Why You Know So Little About the Most Fascinating Woman in American History

A FAIRLY RESPECTED PUBLICATION recently compiled a “top 10 list” of the most influential religious women in American history.

Mary Baker Eddy was nowhere to be seen.

To any worthy theologian this omission is both insulting and ignorant… but sadly not surprising.

It shows more work still needs to be done to ensure her legacy isn’t lost to the myths and misrepresentations pushed over centuries by old white men who despised her for three reasons: being a woman, being successful, and telling the truth.

Mrs. Eddy was never perfect, but she was also not evil, crazy, or avaricious, as many of her early critics and biographers continue to deceive the modern world into believing.

Luckily for seekers interested in exploring beyond haphazard Google searches, riveting and fair accounts exist that offer genuine insight into her heartbreaking formative years and her unwavering determination to grow a movement that restored the lost art of healing last seen in early Christianity.

The most famous woman in America at the turn of the 20th-century left mixed signals about how she wanted Scientists from the future like me writing about her achievements. On one hand she denounced personal adoration, saying things like, “Those who look for me in person, or elsewhere than in my writings, lose me instead of find me.”

But on the other hand, she’d say things like, “I wish I could expose every period of my earth-life for the benefit of the race.”

I’m here to strike the balance between her earthly life and her spiritual ideas, and at the end I’ve cited four wonderful books you’ll want to read.

Challenging the System Early

When Mary was 13, her philosophy teacher at school asked the class: “If you were to take an orange, throw away the peel, squeeze out the juice, destroy the seeds and the pulp, what would you have left?”

Many said they didn’t know, some said nothing would remain, and some kept silent. But when the question was put to Mary, she replied:

“There would be left the thought of the orange.”

Little Mary was already employing her burgeoning metaphysical mind.

Her home life in Lynn, MA was a balance between a strict, Calvinist father, and a gentle, loving mother.

“I remember when I was 12, the doctrine of predestination greatly troubled me, for I was unwilling to be saved if my brothers and sisters were to be numbered among those who were doomed to perpetual banishment from God. So perturbed was I by the thoughts aroused by this erroneous doctrine, that the family doctor was summoned, and pronounced me stricken with fever. My father’s relentless theology emphasized belief in a final judgment day, in danger of endless punishment, hoping to win me from dreaded heresy. But my mother, as she bathed my burning temples, bade me lean on God’s love, which would give me rest, if I went to Him in prayer, seeking his guidance. I prayed; and a soft glow of ineffable joy came over me. The fever was gone, and I rose and dressed myself, in a normal condition of health. This ‘horrible decree’ of predestination forever lost its power over me.”

The fever was Mary’s first recorded healing.

Later in life she credited her early embracing of Christianity to her mother’s nurturing nature. At a young age Mary became obsessed with the Bible, often at home studying it while other kids were out playing.

She showed uncommon feistiness as a prepubescent. When she was around eight, and attending a one-room schoolhouse with children of all ages, one of the older girls, who had been bullying other classmates, came to school one day with a hollowed-out cucumber filled with muddy water, demanding the other children drink from it.

Mary stood up to her and insisted, “You shall not touch one of them.” The girl yelled back at her, “Out of my way or I will knock you over!” But Mary planted her feet, crossed her arms, and said, “No, you will not lay a finger on me nor harm one of them.” The girl, not accustomed to being stood up to, put down the cucumber, told Mary she was brave, and gave her a hug.

In standing up to evil to prove its nothingness, Mary was foreshadowing her seminal scriptural interpretations.

Despite these early hints of a future healer, she herself was constantly sick. For the first four decades of her life she faced repeated bouts of ill health, at times reducing her to near invalidism.

When Everything Changed

The year is 1866. Mary is 45 years old.

On a cold day in February in Lynn, in the company of some friends, she slips on a patch of ice, bangs her head on the pavement, and is knocked unconscious. She’s brought to a cot in a kitchen and visited by a doctor, who says her spine is fractured and she may never walk again. She asks for her Bible, and sends everyone out of the room.

"When apparently near the confines of mortal existence, standing already within the shadow of the death-valley, I learned these truths in divine Science: that all real being is in God, the divine Mind, and that Life, Truth, and Love are all-powerful and ever-present; that the opposite of Truth — called error, sin, sickness, disease, death — is the false testimony of false material sense, of mind in matter; that this false sense evolves, in belief, a subjective state of mortal mind which this same so-called mind names matter, thereby shutting out the true sense of Spirit."

Three days later, she gets out of her bed and walks around fully healed. Her shockingly swift recovery was, she wrote years later, the “falling apple” that led to her discovery of Christian Science.

But initially she didn’t fully understand how she was healed, so she spent the next three years “keeping aloof from society” to plumb the depths of the Bible.

"I had no time to borrow from authors. Such a flood tide of truth was lifted upon me at times that it was overwhelming and I have drawn quick breath as my pen flew on, feeling as it were submerged in the transfiguration of spiritual ideas.”

Over the next six years she poured her revelations into a manuscript, and in 1875 her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures rolled off the printers. It was met with intense curiosity.

She enrolled students, and launched a booming practice that over her lifetime healed hundreds of people, many of them deemed “incurable” or “terminal” from doctors — all without medicine, using only the spiritual principles Jesus used during his 1st-century ministry. She showed that healing wasn’t just a thing of the past, it was presently possible, and that the Bible’s truths extended to all time, and to all people.

Attributing what she unearthed from Scripture to “divine revelation,” she edited her book over the next 40 years.

Her critics complained that writing a book over a four decade span wasn’t exactly how “divine revelation” worked… apparently it needed to be quick and perfect.

The fact is, Mrs. Eddy perfected the Science after her accident in 1866. From that moment on, the Science was complete and absolute. But she had to come up with the right language in order to make it understandable to the public, not to mention go out and prove it actually worked. That took time. This extended unfoldment and demonstration is what made these ideas we heal with today tried, true, and battle-tested.

It’s a miracle Mrs. Eddy wasn’t completely broken during those thin years she was writing what would become Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures — moving nine different times, owning only one chair and one desk (and her desk was just a piece of cardboard), her only child taken from her by family members insisting she wasn’t healthy enough to care for him, friends deserting her because her ideas were so “out there,” former students becoming unexpected foes, not to mention the isolation it took to fully devote herself to putting her cascading ideas to paper.

Yet if she hadn’t suffered so immensely she never would have had to find a way to free herself from it. With her freedom, came ours.

“During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.”

First Major Healings

Mrs. Eddy healed so many people after 1866 that I could never list them all, so here are two, one from the book Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, and the other from Irving Tomlinson, a Universalist minister turned student of Eddy’s:

One summer day in 1868, Mrs. Eddy was walking on the beach in Lynn. A woman named Mrs. Norton was taking her seven-year-old son James to the beach and left him there while she hitched the horse and went for water. James had club feet and had never walked. When his mother returned, she saw him walking hand-in-hand with a strange woman. Mrs. Norton ran up to Mrs. Eddy and they both wept and gave thanks to God. The child was completely and permanently healed and lived a happy, useful life.

Mrs. Eddy was called to treat a girl in Lynn, who, the doctors said, had only a little piece of one lung left, and was dying. There were Spiritualists around and Mrs. Eddy could not reach her thought at first, so she said to her: “Get up out of that bed,” and pulled the pillow from under the girl’s head. Then she called to those in the other room to bring her clothes. The girl got up and was well; she never even coughed again. But the mother was offended at Mrs. Eddy and would not speak to her afterwards because she said Mrs. Eddy had spoken disrespectfully to her dying daughter.

“The miracles recorded in the Bible, which had before seemed to me supernatural,” Mrs. Eddy reflected years later, “grew divinely natural and apprehensible; though uninspired interpreters ignorantly pronounce Christ’s healing miraculous, instead of seeing therein the operation of divine law.”

“I had learned that thought must be spiritualized in order to apprehend Spirit; our reliance on material things must be transferred to a perception of and dependence on spiritual things.”

In 1879 Mrs. Eddy founded the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston, aka The Mother Church, and in 1894 it opened its doors for public worship.

Why You’ve Never Heard of Her

Gender. Rebellion. Slander.

Gender

Being the most famous woman in America in 1900, men were threatened by a woman rising up the male ranks, and that she refused to bend her knee to anyone except God, infuriated them even more. With some of these men, most notably literary icon Mark Twain, she lived rent-free in their heads for years.

Twain became obsessed with, and infuriated by, her success. He simultaneously lauded and scoffed at her “extraordinary daring, indestructible persistency, and devouring ambition.”

But at one point he couldn’t help but concede: “In several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary.”

Twain’s daughter, Clara Clemens, became a Christian Scientist after her father’s death, and wrote a book called Awake to a Perfect Day: My Experience with Christian Science, praising Eddy and Science. She revealed that her father, the showman that he was, reveled in criticizing Eddy in public, but behind closed doors had tremendous respect for her.

Rebellion

Eddy was controversial because she was entirely opposed to all the limited, conventional ways of looking at the world. Her radical spiritual ideas drew the ire of just about every authority in the country at a time when many of the antiquated systems of religion were on the precipice of crumbling under foot of the New Thought Movement. Her more “practical Christianity” was viewed as heresy, and she faced malicious opposition from the social and cultural institutions of the day.

Though she never waned in her determination to guide the Science to completion in virtual solitude, the condemnation and rejection of her ideas then is felt just as strongly now.

Slander

In 1906, Joseph Pulitzer of The New York World launched an aggressive campaign against her, attempting to present her as senile, decrepit, and unable to handle her finances. It became known as the Next Friends lawsuit. It was spearheaded by U.S. Senator from New Hampshire and lawyer William Chandler, who accused Christian Science of delusions of grandeur and a “threat to health,” and condemned Eddy herself of being “insane.”

To prove to the judge she was unfit to be the leader of her own movement, in the Summer of 1907, Chandler pushed for court-appointed interviewers to be sent to her home at Pleasant View. Eighty-six-year-old Mary Baker Eddy passed with flying colors, answered every question lucidly.

After the interview, Chandler was famously overheard muttering, “She’s sharper than a steel trap.”

The case was thrown out, but Chandler refused to lose. Figuring he could more easily prove her insanity after she died, he and his determined cronies spent the rest of their careers maligning her work and character as often as possible in the press. She never returned any of it, practicing what she preached in “blessing them that cursed her,” but the damage from a prolonged slander campaign still reverberates today, which is why most people’s view of the religion is mired largely in fiction.

In 1908, two years before she passed, Mrs. Eddy founded The Christian Science Monitor. It has won seven pulitzers.

By 1930, Christian Science was the fastest growing religion in the United States, with around 300,000 members worldwide. Though membership has dwindled in recent years, the Science itself has maintained its perfection.

Here are four books from which I’ve gleaned valuable insights: 1998’s Mary Baker Eddy — a fair account from a non-Christian Scientist; 2009’s Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer — a work mostly dedicated to her extraordinary healing practice; 2011’s Rolling Away the Stone — a riveting account of the last years of her life, and 2011’s We Knew Mary Baker Eddy — the reminiscences of 22 people who knew her better than anyone.

“Hold perpetually this thought — that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being.” Mary Baker Eddy