When we do not know a person -- and also when we do -- we have to judge the size and nature of his achievements as compared with the achievements of others in his special line of business -- there is no other way: Measured by this standard, it is thirteen hundred years since the world has produced anyone who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy's waist belt. — Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
Who was Mary Baker Eddy?
Mary Baker Eddy was the daughter of an aspiring New Hampshire family. A cousin was a congressman, and her brother Albert was a law partner with Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth President of the United States. Among her forebears was General Knox, a Revolutionary war hero and advisor to George Washington.
She was a semi-invalid during portions of her childhood, and when unable to attend school at the Sanbornton Academy she was home-schooled in part by Albert. A voracious reader, and schooled in the classics of the day, Mary wrote poetry before she was 12, learned classical Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, and was an aspiring author. But in those days, women were not allowed to attend college.
The watershed experience of her career was a fall on the ice. According to the local newspaper, the Lynn Reporter, Mrs. Eddy was "severely injured," and the attending doctor diagnosed her injury as a concussion and possible spinal dislocation. Her immediate recovery, after having been given up by her doctor and prepared for the worst by a clergyman, seemed to her friends to be miraculous. But for Mrs. Eddy it was the beginning of a new life. She wanted to know what had happened and why. She explains in Science and Health,
When apparently near the confines of mortal existence, standing already within the shadow of the death-valley, I learned these truths in divine Science: that all real being is in God, the divine Mind, and that Life, Truth, and Love are all-powerful and ever-present; that the opposite of Truth, -- called error, sin, sickness, disease, death, -- is the false testimony of false material sense, of mind in matter; that this false sense evolves, in belief, a subjective state of mortal mind which this same so-called mind names matter, thereby shutting out the true sense of Spirit.
Over the next three years, Mrs. Eddy took a second look at the Bible and its underlying assumptions and found a God of infinite goodness and love, and man in His image and likeness. She rediscovered spiritual healing. And so she wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, revising it many times as she more clearly grasped the nature of being and its implications.
Mrs. Eddy challenged the religious dogmas of the day that women were incapable of intellectual depth, and that religion should rest upon blind belief, ceremony, and tradition instead of understanding. Traditionalists perceived Christian Science as a challenge, and so in the time-honored fashion of politics, they attacked her character, sometimes viciously, as a means of blocking her message. But Mrs. Eddy rose above the attacks and founded the Christian Science movement.
