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.)
The effort to reduce Christian Scientists’ healing practice to a form of human self-help is, if anything, even more pervasive in today’s secularized culture than it was in Mrs. Eddy’s time. As the three published items that follow illustrate, Christian Science Committees on Publication continue to challenge this basic misconception as she did. Yet words alone won’t lift this burden of skepticism from human thought. It ultimately challenges all church members—everyone who loves Christian Science—to spiritually realize and respond more fully ourselves to the living presence of God, divine Love, and bring this out in healing works.
From the Colorado Springs Gazette
(published in slightly abridged form, reprinted here as sent)
Recently, an interesting column in the Gazette’s election coverage (“[Candidate’s] Religion and its Popular Appeal,” June 3) focused on the influence of the candidate’s former pastor, a popular promoter of “positive thinking.” The article repeated a well-worn and highly misleading stereotype, however, in linking the pastor’s viewpoint to Christian Science and its founder, Mary Baker Eddy.
Actually, Mrs. Eddy’s religion was and is deeply rooted in the Bible with Christ Jesus firmly planted as the example. True, she saw Christ’s message as one of great hope rather than hellfire and doom. But far from making light of human troubles or believing that merely “thinking positive” would allay them, she emphasized humanity’s great need for redemption and genuine spiritual light. This requires facing up squarely to evil and sin.
The idea that the power of the human mind is where healing and health is to be found was foreign to her teaching. True prayer was not “mind cure” through techniques of will or efforts to “think oneself well.” It was—is—the heartfelt yielding to God, divine Love, in which thought and being are spiritually lifted up. I realize that many in our secular society may consider all prayer to be merely a form of self-suggestion, but for Christian Scientists it is this experience of the immediacy of Christ, the divine Spirit witnessed in Jesus’ life, that heals and transforms people’s lives in a way that limited human efforts, positive or otherwise, cannot.
As for politics, finally, perhaps Mrs. Eddy’s response to a reporter’s question on the subject in the election year of 1908 may also illumine values that transcend the party divisions so tumultuously perplexing today: “I am asked, ‘What are your politics?’ I have none, in reality, other than to help support a righteous government; to love God supremely, and my neighbor as myself” [The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 276].
David L. Price
Christian Science Committee on Publication for Colorado
From the website Informazione Consapevole
(posted comment originally in Italian)
… While Mary Baker Eddy was a patient of Phineas Quimby at one point, their paths sharply diverged as her understanding of Christian healing—and what she called the “Science” of Christianity—deepened. Basically, she came to see his practice of therapeutic suggestion as profoundly different from the practice of healing through prayer and true communion with God. As she herself explained: “… I tried him, as a healer, and … he seemed to help me for the time … but when I found that Quimbyism was too short, and would not answer the cry of the human heart for succor, for real aid, I went, being driven thence by my own extremity, to the Bible, and there I discovered Christian Science” (from Robert Peel’s scholarly biography, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 183.)
Cristina Cordsen
Christian Science Committee on Publication for Italy
From the Barre-Montpelier, Vermont Times Argus
(published in slightly edited form under the headline, “Finding faith”)
I found Paul Heller’s article about “Sleeping Lucy” the clairvoyant (August 1 issue) very interesting. There is one point, though, which I wish to correct. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, did not have a “profound faith” in Sleeping Lucy nor call upon her for help in healing. The source for this misinformation, Georgine Milmine’s biography of Mary Baker Eddy, was published in 1907 and reflects the gossip of that decade, when Eddy was one of the most-talked-about women in the country for her position as leader of a new Christian movement that was being widely recognized—and sometimes misunderstood—for healing people through prayer alone.
While it may have looked to some like Eddy and Sleeping Lucy were working in the same vein, nothing could be further from the truth. The basis of Eddy’s method, deeply rooted in the Bible and following Christ Jesus’ teachings and healing works, is the worship of God. It is not psychic but purely spiritual, looking to God, the one Spirit or divine intelligence, as the only real healing power.
Eddy respected the honest efforts of all individuals seeking to help others in any way they might see fit, but she drew a profound distinction between various forms of mental suggestion or human “mind-cure” and the spiritual light that comes through genuine Christian prayer. As she put it in a chapter titled “Christian Science versus Spiritualism” in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “Spirit blesses man, but man cannot ‘tell whence it cometh.’ By it the sick are healed, the sorrowing are comforted, and the sinning are reformed. These are the effects of one universal God, the invisible good dwelling in eternal Science” [p. 78].
With sincere thanks for the opportunity to correct this misconception,
Nancy Humphrey Case
Christian Science Committee on Publication for Vermont
