Mary Baker Eddy

Copyright Michael D. Robbins 2005

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Mary Baker Eddy—Founder of Christian Science

July 16, 1821, Bow Center, New Hampshire. (Source: Sabian Symbols, Chart #533. According to LMT, Davison quotes a biography by Pakin for 5:38 PM)  Died, December 3, 1910, Boston, Massachusetts

 

 

(Sun, Cancer; Ascendant, Sagittarius; Moon in Aquarius; Venus and Mercury in Leo; Saturn and Jupiter conjunct in Aries;  Uranus conjunct Neptune and both rising in Capricorn.) (Source: Sabian Symbols).    

Christian Science is a method by which souls upon the sixth ray may transfer off the mystical path by means of the fifth ray. The system is based upon both belief (sixth ray) and rationality (fifth ray). A rising Neptune accents the fundamental sixth ray (probably the ray of the soul), but a rising Uranus, conjunct Neptune as well as both Venus and Mercury conjuncted in Leo, a fifth ray sign—emphasize science and rationality—albeit with an unusual and transformational twist.

Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.

Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body.
(Mars in 6th house, trine Moon.)

Give up the belief that mind is, even temporarily, compressed within the skull, and you will quickly become more manly or womanly. You will understand yourself and your Maker better than before.
(Pluto conjunct Chiron in 3rd house.)

Happiness is spiritual, born of truth and love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.
(Moon in Aquarius in 2nd house, opposition Mercury.)

Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?

Reject hatred without hating.

Sin brought death, and death will disappear with the disappearance of sin.

Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.

To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings.

Truth is immortal; error is mortal.
(Sagittarius Ascendant.)

“Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind.”

“Jealousy is the grave of affection”

“To live and let live, without clamour for distinction or recognition; to wait on divine love; to write truth first on the tablet of one's own heart - this is the sanity and perfection of living.”

“The age looks steadily to the redressing of wrong, to the righting of every form of error and injustice; and a tireless and prying philanthropy, which is almost omniscient, is one of the most hopeful characteristics of the time.”
(Libra on Midheaven.)

“Experience teaches us that we do not always receive the blessings we ask for in prayer”

“Sin brought death, and death will disappear with the disappearance of sin.”

“I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.”

“Science reveals the possibility of achieving all good, and sets mortals at work to discover what God has already done; but distrust of one's ability to gain the goodness desired and to bring out better and higher results, often hampers the trial of one's wings and ensures failure at the outset.”
(Sun square Saturn/Jupiter.)

“If Christianity is not scientific, and Science is not God, then there is no invariable law, and truth becomes an accident.”
(Uranus & Neptune in Capricorn conjunct Ascendant. Venus in Leo in 8th house.)

Life
She was born in Bow, New Hampshire and raised a Congregationalist, though she rebelled against teachings like predestination. She suffered chronic illness and developed a strong interest in the biblical accounts of early Christian healing. In 1843 she married George Washington Glover. He died about a year later, shortly before the birth of their only child, George Washington Glover, Jr. In 1853 she married Dr. Daniel Patterson. In the 1860s she began to explore faith-healing and associated with Phineas Quimby. His influence on her is disputed; she thought highly of him personally but ultimately disavowed his technique as more mesmerism-based than Christian. She divorced Patterson, her second husband in 1873 for adultery that he readily admitted. In 1877 she married Asa Gilbert Eddy. Her third husband died in 1882.

Illness
After a severe injury in 1866, Eddy turned to the Bible and recovered unexpectedly. Despite this unexpected recovery, however, she still tried to claim money from the city for her injury on the grounds that she was ‘still suffering from the effects of that fall’[1]. She then devoted the next three years to biblical study and the development of Christian Science. Convinced that illness was at base a mental illusion that could be healed through a clearer perception of God, she began teaching her theory of healing to others privately. She felt that she had discovered a positive rule to healing in a new understanding of God as divine Principle and infinite Spirit above the limitations of a material sense of reality she termed error.

Founds her Church
Eddy set forth her understanding of this discovery in a book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which she called the textbook of Christian Science, and which she published in its first edition of one thousand copies in 1875, writing therein, "In the year 1866, I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science" (page 107).

Eddy would devote the remaining years of her life to the establishment of her church, authoring its governing bylaws, "The Manual of the Mother Church," and revising "Science and Health." While Eddy was a highly controversial religious leader, author, and lecturer, thousands of people flocked to her teachings and claimed to find healing.

Builds her Church
Eddy would build her Church on the strength of this healing work by both herself as well as over four thousands students that she taught at her Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston, Massachusetts between the years 1883 and 1889. They spread across the country practicing healing by her teachings. Through the auspices of her church, she would authorize these students to list themselves as Christian Science Practitioners in her church's official monthly organ, the Christian Science Journal.

In 1908, at the age of 87, she founded The Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper devoted to balance. She also founded the Christian Science Journal, a monthly magazine focused chiefly on the church audience; the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly religious periodical written for a more general public audience, and the Herald of Christian Science, a religious magazine with editions in non-English languages, for children, and in English-Braille. She died December 10, 1910.

The definitive, church-authorized, biography of Eddy is Robert Peel's trilogy Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial, and Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority. (1966-1971)

A more recent single volume is a 1999 work by Gillian Gill (ISBN 0738202274), which includes review of the numerous other biographies over the years.

See also Stephen Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone, Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism, (ISBN: 0253346738) for a new account of her founding the church and relations to critics such as Mark Twain. (Indiana University Press: 2006)

Mary Baker Eddy, Speaking for Herself (ISBN 0879522755)
Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1993) began as a famous Muckraking magazine series 1907-08 and highly critical book in 1909. Scholars who are not Christian Scientists rely on it, but church members disfavor it.
The famous novelist Stefan Zweig wrote a biography Mary Baker Eddy

(July 16, 1821 - December 3, 1910)

Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910)--author of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" and founder of the six time Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper "The Christian Science Monitor"--was born and raised near Concord, New Hampshire, in the United States. Because of restrictions on women's education in nineteenth century America, and because of many bouts of illness, she received much of her education at home, sometimes with the help her brother Albert, a student at Dartmouth College.

She experienced some difficult years as a young woman. She was widowed (and pregnant) six months into her first marriage. Hoping to regain a stable home life for herself and her son, she married again, but her second marriage eventually ended in divorce. In poor health during much of this time, she experimented with allopathic medicine and alternative therapies, particularly with homeopathy. She was seeking an understanding of the relationship between mind and body. Simultaneously, she continued a life-long study of the Bible searching to uncover its promise of spiritual healing.

In 1866, she was healed of a life-threatening accident through spiritual insights gained from the Bible. Over the next few years she studied the Scriptures deeply, looking for a spiritual system behind the healing works of Christ Jesus. She tested what she was learning by healing other people, including some considered medically incurable. She also taught others to heal, using this system she later called: "Christian Science."

In 1875, Mary Baker Eddy published the first edition of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," her major work on the theology and healing system of Christian Science. In 1879, she founded a church in Boston, Massachusetts, and served as its pastor for about ten years. In 1881, she established The Massachusetts Metaphysical College to teach others her system of healing --including doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and homemakers. She started a monthly magazine called "The Christian Science Journal," in 1883, and was its first editor. In 1892 she reorganized the church. Several years later she ordained the Bible and "Science and Health" as its pastor. This opened the way for both women and men to conduct church services, where they read from these books. Today local branch churches, known as Churches of Christ, Scientist, have been opened in over seventy countries around the world.

In 1898, she established a publishing company, and added a weekly magazine to its publications. In 1908, at age 86, she founded "The Christian Science Monitor."

"Science and Health" has been a best seller for over 90 years. It has been translated into 17 languages (including English Braille), and was selected by the Women's National Book Association as one of "75 books by women whose words have changed the world." In just the last five years of the twentieth century, it sold over one million copies.

In 1995, Eddy was recognized for her many achievements and inducted in the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 2002, The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity will open to researchers, scholars, and the public, allowing access to hundreds of thousands of documents and artifacts. It will house one of the largest multi-disciplinary collections by and about an American woman.

Glimpses of spiritual reality have lightened the darkness of material history for centuries. But it was left for one woman to receive this full revelation of Truth in this age, — Mary Baker Eddy. The parentage, education, experience, and remarkable spirituality of Mrs. Eddy had made her well fitted for the mission to which God had called her. She possessed a remarkable degree of spirituality even in childhood, and rapidly developed into that individuality which was needed to voice to this age the Science of Christianity.

In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, she recorded the "experiences which led her, in the year 1866, to the discovery of the system that she denominated Christian Science" (Science and Health, p. viii).

Childhood and Background
Mary Baker Eddy was born on July 16, 1821, in Bow, New Hampshire, five miles from Concord, the state capital. The Baker family had been in New England for six generations. Mary Baker’s father was Mark Baker, who married Abigail Ambrose of Pembroke, New Hampshire.

One of Mary Baker’s brothers was Albert Baker, who graduated from Dartmouth College, studied law with Franklin Pierce (who later became President of the United States), and was admitted to the bar in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire. With Albert, she studied moral science, natural philosophy, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew grammar.

At an early age the question of her joining the church presented itself, but she showed opposition to the decree of predestination as taught in the Congregational church. In spite of her stout declaration of disbelief in this, she was nevertheless admitted. She states in her autobiography Retrospection and Introspection, on page 15, “My connection with this religious body was retained till I founded a church of my own, built on the basis of Christian Science, ‘Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone.’”

The Baker family moved to Tilton when Mary was fifteen, and she then attended the private school of Professor H. Dyer Sanborn. Under this instruction and the intellectual and spiritual guidance of the Rev. Enoch Corser, pastor of the Tilton church, Mary made great progress in her studies. She had shown from early on a love for poetry, which later manifested itself in the writing of those hymns found in the Christian Science Hymnal which are treasured by Christian Scientists today for their comforting and healing effects.

Marriage to George Glover
In 1843 Mary Baker married George Washington Glover, a young man who had been associated with Samuel Baker, her elder brother, as a contractor and builder. Originally from Concord, New Hampshire, Mr. Glover had established himself in business in Charleston, South Carolina. Mary Baker Glover first came into touch with slavery in the South. Her husband owned some slaves and her sense of right revolted against the practice.

Hardly a year had passed since her marriage when her husband had occasion to go to Wilmington, North Carolina, on business and took her with him. Yellow fever was found to be raging in that city, and Mr. Glover was incapacitated by the disease and died, leaving his young widow. Mrs. Glover set free her husband’s slaves, and was then escorted as far north as New York, where her brother George met her and took her back to her father’s home, which she had so lately left. A boy was born to her not long after her return, and she named him after her husband, George Washington Glover.

A Challenging Time
In 1849 Mrs. Glover’s mother died, and about a year later her father remarried. There was a rearrangement of domestic affairs. Mrs. Glover’s nurse during her prolonged illness following childbirth was to be married, and it was planned by the family that Mrs. Glover’s son George should go to live with the nurse in her new home, as Mrs. Glover’s health was precarious, and she was about to move into her sister Abigail’s house, where her little son might prove too great a charge. Against this plan Mrs. Glover protested vigorously, and only gave up her child when no escape from this necessity presented itself.

Mrs. Glover continued to write on the subject of slavery, which was daily becoming a more and more burning question and was soon to culminate in the Civil War. She had made a brief experiment of opening a children’s school somewhat on the lines of the kindergarten system, but the times were not ready for this venture and she soon abandoned it. Her position of dependence upon her family was at times exceedingly difficult to bear, especially as she found herself moving farther and farther away from their views on the vital questions of the day. Her invalidism made her helpless to resist the drift of her life into almost constant confinement.

At this time, spiritualism and allied beliefs were stirring public thought. Mrs. Glover interested herself in these matters as she did in the question of slavery, and gradually won her way to definite convictions concerning spiritualism, mesmerism, and animal magnetism (later called hypnotism), convictions which she has recorded in her writings.

Marriage to Dr. Patterson
In 1853 Mrs. Glover, after nine years of widowhood, married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist, a relative of her father’s second wife. She expected from this marriage that it would enable her to take her child back into a home of her own and give her the necessary freedom to work out her individual life problem.

Searching for Healing
In the endeavor to regain her health, Mrs. Patterson tried many experiments and followed many systems. She strictly observed the laws of hygiene, as then understood, subjecting herself to a strict diet and to a regular system of bathing. She likewise began the study of homeopathy, but the acts of spiritual healing recorded in the Scriptures were never altogether absent from her thought.

During her life certain inexplicable occurrences had startled her thought into taking new paths. An experience while she was a child has been recorded in the following language (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 8):

"Many peculiar circumstances and events connected with my childhood throng the chambers of memory. For some twelve months, when I was about eight years old, I repeatedly heard a voice, calling me distinctly by name, three times, in an ascending scale. I thought this was my mother’s voice, and sometimes went to her, beseeching her to tell me what she wanted. Her answer was always, ‘Nothing, child! What do you mean?’ Then I would say, ‘Mother, who did call me? I heard somebody call Mary, three times!’ This continued until I grew discouraged, and my mother was perplexed and anxious.”

Later, when this call repeated itself, the child, on the advice of her mother, answered in the words of Samuel, “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth,” and thereafter the call was not repeated.

In Rumney a mother came to her with a child in her arms who was suffering from inflamed eyes. Mrs. Patterson took the child in her arms, lifted her thought to God, and the child was healed. These and other instances had caused Mrs. Patterson to ponder. She kept them stored in her heart, waiting until the time when an explanation should be vouchsafed her.

Association with Phineas Quimby
About this time Doctor Patterson had heard of the healing powers of a certain Phineas P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, and desired him to try to cure her. There was some correspondence. Mrs. Patterson wrote to Doctor Quimby about her proposed visit to him, but before this could be carried out her sister Abigail, now Mrs. Tilton, had taken her to a water-cure sanitarium at a place called Hill. In October of 1862 Mrs. Patterson finally arrived in Portland, and was assisted into the office of Doctor Quimby, who, she imagined, had discovered the method by which cures were effected in Bible times, and on whom she looked as a living example of a modern practitioner of spiritual healing.

This visit marks Mrs. Patterson’s contact with that which she was later to uncover as being not the Principle of spiritual healing itself, but the subtle counterfeit of the same, as the application of human willpower, instead of the realization or recognition of the truth of being about God, man, and the universe. The future Discoverer of Christian Science was here making her acquaintance at first hand with the phenomena of self-will as distinct from spiritual understanding, and it is not to be wondered at that at first she was baffled by the apparent resemblance between the effects of both methods and should have been induced to believe the magnetic practice of Phineas P. Quimby to be the demonstration of the power of Spirit over untoward physical conditions.

The one feature of his practice which forever excludes it from any resemblance to Christian Science was the belief that he, as a personality, was the healer of disease, that some curative, magnetic fluid was conveyed from himself to his patients.

The method of Quimby was therefore merely a personal belief with himself, a familiar phase of mental suggestion, similar in character to various methods based on mesmerism and animal magnetism (more recently called hypnotism). It was not based upon Principle, was not scientific, and did not attempt to explain the acts recorded in the Scriptures and commonly denoted as miracles.

While due credit must be given to Quimby as a sincere and courageous experimenter in the phenomena of magnetism, no doubt should be permitted as to the essential nature of his practice. It was not what Mrs. Patterson later discovered as Christian Science, nor did it even contain the germ from which Christian Science could originate; neither does the fact that Mrs. Patterson was temporarily cured of physical ills of long standing by Quimby’s method militate against this conclusion, nor indeed the further fact that Mrs. Patterson herself imagined Quimby to possess an understanding of God’s law and was ready to proclaim him as the discoverer of the true nature of the healing done in Bible times. The trend of her thought inevitably gave his practice a religious significance.

Mrs. Patterson was deeply grateful for her relief, but Mr. Quimby did not understand her religious explanation of his practice, and there seems to have remained in his mind only a confused belief that it was God as Principle who mesmerized. It was not until later years that Mrs. Patterson herself reached the conviction that mesmerism was not of God.

In course of time, Mrs. Patterson learned that the mesmeric magnetic method of treating disease was in fact a subtle counterfeit of the true, a method at once destructive to health and dangerous to character. For some years, from the time of her relief from invalidism until her discovery of Christian Science in 1866, she was apparently under the impression that the solution of true mental healing long sought by her was represented by Quimby’s method.

In 1862 and in 1864 Mrs. Patterson wrote down her impressions of his system and turned over the manuscripts to him. In view of their collaboration Mrs. Patterson signed Quimby’s name to these manuscripts, and this gave rise in later times to the report of Quimby manuscripts being in existence from which Mrs. Patterson was assumed to have derived Christian Science. For information on the Quimby manuscripts hoax, click here.

In 1864 Mrs. Patterson moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, with her husband, who there opened an office and engaged in dental practice. Her health was now good and she took an active part in life once more, not only writing for the Lynn newspapers but also attending church and going out into society.

Mrs. Patterson was returning home one evening from a meeting in the company of friends, when she sustained an accident which was to become memorable by reason of its immediate result. The Lynn Reporter of February 3, 1866, made mention of the following:

"Mrs. Mary Patterson of Swampscott fell upon the ice near the corner of Market and Oxford Streets on Thursday evening and was severely injured. She was taken up in an insensible condition and carried into the residence of S.M. Bubier, Esq., near by, where she was kindly cared for during the night. Doctor Cushing, who was called, found her injuries to be internal and of a serious nature, inducing spasms and internal suffering. She was removed to her home in Swampscott yesterday afternoon, though in a critical condition.”

Of this accident and her recovery, Mrs. Eddy herself afterward published the following explanation:

Here, indeed, was the healing for which she had always striven, which she felt must be at hand did one only know how to realize its presence. Here at last was the ideal toward which her whole life had tended from her childhood experiences, her stout refusal to believe in a cruel God, her insistent conviction that divine Love is the liberator of mankind from all woe. This conviction had only been fortified by the measure of sorrow and suffering through which she had passed. Even her experience with the subtle counterfeit of spiritual healing had not disabled her from recognizing the real healing when it dawned upon her consciousness. Thereafter she could never be deceived again, never be in doubt as to what constituted the healing of Bible times. Nor from the moment of her discovery does she ever seem to have hesitated about her manifest mission to give this truth to the world.

Her experiences for the next ten years proved inexpressibly hard, and one would gladly omit all chronicle of them, did they not prove, as perhaps nothing else can do, the unquestioning attitude of her mind toward her mission. It must be understood that as the discovery of Christian Science is inseparable from Mrs. Eddy’s human experience, so also is its development.

Then followed Doctor Patterson’s desertion of his wife, and Mrs. Patterson was obliged to secure a decree of divorce from him. Her father and mother having passed away, she might naturally have gone to the home of her sister, Mrs. Tilton, but the sister made it a condition that she should forsake her unconventional religious convictions, and this Mary Baker was determined not to do. She turned now more and more to the elucidation of the meaning of her discovery and its practical application to human affairs. She chose poverty rather than ease, and now began a life of involuntary wandering from one home to another, from one boarding place to another, the life of a student searching the Scriptures, nourishing her glorious discovery, applying it where she was welcomed; sometimes loved and appreciated, more often misunderstood and even traduced; healing the sick, transforming character, and always writing, writing that mankind at large might gain the spiritual revelation which had come to her.

At first she may have thought that the world would instantly grasp this good news, as eagerly as she herself had done, but she was soon to be undeceived as to any immediate readiness on the part of mankind to assimilate Christian Science. Here and there she found some one ready to listen.

Her First Student
While she was boarding with a family of the name of Clark, she met a Mr. Hiram S. Crafts and his wife. He was an expert workman in the shoe trade. Finding him ready to accept her teachings, Mary Baker made him her first student, and he was soon able to set up as a mental healer and prove the truth of what he had been taught for himself.

As time went on she began to teach little classes of students. Some of these students fell away in the hour of test, and Mary Baker had to experience many of those sudden antagonisms, misunderstandings, and controversies which at first were inexplicable to her, but which later became apparent as the subtle working of an innate resistance in human consciousness to the absolute facts of being.

In 1870 Mary Baker finished a manuscript entitled “The Science of Man.” She copyrighted this manuscript, but did not publish it immediately, and eventually issued it as the chapter entitled Recapitulation in Science and Health. This may be accepted as the first scientific exposition of her discovery made four years before.

Science and Health Published
In 1875, while residing in Lynn, Massachusetts, Mary Baker finished her book Science and Health, placed it in the hands of a publisher, and an edition of one thousand copies was issued. In that year also was made the first beginning of a Christian Science church, when a number of her students united in inviting her to hold meetings and preach to them every Sunday, and subscribed a weekly salary for her.

In 1877 Mary Baker Glover was married to Mr. Asa G. Eddy, who, being in bad health, had been sent to her for treatment. She had healed him, had taken him through one of her classes, and had learned to trust him so thoroughly that she had placed many of her affairs in his charge.

Growing Interest in Christian Science
Mrs. Eddy began to lecture in Boston before audiences growing ever larger and more appreciative. Her home with Mr. Eddy provided her an atmosphere of peace and security for her teaching and healing work.

The beginning of a Christian Science church made in 1875 had not survived the disaffection of some of her students, but in 1876 the Christian Scientist Association was formed, which fulfilled the needs of the times.

In 1879, Mrs. Eddy's followers and students formed the "Church of Christ, Scientist," with Mrs. Eddy appointed pastor. In 1892 a reorganization of this church took place and the name adopted of "The First Church of Christ, Scientist,” which it holds today.

Services were held in Hawthorne Hall in Boston, and in 1882 Mr. and Mrs. Eddy moved to that city, but Mr. Eddy passed away in that same year, and Mrs. Eddy once more faced the world alone in her efforts to establish Christian Science upon a sure footing.

The Massachusetts Metaphysical College In 1881 Mrs. Eddy opened the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston. Of this foundation she writes in the Preface of Science and Health (p. xi), that it was accomplished “under the seal of the Commonwealth,” a law relative to colleges having been passed which enabled her to get this institution chartered for medical purposes. Mrs. Eddy closed this college in 1889 in order to devote herself to the revision of Science and Health, but retained her charter and reopened the college in 1899.

The Christian Science Journal
In 1883 the Journal of Christian Science was first published. This magazine, of which Mrs. Eddy was the editor and publisher, became the official organ of the Christian Science church, under the title The Christian Science Journal.

Many of Mrs. Eddy’s articles in the Journal were later collected by her and issued as her book “Miscellaneous Writings.” During this year also, Mrs. Eddy found herself constrained to sue a former student for the infringement of her copyright, and the United States circuit in Boston sustained her plea and issued an injunction against the pirated works, ordering them to be destroyed.

A Far-Reaching Movement
Christian Science now began to spread to other parts of the United States. In 1884 Mrs. Eddy spent a month in Chicago, initiating thereby a far-reaching movement which soon permeated the whole of the western field. On her return to Boston Mrs. Eddy continued to write and direct the various departments which she had founded.

In 1887 she moved into a house of her own at 385 Commonwealth Avenue. In 1888 she once more visited Chicago, this time to attend the National Christian Scientist Association, and made an address at the Central Music Hall before an audience of about four thousand. A year later Mrs. Eddy addressed an audience in Steinway Hall, New York, but thereafter withdrew more and more from public appearances.

In 1879 Mrs. Eddy’s son, George Glover, had been located by her in Minnesota, and upon her request had come to Boston to visit her, but he did not seem open to the reception of Christian Science teaching. In 1887 he repeated the visit to his mother, this time bringing his children with him, and was affectionately received by Mrs. Eddy, who presented the children to the congregation of The Mother Church. Her son soon returned to the West, and Mrs. Eddy, looking for some one to help her in her immediate surroundings, conceived the idea of adopting as her son Dr. Ebenezer Johnson Foster, a former physician who had become interested in Christian Science, had received instruction in the college, and who resided with other students in Mrs. Eddy’s household.

Pleasant View
From 1892 to 1908 Mrs. Eddy resided at Pleasant View, a house situated on the outskirts of Concord, New Hampshire, on rising ground overlooking a large expanse of hill and valley. Here she spent fifteen fruitful years.

Pleasant View

It was during these years that Mrs. Eddy was fine-tuning the organization of the Christian Science church, supervising the various means she had founded for placing her discovery before the public, writing occasional messages to the church, revising her writings to make her meaning clearer, receiving visitors from all parts of the world whither her teachings had penetrated, keeping in close touch with her pupils who were occupying positions of trust, but ever withdrawing more and more from a merely personal sense of herself on the part of others, and discouraging any personal adulation which the beneficiaries of Christian Science might be inclined to place upon her.

Expansion throughout the World
The Christian Science church which had originally met in Hawthorne Hall, then in Chickering Hall, was now about to acquire a church building of its own. After some vicissitudes, a church occupying the triangle at the junction of Norway and Falmouth Streets, in the Back Bay district of Boston, was finished at the end of December, 1894, and dedicated in January 1895. And in 1902 an extension was added.

Mrs. Eddy’s followers were now found among all classes of society and among the principal nations of the earth. Christian Science not only covered the United States and Canada, but also many parts of the world.

Mrs. Eddy established one by one the different means by which Christian Science is placed before the public. She founded the periodicals of the denomination, beginning with The Christian Science Journal, a monthly to which reference has already been made; Der Herold der Christian Science, printed in German; the Christian Science Sentinel ; The Christian Science Quarterly contained the weekly Christian Science Lesson-Sermons; and The Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper.

Mrs. Eddy's Passing
In 1908 Mrs. Eddy decided to leave Pleasant View and took a house in Chestnut Hill, a suburb of Boston, where she quietly passed away in the winter of 1910, full of years and good works, greatly beloved by a multitude of men, women, and children in all parts of the world, who have been redeemed and healed by her teachings.

This sketch has been adapted from "Christian Science: Its Discovery and Development" by William D. McCrackan. "One's enemies never could do one justice in writing one's record, and it follows that only the friends of Mrs. Eddy — those who have known and loved her most — can really give a correct estimate of her."

"For the world to understand me in my true light, and life, would do more for our Cause than all else could. This I learn from the fact that the enemy tries harder to hide these two things from the world than to win any other points. Also, Jesus' life and character in their first appearing were treated in like manner."