Mary Baker Eddy (July 16, 1821 – December 3, 1910) was the founder of the Christian Science religion. Her works include:
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, The Christian Science Journal (1883), The Christian Science Sentinel (1898), The Herald of Christian Science (1903), The Christian Science Monitor (1908).
After a fall in Lynn, Massachusetts caused a spinal injury in February 1866, Eddy turned to Matthew 9:2 in the Bible and recovered unexpectedly. Although she filed a claim for money from the city of Lynn for her injury on the grounds that she was “still suffering from the effects of that fall,” she later withdrew the lawsuit. Eddy’s attending physician Alvin M. Cushing, a homeopath, testified under oath that he “did not at any time declare, or believe, that there was no hope for Mrs. Patterson’s recovery, or that she was in critical condition.”
She devoted the next three years of her life to Biblical study and what she considered the discovery of Christian Science. In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, Eddy writes “I then withdrew from society about three years,–to ponder my mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind that should take the things of God and show them to the creature, and reveal the great curative Principle, –Deity.”
Convinced by her own study of the Bible, especially Genesis 1, and through experimentation, Eddy claimed to have found healing power through a higher sense of God as Spirit and man as God’s spiritual “image and likeness.” She became convinced that illness could be healed through an awakened thought brought about by a clearer perception of God and the explicit rejection of drugs, hygiene and medicine based upon the observation that Jesus did not use these methods for healing:
It is plain that God does not employ drugs or hygiene, nor provide them for human use; else Jesus would have recommended and employed them in his healing. … The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love. (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 143:5, 367:3)
She eventually called this spiritual perception the operation of the Christ Truth on human consciousness.
Claiming to have first healed herself and then others, and having learned from these experiences, Eddy felt anyone could perceive what she called “the Kingdom of Heaven” or spiritual reality on earth. For her, this healing method was based on scientific principles and could be taught to others. This positive rule of healing, she taught, resulted from a new understanding of God as infinite Spirit beyond the limitations of the material senses.
Some of Marry Baker Eddy noted Quotes (Wisdom):
“Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.”
“Health is not a condition of matter, but of Mind.”
“Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind’s faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which stemma to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity /namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.”
“Give up the belief that mind is, even temporarily, compressed within the skull, and you will quickly become more manly or womanly. You will understand yourself and your Maker better than before.”
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