Mary Baker Eddy
The Rise and Fall of Mary Baker Eddy
 Mary
Baker eddy was born Mary Morse Baker on a farm in Bow, NH on
07/16/1821. Mary was the youngest of six children. Her
parents, Mark and Abigail Baker, were very religious and instilled
religion on their children. Mary was always a devoted Bible reader.
The
Baker family moved to Sanbornton (now named Tilton NH) when Mary was 14
years of age. Mary was not well as she suffered from poor
health so she was often home schooled by her older brother, Albert,
who graduated from Dartmouth College.
At
the age of 22, Mary Baker Eddy married George Washington Glover who has a
construction business in South Carolina. She left her family
to be with her husband in South Carolina. He was 11 years her
senior. Mary soon found herself homeless and broke when George
passed away from yellow fever 6 months after they were married. She moved back to the family home in NH and soon discovered she was
pregnant with her 1st child. George Glover Jr. was born on
09/12/1844.
During
the years to follow, Mary’s health became worse as she struggled to
get through each day. The Baker family had some friends of
theirs from a neighboring town watch after baby George.
Mary
Baker Eddy married Daniel Patterson in 1853 on the condition that he was to
provide a home for little George. Her son was still being
cared for by Mahala and Russell Cheney. One day, the Cheney
family decided to move west and they took little George with then.
Little did Mary know that it would be another 20 years before she
was see her son again.
Daniel
purchased part ownership of a saw mill that was on their property to
support his bed ridden wife but by 1860, the saw mill and their home
were foreclosed on so they rented a home in Rumney.
A
year or two later, the Patterson’s found themselves in the heart of
Swampscott, Mass. which was the center of a shoe manufacturing
company.
During
the 1940’s through the 1960’s, Mary searched desperately for answers
to her recovery. She tried everything from homeopathy to hydropathy. She even saw several people who called themselves
healers. But nothing she did seemed to improve her health at
all. She tried being treated by Phineas P. Quimby of Maine who
used religion as a part of his healing. But she found out that
her health only improved she a short period of time.
All
of these different healing practices gave Mary the idea of spiritual
discovery and how she could use it to make her health improve. This spiritual discovery would be discovered by Mary and would be
called Christian Science.
In
February of 1866, Mary received serious internal injuries when she
fell on an icy sidewalk near her home. The next day, her
doctor brought her home on a sleigh and carried her up to her second
floor apartment where he placed her on a cot near the stove in the
kitchen so she could get some heat. The doctor informed her
close friends that she will probably not recover. Her husband
was away at the time and a telegraph was sent for him to return home
right away. Her minister was even called in. But after three
days, there were no signs of improvement in her health.
A
few days later, Mary was inspired by an account of one of Jesus’
healings. Mary had a spiritual encounter and was able to get
up from her cot and walk across the room with no help. Her
friends were shocked at what they were seeing. During the next
few months, Mary’s health improved.
A
few months later her husband, Daniel, deserted leaving her alone. She would remain unmarried for the next 10 years after being left by
Daniel; she resorted back to her 1st husband’s name, Glover. She would move from rented room to rented room during tough times
but she never gave up the spiritual power of healing.
By
this time, Mary Baker Eddy was at the age of 45, alone and frail. But
despite her downfalls, Mary spent the next several years healing
people with the power of prayer. Some of the people she healed
were a child she met on the beach who was crippled at birth, a woman
who had a dislocated hip, cancer patients and deaf patients. There are just a few of the people whose lives were touched by Mary
and her prayers.
Mary
started to search for the link between her healings and the
spiritual laws of God. She began writing hundreds of pages of
notes on her thinking and findings. These pages would later be
turned into classrooms courses, sermons and published works.
In
the beginning, Mary Baker Eddy named her newly founded encounter Moral Science
with a strong influence on the mental aspect of her healings but
later changed the name to Christian Science with the strong
influence now being on Christianity.
Mary
wrote:
I named it Christian, because it is compassionate, helpful, and
spiritual. God I called immortal Mind. That which sins, suffers, and
dies, I named mortal mind. The physical senses, or sensuous nature,
I called error and shadow. Soul I denominated substance, because
Soul alone is truly substantial. God I characterized as individual
entity, but His corporeality I denied. The real I claimed as
eternal; and its antipodes, or the temporal, I described as unreal.
Spirit I called the reality; and matter, the unreality.
Healing physical sickness is … only the bugle-call to thought
and action, in the higher range of infinite goodness. The emphatic
purpose of Christian Science is the healing of sin; and this task,
sometimes, may be harder than the cure of disease; because, while
mortals love to sin, they do not love to be sick.
After
her recovery, Mary decided to start teach the power of healing and
prayer to others. In 1872, Mary decided to out her teachings
aside and devote the next 3 years to writing a textbook on Christian
Science. Her class load was very sought after. The book
was titled Science and Health. Later reprints were titled
Science and Health with Keys to the Scripture.
Around
the time of the publication of her 1st book, Mary purchased a home
in Lynn, Mass. She resumed her teaching classes in the living
room of her home. She had students who would become some of
her best workers. One of them was Asa Gilbert Eddy. Asa
opened an office and became the first person to advertise as a
Christian Scientist.
Mary
Baker Eddy married Asa a year later. He was a great support to her and
her teachings. He researched copywriting laws to protect her
work and eventually he became her publisher. The couple moved
to Boston, but shortly after the move Mary found herself alone once
again when Asa passed away
In
the late 1870’s and 1880’s, Mary became a well known public speaker
and was highly sought after. She started her speeches in small
living rooms with just a few people and it expanded to large halls
with thousands of people.
She
opened her charted college named Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
She had classrooms full of students and eventually had teachers go
overseas to teach to others. She closed the school in 1889
because she wanted to pursue her dream of opening a church.
That dream came true in 1894 when she held her first service at The
Mother Church in Boston.
Eight
years later, Mary had to expand her church to accommodate all the
people attending her services on Sunday.
Mary
Baker Eddy passed away on December 03, 1910 and her legacy still lives on today.
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