Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Mary Baker Eddy
Search for healing builds enduring church
She still stirs people up,” said Chet Manchester of Mary Baker Eddy. Eddy was the founder of the Christian Science movement, and Manchester shared her history April 21 at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Fayetteville. Manchester, a Christian Science lecturer and former creative director for the Mary Eddy Baker Library in Boston, gave the program for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Arkansas.
“You can still see the influence of her thought,” Manchester said. “She was a revolutionary, which is even more remarkable as a woman in the 19th century.”
Mary Baker was born in 1821 as the sixth daughter to a farm family in rural New Hampshire, Manchester began.
“As a little girl, she said she wanted to walk to the tops of hills, and reach the top to look over the other side,” he said. “She was inquisitive. She had a hunger and thirst for divine things. She was spiritually hungry.”
But she was a sickly child, often too ill to attend school, Manchester continued. Her brother, Albert, a student at Dartmouth College, would come home and tutor her. But he died in 1841 of kidney failure.
“Her heart was broken,” Manchester said. “She adored him.”
Eddy married her first husband, George Glover, in 1843, but he died of yellow fever just six months later, Manchester said.
“She was pregnant (when he died),” Manchester said. “But it was the 19th century, and you know what that means. With no husband, she had no means of support. She moved back in with father, but her stepmother did not like having a rambling boy (Eddy’s son George Glover Jr.) around.”
Eddy was too ill to care for George Jr. herself, so he was sent to live with a former family nurse in 1851. Eddy married again in 1853 to Daniel Patterson, a dentist who promised to help her regain custody of her son. “But he was an unfaithful husband,” Manchester said. “He reneged on his promise to get her son back. But they were reunited when her son was in his 20s.”
WITH PROTEST
“But through all the pain, the suffering, the loss of those close to her, Mary never attributed her suffering to God,” Manchester said.
Eddy’s father, Mark Baker, was
“a strong figure,” Manchester said. “He had an iron will.”
A member of the Congregationalist church, Baker’s day began with lengthy prayer and continued with hard work. The only rest day was the Sabbath.
Mark Baker believed in a doctrine
of predestination, of preelection, Manchester continued. A person had no choice of whether he was going to heaven or hell. That had been predetermined.
Her mother, Abigail, also believed in predestination, but she believed that one could repent,
Manchester noted. “She had a wonderful mother. She would cook, clean and help support her husband. Mary saw (her mother)
had something the world needed. But Mary was not as good as her mother.
“Mary had a fear of her father’s doctrine,” Manchester continued. “She had a fear of the punishment, the threatening, the judging God and (God’s) judgment of a person’s continuing mistakes.”
Reared on the Scripture, and limited in her actions by her health, Mary “regularly turned to the Bible and prayer for hope and inspiration,” reads the website of the Mary Baker Eddy Library.
“Rather than finding the fear and guilt, she rediscovered innocence all people have as God’s children,” Manchester said.
“Even as a young girl, she challenged doctrine she didn’t believe,” he continued. “She joined the church of her father (in 1898), but with protests. She said she would subscribe to all doctrines but (the predestination), and she was accepted into the church with protest.”
“She became a loyal church member of the local church. She read the Bible every day, and she loved Jesus.”
STUDYING SCIENCE
“Mary Baker Eddy was deeply Christian and very scientific,” Manchester continued. As she studied and made notes daily, she was looking for cures for her illnesses. She suffered from dyspepsia and learned, that in other women, their diet was not what it should be, he said.
“Struggling with chronic illness compounded by personal loss, Mary Patterson was preoccupied with questions of health,” reads the library website. “Like many in her day, she avoided the harsh treatments of conventional 19th-century medicine and its dangerous side effects. She sought relief in various alternative treatments of the day, from diets to hydropathy (water cure). During her husband’s long absences, she studied homeopathy in depth and became intrigued by its emphasis on diluting drugs to the point where they all but disappear from the remedy. At one point, she experimented with unmediated pellets (now known as placebos) and concluded that a patient’s belief plays a powerful role in the healing process. While investigating such new cures, she continued to seek comfort and insights in the Bible, still drawn by the healing record contained in its pages.”
“She reflected as she was confined to bed, on all the remedies she sought,” Manchester
said. “She promised to God, that if her health was restored, she would devote her remaining years to help sick and suffering humans.
“She earnestly studied the New Testament and Jesus’ works of healing,” he continued. “She determined the only means of real healing was spiritual, the only true method was the spiritual method practiced by Christ and his followers.
“She believed the suffering from the ignorance of grace causes pain.”
In 1863, Eddy received treatment from Phinneas Quimby, a mental healer, in Maine. After one mental treatment, Eddy enjoyed new energy. She believed she had found somebody who practiced original Christian healing.
“Her health initially improved radically under his treatment, which included a combination of mental suggestion and what might now be called therapeutic touch, but she soon suffered a relapse,” the Mary Baker Eddy website says.
“She returned to Quimby not only for treatment, but also to learn more about his approach,” the website continues. “Thinking he had rediscovered a divine healing method, she spent hours discussing and exchanging ideas with him.”
Quimby was not Christian and not literate in the Bible, while Mary continued to search the tome for answers to healing, Manchester said.
But out of Quimby’s personal presence, Eddy relapsed. “What Quimby really practiced was a form of hypnotism,” Manchester presented. “When Mary was out of his hypnotic influence, she relaxed and the illness returned.
“She saw this as an example of the erroneous human mind — which could be helpful or harmful. She believed this affirmed that it is the mind of Christ Jesus who heals us.”
“A lifelong student of the Bible, (Eddy) gained a powerful insight in 1866 when she experienced a dramatic recovery from a life-threatening accident after reading Jesus’ healings,” reads the website for the Christian Science Church.
Eddy fell, hitting a curbstone of granite, Manchester said. She suffered internal injuries and was sent home with morphine to ease the pain.
“But she didn’t believe in the treatment. She didn’t know what to do.
“On the Sabbath, she said farewell and was on her way to die,” Manchester continued. But totally alone, she opened her Bible to Matthew 9:2.
“‘A change pulsed over me,’” Manchester quoted. “She felt strength instantly and rose to her feet.
“She attributed her healing to reading Scripture. It was just a glimpse, but she knew it was God. She knew Christ had never left her. And Christ is the truth, and truth is always love.”
GOD’S LAW
“From that pivotal moment, she sought an understanding of how she had been healed,” reads the Eddy library site. “She returned to the Bible and prayed for answers.” It became clear to her that spiritual healing was based on divine laws of God and Spirit, and that these laws could be applied by anyone to heal every form of human suffering and sin.
“In this light, spiritual healing wasn’t miraculous, but an effect of understanding God’s omnipotence and love, which are as real and provable today as in biblical times,” the Christian Science website notes. For the next 40 years, Eddy devoted herself to practicing, teaching and sharing the healing science of Christianity.
Nine years of intensive scriptural study, healing activity and teaching led to Eddy’s publication of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in 1875, a companion to the Bible for today’s Christian Scientists.
“In this book, she marked out what she understood to be the ‘science’ behind this healing method. As she saw it, the healing works of Jesus were divinely natural and repeatable,” the library website reads.
Over the years, Eddy taught her system of healing to hundreds of women and men who then established successful healing practices across the United States and abroad.
Disappointed that existing Christian churches would not embrace her discovery, Eddy started her own, the library information continues. In 1879 she secured a charter for the Church of Christ, Scientist, established “to commemorate the word and works of our Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.”