SOURCE: "With Banners Still Flying: Christian Science and American Culture," in With Bleeding Footsteps: Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, pp. 291-310.

[In the following essay, Thomas surveys Eddy's impact on modern American social and religious thought]

Mary Baker Eddy's death in 1910 was not the passing of an ordinary woman. Obituaries appeared in big-city tabloids and small-town weeklies across the country. Thumbing through a sample of these editorial comments today, one is struck by their lack of neutrality. Even when progressive America admired her accomplishments, it was uncomfortable with her, not knowing where to fit her into its notions of authority, leadership, and gender.

The Rochester Times observed that Mrs. Eddy's death marked the passing of a woman who was "probably the most notable of this generation; certainly none other has had more widespread influence or is regarded with greater reverence by more people." Indulging in hyperbole, the paper noted that "millions of followers" flocked to fill the pews of her worldwide church. The Chicago Tribune reflected the same sentiments: with her death, "there passes from this world's activities one of the most remarkable women of her time."

The Chicago Post accurately summed up the meaning of Christian Science to Mrs. Eddy's followers. "Without humbug or sentimentalism, any outsider can and must admit that Christian Science people are good people. They not only believe in their church and attend its meetings with a passionate faithfulness that other churches envy, but they also carry their faith with them into their daily lives." Other newspapers were not as perceptive or careful in their assessments of Mrs. Eddy's contributions. A North Carolina paper stated that "her gospel was largely one of sunshine and mental uplift," while a Michigan daily thought that if Mrs. Eddy was remembered for anything, it would be for the "optimism" that she taught. "Christian Scientists are sunny, hopeful, cheerful."

Even before Mrs. Eddy died, Georgine Milmine was evaluating Christian Science in terms that made her sound like a precursor of such positive thinkers as Norman Vincent Peale. "Mrs. Eddy's teachings," said Milmine, "brought the promise of material benefits to a practical people.… In the West, especially, where every one was absorbed in a new and hard-won material prosperity, the healer … met with an immediate response. This religion had a message of cheer for the rugged materialist as well as for the morbid invalid. It exalted health and self-satisfaction and material prosperity high among the moral virtues." Mrs. Eddy would have grumbled at these words, because she saw her ideas as radical rather than assimilative, and she pushed for religious rigor rather than comfortable accommodation. Christian Science went against the grain; it demanded a spiritual inner-directedness that withstood the whims and fancies of others.

In life, Mrs. Eddy's rigorous spiritual demands and her Christian Science doctrines had the capacity to disturb the wider culture. The Springfield Union captured the flavor of Mrs. Eddy's unsettling influence. "About no personage of her generation has so much and such bitter controversy raged as around the Founder and Leader of the organization and doctrines known as Christian Science." The Concord Monitor skated delicately around this issue by noting that whether one was an admirer of Mrs. Eddy or not, an "impartial pose toward her seems to have been very difficult to maintain." Both of these papers were ostensibly referring to Mrs. Eddy's radical idealism regarding the meaning of reality and how man could overcome disease and death. Her theology sounded strange and threatening to secular ears. Though Mrs. Eddy and her doctrines repelled some people, the papers indicate that she appealed to others, and hint that she and her Christian Science touched the core of American society in diverse, fundamental ways.

One might be hard-pressed to see much of cultural connection in the early years of the movement. From the time when she lived in her modest, nondescript home at 8 Broad Street in Lynn, Massachusetts, to her final days in her tasteful, twenty-five-room gray stone mansion in Chestnut Hill, Mrs. Eddy—as much as was humanly possible—kept her movement enveloped in the spiritual realm. This was especially true for the first decades, when she struggled to keep her fledgling movement alive. Even in its early days, Lynn reflected the disruptive changes of the nineteenth century. As she walked the streets, Mrs. Eddy easily could have brushed shoulders with Quaker and Methodist dissenters, vocal temperance advocates, and disgruntled shoe workers. Indeed, the Lynn of Mrs. Eddy's day was "notorious as a hotbed of radicalism," according to one historian.

But as Mrs. Eddy took those walks along Lynn's streets, it was as if she and many of her early followers, who came from the city's shoe factories, had spiritual blinders on. They simply did not become involved in the social discontents of the day, and often when they did acknowledge them in The Christian Science Journal, they were quickly subsumed under the teachings and meaning of Christian Science. And yet, despite Mrs. Eddy's focus on spiritual matters, the world and its diversity did filter into her movement. A full exploration of this diversity is beyond the scope of this book. The demographic data for any future study of her students would be exceptionally difficult to accumulate; the Mother Church did not keep these kinds of records. Nevertheless, we can make hypotheses based upon some fragmentary, impressionistic evidence about Mrs. Eddy's appeal to the wider culture.

In the late 1890s, Alfred Farlow was asked where Christian Science students came from, and he replied that there was no single type. They came from all kinds of churches; some did not even have an official church affiliation, and they stood on all rungs of the social ladder. There were hints of this diversity even in the early days of the movement, although most of Mrs. Eddy's students clustered around the lower end of the social scale. Mrs. Eddy attracted a number of men and women in their midto late twenties from Lynn's shoe factories. Until he devoted himself to the practice of Christian Science, Samuel Bancroft was a worker in a shoe factory. So were Richard Kennedy and Miss Dorcas Rawson, a member of one of Mrs. Eddy's first classes and one of the eight defectors in 1881. Daniel Spofford worked in a shoe trade in Tennessee, while his wife was a Christian Science practitioner. Others among Mrs. Eddy's early followers came from equally modest beginnings. Delia Manley grew up in Tiverton, Rhode Island; her father was a farmer and made shoes during the winter. Walter Watson came out of the New Hampshire Hills as a house painter, and his wife worked in a glove factory.

Stephen Gottschalk, a close student of Christian Science, noted that until the early 1880s a "significant proportion" of Mrs. Eddy's students came from spiritualism or had some spiritualism in their backgrounds. Indeed, many of Mrs. Eddy's students came from a patchwork quilt of religious backgrounds. Dorcas Rawson, for example, was a "Holiness Methodist," while Laura C. Nourse was raised in a more regular Methodist church. Wallace Wright was a Universalist; so was Mary Godfrey Parker, whose mother was an "ardent Universalist," and her husband was of a similar persuasion. Delia Manley was a churchgoing Baptist; Walter Watson was raised by "good, staunch, New England parents of the Unitarian faith." In looking over her 1880s class, Jennie Sawyer found it remarkable that people representing so many different denominations could find a consensus on such a critical issue as "one's Christian faith."

It is understandable that other Protestants might find Christian Science attractive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science may have been cut out of new cloth, in her public writings, and sometimes in her interviews, she wove the threads of the Puritan past into the fabric of her appeal. In No and Yes, for example, Mrs. Eddy linked herself and her Christian Science to many of America's cherished values. Her ancestors, she proudly noted, were among the first to settle in New Hampshire, where they raised "the Puritan standard of undefiled religion. As dutiful descendants of Puritans, let us lift their standard higher, rejoicing as Paul did, that we are free born."

On many occasions in Science and Health Mrs. Eddy spelled out the duty and destiny of her movement. In one instance, her words harked back to John Winthrop's charge to his small band of Puritan followers. In the current age, Christian Scientists occupied the same position that the disciples did when Jesus confirmed the uniqueness of their mission. They were special, and to convey this Mrs. Eddy repeated the biblical phrase that has come to mean so much to America's special mission:

"Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid." Then, much like Winthrop, Mrs. Eddy urged her students to be fully dedicated to their calling so that "this light be not hid, but radiate and glow into noon-tide glory."

Mrs. Eddy was also forging stronger links between her Christian Science and other Protestant traditions in America. As far back as the Genesis manuscript she hinted at this when she equated the importance of her discovery to Robert Fulton's. In an 1893 article in The Christian Science Journal, her movement was linked to two of America's most resourceful and innovative men, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison. Until Franklin, the article noted, there was no real knowledge of electricity, and until Edison no one realized its potential. The analogy was self-evident: Mrs. Eddy was just as innovative in her spiritual work.

In another article in the Journal, not only were Mrs. Eddy's Protestant roots stressed—she was a New England girl raised by "God-fearing parents"—but it was also emphasized that her parents were middleclass. And Mrs. Eddy tried to convince her readers that Christian Science's spiritual rigor was not out of step with the postmillennial secularism in American society after the Civil War. The current age appeared to be moving toward perfectibility on a number of cultural levels, Mrs. Eddy noted in an 1884 article. Why, then, she questioned, should religion not also strive for "a more perfect and practical Christianity?"

By invoking the Puritan past, Mrs. Eddy appealed to those who wished to cling to cherished values and ideals in a rapidly changing America. The intellectual historian Michael Kammen has recently shown that the Puritan past served late-Victorian Americans in a number of ways. At one end of the spectrum, a number of nineteenth-century Americans used it to attack religious bigotry and intolerance, while in the bulging middle were those who saw the Puritan past as "a mixed blessing." "Moving from the center of the spectrum to the end," writes Kammen, "there remained a considerable number of vocal and perfectly sensible individuals who between 1880 and 1910 not only retained an extremely positive view of the Puritans but felt nostalgia for the qualities of intense faith, imagination, and courage that seemed to be in short supply in late Victorian America."

Mrs. Eddy could be counted among those "perfectly sensible individuals" described by Kammen. For her the Puritans came to represent not only a step back into an ideal past, but also a step forward into the future. Evolutionary ideas and a secular optimism helped to reshape the image of the Puritans; increasingly they were seen as having cut the umbilical cord to England. Having thus broken from a confining, immoral past, they were free to invent their own tradition. In the 1884 article, Mrs. Eddy tapped into this radical tradition; thus, her link to the Puritans is much more complicated than it first looks. She was, in effect, allowing people to acknowledge their roots and to break from them, to be conservative and radical simultaneously.

Puritan roots, Benjamin Franklin, science and manufacturing, perfectibility; no wonder Christian Science began to appeal to more and more middleclass people as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. Businessmen, clergymen, doctors, lawyers, clerks sought out Christian Science. (And it is no wonder that by the turn of the century this connection to basic American values appealed to a number of ethnic minorities such as European Jews who converted to Christian Science as a way of assimilating into American society.) Though Christian Science made headway in small Midwestern towns in this same period, and though Alfred Farlow was probably right in contending that Christian Science drew from all ranks of society, by the late nineteenth century the tone, the attitude, and the language in many of the articles in The Christian Science Journal and the Christian Science Weekly seemed slanted to a middleclass audience's hopes and fears about life in an urban, increasingly bureaucratized, corporate America.

The historian George Cotkin has characterized the intellectuals of the late nineteenth century as "reluctant modernists." This is an apt phrase, for it could easily apply to a large segment of middleclass men and women. In the case of men, for example, though they made their accommodations to the emerging bureaucratized world of corporate America, and seemed to enjoy the growing leisure time and the cornucopia offered by the emerging consumer culture, this acceptance of the new did not come without serious strain and hesitancy. Christian Science addressed its message to those middleclass men who were highly sensitive to these kinds of tensions.

William Rathvon, a prominent Christian Scientist in Mrs. Eddy's last years, wrote a 1903 article extolling the benefits of the religion, and his language reflected this strong middleclass bent. Nineteenth-century Victorians were obsessed with the meaning of character, as if somehow a person's inner qualities would buttress him or her against the onslaughts of modern life. Christian Science, said Rathvon, stood for a special kind of power and permanence. The mental attitude of every person should be "active, alert, and assiduous." The particular kind of fitness in Christian Science was not limited to any one kind of culture or any one kind of person; it applied to all men in all cultures. Though Christian Science "declares daily dividends, its capital is never impaired." By infusing Christian Science thought into daily business activities, one would begin to guarantee higher returns "than any investment that lies within the scope of our modern man of affairs."

Rathvon was comfortable employing the secular idioms of his day; in this essay he even sounded a bit like William James, who, in his quest for security in a pluralistic world, often combined metaphors from the sacred and the profane. Christian Science, however, was never sanguine about the individual's place in the ever-changing secular world. Psychologically, life was not simple for many well-educated middle-class Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of them were "battling a dread of unreality." These feelings, according to T. J. Jackson Lears, "stemmed from urbanization and technological development; from the rise of an increasingly interdependent market economy; and from the secularization of liberal Protestantism among its educated and affluent devotees."

For many in an emerging consumer culture it felt as if the core meaning of self had been lost. Now the self was nothing more than a mask, a false self a person constructed to "sell" others. As this sense of alienation grew at the end of the nineteenth century and into the next, and as it became increasingly possible to define the self through the desire and enjoyment of things, many middle-class Americans increasingly yearned to rediscover "the real thing" in virtually all aspects of their lives. As Miles Orvell has recently noted:

Again and again, around the turn of the century, as the saturation of things reached the limit of containing space, the social and spiritual grace afforded by material objects was put to the question. And Nietzsche's observation on the European bourgeoisie would apply to America as well: "Men of the seventies and eighties … were filled with a devouring hunger for reality, but they had the misfortune to confuse this with matter—which is but the hollow and deceptive wrapping of it. Thus they lived perpetually in a wretched, padded, puffed-out world of cotton-wool, cardboard, and tissue-paper."

Mrs. Eddy never confused matter with reality; in Christian Science, the spiritual core of the self was the "real thing." Some Christian Scientists were lured down the path of material comfort, but Mrs. Eddy always accepted the things of the real world for what they were: illusions, sometimes destructive ones. She held out a warning, for example, that imperialism, monopoly, and a decline in religion posed real threats to the moral fiber of the nation. Yet she also held out a hope for the future if people would only accept "a true Science and Christianity."

A number of Christian Science writers did not sugar-coat their concern that America was deeply divided between the haves and the have-nots. For self-satisfied Americans basking in the sunlight of American prosperity, one writer saw dark clouds gathering, harbingers of a potentially destructive storm that would "threaten our civil institutions, producing universal distrust among all classes." The massive corporations had "grown wealthy and arrogant," and in their rapid growth they had lost sight of the larger community and the meaning of justice. Officeholders were no better. They violated the public trust, lining their own pockets at the public's expense. No matter where one looked, civil and religious institutions had compromised their principles.

What to do about these social ills? By the turn of the century, Americans were offered a variety of social plans that promised a more efficient, equitable world, whether it was from the blueprint of a progressive or a socialist. According to one Christian Scientist writer, socialism, because it aimed at the betterment of all, was an improvement over the "selfish individualism" of capitalism, but like all other "isms" it had a fatal flaw: it mistook institutions and social conditions as "the real and ultimate conditions of earthly existence." From this erroneous assumption emerged a faulty conclusion: if these institutions could be changed and improved, then mankind could attain an earthly paradise. From the Christian Science perspective, this was an illusion.

To achieve true social harmony one had to penetrate beneath the surface of things to get in touch with the spiritual reality. The recognition that what most people took to be real and concrete was actually erroneous belief and illusion is what separated Christian Science reform from "ordinary social reforms." The socialist erred when he or she believed "all discord to be material inequality and individualism." Other reformers were equally mistaken when they considered "competition and private, unchecked capitalism" the major cause of social disharmony.

Christian Science plainly revealed that these causes were not really causes after all; they were effects "of a false sense of Life as material, a false sense of Mind as plural, a false sense of substance as matter, a false sense of existence as temporal." It stood to reason, therefore, that "an entire readjustment of the constituent relations of man to man must be reached and reorganized before we can hope for ultimate harmony." But this could only be accomplished when man understood true spiritual individuality and a true relationship to God. With these understandings, a person could then adjust his or her life to the spiritual reality rather than the material illusion. In Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy held out the hope that Christian Science was slowly, inch by inch, leading the way toward a morally reformed society:

I have never supposed this century would witness the full fruitage of Christian Science, or that sin, disease, and death would not continue for centuries to come; but this I do aver, that, as a result of Christian Science, ethics and temperance have received an impulse, health has been restored, and longevity increased. If such are the present fruits, what may not the harvest be, when this Science is more generally understood?

Christian Science's spiritual radicalism was clothed in a gray flannel suit; it promised a transvaluation, but it would not lead an assault on America's corporate walls. Change, when it came, would be evolutionary, not revolutionary. This was a comforting message to an anxious, if not increasingly neurasthenic, middle class that craved order and stability and yearned for verities. While Christian Science produced testimony after testimony confirming its healings of broken bones and major illnesses from tuberculosis to cancer, its healings were also attractive to people suffering from psychosomatic illnesses like neurasthenia. In the late-Victorian era this was a catchall psychological disorder whose long list of symptoms ranged from depression, to male hysteria, to stress, to chronic fatigue. Though neurasthenia crossed class and gender lines, it seemed to find a welcome home among middle- and upper-middle-class men—the very people supposedly adapting the best and making the most out of a rapidly changing social world.

Ironically, as these men exerted themselves to climb economic and social ladders, they suffered a paralysis of will; seemingly the faster they scrambled to get to the top, the further they fell away from old-fashioned values and from a sense of who and what they were. Indeed, it seemed as though they had lost contact with any kind of emotional center, as though they had become detached from "real things." When Christian Science turned its penetrating look into the workplace of middle-class America, it identified the secularization process as a major source of the middle class's ills. Most businessmen kept their Christian ideals separated from their work, content to devote one hour on Sundays to God and to spiritual concerns.

This was an artificial separation that produced a deep alienation. Indeed, Christian Science made it eminently clear that "a business based on Principle" and governed by Christian values was impervious to the wild fluctuations in the marketplace, where today's success was tomorrow's failure. A host of middleclass professionals—"merchants, bankers, traveling salesmen, railroad officials, and busy people in all aspects of industry"—were turning to Christian Science with spectacular results in their businesses and in their private lives, one writer tooted.

Another writer addressed his article to the rising middleclass businessman, encouraging him never to think about "danger, disaster, failure, limitation, discord, confusion," unless he wanted to have these unnerving thoughts "manifested on your body or in your business." Once a businessman fully accepted the principles of Christian Science; once every act he performed and every relationship he entered into were governed and directed by God, then the vicissitudes of business life could never make him a helpless victim.

Interestingly enough, when Mrs. Eddy died a newspaper in Spokane, Washington, listed Christian Science's spiritual help to the businessman as one of her real contributions. The typical businessman, the paper remarked, was overworked, overanxious, and overwrought. There seemed no place for religion in his practical world, which left him empty and adrift. Above all else the emotionally battered businessman needed a "mental anchorage that … maintains and buoys," that allowed him the freedom to move in the world while at the same time he was firmly anchored in "absolute certainty." This is what Christian Science provided.

A number of newspapers turned Mrs. Eddy's life into a reaffirmation of America's most cherished middleclass values and myths. America was the land of unlimited opportunity; like Horatio Alger, Mrs. Eddy had risen from rags to riches; she had moved from a New England saltbox to a Chestnut Hill mansion. A Milwaukee paper pointedly observed that history was full of women who had made their mark in a world dominated by men, but most of those women had to exercise their power indirectly through "their feminine charms." If it was true that behind every great man stood a woman, then it seemed as if Mrs. Eddy had stepped from the shadows and created a niche all her own.

This was quite a niche. By 1906, Mrs. Eddy's Scienceand Health had sold 400,000 copies. In the brief span from 1882 to 1890, Christian Science had grown from a paltry group of fifty to a burgeoning organization of "twenty churches, ninety societies, at least 250 practitioners, and 33 teaching centers scattered across the country." The Christian Science Monitor had a healthy daily circulation of 50,000. These accomplishments in corporate America did not escape the eye of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Baltimore Sun. In their evaluations of Mrs. Eddy's achievements they used words and phrases commonly reserved for the careers of powerful men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Teddy Roosevelt. The Ohio paper described her as "virile and vigorous," a "natural commander," a "natural organizer" who possessed "intellectual qualities of the highest order." The Sun chipped in by noting that Mrs. Eddy exhibited a "fine business acumen" in managing her church; she had a "tremendous capacity for work" that was coupled to "a great executive ability and penetrating judgment."

Other newspapers, however, had difficulty accepting Mrs. Eddy as a symbol of authority and success in America. They recognized her achievements, but it was as if Mrs. Eddy had crossed gender lines and the newspapers wanted to nudge her back to her proper, feminine side. One newspaper from the West, for instance, lauded her for bringing Christian Science into the crass, materialistic world where success "was the fetish men were worshipping." Even when it praised her, however, the paper did not link her to the great male discoverers and inventors as she and The Christian Science Journal had, but to Joan of Arc. A Philadelphia newspaper duly noted that many women had made their marks as humanitarian reformers in a variety of fields where the moral purity of women was permitted active expression. The paper bemoaned the fact that recently Julia Ward Howe and Florence Nightingale had died. Mrs. Eddy, "the leading woman of her time, and among the greatest in history," achieved her status in religion, a field segregated from the economic and political corridors of power, and she chose not to challenge men from her bastion of strength.

As excerpts from these editorial comments reveal, outsiders found much to admire in Mrs. Eddy, but her success and authority made a number of people—especially men—nervous. We earlier saw that James Henry Wiggin gave a flattering assessment of Mrs. Eddy's power and effectiveness as a teacher. Wiggin, we recall, was the ex-Unitarian minister whom Mrs. Eddy hired to help her smooth out the rough edges of her 1886 revision of Science and Health. Like any demanding executive, she had high standards, knew what she wanted, and would settle for nothing less. When it came to the publication of her book, Mrs. Eddy would not tolerate shoddiness, and she could be exasperating as she fought over the meaning of a word or phrase. Still, Wiggin had a healthy respect for her—or at least that is the impression he gave in his correspondence with her.

But working with a dynamic religious leader who happened to be a woman pricked the masculine pride of this lapsed Unitarian minister. In 1889 he wrote a college friend, mocking Mrs. Eddy's theology as muddled and as "an ignorant revival of one form of gnosticism." As for Mrs. Eddy herself, well, what he really wanted to say would have to wait until he saw his friend, because it was too hot and damning to put in writing. What he did say was damaging enough. "An awfully (I use the word advisedly) smart woman, acute, shrewd, but not well read, nor in any way learned." Apparently this smart, acute, shrewd woman did not have the ability to create, for as Wiggin saw it, she had borrowed all of her ideas from Quimby. In one fell swoop, Wiggin demeaned Mrs. Eddy, her accomplishments, and her Christian Science.

By the turn of the century, when she was becoming something of a household name, Wiggin was not the only man whose gender anxieties were aroused by Mrs. Eddy, and increasingly these men treated her as an aberration. Sometimes these fears of an assertive woman were masked in wider cultural concerns; for some men Mrs. Eddy became a cultural symbol for all that ailed America. No one manipulated this multilayered symbol better than Mark Twain.

In a provocative analysis of Twain and other male writers in the nineteenth century such as Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Cooper, Joyce Warren argues that Twain, like the others, accepted assertive individualism and the American dream of success for men, but when it came to women in his life and fiction, he treated them as "abstract symbols of purity and selflessness." Twain, furthermore, could not conceive of a woman as an independent person. "For Twain, woman existed only as imaged by and in relation to the male self." As Warren notes in a sentence or two, Mrs. Eddy was "the ultimate example of the woman who did not fit the image." In 1899 Twain fired his first salvo at Mrs. Eddy in Cosmopolitan, and three years later his sardonic articles on her and Christian Science began to appear in the North American Review. In 1907 he wove his articles into an even nastier attack in his book Christian Science.

In the early twentieth century, Protestant America was bewildered by the forces that it suspected were invading it. The millions of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe not only brought their Catholicism along with their trunks and suitcases, but they also packed their threatening ideologies of anarchism and socialism. Once settled in their urban tenements, these Catholic ethnic groups, it was feared, would breed and overrun the WASPs of America. And for many Americans the threats did not emanate only from without. The changes in urban living and the growth of the large corporations challenged accepted beliefs about the meaning of American individualism and freedom.

Twain adeptly wedded Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science to those forces that were conspiring to undermine traditional American morality. Twain knew precisely what kind of response he would evoke when he asserted that Mrs. Eddy and her Christian Science church were no better than any other monopoly or trust. She was as power-hungry and money-hungry as any grasping business titan, and the authority of her organization constricted liberty and individualism as effectively as any trust did.

To a Protestant nation beset by fears of being smashed in a tidal wave of Catholic immigrants, Twain's symbolic linking of Mrs. Eddy to the Pope and religious authoritarianism was well calculated to stimulate anxieties and inveterate prejudices. The way Twain pictured it, Mrs. Eddy and the Pope, her Christian Science and his Catholicism, were two unnatural peas in a rotten pod. In the preceding ten or fifteen years, as Protestantism had relaxed its guard, Catholicism had slipped in and taken over the public schools, contaminating America's youth and its future. Christian Science was just as invasive a threat as Catholicism. The Scientists, who looked like your everyday Protestants, were already here; they had already invaded the community. "There are families of Christian Scientists in every community in America," Twain warned, "and each family is a factory; each family turns out a Christian Science product at the customary intervals, and contributes to the Cause.… Each family is an agency for the Cause, and makes converts among the neighbors, and starts some more factories."

Guiding this farflung empire, this monster with its tentacles reaching into every American community, was the authoritarian Mrs. Eddy. Like the Pope, she did not run a democratic organization. To the contrary, she, too, claimed infallibility; she, too, governed with an iron hand. If one looked closely one could see that in her tight-fisted feminine hand she held more power than the Pope. "A marvellous woman; with a hunger for power such as has never been seen in the world before," wrote Twain. He pounded away at Mrs. Eddy's insatiable need for power and dominance:

No thing, little or big, that contains any seed or suggestion of power escapes her avaricious eye; and when once she gets that eye on it, her remorseless grip follows. There isn't a Christian Scientist who isn't ecclesiastically as much her property as if she had bought him and paid for him, and copyrighted him and got a charter. She cannot be satisfied when she has handcuffed a member, and put a legchain and ball on him and plugged his ears and removed his thinker, she goes on wrapping needless chains round and round him, just as a spider would. For she trusts no one, believes in no one's honesty, judges every one by herself.

She is not merely an autocratic leader; she has become a primitive, terrifying creature. And when she was not enslaving her followers this way, her powerful grip was castrating them.

Twain was not the only man to use primitive imagery to convey vividly her threat to the stability of the social world. As Mrs. Eddy went about God's business and her movement grew, she began to unnerve men in the healing professions, particularly the doctors and the clergymen of the conservative Protestant denominations. In a recent article, Jean A. McDonald waded through the periodicals and books of the period and uncovered the primitive fantasies and exaggerated fears that Mrs. Eddy's success stirred in some doctors and ministers. Feeling threatened by the appearance of a strong woman on the public stage, they transmogrified Mrs. Eddy into a witch, a spider, a worm, and an anaconda. As the giant spider, she lured unsuspecting souls into her web in order to "devour" them, while as the giant snake she "coiled herself around the Christian system, breaking all the doctrinal bones of Christianity," and then "slimed it over" so that she could swallow it easily. Like the witch, Mrs. Eddy could change her form, and in one writer's imagination she had taken the "slimy, repulsive worm" of her teachings and transformed them into a beautifully seductive butterfly that would entrap innocent, simple souls.

To one minister she was "the modern witch of Concord," brewing God-knew-what in her cauldron. Another distressed minister envisioned Mrs. Eddy as a seductress enticing young people with "the sweet cup of her sorcery." Moreover, if Mrs. Eddy denied the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story, as she wrote in Science and Health, then she was like Satan's serpent in the garden. Her beguiling interpretations could not hide the fact that in her words there "lurks always the face of that Evil One who can hiss through a serpent, sin through a woman, shine in an angel, be a harlequin in logic, and a devil behind it all." For another anxious clergyman, Mrs. Eddy was Satan disguised as a woman; she was "the woman who introduced the corrupting leaven into the pure meal in the Gospel and leavened the whole lump." How could any man or woman digest what Mrs. Eddy had concocted?

Doctors were not much kinder to Mrs. Eddy. As was to be expected, they used their science to attack hers. Hysteria was one of their old standbys, but sometimes they could be more inventive: "neurotic," "psychotic," "paranoid," and "manic" were some of the terms they used to label and categorize her. No matter which label of pathology one chose to use, Mrs. Eddy clearly had a degenerate mind that employed "morbid symbolism."

These male professionals saw Mrs. Eddy as abnormal. She had surrendered her femininity when she became a strong, competent leader—in short, when she became a man. Mrs. Eddy was not blind to the gender issues her leadership provoked. She knew the risks of being an outspoken woman in late-Victorian America; she knew that for her Christian Science organization to gain a foot-hold in American culture, she would have to accept some of its expectations regarding gender roles.

An 1895 article in The Christian Science Journal again linked Mrs. Eddy to the basic values and ideals of American culture. From her Puritan past she inherited the innate "love of freedom" that was prominent in all she did. The article also praised Mrs. Eddy's work for what it meant for women. Within Christian Science she had opened to women "the two noblest of all avocations, philanthropy and medicine." Her work had "placed women by the side of men in the pulpit." In No and Yes Mrs. Eddy championed the role of women as spiritual reformers. Let no one say in Boston, she declared, that a woman had no rights that man had to respect. Natural law and religion both established woman's inalienable right to be educated and to hold important governmental jobs. These rights, moreover, were ably supported by the best people of both genders. As she drew this essay to a close, Mrs. Eddy foresaw a religious change coming to America; she knew that both Christian Science and women would be at the forefront as America began to fulfill its spiritual destiny. America, yearning for health and spiritual re-birth, must accept Christ, whose life and teachings were imparted by Christian Science. In its march toward its destiny, America should not relegate women to the rear. And in a jab at traditional ministers, she said in words that still have a ring of truth today: "Theologians descant pleasantly upon free moral agency; but they should begin by admitting individual rights."

Clearly representative of Mrs. Eddy's thinking about gender roles were her notes "Man and Woman," which she wrote in December 1900 and which Calvin Frye transcribed about five years after her death. She acknowledged that her organization seemed to favor men in positions of influence and power. There was, for example, only one woman compared to three men on the Board of Education. The Board of Trustees, the Board of Directors of the Mother Church, and the Publication Committee were all male. Out of thirteen members on the Board of Lectureship, only two were women.

To some this may have looked hypocritical. After all, this was a church headed by a woman, a church whose healing practitioners were predominantly female. Why did the men in the church—especially this church—control virtually all the positions of influence and power? From Mrs. Eddy's perspective, there was no real inconsistency or hypocrisy. In terms of gender, God was feminine, masculine, even neuter. God was everything; He was the Mother and Father of the entire universe. As such, man, created in His image, reflected both of His qualities, not simply one or the other. It was this unity that Christian Science aspired to recognize in both men and women.

Although the direction that Mrs. Eddy's argument took next has a remarkably modern ring, we must be careful not to read too much of the present into it. She clearly had her own late-Victorian culture in mind when she said that if at any period of history the reflection of God's masculine side seemed ascendant and more dominant than His feminine side, then it was because human perception and understanding had not fully grasped the true meaning of God's dual nature.

One could not deny that men had predominated in positions of power and influence in history, but history was temporal. "The divine data," on the other hand, was spiritual and infinite. It stood to reason, therefore, that men should not complain if in some future period the balance of power shifted to women. Society would then have to recognize that God's feminine nature had come to the forefront. Mrs. Eddy felt that in the eyes of God men and women were equal. In the divine order, man and woman began "in One and as one." There was no artificial sexual division to mar this unity and harmony. Unfortunately, in the world of material beliefs this inherent unity of God was sundered, split into two artificial halves instead of a seamless whole. However, this did not mean that she capitulated to convention regarding gender issues and role relationships. From the day she fell on the ice to the day she died, Mrs. Eddy saw herself and her movement not in terms of gender, but in spiritual terms: they were all reflections of God. From the early days of the Genesis manuscript, through the 1881 revision of Science and Health, in which she employed feminine pronouns in referring to God, to her notes on "Man and Woman," Mrs. Eddy wrestled with the issues of gender and the gap between man's personal sense and spiritual reality. It would have taken a Solomon to avoid the psychosocial implications of the Bible's account of Adam and Eve and the secondary status of women. It was also impossible to use gender pronouns and nouns in a spiritual sense without people assuming a social-psychological meaning and thus missing the heart of her message.

Most of the full-time practitioners in Christian Science were women. According to one historian they outnumbered men "five to one by the 1890s and eight to one by the early 1970s." In the late 1880s, a Chicago Times reporter was sent to cover a Christian Science meeting. He noted the preponderance of women in the audience and was not too far off the mark when he wrote, "Grammatically viewed, Christian Science is a noun in the feminine gender."

It is clear that no matter how imperfect Mrs. Eddy might have been in reconciling the gender issue (Mary Collson, for one, found that Christian Science fell short of the feminist expectations she carried into the movement), she provided an arena in which women could demonstrate intellectual, organizational, and publicity skills, a sphere of power in which they could demonstrate moral superiority, a sphere prepared by the culture of domesticity but outside the home on a public scale.

The resistance to Mrs. Eddy's leadership on the grounds of gender was confronted in an article in The Christian Science Journal in the spring of 1899. The article hailed Mrs. Eddy as a forceful, active leader whose long years of service had earned her the respect of her followers, much like "a commander whom every private soldier loves and honors." Of course, Mother Eddy was a woman, "and so too is your mother." Was it not obvious that in charitable work and in religion the brunt of the work was borne by women? Was it not also true that "in spiritual perception and intuitive power" women were at least the equal of men?

This was an ingenious argument, for the author placated fears of Mrs. Eddy's strong leadership by claiming that she had not breached the sphere of domesticity; she was merely extending it into the outside world, and, after all, who could deny that a moral woman's place was in religion? But this justification of Mrs. Eddy was also a bit disingenuous, because Mrs. Eddy was being more than a good girl who knew her proper place. She was not merely enlarging a separate sphere for women; other women had been doing this for some time. In terms of gender, she went a long way toward creating interlocking circles rather than separate spheres for the men and women in Christian Science. Women, like men, could exercise a dependent autonomy—as paradoxical as that might sound—within the world shaped by Mrs. Eddy's religious ideology.

It was this kind of feminism and autonomy that Mary Collson measured against the kind she had known at Hull House, and she found it wanting. But it was this kind that allowed Caroline Noyes and Edward Kimball to work side by side despite their disagreements (although Mary Collson and Alfred Farlow could not). As one Christian Science writer put it, "Through the understanding of Christian Science men and women, by one and the same method, can reform the sinner and heal the sick." Throughout the world Mrs. Eddy had "placed woman by the side of man in the pulpit as co-worker and co-equal."

From these pieces of impressionistic evidence, one can also see that Mrs. Eddy provided an arena for men who were looking for nurturing consolation but who for cultural reasons could not find it in Catholicism (here the Mother Mary connection is striking). We recall that Alfred Farlow discovered Christian Science to be a fertile ground for his skills and competence, but he also sought something more than autonomy. As he once put it, "Indeed, we seek [Mrs. Eddy's] advice as a child would seek the advice of its mother, and because of her peculiar relationship to us in this work, we have learned to call her 'Mother.'"

Yet gender stereotypes simply are not adequate to convey the reality of what Mrs. Eddy provided men and women in Christian Science. One crucial aspect of what she did through her connections to a Puritan past and Protestant values was to synthesize Protestant and Catholic images. She legitimated for Protestants the idea of a nurturant-maternal-consoling figure in terms that they could live with and in terms she preferred, as an ideal figure, a vessel for God's intentions, a denial of corporeality, which is consistent with the kind of disciplined rationalization they were learning. As a woman she could not have had such an appeal, especially for men in the nineteenth century, but as an idealized, spiritual figure she could.

In many respects Mrs. Eddy hit the right note at the right time; she synthesized "science" and nurturance, and she contained the anxiety by taking the process out of the body. She emphasized what many wanted to believe anyway: if they were able to couple the will, belief, and discipline to the true spiritual reality, then they could purge from their spirit the kinds of strivings and feelings the capitalist society was imposing. In one of its appeals, at least, Christian Science was a Protestant-capitalist version of nurturance, but precisely for whom will have to await a demographic study, if the data exists. For now, however, we can say that Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science were multivocal symbols. She succeeded in part because of the strength of her religious truth and because she provided an opportunity for different kinds of people. Putting the issue of Christian Science's radical idealism to one side, one can see that her success and the movement's were limited, at the same time, because of their maternal-nurturant-female quality.

Mrs. Eddy's followers, of course, were not swept up in these sociological abstractions; they responded to her in a more immediate, heartfelt way, which was poignantly demonstrated at her funeral. While most of her followers accepted her passing with a sadness moderated by restraint, John Salchow, her "Johnnie," more openly expressed a deep sense of loss. Just as her casket was being placed in the vault at Mount Auburn Cemetery and the door was being closed, Salchow looked at his watch, which read two o'clock. This was the exact time at which Mrs. Eddy used to take her daily drive, and this association had a profound effect upon the grief-stricken Salchow. The emotional pain was too much for him, and he had a brief out-of-body experience. To him it suddenly seemed as if he had become detached from reality. He then felt as if he were "suspended far above the earth," completely unaware of the other mourners. He had a single desire; he wanted to be with his beloved Mother. "I began to separate from myself," he wrote, "rising at an angle of about forty-five degrees and seemed to become two distinct persons, both dressed alike." When he had arisen about a foot or more from what appeared to be his other self, another Christian Science student, sensing his distress, approached him and, gently laying her hand on him, said, "John, she loved you." These comforting words brought Salchow down to earth and slowly he "was again one person." In an exaggerated way, he was expressing what all of the mourners—these children of Christian Science—felt at the loss of their Mother. She had guided them, and especially in "Johnnie's" case, shown them a great deal of love. Now she was gone. Yet as Salchow and the others would rediscover in the days ahead, she still lived through her words: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, along with her other writings, would continue to guide man into the path of spiritual reality.