The Writing Of Science and Health

By: Robert Townsend Warneck
Christian Science Sentinel

When Mary Baker Eddy was a young girl, her friends asked her what she was going to do when she grew up. She replied, “Write a book.” Considering the restrictions on women in the 1820's, reaching such a goal was highly unlikely.

And that this book turned out to be an authoritative theological and scientific publication, as well as a treatise on healing, containing scientific, spiritual laws of harmony and wholeness, made her achievement all the more remarkable.

Mrs. Eddy began writing Science and Health in 1872, when she was 50 years old.

For most of her life prior to this, she’d been struggling against chronic illness and invalidism. She’d began searching for a reliable scientific healthcare system, not just for herself, but for others, too.

In 1857 she promised God that if He would restore her health, she would devote the rest of her life “to helping sick and suffering humanity.” She dad tried dietetics, studied allopathy, practiced homeopathy, and even investigated hydropathy ( a form of water therapy ) and mesmerism. None of these proved a lasting cure.

Remembering her Puritan upbringing in the Congregational Church, her desire to know God and to practice Christian principles had always been a priority in Mrs. Eddie’s life. So along with her ongoing medical researches, she was constantly studying the Bible.

And it was to the Scriptures that she turned in February, 1866, when she suffered a life-threatening injury as the result of a fall.

After contemplating two accounts of Jesus’ healings, she found herself suddenly well. With this cure came the divine revelation that life was of God, solely spiritual and not physical nor subject to so-called laws of matter.

At this point she dedicated herself to understanding what had brought about her healing and revelation. She began studying the Bible more intensively than ever before and by healing others by prayer alone.

At the end of May, 1868, while living in Amesbury, Massachusetts, Mrs. Eddy (then Glover) was called by telegram to New Hampshire to help a woman who was dying of pneumonia. Minutes after she arrived , Mrs. Eddy healed the woman. One of the astonished physicians, a Dr. Davis, asked her what she had done. She replied that God had done it. He said to her, “Why don’t you write it in a book, publish it, and give it to the world?”

Upon her return to Amesbury, she opened her Bible, at random, to Jeremiah 30:2.

“Thus speaketh the Lord of Israel, saying, Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book.”

That she acted on this promptly is clear from letters. Glover wrote almost exactly one year later, when she told her friend: “I have just sent a work to the press for publication entitled—Science of Soul....I have written this and notes on the entire book of Genesis within the last year.....”

At this time she was also working on a class-book for teaching students; this was later included in Science and Health as the chapter “Recapitulation.”

From 1869 through 1871, Mrs. Glover devoted her time to teaching and healing.

When a few of her students began falling away----one was even attacking her publicly through the press—because they felt her standards were too high and the principles of Christian healing too impractical, she prayed for weeks to know what to do. She turned daily to the Bible for an answer, but didn’t receive any.

She wrote about this experience , “But when I grew to receiving it I opened again and the first verse I looked at was Isaiah 30:8.” This verse reads, “Now go, write it, before them in a table, and note it in a book, that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever.”

In March 1872, she held one more class and then stopped teaching to devote the next three years to writing Science and Health.

Those three years were some of the most difficult in her life. Samuel P. Bancroft, a student of hers during this period, has written “....Mrs. Eddy secluded herself..... Depriving herself of all but the bare necessities of life as she wrote. I have known her when nearly crushed with sorrow, but she wrote on. I have known her when friend after friend deserted her, but she wrote on. I have seen student after student bring ridicule and reproach upon her, but still she wrote on.

She told one man: “I moved nine times while writing the book and (a racking) chair was the only furniture and about all I possessed. My writing desk was simply a piece of book cover cardboard. There was no good reason for my moving except the antagonism that was felt to the ideas, and to me for voicing them..”

And to Irving Tomlinson, one of her household staff during her final years, she said,”It seemed as though the more the love of God blessed me, the more was the wrath of man visited upon me.” In spite of all of these obstacles, she persisted in her writing, Science and Health was finally published in October, 1875.

Over the next 35 years, Mrs. Eddy continually worked on her book. Science and Health went through six major revisions and countless minor ones. She felt impelled to do this as her own understanding of Christian Science grew.

To her, the book is the voice of Truth to this age, and contains the full statement of Christian Science....” She once write, “I should blush to write of ‘Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures’ as I have, were it of human origin, and were I, apart from God, its author. But as I was only a scribe echoing the harmonies of heaven in divine metaphysics, I cannot be super-modest in my estimate of the Christian Science textbook.”

Considering her estimate of the book, it’s not difficult to understand why Mrs. Eddy devoted so much of her life after first publishing Science and Health not only to making sure that its message was stated as clearly as possible, but to also overseeing the details of its marketing, promotion, and sales.

For her, Science and Health was the centerpiece of all she had accomplished in founding Christian Science. She established the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879. and in 1895, she made Science and Health, along with the Bible, the pastor of her Church.

She also started each of the Christian Science magazines----The Christian Science Journal (1883), the Christian Science Sentinel (1898), and the Herald of Christian Science (1903), and also a newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor (1908)—for the purpose of further sharing with humanity the Science contained in her textbook

All of the Church’s organizational activities and publications are intended to promote her book’s healing message.

Mrs. Eddy has written: “It was not myself, but the divine power of Truth and Love, infinitely above me, which dictated “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures’....It is too much to say that this book is leavening the whole lump of human thought?”

Source: Christian Science Sentinel
@ October 30, 2000, pages 10-12..

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