Moral and mental aspects of healing

A couple of points from my reading of Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer by von Fettweis and Warneck.

THE MORAL ASPECT

Chapter Moral Science (p.  81). The moral aspect of Mrs. Eddy’s system or “science” set it apart from all other healing methods. She saw it as the most important part. In the book, this is illustrated by this report from the Boston Traveller in 1900.

. . . Remarkable as was the man’s physical healing, even more remarkable was the transformation in his thought and life. His wife told Mrs. [Glover] a few days later that she had never before seen him [hug] his children as other fathers did, but on the night of his recovery he called them to him, and taking them in his arms he told them that he loved them; and with tears rolling down his cheeks he said to his wife, “I am going to be a better man.” It is not strange that the happy wife said to Mrs. [Glover], “Oh, how I thank you for restoring my husband to health, but more than all, I am grateful for what you have done for him morally and spiritually.”

The physical healing was of enteritis and bowel stoppage.

In a similar vein we have Samuel Putnam Bancroft (pp. 87-88) writing in 1870:

Mrs. [Glover] did not claim to be a teacher of religion, however, but of a method of healing the sick without the use of medicine. That was what induced us to study with her. The object of some was to regain health; of others, to commercialize the knowledge acquired. They considered it a sound business proposition. Her religious views, while not concealed, were not capitalized. Later, we learned that our success or failure in healing depended on the purity of our lives, as well as on the instruction she gave us.

Advice to possible students: Don’t come into it for the money! Although, at that stage of Mrs. Eddy’s experience she needed to get her message out.

Bancroft again on page 88. He asked how they should metaphysically view the process of teaching. In part she wrote:

When I teach science it is not woman that addresses man, it the principle and soul bringing out its idea. . . My scholars may learn from me what they could not learn from the same words if uttered by another with less wisdom than even my “grain of mustard seed,” hence, it is not the words, but the amount of soul that comes forth to destroy error.

I feel that this could, to a lesser degree, apply to Christian Science lectures.

I had wondered if the Puritan angle would be carried on through the book, but I do not think so.

HEALING OF INSANITY

There was another item I wanted to comment on: the healing by Mrs. Eddy of an insane man. She explained (in part):

He took a chair, and poised it, but I looked upward and he dropped the chair, and asked if I had something to say to him. I said I had, all from the spiritual side, “The first thing is you have no disease of the brain; you need never have been in the insane hospital” (pp. 83-4).

I was taken with the phrase “disease of the brain.” I reasoned that there are other conditions which could be classified as such – dementia, amnesia. The internet tells me that in 2019, one in every eight people in the world live with a mental disorder, with anxiety, depression.

From the Christian Science viewpoint is not every physical disorder a claim of mental disorder?

I typed a few statements of Truth about brain:

•     Brain is not mind. Mortal mind is not intelligence. Only Mind is mind.
•      Any info coming from brain is false. It is brain that sees a deranged mind.
•       All disease emanates from brain which is the theoretical mind in matter.
•       Brain is matter. Matter is no thing.

Joyce Voysey