uniformity.” But most Spiritualists spoke to or through the dead, while Eddy focused on the self. She founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881, the Christian Science Journal in 1883, the first Reading Room in 1888, the Christian Science Sentinel and the Christian Science Publishing Society in 1898, and the Christian Science Monitor in 1908. Understanding that you needed a communications strategy, she conquered the fields of education, publishing, and journalism. In 1879, she established the Church of Christ, Scientist, which became the First Church of Christ Scientist 13 years later. Until 1910, even as Mary Baker Eddy revised her textbook in 432 editions, showing her ongoing spiritual quest, she gave her ideas an institutional infrastructure. Two years later, another brief marriage to Asa Gilbert Eddy provided her final name change. That book fused the power of American Christianity with the lure of nineteenth-century science, promising what Jesus Christ and George Washington promised: individual salvation. By 1875, recently divorced, she published what became her magnum opus, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Mary started refining her theory that disease resides in the mind more than the body. “Whether she took it or invented it,” her bete noire, Mark Twain would acknowledge, “it was a sawdust mine when she got it, and she has turned it into a Klondike.” Now Mary Patterson, she would repudiate hypnosis and shrug off those who accused her of stealing Quimby’s ideas. Thus began a trying decade and a half that culminated with her seeking healing with a charismatic, mesmerist, Phineas Quimby, setting the stage for her new religion. By the time their son George Washington II was born nine months later, his father had died of yellow fever. She realized the power of “ Life in and of Spirit this Life being the sole reality of existence.” She would say, “I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.” This insight would make her a Gilded Age spiritualist celebrity whose legacy resonates in every health food store entered and healing ritual attempted, in every organic vegetable consumed and homeopathic vitamin swallowed.īorn on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire in 1821, Mary Morse Baker married George Washington Glover in December 1843. On her third day of anguish, writhing in pain, she opened the Bible, and, “ As I read, the healing Truth dawned upon my sense.” She rose, feeling better. Instead of dying, she had her life-defining, empire-creating, history-making, faith-healing epiphany. Now, on February 1, 1866, Mary was in critical condition, having sustained a serious spinal injury after slipping on the ice while walking in Lynn, Massachusetts. Professor Harold Bloom called her "a monumental hysteric of classic dimensions, indeed a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments." However, this great American go-getter put the theatrics to great use. Beyond that traumatic pile-up, Mary Baker Eddy was an emotional wreck, one of those fragile, melodramatic Victorians, prone to acting hysterical and staying in bed. She had also lost contact with her only child because-depending on which faction you believe-either no one wanted to care for a widow and her rambunctious son or she was too self-involved with psychosomatic illnesses to mind him. In the previous fifteen years she had buried a husband, a fiancée, a brother, her mother, and her spiritual mentor, Phineas Quimby. But she had already hit the average life expectancy back then – and lived a stressful life. If we can fly in airplanes, defying gravity, because a little old apple fell from a seventeenth-century tree near Isaac Newton, if we can turn on lights because lightening hit a little eighteenth-century key of Benjamin Franklin’s, many of us think positive when trying to heal-and sometimes blame ourselves when we don’t-because a little old nineteenth-century lady slipped on the ice, Mary Baker Eddy.Īctually, in 1866, when the then Mary Baker Glover Patterson had the little fall that launched a bestseller, a religion, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning newspaper, 1,200 Reading Rooms, a communications empire, and some Supreme Court lawsuits, she was only 45 years old.
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