Mary Baker Eddy (born Mary Morse Baker July 16, 1821 – December 3, 1910) founded the Christian Science movement. She advocated Christian Science as a spiritual practical solution to health and moral issues.[citation needed] Accomplishments included:
Author of the movement"s text book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first copyrighted 1875)
Founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States (1879)
Spiritual teacher and lecturer
Established the Christian Science Publishing Society (1898) that continues to publish periodicals she started including:
The Christian Science Journal (1883)
The Christian Science Sentinel (1898)
The Herald of Christian Science (1903)
The Christian Science Monitor (1908)
She and others credit her with the ability to heal instantaneously.
Married three times, she took the name Mary Baker Glover from her first marriage. She was also known from her third marriage as Mary Baker Glover Eddy or Mary Baker G. Eddy.
1866 injury, healing and study leads to Christian Science
After a severe fall in Lynn, Massachusetts allegedly caused a major spinal injury in February 1866, Eddy reported that she turned to Matthew 9:2[10] in the Bible and recovered unexpectedly. Although she filed a claim for money from the city of Lynn for her injury on the grounds that she was "still suffering from the effects of that fall," she later withdrew the lawsuit.
She devoted the next three years of her life to Biblical study and what she considered the discovery of Christian Science. In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, Eddy writes "I then withdrew from society about three years,--to ponder my mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind that should take the things of God and show them to the creature, and reveal the great curative Principle, --Deity."
Convinced by her own study of the Bible, especially Genesis 1, and through experimentation, Eddy claimed to have found healing power through a higher sense of God as Spirit and man as God"s spiritual "image and likeness." She became convinced that illness could be healed through an awakened thought brought about by a clearer perception of God and the explicit rejection of drugs, hygiene, and medicine based upon the observation that Jesus did not use these methods for healing:
It is plain that God does not employ drugs or hygiene, nor provide them for human use; else Jesus would have recommended and employed them in his healing. … The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love. (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 143:5, 155:15)
She eventually called this spiritual perception the operation of the Christ Truth on human consciousness.
Claiming to have first healed herself and then others, and having learned from these experiences, Eddy felt anyone could perceive what she called "the Kingdom of Heaven" or spiritual reality on earth. For her, this healing method was based on scientific principles and could be taught to others. This positive rule of healing, she taught, resulted from a new understanding of God as infinite Spirit beyond the limitations of the material senses.
At this time no one knows how much, or even if, Eddy influenced the great social and political movements of her day including abolition, the Wellness health movement and the women"s suffrage movement.
Legacy:
In 1921, on the 100th anniversary of Eddy"s birth, a 100-ton (in rough) and 60-70 tons (hewn), eleven-foot square granite pyramid was dedicated on the site of her birthplace in Bow, New Hampshire. A gift from James F Lord, it was later dynamited in 1962 by order of the church"s board of directors. Also demolished was Eddy"s former home in Pleasant View, as the board feared that it was becoming a place of pilgrimage.Although Eddy allowed personal praise in her lifetime for various reasons, including for publicity and fundraising, the church shuns both the cult of personality and religious reliquaries.
