The Founder of Christian Science
Mary Baker Eddy : The Truth and the Tradition. By E. S. Bates and V. Dittemore. (Routledge. 16s.)
TrIrruS often grow quickly round religious, leaders, but Mrs. Eddy was, a myth-maker, about herself.: The first page of this
• -newbiography supplies a good illustration, She was born on a farm in New Hampshire in 1821. A photograph of it shows "a small,, barn-like building, miserably_ inappropriate to a
• . prosperous ,ffirin and plainly revealing_ the indifference of its owner, to both beauty and, comfort." . But in the -official , biography, by Sibyl Wilbur,:, there was an etching . which enlarged. the size of the house and doubled the number of windows. " Mrs. Eddy did, not ehovae to..have been born in *groundings unworthy of her."
An inaccurate. memory and lifelong habits of romancing threw falsplights, of this kind over every episode in her earlier and the result has been a mythological and canonical . ,ae.eynnt, of it which her church still officially countenances, and which our authors here term the " tradition." Against it they set the " truth " ; i.e., a historical attempt to find and state what actually happened. The effect is not only to deprive Mrs. Eddy of all credit as a witness, but to exhibit the first fifty years of her life as a sordid and on the whole singularly unimpressive novitiate for her after-career. Nothing relieves the squalor of a bad home, two unfortunate marriages and chronic hnpecuniosity, save the literary ambitions of ,an ill-educated New .England, blue-stocking, contributing wretched verse and worse prose to the magazine columns of local papers,. , Of holiness, not a trace.
Before we go_ further, let us note how- "tradition " and "truth 7 have hitherto stood. The, canonical biography by. :Sibyl Wilbur (Mrs. S. W. O'Brien). appeared in 1907. It was based on church material, and, was the official answer to a series of articles in MeClure's Magazine.. In, them ``truth " . had first peeped out ; but an attempt to reprint them_ in book form was frustrated. , It was not till 1921 that. the publication of the, Quimby Manuscripts threw fresh lights ; and the discovery of wholesale_ tmacknowledred plagiarisms in Mrs. Eddy's writing was not made till 1928.: But in,1629 followed the devastatingly complete biography by E. H. Dakin ; soon powerfully supplemented in a, long critical study by Mrs. Fleta Campbell Springer ; and very feebly met, if met at all, in a new biography by Dr. Lyman Powell.
The object of the present volume is to present some approach to finality. Its authorship is composite. The actual writing is the work of Dr. Bates, a biographical expert from the staff of . the Dictionary of :American Biography. But the furnisher of . .the,datti,. and -jointly responsible for _their _use, is Mr. John V. Dittemore, whose resources in this , matter are probably unequalled: The present biography Must cover nearlyevery well-attested fact that remained ascertainable. In that sense it- is final.
• Mary Baker Eddy derived marked characters from both her parents. A neighbOur said of her father that he was "a tiger for temper and always in a row." He was a shrewd dealer and extremely hard-fisted. Her mother, on the other .• • hand was:of a cheerful, kindly, sunny disposition. On a larger
• stage than 'her father's Mrs.•Eddy. was to repeat his business shrewdness and. his tigerish temper: Vet, as. S.n.P. Bancroft said, " she was 'naturally joy-loving and light-hearted." Some results of this contradiction passed into the :religion :Which she eventually- founded. : Bat for cater -forty . years • the- edge of her:qualities was. too much-blunted-by '• for- them, to leaVe • Much mark -on - the: world.-- •It- wds • her . healing by. -Thineas P. Quimby, first'. in - October; .1862, ' and then (after a relapse)- in' JanuarrMarch, :1884, that'
changed her life. Quimby, unschooled but original, was a blacksmith's son, a eloeffinakei; through the practice of mesmerism he had passed to that of mental healing, to which he for the first time applied the term " Christian Science " ; a tern whose use in that sense Mrs. Eddy derived from him, together with his ideas and methods. This second- hand origin of what she claimed to have discovered herself she was afterwards most anxious to deriy and conceal.
Of what did he heal her ? From a child she had been highly hysterical, " with.a chronically weak back, too nervous and excitable even to attend school, from which she was withdrawn after the briefest experience." Thenceforth, ' save for short intervals, she remained (till healed) a frequent invalid ; and in first writing to Quimby she described her ease as " spinal inflammation and its train of sufferings— gastric and bilious." Whether her trouble was hysterical and he cured it by suggestion, or whether it was really osteo- pathic and he cured it by the manipulation which was also part of his treatment, is a problem which this book does not discuss. But that he did cure her and many others, there can be no doubt ; nor that he believed in the efficacy of suggestion, retaining manipulation chiefly as an aid to it. " Mrs. Patterson, the authoress," as she then was termed, Might never have gone far with healing on her own account, if she had not very shOrtly after been rendered destitute through desertion by her second husband, the miseratile. dentist Patterson. She tried healing for board and lodging, but she does not seem to have been very good at it ; and perhips it was this, in turn, which led her to follow up the suggestion made to her in a letter (reprinted here) which Julius Dresser wrote after Quimby's death, that " the true way to establish " Quimby's science was "to lecture and buy a paper .and make that the means, rather more than the curing, to introduce the truth." So by degrees instead of a healer she became a teacher and apostle of healing, running what first were schools, and then a "metaphysical college," and finally her church. And thus success came.
The sordid note persists far into these developments ; indeed it is never lost.- But with success unquestionably Mrs. Eddy's personality expanded. Her utter lack of scruple, her romancing untruthfulness, and her bourgeois social vanity (illustrated by her faked genealogy and coat-of-arms) were all probably helps to her progress ; and her incapacity to turn out any literature that a critic could pass mattered less in the America of her day than it would have anywhere else. True, if it had been a bettei book, Science and Health might have made the move- ment instead of being, as our authors show, made by it but neither it nor its successors proved stimibling-blocki. What is at least equally remarkable is that none of the endless personal squabbles and shabby episodes, the squalid litigations of the year 1878, or the famous conflicts later with Josephine Woodbury; or with Augusta Stetson, availed to arrest it.
These facts appear, froni one angle, to supply the strangest arguments in Christian Science's favour. Had Mrs. Eddy been a great spiritual character or a great original thinker, or had she assembled round her an apostolate rich in such qualities, one might have said that the movement was created by its personalities only. Conversely, when one sees so great a growth achieved under such very unimpressive leadership, one is driven to conclude that there must, inherently, be a good deal in it. If " mind-healing " were purely an illusion, could it possibly have won its wide acceptance against the handicap of • all this drab self--seeking • and plain charlatanism in its
advocates ? - - • -- • R. C. K. EN13011.
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