Dialogue with the World December 5, 2016 Issue

Real Christianity, not self-help

from the Office of Committee on Publication

The basic question humanity asks in regard to all religious experience is: Is it truly of God, or is it just a human phenomenon—a product or projection of human belief?

The first public question raised about Christian Science centered on just this point. In 1871, when a letter in the local newspaper assailed her teaching of Christian healing, deriding it as merely a form of “mesmerism” cloaked in religious language, Mary Baker Eddy vigorously defended the spiritual authenticity of the Science of Christianity rightly understood and practiced.

This Science “belongs to God,” she wrote, “and is the expression or revelation of love, wisdom, and truth. It reaches the understanding, first through inspiration, and secondly, by explanation.” Christianity and mesmerism “are separated” by a “barrier” and could not be united, she added in a letter to a student. As her biographer Robert Peel notes, “Here for the first time she faced the issue of Christianity versus mesmerism that was to loom so large through the coming years; …” (Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, pp. 261–263.)

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