Childhood

"One day, when my cousin, Mehitable Huntoon, was visiting us, and I sat in a little chair by her side, in the same room with grandmother, ... the call again came, so loud that Mehitable heard it, though I had ceased to notice it. Greatly surprised, my cousin turned to me and said, 'Your mother is calling you!' Finally, after speaking with her mother, the child Mary responded to the voice with the phrase from Samuel 'Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.' When the call came again I did answer, in the words of Samuel, but never again to the material senses was that mysterious call repeated."

"My mother, as she bathed my burning temples, bade me lean on God's love, which would give me rest if I went to Him in prayer, as I was wont to do, seeking His guidance. I prayed; and a soft glow of ineffable joy came over me. The fever was gone and I rose and dressed myself in a normal condition of health. Mother saw this and was glad. The physician marveled; and the "horrible decree" of Predestination ... as John Calvin rightly called his own tenet ... forever lost its power over me."

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, 155:15)

I am now firmly convinced, having weighed all the evidence I could find in published and archival sources, that Mrs. Eddy's most famous biographer-critics -- Peabody, Milmine, Dakin, Bates and Dittemore and Gardner -- have flouted the evidence and shown willful bias in accusing Mrs. Eddy of owing her theory of healing to Quimby and of plagiarizing his unpublished work.

The hypnotizer employs one error to destroy another. If he heals sickness through a belief, and a belief originally caused the sickness, it is a case of the greater error overcoming the lesser. This greater error thereafter occupies the ground, leaving the case worse than before it was grasped by the stronger error. (S&H 104:22-28)

We cannot peacefully agree as to her motives, therefore her character must remain crooked to some of us and straight to the others. No matter, she is interesting enough without an amicable agreement. In several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived and the most extraordinary. The same may be said of her career, and the same may be said of its chief result...Whether she took it or invented it, it was...materially...a sawdust mine when she got it, and she has turned it into a Klondike; its spiritual dock had next to no custom, if any at all: from it she has launched a world-religion which has now six hundred and sixty-three churches, and she charters a new one every four days. When we do not know a person...and also when we do...we have to judge the size and nature of his achievements as compared with the achievements of others in his special line of business...there is no other way. Measured by this standard, it is thirteen hundred years since the world has produced anyone who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy's waistbelt.

I was at this period interested a good deal in mental healing, and had been treated for neurasthenia with gratifying results. Like most of the world, I had assumed, from his published articles, that he condemned Christian Science and its related practices out of hand. When I confessed, rather reluctantly, one day, the benefit I had received, he surprised me by answering:"Of course you have been benefited. Christian Science is humanity's boon. Mother Eddy deserves a place in the Trinity as much as any member of it. She has organized and made available a healing principle that for two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest kind of guesswork. She is the benefactor of the age."

It seemed strange, at the time, to hear him speak in this way concerning a practice of which he was generally regarded as the chief public antagonist. It was another angle of his many-sided character.

• 1855-1860 - Hall's Brook Road, North Groton, New Hampshire
• 1860-1862 - Stinson Lake Road, Rumney, New Hampshire
• 1865-1866 - 23 Paradise Road, Swampscott, Massachusetts
• 1868,1870 - 277 Main Street, Amesbury, Massachusetts
• 1868-1870 - 133 Central Street, Stoughton, Massachusetts
• 1875-1882 - 12 Broad Street, Lynn, Massachusetts
• 1889-1892 - 62 North State Street, Concord, New Hampshire
• 1908-1910 - 400 Beacon Street, Dupee Estate-Mary Baker Eddy Home, Chestnut Hill, Newton, Massachusetts.

• A well footnoted (scholarly) biography which eventually became the church-authorized biography of Eddy is Robert Peel's trilogy Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (ISBN 0030575559), Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (ISBN 0875101186), and Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (ISBN 003021081X). (1966—1971)
• A more recent single volume is another originally independent, but now church-authorized and still controversial, 1999 work by a non-Christian Scientist, Gillian Gill (ISBN 0-7382-0227-4). Gill's work included a review of numerous other Eddy biographies over the years. She also uncovered evidence that Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, from whom critics have long-claimed Eddy stole all her ideas, could not possibly have been the "author" of the so-called "Quimby Manuscripts" as Horatio Dressor, the son of two of Quimby's students, claimed. Gill wrote that Quimby's actual manuscripts, in his own almost illegible handwriting, indicated that for all intents and purposes Quimby was functionally illiterate and could not write a single cogent English paragraph let alone the manuscripts. She also uncovered materials that demonstrated that Dresser intentionally left out all manuscripts that would have demonstrated the independence of Eddy's ideas from Quimby's.
• See also Stephen Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone, Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism, (ISBN 0-253-34673-8) for a new account of her founding the church and relations to critics such as Mark Twain. (Indiana University Press: 2006)
• Mary Baker Eddy, Speaking for Herself (ISBN 0-87952-275-5)
• Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1993) began as a famous magazine series 1907—08 and critical book in 1909.
• Doris and Moris Grekel also wrote three-part non church-authorized biography on Eddy, The Discovery of the Science of Man: (1821—1888), (ISBN 1-893107-23-X), The Founding of Christian Science: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy 1888—1900, (ISBN 1-893107-24-8), and The Forever Leader: (1901—1910) (ISBN 0-9645803-8-1). This biography was aimed at serious students of Christian Science as opposed to the general public.
• Former Church treasurer and clerk, John V. Dittemore teamed up with Ernest Sutherland Bates, in 1932, to write a biography, Mary Baker Eddy - The Truth and the Tradition. Most of the prose was written by Bates and Dittemore would later distance himself from the book. It has some genuinely distinct information including a list of Eddy's students taught at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
• The famous Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig wrote a biography "The Mental Healers: Mesmer, Freud, Mary Baker Eddy." Original in German: "Die Heilung durch den Geist: Mesmer, Freud, Mary Baker Eddy." Zweig based his book solely on the Milmine biography (above) and after consultation with Sigmund Freud, concluded that Eddy was a madwoman. He never read her seminal work "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" although it was available in German. Zweig's widow in a biography stated that Zweig had regretted his version of Eddy. A 1998 German reprinting of the book contains an afterword with corrections to Zweig's presentation.
• Martin Gardner, The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy, Prometheus Books, 1993.

• Science And Health, With Key To The Scriptures - 1875, revised through 1910
• Miscellaneous Writings
• Retrospection and Introspection
• Unity of Good
• Pulpit and Press
• Rudimental Divine Science
• No and Yes
• Christian Science versus Pantheism
• Message to The Mother Church, 1900
• Message to The Mother Church, 1901
• Message to The Mother Church, 1902
• Christian Healing
• The People's Idea of God
• The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany
• The Manual of The Mother Church