The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science

''The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science'' (1909) is a highly critical account of the life of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and the early history of the Christian Science church in 19th-century New England. It was published as a book in November 1909 in New York by Doubleday, Page & Company. Bohlke 1982, 288–294. Jewell and Stout 2014, 97. The original byline was that of a journalist, Georgine Milmine, but a 1993 printing of the book declared that novelist Willa Cather was the principal author; however, this assessment has been questioned by more recent scholarship which again identifies Milmine as the primary author, although Cather and others did significant editing. Squires 2013, 328–348. Cather herself usually wrote that she did nothing more than standard copy-editing, but sometimes that she was the primary author.

One of the first major examinations of Eddy's life and work, along with Sibyl Wilbur's articles in ''Human Life'' magazine, the material initially appeared in ''McClure's'' magazine in 14 installments between January 1907 and June 1908, Milmine 1907–1908. when Eddy was 85 years old, preceded in December 1906 by a six-page editorial in which ''McClure's'' announced the series as "probably as near absolute accuracy as history ever gets". In the early 20th century, Christian Science became the fastest growing religion in America, and in the view of ''McClure's'', Eddy was the most powerful woman in the country. The ''McClure's'' eyewitness accounts and affidavits became key primary sources for many accounts of Eddy and the church's early history.

The magazine's publisher and editor-in-chief, S. S. McClure, assigned three writers to work on the articles in addition to Cather and Milmine: William Henry Irwin, ''McClure's'' managing editor; and staff writers Burton J. Hendrick and Mark Sullivan. Briefly, the famed journalist Ida Tarbell was assigned to the project but left the magazine before it started. Gill 1998, 565; more in Sergeant 1953, 54–56, and Lyon 1963, 299. The 1909 book was republished by Baker Book House in 1971 after its copyright had expired, and again in 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press, this time naming both Cather and Milmine as authors. David Stouck, in his introduction to the University of Nebraska Press edition, wrote that Cather's portrayal of Eddy "contains some of the finest portrait sketches and reflections on human nature that Willa Cather would ever write". Stouck 1993a, xviii.

A review in ''The New York Times'' wrote in 1910 that the book's evidence against "Eddyism" was "unanswerable and conclusive". However, more recent scholarship has questioned the accuracy and trustworthiness of the series and book. In 2017, scholar L. Ashley Squires wrote: "Christian Science remains poorly understood by the broader scholarly community and the public as a whole. One need only look to the frustratingly enduring usage of the 1907 ''McClure’s'' biography as an authoritative source ... for evidence of scholarly ignorance."

Christian Science

Eddy and 26 followers founded the Christian Science church in 1879 in Boston, Massachusetts, following the publication of her book '' Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures'' in 1875. In her book, Eddy outlined what she felt was the "law" or "Science" of God, which she named Christian Science. Eddy believed Christian Science was provable through demonstration, specifically of healing through prayer. She did not believe that her ideas were new however, instead, the church sought to "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing" which she believed that Jesus had taught.

Christian Science at the time was the fastest growing religion in the United States. The church had 27 members in 1879, and 65,717 in 1906 when ''McClure's'' began its research. In 1890 there were just seven Christian Science churches in the US; by 1910, a few years after the ''McClure's'' article, there were 1,104. Construction of the Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was completed in Boston in December 1894, and in 1906 the Mother Church Extension, rising 224 ft and accommodating nearly 5,000, was built at a cost of $2 million (equivalent to $ million in ), donated by Christian Scientists around the world. Art historian Paul Ivey writes that, for many, the building "visibly declared that Christian Science had, indeed, arrived as a major force in American religious life". The rapid rise of Christian Science as a religious movement created a significant backlash, and although not all media was antagonistic towards Eddy and Christian Scientists many were, most notably The New York ''World'' and ''McClure's''.

Publication

''McClure's'' articles

The ''McClure's'' articles were published in 14 installments between January 1907 and June 1908, under Georgine Milmine's byline, as "Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science". The series was preceded by a seven-page editorial in December 1906, outlining the difficulties of the investigation and explaining why it was being published. The editorial printed a picture of an older women, which it claimed was Eddy, stating that " her photographs taken in later years have been greatly retouched" and that Eddy was more aged than her followers were led to believe. However, this claim got the series off to a rough start when it was found out that the picture was actually an elderly lady living in Brooklyn unrelated to Eddy. Brisbane 1930, 16.

The article attacked Christian Science, referring to it as a cult based on a "hazy and obscure" book, it continued: "A church which has doubled its membership in five years, which draws its believers mostly from the rich and respectable ... and which has just paid for the most costly church building in New England—to the worldly, this is no longer a joke... In 1875 no one living outside of two or three back streets of Lynn had heard of Christian Science. Now, the very name is a catch phrase. In those early days the leader and teacher paid out half of her ten dollars a week to hire a hall, patching out the rest of her living with precarious fees as an instructor in mental healing; now, she is one of the richest women in the United States. She is more than that—she is the most powerful American woman." ''McClure's'', December 1906, 211. The editorial preemptively accused Christian Scientists of opposition to the work: "The Christian Science mind is unfriendly to independent investigation. It presupposes that anything even slightly unfavorable to Mrs. Eddy or to Christian Science is deliberate falsehood."

Synopsis

The book's criticism of Eddy is considerable. According to Stuart Knee: "Eddy is, by turns, guilty of vanity, ignorance, theft, vengefulness, compulsions, witchcraft, mesmerism and the evil eye." Knee 1994, 125. The authors of the series produced witness statements from Eddy's childhood in Bow, New Hampshire, alleging that she engaged in repeated fainting spells to gain attention, particularly from her father, and that, as an adult, she developed a habit of appearing to be seriously ill only to recover quickly. Biographer Gillian Gill disagreed that the book offers an accurate portrayal of Eddy; she argued, for example, that the story of Eddy having "fits" as a child to get her own way, or the way ''McClure's'' described them, was "invented more or less out of whole cloth" by ''McClure's'' journalist Burton Hendrick, and that the accounts of Eddy as "hysterical" were misogynist. Gill 2000. She wrote: "there is no solid evidence at all for Milmine’s melodramatic description of the young Mary Baker repeatedly falling on the floor in hysterical catatonic fits. No family member, no close friend makes any mention of such fits, either when she was young or later. When questioned on the subject in the 1900s, those few remaining contemporaries who had been familiar with the Baker family denied that Mary had shown any such abnormal behavior."

The articles offer examples of Eddy's "marital, maternal, and domestic inadequacies." Most notably the loss of her son: Eddy was widowed when she was 22 years old and pregnant, after which she returned to live in her father's home. Her son was raised there for the first few years of his life, looked after by domestic staff because of Eddy's poor health. ''McClure's'' alleges that she allowed him to be adopted when he was four. According to Eddy, she was unable to prevent the adoption. Women in the United States at the time could not be their own children's guardians, per the legal doctrine of coverture.

Her next two marriages, lifelong poor health, and the numerous legal actions in which she was involved, are examined in detail—including lawsuits she supposedly initiated against her students; a criminal case in which her husband Asa Eddy was arrested for murdering one of them (Asa Eddy was released when it was found the student had faked his death); her belief that her former students killed Asa Eddy by using "mental malpractice"; and her legal adoption of a 41-year-old student and former homeopath when she was 67. The authors allege that Eddy's major work, '' Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures'', which became Christian Science's main religious text, borrowed heavily from the work of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a New England faith healer. Quimby had treated Eddy in the years before his death and According to ''McClure's'' had given her some of his unpublished notes. The series and book discuss the alleged rewrites of ''Science and Health'' by her editor James Henry Wiggin, who served as a proofreader of the book from the 16th edition in 1886 until the 50th in 1891, including the 22 editions that appeared between 1886 and 1888.

Authorship

Initial research and Georgine Milmine's involvement

Born in Ontario, Canada, Georgine Milmine Welles, who went by her maiden name Georgine Milmine, had worked for the ''Syracuse Herald'' as a proofreader and had done some journalistic work. She wanted to write a 12-part monthly series on famous women in American, including Eddy, and had gone to Eddy's home to ask for an interview but was denied. She then went to Josephine Woodbury and Frederick Peabody, fierce critics of Eddy, and Peabody especially became extremely influential to Milmine's research and her views of Eddy; Gill 1998, 564; Peel 1977, 261; McNeil 2020, 220-221, 225. and Peabody was actually hired later on by ''McClure's'' to collect affidavits. Gill 1998, 565. For a number of years she collected material about Eddy for years—newspaper articles from the 1880s, court records, and a first edition of ''Science and Health'', all of which were hard to obtain—but lacked the resources to check and write it up herself, so she sold it to ''McClure's''. There is documented evidence that a number of Milmine's sources were paid to give their testimony. Gill 1998, 569.

S. S. McClure assigned five writers to the story: Milmine, Willa Cather, Burton J. Hendrick, political columnist Mark Sullivan, and William Henry Irwin. When the series was suggested, the journalist Ida Tarbell was also involved, but she left before the series began and had "little or nothing" to do with it. Cather had recently started working at ''McClure's'' as a fiction editor in 1906 when she was 32 years; she worked there until 1912, for most of the time as managing editor. Cather reportedly spent from December 1906 until May 1908 in Boston, checking the sources and writing up the research. Bohlke 1982, 289. The journalist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant