Mary Baker Eddy

1821 - 1910

Mary Ann Morse Baker was born July 16, 1821, on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire. She was the youngest of the six children of Abigail and Mark Baker. Her childhood and much of her adult life, before 1862, was spent in ill health. Although raised with Puritan values, daily Bible reading, and the belief of God's healing power, she spent many years looking for healing in the many remedial methods available in her time. Although she was raised a Congregationalist, she rejected teachings such as predestination, but she developed a strong interest in the biblical accounts of early Christian healing.

On December 10, 1843, she married George Washington Glover. He died on June 27, 1844, a little over two months before the birth of their only child, George Washington Glover, Jr. Because of his mother’s poor health, the child was placed in care of the family’s former nurse and her husband. In hopes of getting her child returned to her, she married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist, on June 21, 1853. She expected that this marriage would enable her to take her child back into a home of her own. In Retrospection and Introspection, page 20, we read: “My dominant thought in marrying again was to get back my child, but after our marriage his stepfather was not willing he should have a home with me.”

In the 1850s and 1860s she explored homeopathy and other alternative healing methods popular in the United States at that time.
When she first visited Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in 1862 she was a virtual invalid, and, with the good doctor's help, her health improved and the change was instantaneous. Her pain and weakness disappeared leaving a sense of comfort and well-being in their place.

Within a week she says that without help she climbed the one hundred eighty-two steps to the dome of the City Hall. She further stated that this experience unfolded in her a clear understanding of the words Jesus spoke to the woman healed after twelve years' illness, "Thy faith hath made thee whole."

While under Dr. Quimby’s care, off and on for the next four years, she became deeply interested in his theory of disease and its cure. She heard many of his essays read, and wrote many herself which she submitted to him for correction or approval. Quimby had called his method the “Science of Christianity,” as well as “The Science of Man” and on at least one occasion he called it “Christian Science.”

She began to give some public lectures on Quimby’s healing system in Warren, Maine. Her advertisement read as follows: "P. P. Quimby's spiritual science healing disease as opposed to deism or Rochester-Rapping Spiritualism."

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby left this plane of existence on January 16, 1866, and that same year Patterson abandoned Mary Glover Patterson.

In February of 1866, a few short weeks after Quimby's death, Mary Patterson fell on an icy, slippery sidewalk and was taken up for dead. She came back to consciousness only to find herself the helpless cripple she was before she saw Dr. Quimby. Feeling that she had not long to live, she asked for her Bible. In her study she found Matthew 9:2 and from reading the account of one of Jesus' healings, she felt God's presence very strongly. Shortly afterwards, she rose from her sickbed.

In a letter to Julius Dresser, a fellow patient who was healed by Quimby, she wrote as follows: "The physician attending said I had taken the last step I ever should, but in two days I got out of bed alone and will walk; but yet I confess I am frightened . . . I think that I could help another in my condition if they had not placed their intelligence in matter. This I have not done, and yet I am slowly failing."

In the same letter she asked Mr. Dresser whether he could help her overcome the present physical difficulties caused by her accident. She wrote that she believed that he could help with her healing and was best fitted to take up where Quimby left off.

Mr. Dresser did not respond to this appeal and thus she alone was left to depend on her own interpretation of Quimby's method. She recovered her health and marked this period as the time that she came to fully understand the "Science of Christianity," which she named Christian Science.

She wrote the following poem as a tribute to Dr. Quimby, which accompanied her letter to Mr. Dresser and was published in a Lynn newspaper shortly afterwards :
LINES ON THE DEATH OF DR. P.P. QUIMBY, WHO HEALED WITH THE TRUTH THAT CHRIST TAUGHT, IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO ALL ISMS.
Did sackcloth clothe the sun, and day grow night,
All matter mourn the hour with dewy eyes,
When Truth, receding from our mortal sight,
Had paid to error her last sacrifice?
Can we forget the power that gave us life?
Shall we forget the wisdom of its way?
Then ask me not, amid this mortal strife,
-- This keenest pang of animated clay, --
To mourn him less: to mourn him more were just,
If to his memory 'twere a tribute given
For every solemn, sacred, earnest trust,
Delivered to us he rose to heaven.
Heaven but the happiness of that calm soul,
Growing in stature in the thrown of God:
Rest should reward him who hath made us whole,
Seeking, through tremblers, where his footsteps trod.
...................MARY M. PATTERSON (LYNN, FEB 22, 1866)

After Patterson abandoned her in 1866, and during the years following, she was a lonely figure, going from place to place talking about a new system of healing without the benefit of medicine, reading from a manuscript she was working on, teaching an occasional pupil, and finally conducting classes in the principles underlying the healings.
The extent of Quimby's influence on Eddy has been one of the most disputed aspects of her life.

The early years of Mary Glover Patterson’s unfoldment were fraught with success and some failure inasmuch as several students of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby spent the rest of their lives in controversy with her over what they considered plagiarism of the unfoldment of Dr. Quimby. However, she prevailed (even in a court battle) and went on to found a religion that today consists of some 2300 churches in 68 countries.

By 1870 she was teaching her new-found science in collaboration with practitioners who did the healing.

After years of living apart, since Patterson abandoned her in 1866, she divorced him in 1873 on grounds of desertion.

In 1875, she published her beliefs in a book entitled "Science and Health" under the name of Mary Glover (years later retitled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy).The first publication run was one thousand copies, which she self-published. In it she claimed, "In the year 1866, I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science" (p. 107). (1866 was a momentous year in Mary Baker Eddy’s life for in that year she was abandoned by Patterson and Phineas Parkhurst Quimby passed from this plane of existence.)

In 1877 Mary Baker Glover was married to Mr. Asa G. Eddy, who, being in poor 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. She was known for the remainder of her life as “Mary Baker Eddy.”
This book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and Mary Baker Eddy's forceful personality attracted numerous followers, and on Aug. 23, 1879, the Church of Christ, Scientist, was chartered. Asa Eddy helped organize the movement.

Mrs. Eddy chartered the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881, where she taught her beliefs.

Asa Eddy died in 1882, and the next year Mrs. Eddy began to publish the Journal of Christian Science. From 1882 to 1889 she was supported by approximately 800 students at her Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston. She authorized these students to list themselves as Christian Science Practitioners in the Christian Science Journal.
In 1898, she founded the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly religious periodical written for a general audience, and the Herald of Christian Science, a religious magazine with editions in non-English languages, for children, and in English-Braille.

Her fame spread, support grew, and Mrs. Eddy became wealthy. But dissensions divided the Church, and in 1889 "Mother Eddy" moved to Concord, N.H., apparently withdrawing from leadership. In seclusion, however, she restructured the Church organization: the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston was established on Sept. 23, 1892, as the Mother Church. Mrs. Eddy was its head, and all other churches were subject to its jurisdiction. Though internal quarrels diminished, they continued to the end of her life.

Partly to guarantee a trustworthy newspaper for the movement, Mrs. Eddy, in 1908 began publishing the Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper which continues to be published today not only in the United States, but in many other countries. The same year Mrs. Eddy began publishing the Christian Science Monitor she moved to Chestnut Hill near Boston.

Mary Baker Eddy passed away at Chestnut Hill on December 3, 1910, at age 89.