Eddy's Wealth

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Mary Baker Eddy eventually left Boston and retired to Concord, visiting the centre of Christian Science in Boston only another four times in her life, although still maintaining a strong grip on the movement and its organization to the end of her life.

She founded a college and a newspaper and lectured continuously until she died of pneumonia in 1910. Like Mesmer, she managed to accumulate a fortune from her religious healing work. Membership of the Christian Science movement rose to a peak in the 1930s with an estimated 300,000 members. Since then membership has drastically fallen as Christian Science has had to compete in the marketplace with other sects.

Although the name of Christ appears in the movement's title, Eddy did write: 'If there had never existed such a Galilean prophet (Jesus) it would make no difference to me.' {Science and Health). And the movement's denial of the role of the physician goes against the use of the physician advocated in the Bible, specifically in Ecclesiastes:

'The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them .... Give place to the physician, for the Lord hath created him; let him not go from thee, for thou hast need of him. There is a time when in their hands there is good success.'

It is difficult to assess the Christian Science movement. There is little attention to charity, no interest in any supernatural power, and health and wealth are promised to its followers, who are and were mainly middle class. Christian Science could happily deny the reality of matter but did not so easily deny the value of money.

At the end of her life, Eddy had become a wealthy woman, with a fortune estimated at upwards of four million dollars. To take a short course at her 'metaphysical college' cost 300 dollars alone.

The Christian Science movement's views on healing can appear to be inconsistent. Some members will employ the use of dentists, doctors, opticians and doctors, if need be. Indeed, Eddy herself used drugs, especially morphine to dull pain, on numerous occasions towards the end of her life.

Beyond this, there are ethical problems with the philosophy of the group. Treating all pain as delusional instead of as a warning sign that demands enquiry into the cause is obviously foolish, as is risking the aggravation of a depression in a patient, brought about by telling him or her that his or her illness is both delusional and equivalent to sin and, by extension, the fault of the patient.

For instance, Eddy denied that food promulgated life-she was given to making remarks such as 'we have no evidence of food sustaining life, except false evidence'.

Eddy's teaching on the unreality of matter, sin and suffering seems to conflict with the Biblical doctrines of the Creation, Fall and Redemption. It should also be remembered that Jesus himself said no word that could reasonably be interpreted as hostile to the physical medicine of his time.

Christian Science also has its own individual slant on healing, although the movement is not primarily curative in aim. The distinction between the Christian Scientist and that of the standard faith healer on the matter of healing is that, while the latter holds that pain and disease are actually illusions of the imagination, the faith healer admits their existence but affirms the possibility of their removal by non-scientific means.

Eddy's personal philosophy could be strange. On the health of infants, she advises: "The condition of the stomach, bowels, food, clothing, etc, is of no serious importance to your child.' The Christian Scientist is happy if his patient knows little or nothing, because 'a patient thoroughly booked in on medical theories has less sense of the divine power, and is more difficult to heal through Mind, than an aboriginal Indian who never bowed the knee to the Baal of civilization.'

As well as reality and food, the idea that procreation was what produced life came in for some heavy criticism: 'Until it is learned that generation rests on no sexual basis, let marriage continue .... The suggestion that life germinates in eggs is shown by divine metaphysics to be a mistake' (quoted in Godwin).

Some passages of Christian Science are just plain confused: 'The nothingness of nothing is plain; but we need to understand that error is nothing, and that its nothingness is not saved, but must be demonstrated in order to prove the somethingness ... of Truth.'

She claimed to have administered one cure by preaching to a horse. Perhaps it should be said that to mock the ideas of Christian Science is taking an easy target. We should remember that Eddy's time was not our own before we rash to judge her approach to healing. It would be the turn of the century before Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung stated that certain illnesses could reside in the unconscious mind.