Introduction by ACOM/ Interfaith Representative for Rancho Santa Fe branch church: 

In viewing the document handed out at the Interfaith meeting about the connections of New Thought ideologies, as a Christian Scientist, I would like to add to the conversation from research on the relationship between Mary Baker Eddy and Quimby. I requested our church’s Committee on Publication for Southern California, who previously gave us an overview of Christian Science, to provide information on this topic because a number of scholars both within and outside the church have researched and written extensively on the subject of Mary Baker Eddy’s right to claim the originality of her own work and inspiration. 

 

Committee sharing:

First Background:

Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science based on a biblically-derived spiritual healing of a debilitating physical condition. This healing flowed from her lifelong study of the Bible. Not long after she began healing and teaching others, based on her new understanding of what Jesus lived and taught, other religious groups and practices, which would later be grouped as New Thought, were emerging. Eddy found the need to distinguish the healing practice of Christian Science from the different healing and healthcare practices of her day that used some of the same language as is used in Christian Science, but that in other regards, were substantially different. One of the key differences is her insistence that healing is from God, the divine Mind alone. She did not practice or teach mind over matter, positive thinking, or visualization, but the yielding of the human mind to God or the Mind of Christ.

As I shared with you last time we were together, in February of 1866 Mary Baker Eddy had a pivotal healing that led to her understanding that the healings found in the Bible were not rare miracles but based on universally available divine laws. Before this, she had been seeking health by trying various healing methods available to her in her day, including Phineas Quimby in 1862. She was suffering severely with spinal inflammation and chronic dyspepsia. By the time she seeks out Quimby’s help, she is almost an invalid. Historian Amy Voorhees in A New Christian Identity states, “Eddy was forty-one years old and had already spent years probing the Bible and experimenting with various cures in a quest for health. She was accustomed to questioning data about illness and cure, health and purpose, God’s will and creation’s status.” (p. 75) Through all the different methods she tries to that point, she is already discovering the impact of thought or mortal belief in relationship to disease and contemplating from her biblical study the Mind of Christ in relationship with healing. 

Eddy experiences initial healing with Quimby, which as one can imagine gives her great joy, but the healing does not last. As with other patients of Quimby’s, the healing is often tied to being present with him as the healer. But during her visits, her relief causes her to pursue an understanding of his method. She is searching for a scientific approach to healing through God’s powerful love. Her own religious journey informs her research into Quimby’s methods. “She at first assumed she could grasp…a biblical ‘truth’ behind his work…” (Voorhees, p. 52) 

Quimby has no particular interest in religion, and it is Eddy who tries to convince him to explore his method on religious terms. A few years after her healing in 1866, she saw just how completely what she was learning about spiritual healing through experience, prayer to God and her ongoing study of the Bible diverged from Quimby’s method. With a growing new understanding of spiritual healing including her pivotal healing in 1866, she embarks in a new direction, resulting in the permanent healing of her previous ailments, and others for whom she prays and who experience permanent healing. 

As Christian Science begins to spread across the country and receives notoriety in the press, a previous patient of Quimby’s, Julius Dresser, who also knew of Eddy when she visited Quimby, starts a public campaign stating that she has stolen her ideas from Quimby. Dresser does not know of the long independent journey with the Bible Eddy has engaged in after Quimby – a journey that began in childhood, continued throughout her life, but that took on a new focus after her healing February, 1866., Nor was Dresser acquainted with her writings that have come from that search. He discovers a few words that he assumes she has adopted from Quimby. These words are also in the vocabulary of the day, as well as words Quimby has adopted from her in their conversations, which are later credited to Quimby. Dresser challenges her claim to having a revelatory experience. Dresser’s claims continue to contribute to confusion about the relationship between Christian Science and New Thought to this day, even though there is substantial scholarship that concurs that Eddy did not plagiarize Quimby. “Former Quimby associates…invariably claimed a disjunction between her method and his. Quimby’s son George writes, ‘Don’t confuse his method of healing with Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science, so far as her religious teachings go…The religion which she teaches certainly is hers.’” (Historian Amy Voorhees, A New Christian Identity, p. 54)

 

From Gillian Gill, a historian who focuses on women’s studies and has written biographies on famous women, including Mary Baker Eddy. The following is an excerpt from a detailed account of what took place behind the controversy of Quimby’s role in her life:

“In the public, on scheduled occasions and in special interviews, Mrs. Eddy was the epitome of calm, sweetness and grace, but she was under enormous pressure, not only from her students and followers, but also from her professional rivals, many of whom were former adherents. As Stephen Gottschalk has shown so brilliantly in his book on the emergence of Christian Science, Boston in the 1880s was seething with the activities of rival mental healing groups. That Mrs. Eddy and her Christian Science were perceived as the leaders in the field can be gauged by the intensity of the attacks raised against her, and given how small and frail her movement still was in 1883, it is a sign of her great abilities that she continued to make such phenomenal headway. The most notable and long lasting of these professional controversies came up in early 1883, but troubles were destined to plague Mrs. Eddy for the rest of her life, and still occasionally her movement faces such troubles even today.” Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 311-312.

Since March is Women’s history month and in honor of what this woman historian author tries to do in giving famous women their voice, honoring their lives and often setting the record straight in those regards, I think it is noteworthy to realize that some of the issues surrounding Eddy and Quimby have to do with the gender beliefs of her day. Critics had difficulty wrapping their heads around a woman being able to speak and write profusely about theology, science and medicine. It was easier to elevate a relatively unknown local man and his small healing practice than to accept a fast growing church under female leadership. Needless to say, rumors spread through the yellow journalism of that time period to promote and find sympathy with the status quo of this commonly held bias. Despite this bias, Mary Baker Eddy and her seminal writings, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, has also received much recognition over the years. Mary Baker Eddy was named by Smithsonian Magazine (November 17, 2014) one of the “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time.” Science and Health was included by the Women’s National Book Association on its list of “75 Books By Women Whose Words Have Changed the World.“ Noted suffragist Susan B. Anthony observed in 1899, “No man ever obtained so large a following in so short a time.” Albert Einstein visited a Wednesday evening Testimony meeting of a Christian Science church in the 1950’s and walked out saying to a visitor at the service, George Nay, “Do you realize what a wonderful thing you have?” https://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/research/albert-einstein/ 

From a noted New Thought practitioner, William Walker Atkinson, in a 1915 history of New Thought:

“Quimby, Dresser, Evans, and a few others are remembered—the others are forgotten. All served their purpose in the great plan, however, and made the connecting link between the two schools of thought. Mrs. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, undoubtedly did more than any other one person to make popular the healing of the body by metaphysical methods, and her insistence upon her basic philosophy was an inspiration to others who agreed with her in the main, but who differed from her regarding certain points of doctrine and organization.

Many of Mrs. Eddy’s pupils separated from her organization, and formed schools of their own, or else practiced and taught independently. Others, not her pupils, but influenced by the movement which she had initiated, also founded similar organizations and associations.”

 

From a noted religious historian J. Gordon Melton in his 1996 article, “The Case of Edward J. Arens and The Distortion of the History of New Thought”: 

“In spite of the fact that Quimby had died in 1866, twenty years before there was a New Thought movement, that none of the leaders of the movement had met Quimby or read any of his material, that there is virtually no reference to him or his teachings during the first forty years of the movement, and that his teachings (being unavailable to the movement prior to 1921) had no effect on its growth and development, the Alliance seized upon Quimby and elevated him to the position of founding saint. . . .

 The adoption of Quimby and the subsequent forgetting of [Emma] Hopkins presents one of the more intriguing problems of New Thought history and, for the historian, one of the more interesting episodes in historical reconstruction. That the mythologizing of New Thought history around the personage of Quimby has been allowed to stand so long is in part due to the dogged determination of Horatio Dresser to promote the Quimby cause coupled with the concurrent lack of attention of historians to the two movements so directly involved in what turned into a continuing theological controversy.”

Just some clarifying comments. Quimby died in January of 1866, a couple of weeks prior to Mary Baker Eddy’s healing from her fall on the ice. Horatio Dresser is the son of Julius Dresser. 

The article concludes as follows:

“Because of the debate between Eddy and the Quimby champions, and with the world-wide fame of Eddy later, Quimby’s name became famous throughout the world by the time of Eddy’s death in 1910. Many of the religious organizations that came together around the name “New Thought,” to varying degrees, accepted the claims of the Quimby champions and at least nominally accepted Quimby as the father of New Thought, even though, as outlined above, almost none of them had ever known him, and his manuscripts would not be published in any significant number until years later, in 1921.”

 

From religious historian, Britta Waldschmitt-Nelson, in Christian Science im Lande Luthers (2009), has written of the death of Quimby and how that spurred Eddy on to her own independent views on spiritual healing:

As translated into English by DeepL: “However, the sudden loss of a mentor drove Eddy, albeit initially involuntarily, to help herself instead of relying on Quimby’s advice. This, in turn, opened the door, so to speak, to the independent development of her own ideas about spiritual healing.”

 

From Mary Baker Eddy’s own words in her Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896, p. 96:

“How is the healing done in Christian Science?

This answer includes too much to give you any conclusive idea in a brief explanation. I can name some means by which it is not done.

It is not one mind acting upon another mind; it is not the transference of human images of thought to other minds; it is not supported by the evidence before the personal senses, — Science contradicts this evidence; it is not of the flesh, but of the Spirit. It is Christ come to destroy the power of the flesh; it is (divine) Truth over error; that understood, gives man ability to rise above the evidence of the senses, take hold of the eternal energies of Truth, and destroy mortal discord with immortal harmony, — the grand verities of being. It is not one mortal thought transmitted to another’s thought from the human mind that holds within itself all evil.”

 

Additional note on Joel Goldsmith as Under Christian Science on the Chart:

[Your Interfaith Representative for Rancho Santa Fe branch church] shared with me the chart you all received giving the history of the New Thought movements. On the chart, it has Joel Goldsmith as under Christian Science. While Goldsmith was an adherent of Christian Science for a time, he had long since left Christian Science behind and developed a distinct philosophy when he wrote and published his chief work, The Infinite Way.

 

Christian Scientists see ourselves as a Christian denomination whose pastor is the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. The Scriptures and Eddy’s book, based entirely on the Bible, are what guide the church, its teachings and missionary purpose in the world.