Mary Baker Eddy: her life and times

Today we’ll be talking with Judy Huenneke, Senior Researcher at The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity about “Mary Baker Eddy: her life and times.” Judy has worked with the archival collections of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, for two decades, processing and exploring information related to Mrs. Eddy’s life. The staff in the research area has responded to literally thousands of questions about Mrs. Eddy each year. And we’re really glad that Judy was available to respond to your questions on this chat.

Judy, do you have a few comments you’d like to make to get us started?

Judy Huenneke: Well, I’ve put together some points about Mary Baker Eddy, not so much in order of importance as in the order in which I might introduce these to someone who knows little or nothing about her. I think it also serves as a great, though brief, outline of what we have about her in the Library collections.

So my first point is, Mary Baker Eddy: a triumph over adversity. Her life story is simply extraordinary, beginning with a 19th-century woman who had more than her share of challenges and tragedies. In 1866, at perhaps the very lowest point in her life, she had a transforming experience—one that healed her after a very serious accident. And her life changed as she began to take what that experience had taught her and use it to help and heal others.

My second point talks about Mary Baker Eddy as a church builder, because one of the ways that she brought her discovery to the world was by founding a church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist. She spent most of the last two decades of her life building, nurturing, and strengthening the church she established. This is an extraordinary achievement for anyone, much less a 19th-century woman.

Next, we talk about Mary Baker Eddy’s celebrity. As Mary Baker Eddy’s church grew and prospered, she became a national and international celebrity. Few of us probably realize just how famous she became during the last 15 years or so of her life. On the positive side, I think the media and the public were fascinated by her life story and her achievements. On the negative side, because her success was so unusual and exceptional, she was an ideal target for harsh and humiliating criticism, not to mention a destructive lawsuit involving family members.

Mrs. Eddy really didn’t revel in her celebrity. She didn’t enjoy it at all, and she was in many ways a very private person.

Next, let’s think of Mary Baker Eddy as a publisher. Mary Baker Eddy achieved amazing success as the author and publisher of Science and Health—even more amazing when you consider that her education was a modest one, and her writing experience prior to writing this book was limited to poetry and short essays. She continued to work on improving her book on spiritual healing for more than three decades after its initial publication. And we can’t forget that she also published numerous shorter works on her discovery, Christian Science. To nurture her movement, she started monthly and weekly publications. She also founded a daily newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor. By providing fair and accurate reporting, the Monitor was, and still is, an alternative to what was then called yellow journalism—the press coverage that tended toward the sensationalistic and shocking. That’s pretty amazing.

And finally, Mary Baker Eddy as teacher and healer. Yes, Mary Baker Eddy was a teacher and practitioner of spiritual healing. Her desire to share what she had discovered about healing through prayer empowered the last four decades of her life and led to all of the achievements that I’ve mentioned. She taught hundreds of students, and then nurtured them as they progressed and grew as healers and teachers themselves. It’s really an extraordinary story, and it’s one that I think remains very moving and touching nearly a century later.

spirituality.com host: Oh, I couldn’t agree with you more. And of course, we have visitors now, who are coming with their questions. The first one is from Mary in Boston. And she says, “I visited the exhibition of photos from Mrs. Eddy’s life at the Mary Baker Eddy Library, and it’s lovely. Can you tell me anything about the inspiration for that exhibit?”

Judy: Well, here’s a little bit on the inspiration behind that exhibit. I wasn’t deeply involved in it. But one thing that I, and many other Library staff members, have noticed over the years is that we have a wonderful collection of photographs taken by members of Mrs. Eddy’s household. There are literally hundreds of them. And we always hoped we could have an exhibit of them some day. We decided to combine that with some information that would be interesting to anyone who visited the Library, information on how photography became part of people’s daily lives in those early years of the century. Before that the technology was such that photography was really confined to professionals, oftentimes in studios. But by the turn of the century, cameras could be used by anyone, and, therefore, there were members of Mrs. Eddy’s household who went and took these marvelous photographs of themselves and others at work.

spirituality.com host: So they were really almost like snapshots?

Judy: Oh, they really are snapshots, some of them extremely candid.

spirituality.com host: Oh, that’s nice. Frank, who’s writing from Glenview says, “Why do you think Mary Baker Eddy’s life is as important as her discovery?”

Judy: Well, I’d like to use a quote from Mary Baker Eddy herself regarding that. And this is a quotation from a letter that she wrote in 1893 to her student Edward Kimball. She says, and this is just a postscript to the letter, “For the world to understand me in my true light, and life, would do more for our Cause than aught else could. This I learn from the fact that the enemy tries harder to hide these two things from the world than to win any other points” (L07433, letter to Edward A. Kimball, October 15, 1893, courtesy of The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity).

I think part of it is this idea that we have to respect the message of Christian Science, as well as Mary Baker Eddy as the messenger, the person who brought this message to the world.

spirituality.com host: From someone named RB in the Midwest—and I’d just like to say, it’s really nice if you can tell us a little bit more explicitly where you’re from just because it’s fun for us to know—at any rate, our Midwestern questioner is asking, “I never thought I could be a worker in Mrs. Eddy’s household. Did you have to be practically perfect to be a worker? Did she have to release any members of her household from time to time because they did not measure up?”

Judy: That’s an interesting question. Well, there were a number of people who served in Mrs. Eddy’s household for long periods of time, and there were people who served for short periods of time. I think the reasons really varied from person to person. I don’t think that you had to be perfect to work for her, but I think that you had to be striving to reach, perhaps, a higher level in your thinking when you did work for her.

spirituality.com host: I think there were times when the people there had to deal with a lot of outside issues, for example, like during the lawsuit that you mentioned earlier. So it could be a pressured environment.

Judy: Yes, it definitely could be a pressured environment.

spirituality.com host: Anthony from Geneva is saying, “To what extent to you think Mrs. Eddy was a child of her times, rather than an exceptional person in her own right?”

Judy: That’s an interesting question. I think that we do have to see Mrs. Eddy to a certain extent as a child of her times. It’s very important to see her within the context of the 19th century. I think that that is helpful in understanding some of the decisions that she made in her life, and in some ways, maybe understanding better why she was so extraordinary, because it is important, as many people know, to have a better sense of the role of women in 19th-century American society in order to really understand how extraordinary her achievements were, but also to understand how her achievements could have generated the kind of animosity that they did.

But I think as we look at Mary Baker Eddy’s life, we’ll also see that her life would have been extraordinary in any age, not just in the 19th century.

spirituality.com host: Do you want to elaborate a little bit more on what it was like to be a woman in the 19th century?

Judy: Well, it wasn’t easy. I’m not a woman’s historian, but I can talk about some of the limitations that most women in the United States had to deal with. One thing that really had an impact on Mary Baker Eddy’s life was the fact that during the mid-19th century, a woman could not be the legal guardian of her children, of her own biological children. And this affected Mrs. Eddy when her husband died shortly before her only child, her son, was born in 1844. Her father, Mark Baker, became the legal guardian of her son, and Mrs. Eddy, in all respects, didn’t have much control over what happened to that son—where he ended up being sent—which was out of the house and eventually to the Midwest from New England.

And the subsequent train of his whole life was affected by the fact that he was not able to be raised by his mother, and that his own mother was helpless to do anything about it. I think that’s a very vivid example of the kinds of rights that women had and didn’t have during that period.

spirituality.com host: Right. That’s very helpful. Susie, who’s writing from Watertown, New York, is also asking about Mrs. Eddy’s upbringing. She says, “I always felt part of Mrs. Eddy’s strength stems from the fact that she was a New England woman, born and bred. Do you think her upbringing had an effect on her courageous life and discovery?”

Judy: Yes, I very much think it did. If you read some of the wonderful published biographies of Mrs. Eddy, you can get a better sense than I can ever describe here of the kind of upbringing that she had in New England. She had very fine parents. And I guess I can describe the community that she lived in as being small but very much tending toward education and tending toward a very active church life. So I think that this all had a great influence on her.

Her brother, as some of the listeners may know, was college-educated, which was really quite an extraordinary achievement during that time, and [he] was for a while a member of the New Hampshire state legislature. So she knew some very extraordinary people, and some very well-educated people, and I think this had a profound influence on her.

spirituality.com host: “Did Mrs. Eddy ever comment on what she thought about separation between church and state?” That’s a question that’s coming from Janet in New Jersey.

Judy: I’m not certain about that. But that would be something I’d love to look up and get back to you on. Would I be able to mention here that we answer questions all the time? There are many different ways you can do that. You can certainly send us a letter by regular mail. You can telephone us. Should I give the telephone number?

spirituality.com host: Sure.

Judy: It’s 617-450-7218. And then we also have an e-mail address, one that’s well used by many people, so feel free to send your questions. And that e-mail address is research@marybakereddylibrary.org.

spirituality.com host: Or you can go to the Mary Baker Eddy Library website. Would you like to give the address for that?

Judy: Yeah, that’s www.marybakereddylibrary.org.

spirituality.com host: Great. So there you go—you’ll be able to contact the Library in all those different ways, and they’ll love to hear from you. Now this is from Clare, who’s writing from Chicago, Illinois. And she says, “Are you still getting more records, letters, etc., that relate to Mary Baker Eddy’s life, or do you think there’s not much more out there?”

Judy: Well, let me say that I think this is a perfect way for me to describe the fact that our collections are about far more than Mary Baker Eddy and her life and times. We have collections that relate to the whole history of the Christian Science movement, from its very beginnings in 1866 down to the present day. And we are answering questions that relate to the history of the Christian Science movement past 1910. So I hope when you use that e-mail address, if you do have some questions that relate to more recent events, that you feel free to ask us about that.

But there still are materials out there, and we still are getting things in, even some letters written by Mary Baker Eddy herself. So that’s quite exciting. And if you or someone you know comes across something, and you just simply assume that it must already be in the Library collections, I would very much urge you to give us a call and find out for sure, because there are still some things out there that we’d love to be able to have in the collections, and thus be able to share with the world.

spirituality.com host: This is a little bit—I’m wondering if RB who’s writing again from the Midwest is thinking of the fact that Mrs. Eddy couldn’t have her son with her when he’s asking this question: “Why did Mrs. Eddy adopt Foster Eddy?” And you may need to give a little background on that one. “Could not everything she was seeking be accomplished by a regular relationship with him?” That is, a nonadoptive relationship.

Judy: Well, from what I’ve read in the records, Mrs. Eddy was feeling the need for someone to really help her and support her. And so when she met this man named Ebenezer Foster in about 1888, they soon became close. She had taught him Christian Science healing, and she felt that he was an upright man. And so she decided to make the relationship closer by adopting him, which was what she did, I believe either that year or the following year.

Unfortunately, Foster Eddy turned out to not be the most responsible kind of guy, and the relationship ultimately crumbled away. And, as we mentioned, that lawsuit that came up later in about 1907, Foster Eddy turned out to be one of the people who prosecuted her.

spirituality.com host: And so that was the end of things, wasn’t it?

Judy: Yeah, it was kind of a tragic ending to that relationship. So it shows that sometimes Mary Baker Eddy did make choices that she later came to regret.

spirituality.com host: Right. Now, the next question is from Ned Garnhart in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And Ned is asking, “Did Mrs. Eddy have a telephone in her household? Did she ever talk on it herself?” Maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about her views of technology, at least of that time.

Judy: Yeah, well, I can talk about the telephone first. There was a telephone in her house. We don’t have any records in the archives that indicate that she ever used it herself. But she certainly had members of her household who did. And I believe there were telephones in both her house in Pleasant View in Concord, New Hampshire, where she lived until 1908, and also her home Chestnut Hill, here in the Boston area.

Now about technology, I think that we find when we read through the various manuscripts and books that Mrs. Eddy wrote, that she was as big a fan of technology as anyone. She felt that anything that could be useful should be used, regardless as to whether it represented new, cutting-edge technology or whether it was more old-fashioned.

spirituality.com host: Speaking of the Pleasant View house, we have kind of an unusual question from Fred in New Hampshire, who says, “I’ve heard stories about Mrs. Eddy’s house in New Hampshire. Apparently it burned down, I guess.”

Judy: No, that’s not correct.

spirituality.com host: OK. And he says, “It was constantly being picked at by fans of Mrs. Eddy who were taking off pieces of it.” Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Judy: OK. Now since Fred mentioned something about a house burning down, maybe he’s thinking about Mrs. Eddy’s birthplace in Bow, New Hampshire, which actually burned down in a fire in 1910, before Mrs. Eddy herself passed away.

Her home Pleasant View, which was also in Concord, which is right next door to Bow, was demolished in 1917. As far as I know, there was no fire involved.

spirituality.com host: And what about the house in Bow? Was that just an ordinary fire, an accidental burning, or something like that?

Judy: As far as we know—I’ve never seen anything that would make me indicate that it was anything other than an accidental fire. I believe, though, it might have been a problem at both houses that people were picking off souvenirs, unfortunately.

spirituality.com host: This is a women’s history question from Emily in Portland, Oregon. She says, “For a women’s history class, could you touch on some of the rights for women in the 1800s, and how a woman’s place affected Mrs. Eddy’s discovery.” I think you’ve done a little bit of that, but if you want to elaborate on it more, that would be great.

Judy: Well, I’m certainly no expert in the field of women’s studies, but just based on the little I’ve read and just looking into Mrs. Eddy’s life—maybe I can’t talk so much on the rights that they had or didn’t have, just that the obstacles that Mary Baker Eddy faced as … she lived much of her life as a single woman in various ways.

She discovered Christian Science in 1866. Not very long after that, her husband at that time deserted her. So she was a single woman—and seven years later, a divorced woman. That placed her in kind of an iffy area in the society of her day. And of course, it wasn’t easy to get a job if you were a woman during that time period either. And so, as some people may have read in some of the biographies [of Mary Baker Eddy’s life], she led a somewhat itinerant existence at that time, going from house to house, living very much on the edge, yet still working as a teacher and a healer. I think that it’s quite extraordinary that she was able to take those experiences and use them to grow higher, to eventually reach the point where she had written a book and was able to publish it, and to build a church from there.

And of course, during that time period for a woman to be the head of a church was very unusual, very strange. And yet she was able to work through that as well.

spirituality.com host: One thing that I’m just thinking of as you were talking was also her public speaking. It was unusual for a woman to speak publicly, wasn’t it?

Judy: I think it was more unusual at that time period—certainly not completely unknown, but for Mrs. Eddy to give the number of talks that she did, she became by the late 1870s, in her church, the regular pastor from week to week. So she was delivering a sermon just like the gentlemen on a weekly basis in her church. This was probably considered pretty unusual.

spirituality.com host: This is from Mike and Star in State College, Pennsylvania: “Mrs. Eddy was visionary beyond the religious periodicals that she founded, Science and Health, and The Christian Science Monitor. Were there other things unfulfilled that she had on her “to do” list before she passed on?”

Judy: That’s an interesting question. Right off the top of my head, I can’t think of any particular project that she had that she felt was unfulfilled by the end of her life. I think she was very good at setting out and doing what she intended to do. She was a very focused person. And that’s how she was able to accomplish many of the wonderful things that she did.

spirituality.com host: In a way, hadn’t she been sort of trying to turn over some of the day-to-day activities to the workers who were part of the church structure, so that she could spend more time with healing and things like that?

Judy: Well, she started doing that quite early on. In the 1880s, some 20 years before her passing, she was already trying to get her followers to take on more and more of the daily duties.

I think one misconception about Mrs. Eddy that many people have is that she was somewhat dictatorial in the way she did things, that she was very controlling, she held on to things. And yet if you come into the Library, or simply see a compilation of some of the correspondence that we have, you’ll see that for many years she did her best to leave the decision making to others on many topics. Certainly there were some items where she made the final decision, but in many, many other areas, she would write at the end of a letter [and I’m paraphrasing here], “Do as you think best.”

spirituality.com host: This is from Robin in Halifax: “Someone I spoke with recently heard that Mary Baker Eddy had secretly eloped at some point in her life, and then claimed that she was abducted. This person feels that such an incident discredits her work. I’ve never heard such a claim or accusation before. Is there any truth to this, or an incident that could have been misinterpreted? Just want to be able to give the correct information, or explain where this came from, if anywhere.”

Judy: No, I have to say I’ve never heard that story before. And I can’t think of how it could even be a distortion of any other event in Mrs. Eddy’s life.

If you do find more information on this, feel free to use that e-mail address and contact us. But maybe this gives me a little place to talk about the fact that one of the things we do for people is to verify either events that people have heard about that supposedly took place in Mary Baker Eddy’s life, or various quotations and essays that seemed to circulate around that sometimes have Mrs. Eddy’s name at the bottom, but in fact, as far as we can tell, did not originate with her. We do this kind of authentication work pretty regularly.

spirituality.com host: Thanks. Anthony in Geneva is asking, “Was Mrs. Eddy able to play a musical instrument?”

Judy: I think she had some keyboard skills. I believe there’s a letter from the early 1850s in which Mrs. Eddy, who at that point was a poor widow, talks about possibly becoming a piano teacher. And I’ve also heard that she had a very fine singing voice, as well. So she did have some musical skills.

spirituality.com host: Dorothea in Miami is asking, “Can you talk a little more about Mrs. Eddy’s early life, especially her young adult, teen years. I’d love to be able to share some of this information with my teenage niece.”

Judy: Well, let me say that maybe one of the best resources for finding out more about her early years can be found in two books. One is Gillian Gill’s biography, Mary Baker Eddy, which has an excellent section on the Baker family and Mary Baker Eddy’s upbringing. Also, there’s an older book which probably you can find in a Christian Science Reading Room, although it’s no longer for sale, called, Mary Baker Eddy: The Golden Days, by Jewel Spangler Smaus. They’ll certainly give you a much more complete picture than I can in just a few minutes. But it’s wonderful to read through the correspondence that you’ll find in these books and in the collections of the Library, in which we see the wonderful rapport that Mary Baker Eddy had with her brothers and sisters, and the great life that they had growing up in New Hampshire in what was kind of an exciting period—the antebellum years in the United States—a time period when there were a lot of new ideas circulating in the air. Many different ideas on religion, on technology, on political reform. Just a very interesting period. I think not only will these biographies be interesting to you, but there are also some great historical works on that time period in American history that you might find very interesting as well.

spirituality.com host: Ned in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is asking, “Tell us about the granite pyramid that marked the place of Mrs. Eddy’s birth in Bow, New Hampshire. Who put it there and why, and why was it removed around 1962?”

Judy: From the historical research I’ve done on that pyramid, I believe it was put up in 1921 on the occasion of the centennial of Mrs. Eddy’s birth. And I believe it was put up by a group of Christian Scientists. It was not put up by the Church. And I’ve never seen any information as to why it was demolished—I think it was in 1961 or 1962. [The correct date is 1962.]

Again, if you want to e-mail that question to us, perhaps we can do a little more research and get more data to you.

spirituality.com host: Benjamin in North Carolina has a nice question for you. He says, “What would you say is the most unique or valuable item in the Mary Baker Eddy Library? What is your personal favorite item?”

Judy: Well, that’s an incredibly [difficult] question, given that we probably have millions if not billions of documents in the archives. One of the favorite collections is the early records of the Committee on Publication. And it’s just wonderful to look through these records and see the correspondence that Alfred Farlow had with people all over the world, who were either asking questions about Christian Science, or who were dealing with other people who had questions about Christian Science.

That reminds me of some other records that relate to Alfred Farlow, who was the first Manager of the Committee on Publication, and that is a wonderful collection we have of affidavits that he gathered from people in New England relating to Mary Baker Eddy’s life. He and his compatriots went around New England—here, we’re talking about 1906, 1907—to find people who had known Mary Baker Eddy in the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s. And gathering information from them, finding out what they knew about her, what they remembered about her. A fascinating group of records, I can assure you.

spirituality.com host: Amy from Stephenville, Texas—this is maybe not a question we can answer, but I’ll try it: “What was Mrs. Eddy’s reason for establishing the name Christian Science Society?”

Judy: Ah, that’s a good question. We’ve actually done some research on that, and I’m going to see if I can remember it all. But part of our research is somewhat speculative in nature. One thing that I’ve noticed living in New England for most of my life is that there are other churches that use the name Society. So I’ve come to the conclusion that probably the reason why she used Christian Science Society was because of these societies that are led by other denominations in New England, most notably, the Unitarians. And that’s why I think she probably used that term. But we haven’t found any document by Mrs. Eddy in which she explains why she decided to use that term.

spirituality.com host: Joy in Los Angeles is asking, “Sometimes I struggle with the statement in the marriage chapter in Science and Health that talks about the roles of men and women—how men shouldn’t be expected to take part in domestic duties, and how women shouldn’t be expected to understand politics. Was this a product of her times? Mrs. Eddy was hardly domestic, and had to deal with politics constantly. The statement just seems so out of step with the rest of her life.”

Judy: Well, that’s an interesting question. I’m certainly not here to interpret what Mrs. Eddy might be saying or might not be saying in any of her works, published or in her correspondence.

It’s interesting to note that when we think about Mrs. Eddy’s own life that in fact her third husband, Asa Eddy, did become quite involved in domestic duties and helped out quite a bit while his wife was working to establish the Church, and that certainly Mrs. Eddy had a very healthy interest in the politics of her day, and read papers, magazines—made sure that she kept up on the news. So that’s all I can offer from an historical standpoint.

spirituality.com host: This question is from Bournemouth, England: “You say Mary Baker Eddy delivered sermons in the early days of the Church. Was this very different to today’s church services with two Readers? If so, why were the sermons dropped?

Judy: Well, that is a great question, because the church services certainly were different in those days. They did have preachers, not only in the Church in Boston, but as branch Churches [of Christ, Scientist,] developed, those churches generally had pastors who delivered sermons, as well.

The Christian Science Quarterly—the quarterly periodical that gives the Lesson-Sermons that are compilations of excerpts from both the Bible and Science and Health—this periodical didn’t actually start being printed until 1890. So you have over ten years of church activities before that.

By the early 1890s in many of these branch churches that were beginning to rise all over the country and the world, many of these churches were actually using these excerpts from the Bible and Science and Health to craft their own sermons.

Finally, by the end of 1894, Mrs. Eddy felt that personal preaching was not appropriate in her Church, and she established a pastor that was both the Bible and Science and Health. The following year, in 1895, just a few months later, she decided that this should be the pastor for all Christian Science churches.

And if you’re talking about the order of the church services, yes, they were somewhat different in those days, although I think the basic outlines would be quite familiar to anyone who attends a Christian Science service today.

And so it was the preaching, I think, that one would say was the main difference between what one would find in a church service today and what one might have heard in, say, 1885 or 1890.

spirituality.com host: And by saying that she established the Bible and Science and Health as the pastor, what we’re talking about here is that two people read from these books during the service. There’s a First Reader who reads from Science and Health, and a Second Reader who reads from the Bible. And they present a Bible Lesson, which is composed of selections from each of those books.

Judy: Exactly.

spirituality.com host: “Was a recording ever made of Mrs. Eddy’s voice?” asks Anthony, who doesn’t tell us where he’s from.

Judy: Well, we have never found any record of a recording being made of Mrs. Eddy’s voice. I think just the other day, one of the staff members showed me a letter in which a member of her household was looking to purchase what were called wax cylinders to make a recording. But we’ve never found out if he used them to record Mrs. Eddy’s voice or not. If any recording was made, we certainly haven’t found it in the collections.

spirituality.com host: From Michael in Maine, “Did she regard her last revisions inScience and Health as really her final revisions?”

Judy: Well, there’s certainly no record in the archives in which she says, “These are the last ones that I will ever make.” So I guess I have to conclude that had she lived longer, she would probably would have made some more changes. But that’s pure speculation on my part, of course.

However, I’m sure that some of the listeners have heard about the fact that over 400 editions of Science and Health were published during Mrs. Eddy’s lifetime. Let me explain that these revisions or editions are not really editions in the normal sense of the term, they’re more printings of Science and Health than actual major revisions.

But it’s also interesting to note that in virtually every one of these editions, there are some changes. She was always working with the book, making little changes here and there. Sometimes the number of changes one would find in an edition might be very small—under ten. And then others, of course, were much more extensive.

She made very few revisions the last few years of her life in 1908, ’09, and ’10—her years in Chestnut Hill. So I don’t have this feeling that there are some major changes that she would have made had she lived any longer. In fact, one of the last major revisions ofScience and Health dates from 1902. And if you look at that edition of Science and Health, you’ll find it very, very similar to what’s being published today.

spirituality.com host: Brian from Wayne, New Jersey, says, “There seem to be a lot of rumors and erroneous anecdotes to do with Mrs. Eddy’s life. Why do you think this is? And how can we as Christian Scientists help to overcome these errors?”

Judy: Well, I can’t say right off the top of my head why so many of these rumors have sprung up. But probably part of it is the fact that there are some very harshly critical biographies of Mary Baker Eddy that have been published over the years, and it seems like a lot of people still tend to use these biographies when trying to find out information on Mary Baker Eddy. And some of them have some of the craziest and wildest stories you could imagine about her. And yet these have been published by major publishers and still circulate pretty widely.

I think the best thing that someone can do to make sure that these stories don’t get too far is to become very knowledgeable on Mrs. Eddy’s life. And that’s not a difficult thing. There are very good books published—I mentioned the Gillian Gill book. And also, of course, there’s the Robert Peel trilogy on Mary Baker Eddy, and there are the numerous documents that we have in the Library.

Also, as we mentioned, the e-mail address and the telephone number for the Research Room is always available for you. You can give us a call if you hear a story, as I mentioned earlier, and you can find out from us if that story is really something that can be verified or not.

spirituality.com host: Sarah in Boston is asking something actually somewhat related. She says, “Can you tell us about Mary Baker Eddy’s contacts, if any, with Mark Twain. In a recent program on NPR (that’s National Public Radio), the author of a book on Mark Twain didn’t appear to have complete information when a caller asked him about this.”

Judy: Oh, that’s interesting. Well, there’s a book that’s just recently been published that talks quite a bit about the relationship between Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy—or maybe relationship is not quite the right term. This book is called, Rolling Away the Stone, by Stephen Gottschalk. It’s just been published by the University of Indiana Press. Now let me just summarize what that book has to say about that.

Mark Twain had a certain fascination—I think that’s the best way to put it—with both Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. He was very interested in alternative methods of healing because of some bad experiences that his wife and his family had had with illness. And so he was quite fascinated with Christian Science, and he became quite fascinated with Mrs. Eddy.

Sometimes his fascination was rather positive, and many other times it took on a very negative tone. It’s hard to speculate exactly what it was that he found so abhorrent about Mrs. Eddy at times, but he ended up writing a series about Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy for one of the leading magazines of the day. And then he ended up putting it into a book form in 1907, that year when she was facing that terrible lawsuit. It’s not a complimentary book, believe me. And I’m sure it’s had some influence on what people have to say and think about Mary Baker Eddy.

But it’s interesting to think about what it was that Mark Twain found in some ways irresistible, and in other ways found so detestable.

spirituality.com host: We’ve heard from someone in Washington, DC, who wants to know if you can give us some background on Christian Science Reading Rooms. “What were they like in her day?”

Judy: Well, rather than give you the background, let me tell you to contact us, because we have a great handout, as we call it, on Christian Science Reading Rooms, and I really can’t summarize it—it’s about four or five pages long. And it gives some nice background on what Reading Rooms were like in Mrs. Eddy’s day, and also gives some references to some of the articles that appeared in the monthly Christian Science Journal, and weekly [Christian Science] Sentinel on that topic.

One thing that I’ve found fascinating, and we’re still doing more digging on this, is the relationship of Christian Science Reading Rooms to the other reading rooms of the period. Publishers’ reading rooms were not uncommon during the late-19th century. And one thing, perhaps, that we forget in this day and age is that books were much more expensive in the late-19th century than they are today. Therefore, many publishers in their rooms, where they sold their products, would provide an area where people could sit down and read, because this was a major purchase. This was not something one would take lightly when purchasing a book. So people would definitely sit down, read a book, and then decide whether they wanted to buy it or not. And that and much more is in the handout, so contact us if you’re interested in a copy.

spirituality.com host: That’s great. David in Heathfield in the UK is saying, “For those that had a long association with Mrs. Eddy, were they conscious of her unusual attributes when in her presence, and was it obvious how spiritually-minded she was?”

Judy: Well, that’s interesting that you should mention that. We have a wonderful collection of what we call “Reminiscences” of Mary Baker Eddy. And these are accounts by people who knew her. Some of them were Christian Scientists, some of them were not. And we have something on the order of about 800 of these accounts. Some are a page long, and some—or one, I should say—is over 800 pages long. And reading through them, and I can’t claim to have read all 800 of them, but I’ve read a great many of them, and certainly most of them talk about the extraordinary qualities that Mrs. Eddy had and how interesting it was to listen to her talk, and either to work for her or to study Christian Science healing with her.

So I certainly urge people who are interested in more of these accounts to contact us. We’d be happy to send you a copy, or you could come in and read it.

spirituality.com host: Gary in Nanaimo, Canada, is asking about the Monitor: “Can you give any more details about Mrs. Eddy’s establishing The Christian Science Monitor? I understand the startup costs were higher than she expected.”

Judy: Well, when she gave the order to the Board of Trustees of The Christian Science Publishing Society to start The Christian Science Monitor, I believe she received a response either from the Trustees or from The Christian Science Board of Directors in which they discussed at length all the things that would have to happen for this newspaper to be published, and this included, for one thing, having a printing press. And they had just completed a building for The Christian Science Publishing Society, and so there had to be some kind of a redesign in order to allow room for this printing press and to hire the staff needed, not only to write the paper, but also to print and publish it.

And Mrs. Eddy took that into account, and I think she ended up giving them a little more time to get the paper together. But still, I believe the initial call for this paper came in the late spring/early summer of 1908, and the first issue was published around Thanksgiving later that year.

spirituality.com host: That’s pretty good.

Judy: Yeah, they got things together very quickly.

spirituality.com host: That’s neat. Ken in St. Louis is asking a more topical question. He says, “I read in Time magazine that Val Kilmer is writing a screenplay about Mrs. Eddy’s life. Do you know anything about this?”

Judy: I know that he has been using some documentation from the Library collections. But I can’t say that I know anything beyond that.

spirituality.com host: And Carol in Chicago has an interesting question. We’re getting back a little bit to women’s history here. She says, “This year I took a Chicago history course at a university in Chicago. I learned that Mary Baker Eddy came to Chicago during the late 1800s and spoke in the downtown area. Her name was never mentioned in the course literature. Do you believe that this outstanding woman’s history will ever be included in history books at any level of education?”

Judy: Well, one of the intents of the Library is to make Mary Baker Eddy’s life more widely known to people throughout this country and throughout the world. And we certainly hope that Mary Baker Eddy will become a part of the history books in a more regular way. She certainly needs to be there. If people are really trying to understand the accomplishments of women in the 19th century, Mary Baker Eddy’s life needs to be in those books.

Now just talking about Chicago for a minute, Mrs. Eddy actually visited Chicago twice. She was there in 1884 and taught a class there. And I think she gave a few brief talks, as well. The big visit that was mentioned in what you were reading was in 1888. She spoke at one of the major halls in Chicago. Several thousand people attended, and I guess it was considered a very important event at that time. So I’m sorry that you didn’t get to hear more about it in the class that you took.

spirituality.com host: And one of the things that is kind of intriguing about Mary Baker Eddy’s contribution isn’t just the women’s history part of it, but also the spirituality part of it, because through her discovery of Christian Science, don’t you feel that her discovery influenced religious thought, even if it became a separate entity? Wasn’t there a sort of a leavening of thought as the result of that discovery, to some extent?

Judy: I think that there definitely was. And maybe we can see part of it in that example of Mark Twain being influenced by Mrs. Eddy’s ideas, being influenced by Science and Health, and yet at the same time resisting it. It’s interesting if you go through our extensive file of newspaper clippings to see all the talk that was going on about Christian Science in the late-19th, early-20th century. Many people were disturbed by it; many people were fascinated by it. But everyone was talking about it.

spirituality.com host: Mary in Portland, Oregon, is asking, “If there was only one thing you could tell us about Mrs. Eddy, what would you tell us?”

Judy: I actually was thinking about that over the last few days. And I was thinking that something I found really extraordinary about Mrs. Eddy was that when she discovered Christian Science in 1866, she decided that what she most wanted to do was to take this discovery and to use it to help other people. That desire to help others was what really empowered her life for 45 years; and even before that, she always had a desire to help people. And I think that’s something that’s really important to consider when looking over her whole life story.

spirituality.com host: Eric in Los Angeles is asking, “I’ve really enjoyed the quarterly magazine that the Mary Baker Eddy Library produced. When will the magazine be back again? Also, I’ve really found the two collections titled, “Advice to Healers,” very helpful. How can we find out about other collections that are available from the Mary Baker Eddy Library?”

Judy: Well, the magazine is on a bit of a hiatus right now, but we are putting together some other compilations that will probably be sent out to Friends of the Library.

You also mentioned a compilation that a number of people have enjoyed called, “Advice to Healers.” These are letters that Mary Baker Eddy wrote to her students, and we do have a few other compilations available. Probably the best way to find out what’s available is to contact us either by e-mail or telephone, and we’d be happy to talk with you.

As I mentioned earlier, we have something like 800 reminiscences, and a number of them have been put into a format where we can photocopy them and send them off to people. So at this point, it’s just not possible to put together a list. But please give us a call, and maybe we can mention some things that would be of great interest to you.

spirituality.com host: Julie in Maine is asking, “Can you tell me why Mrs. Eddy laid so much stress on how local churches should be named, that is, First Church, Second Church, etc.?”

Judy: That’s a good question. I don’t feel like I can answer that right off the top of my head. I think it was a process that took some time, because in the early years, there was not a naming convention, as there was in the later years. So I’d love to have you send that question along to the Research Room, and maybe we could get back to you with some further information on how that evolved.

spirituality.com host: OK. And Ned from Pittsburgh is back with a new question: “Early Christian Science churches had choirs, according to the biographies. Why did Mrs. Eddy eliminate these and provide for a soloist in the Sunday order of service?”

Judy: Well, it’s my understanding that in the late 1890s, there seemed to be some kind of political issues involving choirs. And there was a question about some churches having larger and better choirs than other churches. I believe that the reason why the choirs may have been eliminated was to eliminate this sense of rivalry between different churches.

spirituality.com host: I see. And this is a question that we might feel we don’t want to get into, as it’s a bit theological: “Is Mrs. Eddy referred to in the Bible, as one of the two witnesses and/or the woman in Revelation, or elsewhere?” And this is from RB in Indiana.

Judy: Well, I don’t think that’s really an historical question, frankly, but it is something that people can look into by researching in the Research Room. One of the great facilities that we have in the Research Room is that we have computers where people can do keyword searching into all of the correspondence that Mrs. Eddy wrote from the 1830s down to 1910, and also keyword search on the many autograph essays that she wrote over the years. So an individual could come in and research that point, using our computers.

spirituality.com host: That’s great. And having used those computers myself, I can say it’s a really very fruitful experience and has a lot of good things, and a wonderful staff in the Library to help you.

Judy, before we wrap up our discussion—and if you have any more questions, and you send them real quick, we might be able to answer some of them—I would like to ask you to repeat the contact information for the Library, just in case people didn’t get it. Let us have everything.

Judy: OK. If you want to telephone us, the number for the research desk is 617-450-7218. If you wish to e-mail us, the e-mail address is research@marybakereddylibrary.org.

spirituality.com host: Great. And do you have any final comments that you’d like to make in connection with both the chat and the questions that have come up here, and in terms of the overall vision for the Library and what people can find there, and Mrs. Eddy’s life?

Judy: I can just make a very brief statement, which actually isn’t from me, but it’s from Mary Baker Eddy. It’s a statement that is found in an article that she wrote in March 1910 regarding the first biography that had been published about her, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, by Sibyl Wilbur. She talks about this book, and then she says, “I briefly declare that nothing has occurred in my life’s experience which, if correctly narrated and understood, could injure me ...” [The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 298]. And I heartily agree with that statement, having worked with these records for a number of years, and read a lot of the documents that we have in the collections. I think very much so that if we can have her life correctly narrated and understood, it cannot in any way injure our understanding of her or of Christian Science.

spirituality.com host: And, Ian in London actually decided to take advantage of my offer to answer another question and that is, “Are there are any plans to make the Library’s collections digitally available online?”

Judy: Well, there are some plans. They’re very much in the planning stage at this point. We don’t have the software that can allow that kind of access at the moment, but we certainly hope that will happen in the future. I don’t know exactly when that will be, but I think it’s something that will happen.

spirituality.com host: And Ned in Boston is also jumping in here, “Gillian Gill mentioned something about Mary Baker Eddy’s family becoming Christian Scientists. Can you comment about that?”

Judy: Several of her family members did end up becoming interested in Christian Science. I’m talking more of the family of her son, George Glover. I’m not going to go any further into it than that, because I want to let people’s lives remain private. But several of the members of her family did become interested in Christian Science.

spirituality.com host: And was that partly through their relationship with her, or because of studying it and feeling moved by it?

Judy: I think probably based on both. But they definitely were students of Christian Science more so than just being influenced by her own life, because her family, her son’s family, were very much in the West rather than here in the Boston area.

spirituality.com host: Lois in Eugene, Oregon, is saying, “Is there anything you can tell us about Mrs. Eddy’s, or the Christian Science Church’s, active invitation of, or perhaps recruitment of, African-Americans?”

Judy: Well, we have a little bit of information on that. We do know that one of the testimonies in the final chapter of Science and Health—that chapter is called “Fruitage”—one of the testimonials is actually by an African-American woman, who was a practitioner, a healer, listed in The Christian Science Journal for, I think, nearly 50 years.

There was a great article that actually appeared in Ebony magazine in the late 1940s about various Christian Scientists who were African-Americans.

spirituality.com host: And I’d like to chime in on this one. There’s a wonderful book that, if you can get to a Christian Science Reading Room you might be able to find, called, In My True Light and Life, and it’s a compilation of Mrs. Eddy’s life as a healer and many, many different aspects of her ministry, and her followers, and so forth. And it has an absolutely wonderful account of healing of an African-American child that was born blind.

Judy: That’s right.

spirituality.com host: Mrs. Eddy came into the church where this child’s mother was working as a seamstress. And Mrs. Eddy loved children, and she would talk to them and so forth, and she saw this little child and spoke with her, and ended up, I believe, teaching her the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm.

Judy: That’s right.

spirituality.com host: And she also was aware that the child was blind. And in the course of—I think Mrs. Eddy visited a couple of times—and in the course of it, the child was healed. And that child went on to not only become a Christian Scientist, but had extraordinary vision even—I think she was in her 80s, and she was still doing seamstress work.

So it was very, very moving account. I’m choking up as I’m thinking about it, because it was very touching to me when I first read it, and still is. So I think that would be another wonderful example of her openness to anyone without having any concern about what racial background they had.

And then we have one more question, and this might have to be our last one, from Bournemouth, England: “What were Mary Baker Eddy’s hopes for the future of the Church?”

Judy: Well, that’s a good question. I think that we can see her hopes for the Church summarized in the books that are published today, by the By-Laws that are in the Manual of The Mother Church, and what she had to say about Church in Science and Health with Key to Scriptures. I don’t think that there are any particular prophecies in the archival records that would in any way be different from what we can see in the Manual and inScience and Health.

spirituality.com host: But we’re certainly grateful for her discovery and founding of the church, aren’t we?

Judy: Yes.

spirituality.com host: Well, thank you all for joining us this afternoon. It was a wonderful time with all your wonderful questions. And for all of you who would like to hear this chat again, you can find the replay of the chat in the Event Archive section within a day or two, or you can get it as a podcast for your iPod or MP3 player. To find out how to subscribe to a podcast, visit the Event Podcast page in the Events section of the website.

And we’re just so grateful that you all joined us and brought these neat questions. And we’re thankful to Judy, too, for spending this time with us. And we look forward to having you come to another chat with us. Thanks again, and have a great afternoon.