2023/01/07

Emilie Cady | Truth Unity Resources from this Teacher

Emilie Cady | Truth Unity

Emilie Cady

Emilie Cady

June 19, 2020. Willow Creek Cemetery, Dryden New York

Emilie Cady

Emilie Cady

Emilie Cady

Emilie Cady

Emilie Cady

About Emilie Cady

Emilie Cady

We have an wonderful 2-part biographical overview of Emilie Cady from Russell Kemp, published in Unity magazine in 1975. Click here for Part 1 and click her for Part II.

From Wikipedia:

Harriet Emilie Cady (1848–1941) was an American homeopathic physician and author of New Thought spiritual writings. Her 1896 book Lessons in Truth, A Course of Twelve Lessons in Practical Christianity is now considered the core text on Unity Church teachings. It is the most widely read book in that movement, and has sold over 1.6 million copies since its first publication.

Born in 1848 in Dryden, New York to Oliver and Cornelia Cady, Cady's first job was as a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse in her hometown. In the late 1860s, however, she decided to pursue the field of medicine, and enrolled in the Homeopathic College of New York City, graduating in 1871, and becoming one of the first woman physicians in America.

Introduced to the teachings of Albert Benjamin Simpson, Cady became deeply involved in spiritual and metaphysical studies. She was inspired and influenced by Biblical teachings and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was taught by Emma Hopkins, the New Thought "teacher of teachers".

Cady also associated with several prominent figures in the New Thought movement of the time, including: Emma Curtis Hopkins, Divine Science minister Emmet Fox, Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science, and Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, co-founders of Unity Church. Finding The Christ in Ourselves, a pamphlet she had written and sent unsolicited to Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, was published by them in the October 1891 issue of Thought.

Cady died January 3, 1941 in New York City.

From Metaphysics to Mysticism

Talk given November 15, 2021 at Unity of Hagerstown, Maryland

01 Metaphysics and Mysticism
 
  • 01 Metaphysics and Mysticism
  • 02 We are Metaphysical Christians
  • 03 Our friends and family are mystics
  • 04 What is Metaphysics?
  • 05 A powerful example of mysticism in Unity
  • 06 Mysticism is I-Thou
  • 07 Metaphysics will get us to mysticism
  • 08 From bad decisions to fullness of time
  • 09 From oneness with Self to oneness with God
  • 10 From being source to being an inlet and outlet for Source
  • 11 From calling on Principle to hearing God’s call
  • 12 From practicing Principle to practicing Presence
  • 13 From Power to Gentleness
  • 14 From forgiving evil to giving Good
  • 15 From only Good to only God
  • 16 From Truth to Trust
  • 17 From Greek philosophy to practical Christianity
  • 18 We must go from Metaphysics to Mysticism
  • 19 Why we need to start with Metaphysics
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2023/01/06

Mary Baker Eddy - Wikipedia

Mary Baker Eddy - Wikipedia



Mary Baker Eddy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mary Baker Eddy

Born
Mary Morse Baker
July 16, 1821

Bow, New Hampshire, U.S.
Died December 3, 1910 (aged 89)

Newton, Massachusetts, U.S.
Resting place Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Other names Mary Baker Glover, Mary Patterson, Mary Baker Glover Eddy, Mary Baker G. Eddy
Known for Founder of Christian Science
Notable work Science and Health (1875)
Spouses
George Washington Glover
(m. 1843–1844 d.)
Daniel Patterson
(m. 1853–1873 div.)
Asa Gilbert Eddy
(m. 1877–1882 d.)
Children George Washington Glover II
(1844–1915)
Parent(s) Mark Baker
(1785–1865)
Abigail Ambrose Baker
(1784–1849)


Mary Baker Eddy (July 16, 1821 – December 3, 1910) was an American religious leader and author who founded The Church of Christ, Scientist, in New England in 1879.[1][2] She also founded The Christian Science Monitor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning secular newspaper,[3] in 1908, and three religious magazines: the Christian Science Sentinel, The Christian Science Journal, and The Herald of Christian Science. She wrote numerous books and articles, the most notable of which was Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which had sold over nine million copies as of 2001.[4]

Members of The First Church of Christ, Scientist consider Eddy the "discoverer" of Christian Science, and adherents are therefore known as Christian Scientists or students of Christian Science.[5] The church is sometimes informally known as the Christian Science church.

Eddy was named one of the "100 Most Significant Americans of All Time" in 2014 by Smithsonian Magazine,[6] and her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was ranked as one of the "75 Books by Women Whose Words Have Changed the World" by the Women's National Book Association.[7]


Contents
Early life[edit]
Bow, New Hampshire[edit]
Family[edit]

Eddy's birthplace in Bow, New Hampshire

Eddy was born Mary Morse Baker in a farmhouse in Bow, New Hampshire, to farmer Mark Baker (d. 1865) and his wife Abigail Barnard Baker, née Ambrose (d. 1849). Eddy was the youngest of the Bakers' six children: boys Samuel Dow (1808), Albert (1810), and George Sullivan (1812), followed by girls Abigail Barnard (1816), Martha Smith (1819), and Mary Morse (1821).[8]

Mark Baker was a strongly religious woman from a Protestant Congregationalist background, a firm believer in the final judgment and eternal damnation, according to Eddy.[9] McClure's magazine published a series of articles in 1907 that were highly critical of Eddy, stating that Baker's home library had consisted of the Bible.[10] Eddy responded that this was untrue and that her father had been an avid reader.[11][12] According to Eddy, her father had been a justice of the peace at one point and a chaplain of the New Hampshire State Militia.[13] He developed a reputation locally for being disputatious; one neighbor described him as "[a] tiger for a temper and always in a row."[14] McClure's described him as a supporter of slavery and alleged that he had been pleased to hear about Abraham Lincoln's death.[15] Eddy responded that Baker had been a "strong believer in States' rights, but slavery he regarded as a great sin."[13]

The Baker children inherited their father's temper, according to McClure's; they also inherited his good looks, and Eddy became known as the village beauty. Life was nevertheless spartan and repetitive. Every day began with lengthy prayer and continued with hard work. The only rest day was the Sabbath.[16]
Health[edit]

Mark Baker

Eddy and her father reportedly had a volatile relationship. Ernest Sutherland Bates and John V. Dittemore wrote in 1932, relying on the Cather and Milmine history of Eddy (but see below), that Baker sought to break Eddy's will with harsh punishment, although her mother often intervened; in contrast to Mark Baker, Eddy's mother was described as devout, quiet, light-hearted, and kind.[17] Eddy experienced periods of sudden illness, perhaps in an effort to control her father's attitude toward her.[18] Those who knew the family described her as suddenly falling to the floor, writhing and screaming, or silent and apparently unconscious, sometimes for hours.[19][20] Robert Peel, one of Eddy's biographers, worked for the Christian Science church and wrote in 1966:


This was when life took on the look of a nightmare, overburdened nerves gave way, and she would end in a state of unconsciousness that would sometimes last for hours and send the family into a panic. On such an occasion Lyman Durgin, the Baker's teen-age chore boy, who adored Mary, would be packed off on a horse for the village doctor ...[21]

Gillian Gill wrote in 1998 that Eddy was often sick as a child and appears to have suffered from an eating disorder, but reports may have been exaggerated concerning hysterical fits.[22] Eddy described her problems with food in the first edition of Science and Health (1875). She wrote that she had suffered from chronic indigestion as a child and, hoping to cure it, had embarked on a diet of nothing but water, bread, and vegetables, at one point consumed just once a day: "Thus we passed most of our early years, as many can attest, in hunger, pain, weakness, and starvation."[23]

Eddy experienced near invalidism as a child and most of her life until her discovery of Christian Science. Like most life experiences, it formed her lifelong, diligent research for a remedy from almost constant suffering. Eddy writes in her autobiography, "From my very childhood I was impelled by a hunger and thirst after divine things, — a desire for something higher and better than matter, and apart from it, — to seek diligently for the knowledge of God as the one great and ever-present relief from human woe." She also writes there, "I wandered through the dim mazes of materia medica, till I was weary of 'scientific guessing,' as it has been well called. I sought knowledge from the different schools, — allopathy, homeopathy, hydropathy, electricity, and from various humbugs, — but without receiving satisfaction."[24]
Tilton, New Hampshire[edit]

The Congregational Church in Tilton, New Hampshire, which Eddy attended

In 1836 when Eddy was about 14-15, she moved with her family to the town of Sanbornton Bridge, New Hampshire, approximately twenty miles (32 km) north of Bow. Sanbornton Bridge would subsequently be renamed in 1869 as Tilton.[25]


My father was taught to believe that my brain was too large for my body and so kept me much out of school, but I gained book-knowledge with far less labor than is usually requisite. At ten years of age I was as familiar with Lindley Murray's Grammar as with the Westminster Catechism; and the latter I had to repeat every Sunday. My favorite studies were natural philosophy, logic, and moral science. From my brother Albert, I received lessons in the ancient tongues, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.[26]

Ernest Bates and John Dittemore write that Eddy was not able to attend Sanbornton Academy when the family first moved there but was required instead to start at the district school (in the same building) with the youngest girls. She withdrew after a month because of poor health, then received private tuition from the Reverend Enoch Corser. She entered Sanbornton Academy in 1842.[27]

She was received into the Congregational church in Tilton on July 26, 1838, when she was 17, according to church records published by McClure's in 1907. Eddy had written in her autobiography in 1891 that she was 12 when this happened, and that she had discussed the idea of predestination with the pastor during the examination for her membership; this may have been an attempt to reflect the story of a 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple.[28][29] She wrote in response to the McClure's article that the date of her church membership may have been mistaken by her.[30] Eddy objected so strongly to the idea of predestination and eternal damnation that it made her ill:


My mother, as she bathed my burning temples, bade me lean on God's love, which would give me rest if I went to Him in prayer, as I was wont to do, seeking His guidance. I prayed; and a soft glow of ineffable joy came over me. The fever was gone and I rose and dressed myself in a normal condition of health. Mother saw this and was glad. The physician marveled; and the "horrible decree" of Predestination – as John Calvin rightly called his own tenet – forever lost its power over me.[31]
Marriage, widowhood[edit]

Eddy in the 1850s

Eddy was badly affected by four deaths in the 1840s.[32] She regarded her brother Albert as a teacher and mentor, but he died in 1841. In 1844, her first husband George Washington Glover (a friend of her brother Samuel) died after six months of marriage. They had married in December 1843 and set up home in Charleston, South Carolina, where Glover had business, but he died of yellow fever in June 1844 while living in Wilmington, North Carolina. Eddy was with him in Wilmington, six months pregnant. She had to make her way back to New Hampshire, 1,400 miles (2,300 km) by train and steamboat, where her only child George Washington II was born on September 12 in her father's home.[33][34]

Her husband's death, the journey back, and the birth left her physically and mentally exhausted, and she ended up bedridden for months.[35] She tried to earn a living by writing articles for the New Hampshire Patriot and various Odd Fellows and Masonic publications. She also worked as a substitute teacher in the New Hampshire Conference Seminary, and ran her own kindergarten for a few months in 1846, apparently refusing to use corporal punishment.[36]

Then her mother died in November 1849. Eddy wrote to one of her brothers: "What is left of earth to me!" Her mother's death was followed three weeks later by the death of her fiancé, lawyer John Bartlett.[37] In 1850, Eddy wrote, her son was sent away to be looked after by the family's nurse; he was four years old by then.[38] Sources differ as to whether Eddy could have prevented this.[39] It was difficult for a woman in her circumstances to earn money and, according to the legal doctrine of coverture, women in the United States during this period could not be their own children's guardians. When their husbands died, they were left in a legally vulnerable position.[40]

Elizabeth Patterson Duncan Baker, Mark Baker's second wife

Mark Baker remarried in 1850; his second wife Elizabeth Patterson Duncan (d. June 6, 1875) had been widowed twice, and had some property and income from her second marriage.[41] Baker apparently made clear to Eddy that her son would not be welcome in the new marital home.[39] She wrote:


A few months before my father's second marriage ... my little son, about four years of age, was sent away from me, and put under the care of our family nurse, who had married, and resided in the northern part of New Hampshire. I had no training for self-support, and my home I regarded as very precious. The night before my child was taken from me, I knelt by his side throughout the dark hours, hoping for a vision of relief from this trial.[42]

George was sent to stay with various relatives, and Eddy decided to live with her sister Abigail. Abigail apparently also declined to take George, then six years old.[41] Eddy married again in 1853. Her second husband, Daniel Patterson, was a dentist and apparently said that he would become George's legal guardian; but he appears not to have gone ahead with this, and Eddy lost contact with her son when the family that looked after him, the Cheneys, moved to Minnesota, and then her son several years later enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War. She did not see him again until he was in his thirties:


My dominant thought in marrying again was to get back my child, but after our marriage his stepfather was not willing he should have a home with me. A plot was consummated for keeping us apart. The family to whose care he was committed very soon removed to what was then regarded as the Far West. After his removal a letter was read to my little son, informing him that his mother was dead and buried. Without my knowledge a guardian was appointed him, and I was then informed that my son was lost. Every means within my power was employed to find him, but without success. We never met again until he had reached the age of thirty-four, had a wife and two children, and by a strange providence had learned that his mother still lived, and came to see me in Massachusetts.[42]
Study with Phineas Quimby[edit]

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

Mesmerism had become popular in New England; and on October 14, 1861, Eddy's husband at the time, Dr. Patterson, wrote to mesmerist Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who reportedly cured people without medicine, asking if he could cure his wife.[43] Quimby replied that he had too much work in Portland, Maine, and that he could not visit her, but if Patterson brought his wife to him he would treat her.[44] Eddy did not immediately go, instead trying the water cure at Dr. Vail's Hydropathic Institute, but her health deteriorated even further.[45][46] A year later, in October 1862, Eddy first visited Quimby.[47][48] She improved considerably, and publicly declared that she had been able to walk up 182 steps to the dome of city hall after a week of treatment.[49] The cures were temporary, however, and Eddy suffered relapses.[50]

Despite the temporary nature of the "cure", she attached religious significance to it, which Quimby did not.[51] She believed that it was the same type of healing that Christ had performed.[52] From 1862 to 1865, Quimby and Eddy engaged in lengthy discussions about healing methods practiced by Quimby and others.[53][54][55] She took notes on her own ideas on healing, as well as writing dictations from him and "correcting" them with her own ideas, some of which possibly ended up in the "Quimby manuscripts" that were published later and attributed to him.[56][57] Despite Quimby not being especially religious, he embraced the religious connotations Eddy was bringing to his work, since he knew his more religious patients would appreciate it.[58]

Eddy around 1864

Phineas Quimby died on January 16, 1866, shortly after Eddy's father.[a] Later, Quimby became the "single most controversial issue" of Eddy's life according to biographer Gillian Gill, who stated: "Rivals and enemies of Christian Science found in the dead and long forgotten Quimby their most important weapon against the new and increasingly influential religious movement", as Eddy was "accused of stealing Quimby's philosophy of healing, failing to acknowledge him as the spiritual father of Christian Science, and plagiarizing his unpublished work."[60] However, Gill continued:


"I am now firmly convinced, having weighed all the evidence I could find in published and archival sources, that Mrs. Eddy’s most famous biographer-critics—Peabody, Milmine, Dakin, Bates and Dittemore, and Gardner—have flouted the evidence and shown willful bias in accusing Mrs. Eddy of owing her theory of healing to Quimby and of plagiarizing his unpublished work."[61]

Quimby wrote extensive notes from the 1850s until his death in 1866. Some of his manuscripts, in his own hand, appear in a collection of his writings in the Library of Congress, but far more common was that the original Quimby drafts were edited and rewritten by his copyists. The transcriptions were heavily edited by those copyists to make them more readable.[62] Rumors of Quimby "manuscripts" began to circulate in the 1880s when Julius Dresser began accusing Eddy of stealing from Quimby.[63] Quimby's son, George, who disliked Eddy, did not want any of the manuscripts published, and kept what he owned away from the Dressers until after his death.[64] In 1921, Julius's son, Horatio Dresser, published various copies of writings that he entitled The Quimby Manuscripts to support these claims, but left out papers that didn't serve his view.[65] Further complicating the matter is that, as stated above, no originals of most of the copies exist; and according to Gill, Quimby's personal letters, which are among the items in his own handwriting, "eloquently testify to his incapacity to spell simple words or write a simple, declarative sentence. Thus there is no documentary proof that Quimby ever committed to paper the vast majority of the texts ascribed to him, no proof that he produced any text that someone else could, even in the loosest sense, 'copy.'"[66] In addition, it has been averred that the dates given to the papers seem to be guesses made years later by Quimby's son, and although critics have claimed Quimby used terms like "science of health" in 1859 before he met Eddy, the alleged lack of proper dating in the papers makes this impossible to prove.[67][68]

According to J. Gordon Melton: "Certainly Eddy shared some ideas with Quimby. She differed with him in some key areas, however, such as specific healing techniques. Moreover, she did not share Quimby's hostility toward the Bible and Christianity."[69]

Fall in Lynn[edit]


Eddy's son George Washington Glover II

On February 1, 1866, Eddy slipped and fell on ice while walking in Lynn, Massachusetts, causing a spinal injury:


On the third day thereafter, I called for my Bible, and opened it at Matthew, 9:2 [And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.(King James Bible) ]. As I read, the healing Truth dawned upon my sense; and the result was that I arose, dressed myself, and ever after was in better health than I had before enjoyed. That short experience included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence.[70]

Two contemporaneous news accounts are recorded of this event:

Lynn Reporter, February 3, 1866:


"Mrs. Mary M. Patterson, of Swampscott, fell upon the ice near the corner of Market and Oxford streets, on Thursday evening, and was severely injured. She was taken up in an insensible condition and carried to the residence of S. M. Bubier, Esq., near by, where she was kindly cared for during the night. Dr. Cushing, who was called, found her injuries to be internal, and of a very serious nature, inducing spasms and intense suffering. She was removed to her home in Swampscott yesterday afternoon, though in a very critical condition."

Salem Register, February 5, 1866:


"Mrs. Mary M. Patterson of Swampscott was severely injured by a fall upon the ice near the corner of Market and Oxford streets, Lynn, on Thursday. It is feared she will not recover."

These contemporaneous news articles both reported on the seriousness of Eddy’s condition. Compare the statement in the Register, “It is feared she will not recover” and the statement in the Reporter that Eddy’s injuries were “internal” and she was removed to her home “in a very critical condition,” to Cushing’s affidavit 38 years later, in 1904: “I did not at any time declare, or believe, that there was no hope of Mrs. Patterson’s recovery, or that she was in a critical condition.” Cushing's effort to downplay the seriousness of the accident perhaps reached its most extreme point in this letter from Gordon Clark, confirmed Eddy critic and author of The Church of St. Bunco, to the editor of the Boston Herald, March 2, 1902:


"I have a recent letter from him [i.e., Dr. A. M. Cushing] in which he utterly denies the whole substance of her assertions. Her injury was mostly a jar of her imagination and a contusion, on her veracity."

Eddy later filed a claim for money from the city of Lynn for her injury on the grounds that she was "still suffering from the effects of that fall" (though she afterwards withdrew the lawsuit).[71] Gill writes that Eddy's claim was probably made under financial pressure from her husband at the time. Her neighbors believed her sudden recovery to be a near-miracle.[72]

Eddy wrote in her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, that she devoted the next three years of her life to biblical study and what she considered the discovery of Christian Science: "I then withdrew from society about three years,--to ponder my mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind that should take the things of God and show them to the creature, and reveal the great curative Principle, --Deity."[73]

Eddy became convinced that illness could be healed through an awakened thought brought about by a clearer perception of God and the explicit rejection of drugs, hygiene, and medicine, based on the observation that Jesus did not use these methods for healing:


It is plain that God does not employ drugs or hygiene, nor provide them for human use; else Jesus would have recommended and employed them in his healing. ... The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love.[74]

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