Cults

    •      God is divine principle.

    •      Jesus is not God. The incarnation and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ did not occur.

    •      Scripture is not inerrant.

    •      Sin, death, evil do not exist.

    •      There is no literal, physical existence of the material universe.

Historical Perspective

For decades Christian Science was the matriarch of the Mind Science family. With a large and growing membership, secular and religious respect, and great wealth, the Mother Church dominated the Mind Science movement, more important in almost all respects than Unity School of Christianity, Mind Science, Religious Science, Divine Science, and their other siblings. However, during the 1960s a trend became apparent. Christian Science was losing members and income at a steady and significant rate.

By the mid-seventies Christian Science members and even the public media were aware that the decline was long-term and steady. Since the mid-1980s, it has solidified its public image as a benign Christian denomination of thoughtful, spiritually mature people who enjoy a rather intellectual, quiet faith.

This faith gives them peace with God without any of the unappealing aspects of traditional Christianity, such as the existence of hell, the doctrine of the Trinity, or the incarnation, resurrection, and atonement of Jesus Christ.

The next couple of decades will tell whether Christian Science will be able to survive. Its forces are much diminished from what they once were. Only time will tell if the small core of faithful members will endure and spur growth in excess of attrition. Yet, even now, the Christian Science cult is a powerful force with which evangelical Christians everywhere must deal. We shall examine its roots, founder, growth, and controversies, and contrast its teachings with the clear word of Scripture.

Mary Ann Morse Baker—better known among the band of faithful Christian Scientists as Mary Baker Eddy, “Mother” and Leader, the “Discoverer and Founder” of Christian Science. She was born in Bow, New Hampshire, in the year 1821 in the humble surroundings of a New Hampshire farmhouse, and reared a strict Congregationalist by her parents, Mark and Abigail Baker. The life of young Mary Baker, until her twenty-second year, was marked with frequent illnesses of both emotional and physical nature, and the then infant science of mesmerism was often applied to her case with some success.

In December of 1843, at the age of twenty-two, the future Mrs. Eddy was married to George W. Glover, a neighboring businessman, whose untimely death of yellow fever in Wilmington, South Carolina, some seven months later reduced his pregnant wife to an emotional and highly unstable invalid, who, throughout the remaining years of her life, relied from time to time upon the drug morphine as a medication.

To be sure, no informed person believes that Mrs. Eddy was a “dope addict,” but much evidence from incontrovertible sources is available to show beyond doubt that throughout her life Mrs. Eddy made repeated use of this drug.

After a brief and disastrous second marriage, Mary Baker Glover Patterson married Asa G. Eddy when Mrs. Eddy was fifty-six years of age. Asa Eddy’s death of a coronary thrombosis prompted Mrs. Eddy to commit a nearly fatal mistake where Christian Science was concerned. She contested the autopsy report, and the physician she chose confirmed her conviction that Asa died of “arsenic poisoning mentally administered.” Such a radical report prompted an inquiry into the credentials of Mrs. Eddy’s physician, Dr. C. J. Eastman, dean of the Bellevue Medical College, outside Boston. It was found that “Doctor” Eastman was running a virtual abortion mill, and had no medical credentials whatever to justify his title. He was sentenced to ten years in prison upon his conviction, and the Bellevue Medical College closed. Mrs. Eddy had contradicted her own advice concerning autopsies.5 And she would have been far better off to have practiced in this instance what she preached and to have abandoned Asa’s remains to the scrap heap of mental malpractice, but the error was virtually unavoidable since Mrs. Eddy was not to be outdone by any medical doctor. She was an expert healer by her own admissions; the autopsy was therefore inevitable.

Mrs. Eddy’s letter to the Boston Post dated June 5, 1882, in which she accused some of her former students of mentally poisoning Asa Eddy with malicious mesmerism in the form of arsenic mentally administered is one of the most pathetic examples of Mrs. Eddy’s mental state ever recorded and one which the Christian Science Church would like to forget she ever wrote.

 The Influence of P. P. Quimby

The real history of Christian Science, however, cannot be told unless one P. P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, be considered, for history tells us that as Mrs. Eddy was the mother of Christian Science, so Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was undoubtedly its father. “Dr.” Quimby in the late 1850s entitled his system of mental healing “The Science of Man,” and used the terms “The Science of Christ” and “Christian Science” for some time before Mrs. Eddy gratuitously appropriated the terminology as her own, something she dared not do while the old gentleman was alive and her relationship to him known to all.

Mrs. Eddy’s relationship to Dr. Quimby began when she arrived in Portland, Maine, in 1862 and committed herself to his care for treatment of “spinal inflammation.” In November of that same year Mrs. Eddy noised abroad to all men that P. P. Quimby had healed her of her infirmity. Said the then adoring disciple of Quimby, “I visited P. P. Quimby and in less than one week from that time I ascended by a stairway of 182 steps to the dome of the City Hall and am improving ad infinitum.”

In later years Mrs. Eddy’s recollection of Quimby was somewhat different from her earlier echoes of praise, and she did not hesitate to describe him as a very “unlearned man,” etc. Dr. Quimby termed his ideas “Science of Health.” Mrs. Eddy entitled her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and published it in 1875 filled with numerous plagiarisms from the manuscripts of P. P. Quimby and by the writings of Francis Lieber, a German-American publisher and authority on the philosophy of Hegel. For full documentation on Mrs. Eddy’s plagiarism from Quimby the reader is urged to study the first four chapters of my book The Christian Science Myth, which documents exhaustively the entire controversy and proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mrs. Eddy plagiarized a great part of her work from Quimby and other sources, and then had it all copiously edited by the Rev. J. H. Wiggin, a retired Unitarian minister.

Our authority for exposing this plagiarism on the part of “Mother” Eddy is none other than Mrs. Eddy herself, who wrote, “When needed tell the truth concerning a lie. The evasion of truth cripples integrity, and casts thee down from the pinnacle. . . . A dishonest position is far from Christianly scientific.” In addition, Mrs. Eddy made the following statement on the subject of plagiarism: “There is no warrant in common law and no permission in the gospel for plagiarizing an author’s ideas and their words.”10 So it appears that out of her own mouth Mrs. Eddy has condemned plagiarism, a practice from which she seemed to have extreme difficulty abstaining.

 The Figment of Divine Authorship

According to an authorized statement published by the Christian Science Publishing Society of Boston, Eddy, after a fall on a slippery sidewalk February 1, 1866, was pronounced “incurable” and given three days to live by the attending physician, Dr. Alvin M. Cushing. The third day, allegedly her last on earth, Eddy (the statement makes out) cried for a Bible, read Matthew 9:2, and rose completely healed. Thus the statement claims “she discovered” Christian Science. This is the story maintained by the organization today, as a comment on the First Church of Christ, Scientist website states:

 In 1866 [Eddy] was severely injured in a fall, and turned to the Bible as she had been accustomed to doing. All she had pondered in the past came strongly and clearly to her as she read an account of one of Jesus’ healings. She was immediately healed. Convinced that God had healed her, she spent the next several years searching the Scriptures to understand the principle behind her healing. She named her discovery Christian Science and explained it in 1875 when she first wrote Science and Health.

Corroborating this new story, Eddy in her book Retrospection and Introspection (38) declares that in February of 1866 (one month after Quimby’s death), she was mortally injured in a sidewalk fall and was not expected to live. She, however, vanquished the angel of death in this skirmish, and on the third day emerged triumphant over her bodily infirmity. These two statements, the interested reader will note, substantiate each other in every detail; it is therefore most unfortunate that they should both be falsehoods. Mrs. Eddy never discovered Christian Science in the manner claimed, never was in danger of losing her life in the manner described, and never “rose the third day healed and free” as she maintained.

Two incontrovertible facts establish these truths beyond doubt:

    1.      Dr. Alvin M. Cushing, the attending physician at this “illness” of Mrs. Eddy, denied under oath in a 1,000-word statement that he ever believed or said that she was in a precarious physical condition. Moreover, Dr. Cushing stated (contrary to the claims of Christian Scientists) that Eddy always enjoyed robust health and that he further attended her in August of the same year four separate times and administered medicine to her for bodily ailments.

    2.      Julius Dresser (pupil of the late “Dr.” Quimby) received a letter from Eddy dated February 15, 1866, two weeks after her alleged “recovery” from the fall on an icy sidewalk. In this letter Eddy alludes to the fall and claims Dr. Cushing resigned her to the life of a cripple. Eddy wrote: 

Two weeks ago I fell on the sidewalk and struck my back on the ice, and was taken for dead, came to consciousness amid a storm of vapors from cologne, chloroform, ether, camphor, etc., but to find myself the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby. The physician attending said I had taken the last step I ever should, but in two days I got out of my bed alone and will walk; but yet I confess I am frightened . . . Now can’t you help me? . . . I think I could help another in my condition . . . yet I am slowly failing. . . .

Barring the obvious medical error of a doctor administering chloroform and ether to an unconscious person, Eddy’s account once again demonstrates her ability to think in paradoxes and contradict all reason and logical expression. The accounts are therefore spurious and complete fabrications.

Horace T. Wentworth, with whose mother Eddy lived in Stoughton while she was teaching from the Quimby Manuscripts (1867–1870), has made the following statement, and no Christian Scientist has ever refuted it:

 As I have seen the amazing spread of this delusion and the way in which men and women are offering up money and the lives of their children to it, I have felt that it is a duty I owe to the public to make it known. I have no hard feelings against Mrs. Eddy, no axe to grind, no interest to serve; I simply feel that it is due the thousands of good people who have made Christian Science the anchorage of their souls and its founder the infallible guide of their daily life, to keep this no longer to myself. I desire only that people who take themselves and their helpless children into Christian Science shall do so with the full knowledge that this is not divine revelation but simply the idea of an old-time Maine healer.

Further than this statement, Wentworth has also recorded as incontestable evidence the very copy of P. P. Quimby’s Manuscripts from which Eddy taught during the years of 1867 through 1870 that contains corrections in Eddy’s own handwriting. Note, please, all this is undeniable fact—yet Eddy maintains that she alone “discovered and founded” the Christian Science religion. What a historical perversion the prophetess of Christian Science has attempted to perpetrate. Let it also be remembered that Eddy claimed for Quimby’s theories, which she expanded, Divine import, owning that she only copied what God Almighty spoke.

From the home of the Wentworths in Stoughton, Massachusetts, where she taught from the Quimby manuscripts, Eddy went on to Lynn, Massachusetts, where she completed her “writing” of Science and Health, which she published in 1875. After leaving Lynn, largely because of the revolt of most of her students, Eddy came to Boston and opened what later became “The Massachusetts Metaphysical College” (571 Columbus Avenue), where she allegedly taught some 4,000 students at $300 per student over a period of eight years (1881–1889). One cannot help but wonder what would induce a reasonably intelligent person to spend that amount of money for a course that never lasted the length of a college half-semester and which was taught by a staff hardly qualified intellectually to instruct the ninth grade. Eddy herself knew comparatively nothing of biblical history, theology, philosophy, or the ancient languages. Christian Science sources have attempted for years to prove that Eddy was a scholar in these fields, but the Rev. J. H. Wiggin, her literary adviser for some years, and himself an excellent scholar, has gone on record as saying that she was grossly ignorant of the subjects in question.

When Eddy left the thankless community of Lynn, Massachusetts, she was then sixty-one years old and possessed fewer than fifty persons she could call “followers.” As the calendar neared 1896, however, the indomitable will and perseverance of Mary Baker Eddy began to pay sizable dividends. Her churches and societies numbered well over 400 and the membership in them eventually increased from 800 to 900 percent.

Eddy’s reign had very little internal opposition and hence went unchallenged during her lifetime, but after her decease a definite scramble for control of her empire ensued.

Martin, W., & Rische, J. M. (2020). The kingdom of the cults handbook: quick reference guide to alternative belief systems (pp. 89–95). Bethany House.