Nothing apparently came of the first tentative organization in 1875. The first incorporated Church of Christ Scientist was chartered in 1879 with twenty-six charter members and Boston as its seat. Meetings of this church were held, to begin with, in Lynn and Boston, but Lynn was not friendly to the new enterprise and the Boston group became the center of further growth. Mrs. Eddy left Lynn finally in 1882 and during all the next period the history of Christian Science is the history of the Mother Church in Boston and of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Mrs. Eddy suffered no dissent, her pupils either followed or left her. She was the controlling force in the whole movement. She began to surround herself with a certain mystery and delighted in theatrical effects. She had written and rewritten "Science and Health" until it began to take final form. The Journal of Christian Science became the official organ of Mrs. Eddy's movement as "Science and Health" was its gospel.
The movement reached beyond Boston and New England and invaded the West. It was now so outstanding as to create general public interest. The churches began to take notice of it and indeed, whatever has been for the last twenty years characteristic of Christian Science was then actively in action. What follows is the familiar story of Mrs. Eddy's own personal movements, her withdrawal to Concord, her growing detachment from the movement which she nevertheless ruled with an iron hand, the final organization of the church itself along lines wholly dictated by its leader, the deepening of public interest in the movement itself, Mrs. Eddy's removal from Concord to Newton and her death. She left behind her the strongest and most driving organization built up by any religious leader of her time. Of all those, who since the Wesleys have inaugurated and carried through a distinct religious movement, only Alexander Campbell is in the same class with Mrs. Eddy and Campbell had behind him the traditional force of the Protestantism to which he gave only a slightly new direction and colouring. Mrs. Eddy's contributions are far more distinct and radical.
We need, then, to turn from her life, upon whose lights and shadows, inconsistencies and intricacies, we have touched all too lightly, to seek in "Science and Health" and the later development of Christian Science at once the secret of the power of the movement and its significance for our time.
V
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A PHILOSOPHY
Christian science has a considerable group of authorized publications and a well-conducted department of publicity. Its public propaganda is carried on by means of occasional lectures, always extremely well advertised and through its reading rooms and periodicals. Its unadvertised propaganda is carried on, naturally, by its adherents. Every instance of obscure or protracted illness offers it an opportunity and such opportunities are by no means neglected. But the supreme authority in Christian Science is Mary Baker Eddy's work "Science and Health." This is read at every Sunday service and is the basis of all lectures and explanatory advertisements. In general its exponents do not substantially depart from the teachings of its book, nor, such is the discipline of the cult, do they dare to. There are doubtless such modifications of its more extreme and impossible contentions as every religion of authority experiences. Christian Science cannot remain unaffected by discussion and the larger movements of thought. But it has not as yet markedly departed from the doctrines of its founder and must thereby be judged.
The book in its final form represents a considerable evolution. The comparison of successive editions reveals an astonishing amount of matter which has been discarded, although there has been no real modification of its fundamental principles. References to malicious animal magnetism which fill a large place in the earlier editions, are almost wholly wanting in the last, and there has been a decided progress toward a relative simplicity of statements. The book is doubtless much in debt to Mrs. Eddy's literary adviser, Mr. Wiggins, who brought to the revision of Mrs. Eddy's writings a conscientious fidelity. One needs to stand a good ways back from the book itself in order at all to get any balanced view of its philosophy but, so seen, its fundamentals are almost unexpectedly simple.
Christian Science a Philosophy, a Theology, a Religion and a System of Healing; General Conditions Which Have Lent it Power
Christian Science is offered as a philosophy, a theology, a religion and a method for the practical conduct of life and it needs to be considered under each of these four heads. It demands also for any proper understanding of it the backgrounds of Mrs. Eddy's peculiar temperament and checkered history. It is a growth. For her fundamentals Mrs. Eddy is, beyond reasonable debate, in debt to Quimby and in some ways Quimby's original insights have suffered at her hands. None the less, in its final form "Science and Health" is what Mrs. Eddy has made it and it is what it is because she was what she was. She shared with her own generation an absorbing interest in fundamental theological problems. She inherited a religion which has reduced the whole of life to rigid and on the whole too narrow theological formulæ. She was not able to fit her experience into the formula which her faith supplied and yet, on the other hand, her faith exercised a controlling influence over her life. She was in a small and pathetic way a kind of nineteenth century Job grappling with the old, old question given sin and, above all, pain and suffering to find God. She could not adjust either Divine love or a just Divine sovereignty to what she herself had been called upon to bear. A natural tendency toward the occult and the desperate willingness of the hopelessly sick to try anything which promises a cure, led her in many directions. So much her biography explains.