CHAPTER CV
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
(Founded 1883)
Christian Science was founded in 1883. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder, was born in 1821 at Bow, New Hampshire, U. S. A. and died in 1910. Having suffered greatly all her life from neurasthenia and hysteria she developed mediumship at an early age. Spiritistic sessions further revealed her psychic gifts but it is more than likely that her early years of experimental psychic research exposed her, in after years, to the horrors of what she later described as " Malicious Animal Magnetism ", familiarly referred to by her students as M. A. M. At the age of 22, she married George Washington Glover, a Freemason and Oddfellow, who took her to live at Charleston, South Carolina, six months later. However he contracted yellow fever while at Wilmington where he died in June 1844. In 1853, she married Daniel Patterson, a medical practitioner, from whom she was later separated. In October 1862 she applied for medical assistance to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (d. 1866) a healer, who had many marvellous cures to his credit. His medical system was based on an understanding of the scientific laws governing the use of hypnotism, mesmerism and suggestion. It is claimed that she derived her system from him. Her book Science and Health was first published in 1875. In 1877 she married Asa Gilbert Eddy who left her a widow in 1882. In 1881, she founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston and two years later, when the movement was well established, started publishing the Christian Science Journal. On June 13, 1888, the National Christian Science Association held its second annual meeting at Central Music Hall, Chicago. This had been organized as well as advertised by George B. Day, Pastor of the First Church of Christ Scientists, Chicago, and the speech delivered by Mrs. Eddy on the second day of this session was acclaimed by her 4,000 listeners as an inspired oration. In view of the extraordinary pitch of enthusiasm attained by her audience and knowing the practice of " charging" public rooms or halls one is led to ask oneself the question as to whether the assembly hall had been specially "charged" for that particular meeting. Whether Mrs. Eddy herself, like the Sybils of ancient times, was also " inspired" by outside hypnotic influence is another hypothesis to conjure with. From then on, Mrs. Eddy's religious future was assured. Under her leadership suggestion became indeed the foundation of a religion, a religion in which psychic force, operating under suggestion, accomplishes definite physical results. Mrs. Eddy's acquaintance with Mrs. Augusta Stetson, another Christian Science leader, had already taken place for, according to E. F. Dakin, author of Mrs. Eddy {page 178) "it was at a meeting in a fashionable home on Monument Hill in Charleston that she first met Augusta Stetson, in 1884... She (Mrs. Stetson) had been born of old Puritan stock in Waldoboro, Maine, about 1842. In after life she shrouded her past in mystery, refused -to tell her age, and the town records were eventually burned. She grew up as one of five children in a house which her father, Peabody Simmons, carpenter, built with his own hands. When the family moved to another Maine town, Damariscotta, Augusta was organist there in the Methodist church and a singer in the choir. At 24 she married a ship-builder, Frederick Stetson, who was partially an invalid as a result of imprisonment in Libby Prison during the Civil War. As his wife, she went to England where he secured employment with a British shipbuilding firm. Later, he was sent to Bombay, and here she had an opportunity to delve into a subject in which she had an instinctive interest — the oriental philosophies. In these philosophies affirmation and denial play an important role, and a pantheistic God is postulated — a God who is the Universe, whose mind is All, and of whose mind matter, like force, is but one manifestation or expression in the midst of many. " Mrs. Stetson started healing and teaching Mrs. Eddy's system in New York in 1886, later resigning her connection with the Christian Science church in 1909. One can almost describe this system as emerging clearly out of the realm of occultism, a kind of suggestion or auto-suggestion, whereby practical beneficial results may be induced in a patient by the application of certain occult laws to their personal medical requirements. Mrs. Eddy's dogma is summed up by Hudson in the following words : " Matter has no existence. Our bodies are composed of matter, therefore our bodies have no existence. " It follows of course that disease cannot exist in a non-existent body. " 1 However, regardless of this paradox and the various opinions hitherto expressed about Christian Science, we recognize, while admitting the efficacy of Mrs. Eddy's use of the force of beneficent animal magnetism, that her personal fear of the action of Malicious Animal Magnetism, so derided by her theological adversaries, is logical and founded. These forces operate on sound scientific lines and those who can use the power of suggestion to gain ascendency over a sick person may use it again later for other motives. The danger of such misapplication is not one to be disregarded in calling in a healer, whatever Mrs. Eddy's detractors may say ! That danger is real and every student of the occult knows it. The movement has become popular and has a following among people of wealth who seem to become the easy prey of occultists and charlatans. The following extract from the Daily Telegraph of Decr. 18, 1930, illustrates this ;
HARMFUL DEMONSTRATIONS
A warning against the dangers of hypnotism in public has been issued by the Academy of Medicine as the result of an investigation by a special committee. This was set up at the request of the Council of the Meuse Department, which suggested that public experiments in hypnotism should be stopped. The academy declares that such demonstrations are bound to have a harmful influence. They are likely to excite undesirable curiosity, and, in the case of many sensitive people, to give rise to nervous and psychological trouble. Another grave criticism is tha t they may lead young people to believe tha t the exercise of hypnotism may enable them to influence the will and actions of those with whom they come into contact— " which, " asserts the report, " is contrary to the truth. " A resolution passed by the academy recommends the forbidding of such displays throughout the country
1. Hudson, The Law of Psychic Phenomena, p. 157.
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