Biographical Sketch

The Christian Science movement is the result of the lifework of a most extraordinary woman, Mary Baker Eddy. Never before has the life of such a spiritually gifted individual been so well documented. From her childhood days on a New England farm to her role as Leader of the Christian Science Cause, her earthly experience is well-known and tells the poignant story of her struggle, suffering, toil, lack, and loneliness, as well as her success in discovering Christian Science and bringing it to the world. Born near Bow, New Hampshire, in 1821, Mary Baker was the youngest of six children. During her early years it was apparent that she was an unusually gifted child. She studied natural philosophy, logic, and moral science as well as the Bible. She wrote poetry and prayers in the style of the Book of Psalms. She grew up in a very religious home. Her family attended the Congregational Church. She showed an independence of mind early in life when she would not accept the religious doctrines believed in so strongly by her father. At one time the conflict between them was so heated that Mary developed a high fever. When her mother told her to turn to God for help, she did. In her prayer, she was so aware of God’s love for her that her fear and distress vanished and the fever left. This was one of many spiritual experiences she had in childhood. In 1836, the Bakers moved to Sanbornton, New Hampshire, and she attended several academies there. Her teachers were impressed with her writing talent and the depth and independence of her mind. Some foresaw her becoming an intellectual and spiritual genius. Her early life was marked with promise and filled with such warmth and happiness that she remembered them throughout her life as the “golden days.” But those days came to an end in her twentieth year with the first of many tragedies and severe trials. Her favorite brother, Albert, passed away very suddenly at the beginning of a brilliant political career. He had received the nomination to Congress from New Hampshire shortly before his death. This was a great loss to her, for she was especially close to him. Two years later, in 1843, she married George Washington Glover, a friend of the family. He took her to live in South Carolina, where he had a prosperous lumber and construction business. Six months later, he was stricken with yellow fever, and died within nine days. When his investments were destroyed by fire and theft, Mrs. Glover was left penniless, and expecting a child. Returning to her parents’ home, she gave birth to George Glover in September of 1844. Afterwards her health was so poor that her family despaired for her life, and her father had to take her baby to a neighbor woman, who nursed and cared for him. As her health improved, Mrs. Glover attempted to support herself and her son by teaching and writing, but the income was insufficient, and she had to depend on the charity of her family. These years seemed to lack direction and purpose, and were filled with continued personal loss. In 1849, her mother passed on, leaving a void in her life that only memories could fill. When her father married again, she went to live with her sister. Her son was then sent to live permanently with the woman who had often cared for him in the past. When the woman married, and she and her husband moved to North Groton, New Hampshire, forty miles from Sanbornton, Mrs. Glover’s sister and father decided that George should go with them. The ordeal of parting with her child seemed almost more than Mrs. Glover could endure. Years later in her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, she wrote: “The night before my child was taken from me, I knelt by his side throughout the dark hours, hoping for a vision of relief from this trial.” Her father’s religion taught that these heartbreaking hardships were God’s will and should be accepted with humble resignation. But she rebelled against this doctrine. Instead, she brought to bear on these experiences her talent for logic and her search for a spiritual understanding of God. She turned to the Bible for an explanation of Jesus’ healing works. She evidently discerned a relationship between chronic mental distress and physical illness. Her search led her to the study of homeopathy, and here she observed the power of the mind to cause and cure disease. At one time, in her homeopathic research, she diluted a drug until there was no trace left of it. Mixing a drop of this in a glass of water, she administered a teaspoon every half hour to a patient suffering with a high fever and cured him. She also cured a woman of dropsy by first giving her a highly diluted solution of sulphuris, later substituting for it unmedicated pellets, which the woman took until she completely recovered. Mrs. Glover often referred to this experiment as her first real discovery leading to the Science of Mind-healing. After parting with her son, the longing for him and a home of her own caused a relapse of her illness. At this time Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist and a relative of her stepmother, persuaded her family that she should marry him. He promised to make a home for her and her son, and to help her regain her health. Anxious to be reunited with her son and feeling a genuine affection for Dr. Patterson, Mrs. Glover married him in 1853. After their marriage, the doctor refused to let George live with them because he felt that she was not strong enough to care for him. Thus, Mary Glover Patterson faced another bitter disappointment. However, within a short time, they moved to North Groton to be near her son. This reunion was short-lived, for soon the foster family moved West in 1856, taking George with them. His mother did not see him again until he was thirty-four. Her marriage was a sad and lonely one. Dr. Patterson traveled in his work, leaving her alone for long periods of time. He was constantly in financial difficulties. With the loss of her son and the hardships and emptiness of her marriage, Mrs. Patterson’s health grew worse. The isolated five years spent in North Groton were years that brought deep mental searching for a spiritual answer to the suffering she was enduring. The contrast between the illogical, unjust, and uncontrollable forces of mortal life, and her capacity for logic, philosophy, religion, intensified her search to understand how Jesus overcame human adversity through spiritual means alone. Her continued suffering led her, in 1862, to Portland, Maine, to be treated by Dr. Quimby, whose means for healing were drugless. Although she did not know it at the time, Quimby was employing hypnotic suggestion to heal. Her own expectancy of healing, and the hypnotist’s ability to influence her, did relieve her suffering briefly. She was, at that time, inclined to believe that there was a connection between his mesmeric healing and the works of Christ Jesus. After her discovery of Christian Science, she discerned the difference between the two. The hypnotic treatment she received from Quimby did not permanently heal her, and soon the old problems returned. In the summer of 1864, she and Dr. Patterson moved to Lynn, Massachusetts. It was at this time that she discovered that the doctor’s periods of absence sometimes were concerned not so much with business as with other women. Bravely she held the marriage together for several more years. During these years, she supplemented their income with her writing, and always there was present the searching for a spiritual understanding of the Bible. Then in February, 1866, an event took place that brought about her discovery of Christian Science. One Thursday night, on her way to a temperance meeting, she fell on the ice and was taken unconscious to a nearby house. On regaining consciousness, she asked to be taken home. By Sunday, there was no hope for her recovery, and she seemed near death. She asked to be left alone with her Bible. Opening it to the Gospels, she read one of Jesus’ healings, and there poured into her consciousness a revelation of the spiritual nature of God and His creation — man and the universe. In her own words: “He whom my affections had diligently sought was as the One ‘altogether lovely,’ as ‘the chiefest,’ the only, ‘among ten thousand.’ Soulless famine had fled. Agnosticism, pantheism, and theosophy were void. Being was beautiful, its substance, cause, and currents were God and His idea. I had touched the hem of Christian Science.” (Retrospection and Introspection) Her revelation brought about a healing. She got up, dressed herself, and joined her friends in the next room, much to their amazement. Her healing was permanent. This was the great turning point in her life. Shortly after Mrs. Patterson’s revelation and healing, she and Dr. Patterson separated. The cause of the separation was another of his romantic affairs. He had convinced the wife of a prominent man in Lynn to elope with him. When he returned, Mrs. Patterson refused to take him back, and the marriage ended in divorce seven years later. Following this separation, she was completely alone and without income. She turned to the Bible to understand how her healing had come about. She found the Scriptures filled with new meaning. She began to understand how she had been healed, and she found that she could heal others. Even more important, by explaining her discovery to students, she found she could teach them how to heal! A shoemaker, living at the house where she was boarding, seemed to grasp her explanation of spiritual healing sufficiently to be successful in healing even the most difficult cases of disease. Under her instruction, he became the first Christian Science practitioner. This early adventure in Christian Science healing lasted little more than a year, but it proved to her that all humanity could learn how to heal through prayer alone. During the next three years, she moved from house to house seeking quiet time in which to think through her discovery. Her teachings were so revolutionary and her healings so successful that they challenged all of the fundamental concepts of that age. She worked to put her thoughts into words and to interest others in her ideas, but she often found herself alone and rejected. In June of 1870, she returned to Lynn with a student to do healing work and teach Moral Science, as she then called it. For the first time, her work began to attract enough students to become organized. She held classes, and many who studied with her found that they could heal themselves and others through the metaphysics that she taught. She realized that she must record her discovery so it would not be lost, and so she spent three years from 1872-1875 writing the first edition of Science and Health. In the autumn of 1875, the book was published, and she began to reach beyond the boundaries of Lynn with her discovery. Following this, the burden of work that fell on this lone woman is indescribable. She, as Christ Jesus before her, had her share of Judases. Others, as the disciples of old, leaned on her more than they supported her. At this time, a student, Asa Gilbert Eddy, became an ardent helper, doing all that he could to lessen her work. In 1877, she married him, and from then until his death, five years later, he was a constant source of help and support to her. During this period, the Church of Christ, Scientist, was formed with Mrs. Eddy as its Pastor. By 1883, church services were being held in Boston, and soon Mrs. Eddy moved to this bustling metropolis. Here she was Founder of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College where she held classes on Christian Science. Her teachings attracted an increasing number of students on one hand, and strong opposition by the churches, public, and press on the other. Still, Mrs. Eddy worked on. In addition to holding classes, she healed and counseled others, preached in her church, and lectured on Christian Science, wrote a number of books and articles, revised Science and Health, and corresponded voluminously with students struggling to bring this Science to other parts of the world. In April of 1883, she began publishing The Journal of Christian Science, and was its first editor. She worked to establish her church and to bring unity and harmony to it. But in Boston, as in Lynn, her students were more inclined to lean on her, rather than to develop their own spiritual abilities. Others deserted her, turned on her, and even tried to replace her as the Leader of the movement. Meanwhile, Christian Science was spreading across the nation and into foreign countries. It became increasingly clear to Mrs. Eddy that if her church was to survive when she was no longer here, it had to rest on the strength and abilities of her followers, independent of her personal counseling and support. She could see, too, that her church had to be established on a foundation that human ambition and hate could not destroy. In 1889, Mrs. Eddy closed her college, requested that the formal church organization in Boston disband, and that her students spend more time in study and prayer. She retired to the hills of Concord, New Hampshire, to pray over the footsteps to be taken next. At this time, Christian Science meetings were taking place throughout the country. Mrs. Eddy evidently did not intend to reorganize the church in Boston. However, the church at that time drew its members from churches of other denominations, and the first Christian Scientists felt the need for a church organization. For three years, they asked Mrs. Eddy to let them reorganize. She advised against it until 1892. She then agreed to it, saying that through prayer she had seen the wisdom at that time to reorganize. In 1892, she deeded land for the church edifice through a trusteeship, and in 1893 the members began building on this land. Mrs. Eddy offered to write a manual of rules and regulations for governing the church in Boston. This, the members willingly accepted. In December of 1894, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, was completed. In 1895, she issued the first Church Manual of by-laws to govern it. Through the Manual, she established the Christian Science Board of Directors to run the church. However, she held control over the directors and the Church through her authority to do so written into the Manual. Thus, the newly formed church with its Board of Directors came under her direction. In 1898, Mrs. Eddy established The Christian Science Publishing Society. Its three trustees were entrusted with the publication of the periodicals. When the attendance of The Mother Church required a larger edifice, The Mother Church Extension was built, completed, and dedicated in 1906. In 1908, the Christian Science Monitor was added to the church publications. This was the last important step Mrs. Eddy took in building her movement before she passed on in 1910 at the age of eighty-nine. At the time of her passing, the Christian Science movement was having phenomenal growth. Newspapers acknowledged that she had made one of the greatest contributions toward human welfare of any woman ever known. They praised her wisdom and foresight in providing for a movement that would continue without her personal leadership. Her discovery was so in advance of the times that the world has yet to make full use of its healing potential. [See Biographies and History for biographies about Mrs. Eddy, along with memoirs by some of her students, and accounts of the early history of the movement which she founded.]