Eddy, Mary Baker (1821-1910), was an American religious thinker and leader. She founded the Christian Science denomination—the Church of Christ, Scientist—in 1879. She developed a theology of spiritual healing, which remains controversial but continues to influence Christianity. See Christian Scientists.
Eddy, whose maiden name was Mary Morse Baker, was born on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire, on July 16, 1821. In her youth, she rebelled against the New England Puritan idea of a harsh and unforgiving God. But her religious upbringing also gave her a deep love of the Bible.
Eddy’s personal misfortunes increased her religious questioning. In 1844, her first husband died after less than a year of marriage. She married Daniel Patterson in 1853. During much of this time, she was in poor health, and she began to investigate methods of healing. In 1862, she met Phineas Quimby, who claimed to relieve people of their ailments through what today would be called the power of suggestion. Her contact with Quimby reinforced her own growing conviction that disease had a mental, rather than a physical, cause. But Eddy eventually broke with Quimby, insisting that true healing came from God’s power acting on, not through, the human mind.
Eddy gained this conviction in 1866, when she recovered from an injury while reading about one of Jesus’s healings in the Gospels. For the next nine years, she studied the Bible, practiced and taught healing, and wrote. In 1875, she published the “textbook” of Christian Science, ultimately named Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. In it, Eddy stated that disease and other evils result from the human mind’s ignorance of our relationship to God. She taught that through Christian discipleship, people can follow Jesus’s command that His followers practice spiritual healing. Eddy saw Jesus’s healing works and Resurrection as demonstrating that the true nature of reality is spiritual, not bound by material limits.
Eddy devoted the rest of her long life to advancing what she saw as her discovery of the “science,” or underlying spiritual laws, that explain the events in the Bible and show their continuing meaning. Eddy’s second marriage ended in divorce in 1873, and she married Asa G. Eddy in 1877.
In 1892, Eddy reorganized the Christian Science church into its present form as The Mother Church in Boston and its branch churches, now in over 60 countries. In 1908, she founded the daily newspaper The Christian Science Monitor as a crucial link between her church and the world. She died on Dec. 3, 1910.
