A. Bronson Alcott, Phineas Quimby, and Mary Baker Eddy

I am surprised at the many pages of Robert Peel's Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Discovery devoted to Amos Bronson Alcott and Phineas Quimby, and their association with Mary Patterson (as Mary Baker Eddy was then). And to learn that she had quite a few exchanges with Alcott, other than the exchange she records on page 5 of Pulpit and Press. [Ed. Eddy writes that "his athletic mind, scholarly and serene, was the first to bedew my hope with a drop of humanity. When the press and pulpit cannonaded this book, he introduced himself to its author by saying, “I have come to comfort you.” (Pulpit and Press, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 5:14–18 his)]

Alcott was a noted philosopher and dreamer. His daughter Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, has recorded his impracticality as a father and provider. (He is worth a look on Google.) This period of Mary’s life could perhaps see her influencing and being influenced by the philosophers of that period.

There is quite a bit in Mrs. Eddy’s Prose Works about Phineas Quimby. More than I expected. There continue to be individuals who claim that Mrs. Eddy’s discovery was stolen from his work. The enquirer could learn the facts from what Mrs. Eddy has written, but Peel has given even more concrete evidence that Christian Science was indeed Mrs. Eddy’s own discovery.

Quimby was a symbol of Mrs. Eddy’s coming to terms with mesmerism as a would-be healing principle. Before her association with Mr. Quimby, Mrs. Eddy had practised homeopathy. She records in her textbook what she learned from it.

In last week’s Bible Lesson-Sermon ("Christian Science" – for Sunday 27^th June, 2021), we found the phrase “the next stately step.” It seems to me that what I have recorded above was a glimpse of those other stately steps Eddy took to reach the goal. The full sentence reads: "Metaphysics, as taught in Christian Science, is the next stately step beyond homœopathy" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 156:28–29).

(Maybe she didn’t consider the Alcott and Quimby phases to be stately steps!)

In the chapter The Great Discovery in her autobiographical work Retrospection and Introspection Eddy wrote: “During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon" (Retrospection and Introspection, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 24:7).” According to Peel’s Appendix A: Chronology (p. 293), that would take her back to the time of her brother Albert’s death, her marriage to George Glover and his premature death, and then her mother’s death. 

One could say perhaps that she was seeking the Science of Christianity. On page 177 Peel pops in this sentence: “There were more depths in traditional Christianity open only to experience, not to theory.” The history of her life tells us that she healed naturally, even as a child; she had actually demonstrated, so she searched for the theory or the Science of the healing.

Joyce Voysey

 

Spiritual strength and author Robert Peel

It is always interesting to know a little about the author of a book, so some detective work by Joyce Voysey has shed some light on Robert Peel, the author of our current study, Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Discovery.

Book Club followers will find the two images here of interest. They are from a much earlier book by Peel called Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1958 (7th printing 1969).

Some of Peel's own story is shared in his book Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age (1987) under the title Personal Statement. Here he tells of the profound changes that occurred in his family as a result of some specific healings. He also pinpoints "prejudice, misunderstanding, sloppiness, and ...deliberate falsification of the facts" in much writing on the subject of Christian Science. Surely this was a major motivation for him as a historian and Christian Scientist to write the trilogy we have currently begun to investigate. 

In a tender account of the healing of his ill father, Peel recalls: "I had never before seen such stark suffering, and my father's groans seemed to fill the house. But a few minutes later [after his mother had begun praying for him as she was learning to in her study of Christian Science, and because his father had specifically chosen this healing method] they [the groans] stopped, and a period of extraordinary quiet followed It was a quiet that seemed filled with perfect peace and assurance, a quiet within and without oneself, like nothing I had ever experienced before." His father soon fell asleep and "within an hour, he ... emerged free and fit, and called the hospital to cancel the [operation]. ... From that time on, the whole household atmosphere changed radically--greatly improved health ... a new spiritual strength and buoyancy, a new meaning to life" (p. 184).

This spiritual strength is significant. On pages 80-81 of Years of Discovery, Peel contrasts the "genteel ideal of womanhood" characterised by "watery self-effacement" prevalent in the nineteenth century when Mary Glover was newly widowed and a new mother, with "common sense and spiritual honesty", qualities which the young Mary put to use as she went forward to open a "infant school", described as "one of the first kindergartens in New England". Spiritual mettle was to sustain and forward the lives of both Anne Peel and Mary Baker Eddy, as well as Robert Peel himself.

Julie Swannell (research Joyce Voysey)

Benjamin Franklin - an influential thinker and doer

 

Robert Peel (Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Discovery) seems to want us to expand our education through looking up the famous and influential thinkers of history.

I am particularly interested in his reference to Benjamin Franklin. On page 10 he speaks of Mary’s mother’s Franklinesque maxims, his example being invoked when Mary picked up a pine cone in a neighbour’s woods and was rebuked by her mother for stealing.

Lower down in the page Peel speaks of Franklin’s prudential ethics and his anti-Puritanism.

Benjamin Franklin is a great hero of mine. Carl van Doren’s biography of him has been with me since I inherited it from my brother in 1943, and I think I have been greatly influenced by it on my path to being a thinker (with a small “t”). He was a great Thinker of his era, although he had very little schooling. He was also a printer, which made him interesting to our family of printers. And he produced a famous calendar with wise thoughts and “maxims” printed on its pages: Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Here are some of his “maxims”:

• Hide not your Talents, they for Use were made. What’s a Sun-Dial in the shade!
• Glass, China, and Reputation, are easily crack’d, and never well mended.
• What more valuable than Gold? Diamonds. Than Diamonds? Virtue.
• Haste makes Waste.
• Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.
• It is better to take many Injuries than to give one.

Benjamin Franklin's "Plan", made up of 13 Virtues, each with short descriptions, is famous:

1.      Temperance: Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation.

2.      Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.

3.      Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.

4.      Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.

5.      Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.

6.      Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.

7.      Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8.      Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9.      Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10.  Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.

11.  Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.

12.  Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

13.  Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Franklin was a Founding Father of the Unites States of America, printer, publisher, author, inventor and scientist, diplomat.

On page 13 Peel gives us reference points to the time of Mary’s birth and to great names of that time. Napoleon had just died, Beethoven had not yet composed his Ninth Symphony, Goethe had not yet written Wilhelm Meister. President Monroe gets a mention as do Castlereagh, Talleyrand, Metternich, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. All thinkers and doers who influenced the “news” of Mrs. Eddy time.

“Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.” Notes on Chapter Two – p. 315, note 12.

Joyce Voysey

Ed. In looking up the final quote in Joyce's piece today, I have finally devised a system for easily finding the correlation between the main text and Peel's excellent Notes. The idea came to place coloured sticky tabs numbered 1-7 for the chapters, and corresponding seven coloured tabs in the Notes section. Voila! 

A scientific endeavour

It seems to me that Robert Peel (Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Discovery) could have taken the phrase, “The time for thinkers have come” (see Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, vii: 18) as the basis of his recording of and commentary on Mary Baker Eddy’s life. He was a historian, and as I see it, he writes as a historian who is endeavouring to convince the literary and scientific world of the scientific nature of Mrs. Eddy’s discovery of Christian Science. 

The Science which she discovered was the Science of actual Being, the science of everything, really. She discovered that every true science is based on the divine Principle she proclaims to be God. Science and Health, the textbook of Christian Science, states, “All science is divine” (126:8 only). And, “There is no physical science, inasmuch as all truth proceeds from the divine Mind” (127:23-24).

I checked Science and Health on its use of the phrase, “the science of….” Here is what I found –

the science of -

• being
• celestial being
• Christ
• Christianity
• creation
• divine Mind
• Genesis
• God
• healing
• Life
• Love
• man
• mental healing
• mental practice
• Mind
• Mind-healing
• Soul
• Spirit
• spiritual reflection
• the Scriptures
• this proof

And Mrs. Eddy’s prose works other than Science and Health add a few more –

the science of -  

• Christian healing
• divine Love
• good
• man
• metaphysical healing
• omnipotence
• physical laws
• Principle
• Psychology
• the Scriptures
• treating disease
• Truth
• wedlock

I have come to wonder if Christian Scientists would do well to emphasise the fact that Christian Science is science more than the fact that it is scientific religion.

Joyce Voysey

 

The girl from Bow

 Robert Peel starts his biography "on the uplands of Bow" (Mary Baker Eddy: Years of Discovery, p. 3). Wikipedia reports that: "The town's name comes from its establishment along a bend, or "bow", in the Merrimack River. The first census, taken in 1790, reported 568 residents." Bow lies south of Concord. Tilton, where her sister Abigail lived with her husband, lies further north again. Boston is to the south east. Today, you can drive from Bow to Boston in about an hour and a quarter. The trip from Bow to Tilton is just under half an hour. Photos of Bow today show forested areas and a beautiful river. There are at least six properties for sale in the area as I write, and the summer temperatures are rising, as indicated on the chart below.

rss.weather.com

As Mary Baker grew, her father insisted on his "relentless theology" (23) while her mother was "the reconciler" (ibid). Peel recounts a letter from 1844 from Mrs. Baker to her youngest daughter, which encourages Mary to "think as kindly of your Father as you can... [because] he loves you and you are as near and dear to him as any child he has" (ibid).

The young Mary certainly had a loving family around her in those early years.

Julie Swannell