Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 55

Christian Science in the Gilded
Age: Its Philosophical and
Intellectual Challenge
The philosophy of Christian Science is both simple and
profound. It rejects materialism and reinterprets transcendentalism to
mean the perfectibility of man through spirit rather than flesh.
While many American philosophers of the post-Civil War era
eagerly acclimated themselves to a harsh materialism, Science
demanded the recognition of an older truth: The presence, in all
humankind, of God’s eternal, immutable law.(l)
The thrust of the conventional intellectual attack was directed
at the originality, validity and progressiveness of Christian Science.
Intuitively, the idealism of Science was more attractive than the
selective, patrician doctrine of Herbert Spencer; rationally, Darwin
ist cynicism negated progress. In order to defeat Science, Darwinists
were obligated to defend the worthlessness of humanity and the
righteousness of poverty. In any age, the defensibility of this
position is questionable.
The relevance of Christian Science to the society of the late
nineteenth century was questioned by several American thinkers. The
Science philosophy was more vunerable than most because it appears
that the germ of it did not originate in the mind of Mary Baker Eddy.
The fact that Mrs. Eddy was not absolutely candid, often contradictting her previous pronouncements on the movement's birth, merely
compounded the confusion and gave the philosophical argument
against her a measure of credibility which it otherwise would not
have possessed.
Mrs. Eddy’s second husband, Daniel Patterson, was captured by
Confederate soldiers in the autumn of 1862. Disheartened and
physically unwell, she travelled to Maine to take a cure with a
physician named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. They met on the brisk
October morning in a year when Mary Baker Eddy was particularly
receptive to revelations.(2)
At the time of confrontation, was Mrs. Eddy already groping
toward a new approach or was her mind activated and subcon
sciously motivated by Quimby? Even her official biographer