In 1879, the Church of Christian Scientists was assembled, and Eddy was ordained as the pastor. By this time, the controversy surrounding the split between New Thought and Christian Science was characterized by the dispute between Mary Baker Eddy and Annetta and Julius Dresser, who continued to attack Eddy throughout the rest of their lives.
Some of the shenanigans of the Christian Science movement have attracted quite a bit of attention over the years. Mark Twain relates several stories in his book Christian Science, along with his passionate opinions on the subject, some of which are included here:
Among other witnesses there is one who had a “jumping toothache,” which several times tempted her to “believe that there was sensation in matter, but each time it was overcome by the power of Truth.” She would not allow the dentist to use cocaine, but sat there and let him punch and drill and split and crush the tooth, and tear and slash its ulcerations, and pull out the nerve, and dig out fragments of bone; and she wouldn’t once confess that it hurt. And to this day she thinks it didn’t, and I have not a doubt that she is nine-tenths right, and that her Christian Science faith did her better service than she could have gotten out of cocaine. . .
No one doubts—certainly not I—that the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body. From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack, the wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist have made use of the client’s imagination to help them in their work. They have all recognized the potency and availability of that force. Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know that where the disease is only a fancy, the patient’s confidence in the doctor will make the bread pill effective.
Faith in the doctor. Perhaps that is the entire thing . . . . Genuine and remarkable cures have been achieved through contact with the relics of a saint. Is it not likely that any other bones would have done as well if the substitution had been concealed from the patient? When I was a boy a farmer’s wife who lived five miles from our village had great fame as a faith-doctor—that was what she called herself. Sufferers came to her from all around, and she laid her hand upon them and said, “Have faith—it is all that is necessary,” and they went away well of their ailments. She was not a religious woman, and pretended to no occult powers. She said that the patient’s faith in her did the work. Several times I saw her make immediate cures of severe toothaches. [Once] my mother was the patient . . . . Within the last quarter of a century, in America, several sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines. There are the Mind Cure, the Faith Cure, the Prayer Cure, the Mental Science Cure, and the Christian-Science Cure; and apparently they all do their miracles with the same old, powerful instrument—the patient’s imagination.
From the very start, the New Thought movement was unique among religious movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for having women play a prominent role in its leadership. The first graduation ceremony of the New Thought movement’s Emma Hopkins College of Metaphysical Science in 1889 had twenty-two graduates, twenty of whom were women.
Conspicuous among the many women involved New Thought and Prosperity Consciousness movements were two: Emma Curtis Hopkins, who edited the Mind Cure Journal after being excommunicated by Mary Baker Eddy from Christian Science for not being Jesus-centered enough, and Elizabeth Towne, who in 1910 started the widely read New Thought magazine Nautilus.
While the New Thought movement did a great deal to make an individual feel more responsible for his outcome, it also had the side effect of disconnecting the individual from a greater causality. Not everything can be traced back to personal and individual actions, and there are some things out of the realm of possibility for any individual to change. Take for example slavery in America, or the Armenian Holocaust in Turkey or the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. In his book, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls, Robert C. Fuller explains how he thinks New Thought ideology separates people from one another:
As an orientation to life, the New Thought philosophy aggravated rather than assuaged the emotional distance between people. Since the psychological model of human fulfillment New Thought borrowed from the mesmerists completely lacked any interpersonal variables, it couldn’t demonstrate the strength-bestowing importance of such traditional virtues as cooperation, compromise, or delay of personal gratification . . . . Thus, the nation’s first popular psychology degenerated into an ideology that taught its adherents to systematically exclude the needs or opinions of others as illusory obstacles to self-actualization. The New Thought projected values which ironically prevented confused individuals from coming in touch with the most valuable healing resource of all—each other.
While New Thought reinforces the idea that sickness and poverty reveal the individual’s incapacity to connect with a higher purpose, other Christian beliefs taught that Jesus said that sickness had a divine purpose, usually to encourage one’s spiritual evolution, and that sickness was not caused by sin alone.
With the man born blind, Christ gives to his disciples a surprising reply: It was not that this man sinned, or his parents [had], but that the works of God might be made manifest in him. We need not assume that Christ denies that sin is at the root of this blindness too. However, he reveals here another aspect of sickness . . . . Every sickness has two aspects: one of the past, the cause; one of the future, [which] meaning shall be made manifest. The disciples learn to see that this illness, indeed that every illness, is for the manifestation of the works of God. Every illness is given in order that man may grow into a further manifestation of the divine in him.27
All that we know of matter is force, as all its properties are only modifications of force. Its inmost essence may be spiritual, and what we call matter may be only the outward clothing, or ultimation, or external manifestation of some spiritual reality. The properties of matter are reduced to the single idea of force. Mind is a higher and diviner force, approaching many degrees nearer the Central Life. All force, in its origin, as well as all causation, is spiritual. Mind is a manifestation of force entirely distinct from that we call matter. Between color and thought, there is a broad distinction. They are not identical. One belongs to matter, the other to mind. One is a material, the other a spiritual property or force.
—Warren Felt Evans, The Mental Cure
Warren Felt Evans was a farmer’s son, born to Eli and Sarah Edson Evans in Rockingham, Vermont, on December 23, 1817, the sixth of their seven children. Evans, along with the Dresser family, wrote extensively on the teachings of Phineas Quimby. Evans didn’t quite establish a movement like Mrs. Eddy; instead he set up a healing practice in Salisbury, Massachusetts. Evans quickly gained notoriety due to his skill as a healer, and he published several books that were widely popular. These include The Mental Cure: Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the Body, Both in Health and Disease, and the Psychological Method of Treatment (1869); Mental Medicine (1872); Soul and Body, The Divine Law of Cure (1881); The Primitive Mind Cure (1885); and Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics (1886).
Evans’