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CHAPTER 5 The Mother Church Mary Baker Eddy and the Practice of Sentimentalism Christian science was among the most controversial and alluring new sects of the American nineteenth century, and its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, was by extension among the most provocative public figures of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, her vexed reputation enduring well after her death in 1910. As the author of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first published in 1875 but reissued in revised form numerous times) and the leader of Christian Science, Eddy became an international celebrity and the object of both veneration and condemnation. Her followers exalted her as a divinely inspired prophet whose religious revelations offered relief from bodily ailments, and her detractors denounced her as a barely literate charlatan and plagiarist. Mark Twain, one of her most dedicated critics, acknowledged these competing public perceptions when he stated that, although he deemed her a crook and a fraud, she was nonetheless “the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary.”1 Eddy’s theological ideas were partially responsible for these divergent public opinions, for, in asserting that “a sick body is evolved from sick thoughts” and that bodily healing could be effected through prayer and theological instruction, she ran afoul of the late-century professionalization of medicine and its attendant efforts to eradicate alternative healing techniques and practitioners; all the same, Eddy’s ideas found favor amid the late-century New Thought movement, which concurred with Eddy in the belief that thoughts may exert profound influence on the body and on the material world.2 Primarily, however, Eddy’s own life and persona were the chief sources of this public disagreement about her legitimacy as a religious authority. Mark Twain’s 1902 remarks evidence 182 Chapter 5 this preoccupation with Eddy’s public persona: he wrote, “I am not combating [Christian] Science. . . . I haven’t a thing in the world against it. Making fun of that shameless old swindler, Mother Eddy, is the only thing I take any interest in.”3 Central to Twain’s admission is his telling use of Eddy’s honorific, Mother, a term widely used by Eddy’s followers to describe her and one that Eddy freely employed in both published writings and in private correspondence, as with the valediction “With love, Mother” that she used to close her 1896 Message to the Annual Meeting of the Church of Christ, Scientist.4 The sting of Twain’s statement derives from its pointed contrast between this affectionate appellation and his counterclaim that Eddy was a brazen con artist altogether undeserving of this sobriquet.5 Her public presentation, Twain suggests, is decidedly at odds with the reality of her true private nature. Twain was justified in highlighting this moniker, for maternity figured prominently in Eddy’s public image and in her theological writings. She wrote extensively about the religious significance of mothers, as with her assertion that the Virgin Mary was a prophet in her own right and her claim that the mother figure in religious scripture symbolically denotes “God; divine and eternal Principle; Life, Truth, and Love” (Science and Health 592:16−17).6 As an institutional extension of this public elevation of maternity, the monumental Boston church and headquarters that Eddy commissioned in the 1890s was dubbed the Mother Church, an edifice that contained a well-appointed chamber reserved for Eddy called Mother’s Room. The room contained numerous visual markers of Eddy’s maternal authority: she requested that the words “MOTHER” and “LOVE” be engraved over the room entrance, and the chamber contained a stained-glass window adorned with the words “Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me,” from Matthew 19:14.7 As it had with Twain, Eddy’s maternal persona elicited considerable ire among critics who suspected a disconnection between this maternal public image and Eddy’s private reality. According to such critics as Twain and Georgine Milmine, Eddy was in no way the embodiment of maternity, with its allied associations with caregiving, domesticity, and selflessness: rather, they claimed, Eddy was a self-absorbed malingerer, a slattern, and a liar. Furthermore, critics alleged that Eddy had been an indifferent, even neglectful mother incapable of caring for her own son, who had been raised by surrogates and came to know his mother only in adulthood. Her motherhood, they maintained, was little more than a fiction. Theobjectofthischapterisnottorehearsethisheatedturn-of-the-century debate about Mary Baker Eddy’s legitimacy or to determine the precise...

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