BOOK REVIEWS

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND MIND CURE I N AMERICA:

A REVIEW ARTICLE
RAYMOND J. CUNNINGHAM

RAYMOND J, CUNNINGHAM i s Associate Professor of History at Fordham Uni-

versity. H i s field of special interest i s American intellectual and cultural history. He
has published several articles on spiritual healing in American churches in various
scholarly journals.

The appearance of a quantity of books dealing with popular mental thera-

peutics or “mind cure’’ in its historical and cultural context over the last several
years suggests that an overview of the major literature on the subject is now in
order. William James was one of the first to explore the significance of mind cure
among Americans a t the turn of the century. Commenting on the “religion of
healthy mindedness” in the United States, he observed that “the extremely prac-
tical turn of character of the American people has never been better shown than by
the fact that this, their only decidedly original contribution to the systematic
philosophy of life, should be so intimately knit up with concrete therapeutics.”’
How to become healthy, wealthy, and wise has indeed been a persistent concern
of James’ countrymen, and the pursuit of these benefits has manifested itself in
diverse ways. Among the various mind cure groups, Christian Science soon com-
manded the greatest attention, owing to the remarkable personality of its founder
and the impressive effectiveness of its organization. Thus, the earliest studies of
mental therapeutics were, in fact, assessments of Christian Science.
The historical investigation of Christian Science originated in the contemporary
polemics that accompanied its growth. I n 1907, in response to unfriendly jour-
nalistic publicity, Christian Science leaders sponsored The Life of Mary Baker E d d y
by Sybil Wilbur, a newspaper woman and student of the new religion. An entirely
uncritical work, it became the authorized biography, although it has never been
considered reliable by non-Christian Scientists. A very different reception was
given to Georgine Milmine’s The Life of Mary G. Baker E d d y and the History of
Christian Science (New York, 1909). Milmine, too, was a journalist but of a dif-
ferent breed. Her book, a revision and amplification of articles written for McClure’s
Magazine in 1907-1908, was representative of the “muckraking” journalism of
that period. Milmine received no official cooperation, but she and her co-workers
amassed a great store of first-hand information through interviews and affidavits
secured from former acquaintances and associates of Mrs. Eddy.
Milmine’s approach was one of skepticism, and the picture of Eddy and her
organization is unflattering. Matters which have continued to engage the interest
of scholars were first explored in this contemporary history, e.g., the intellectual
origins of Eddy’s ideas, her complicated controversies with erstwhile disciples,
and the remarkable affluence of the movement in a short span of years. Milmine
‘William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in H u m a n Nalure, Being the
Giflord Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 (New York, 1902, p. 95).

299
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stressed “the businesslike methods which have always been so conspicuous in the
operations of the Christian Science Church” (p. 369), and it was this, perhaps, that
most aroused the distrust of the Progressive generation. A t the same time, she
acknowledged the therapeutic value of its teachings and attempted to account for
its dramatic expansion: “Mrs. Eddy’s teachings brought the promise of material
benefits to a practical people, and the appeal of seeming newness to a people whose
mental recreation was a feverish pursuit of novelty” (p. 375).
Mary Baker Eddy died in 1910, but two decades elapsed before the publica-
tion of the first posthumous study, Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Viyginal Mind
(New York, 1929) by Edwin F. Dakin. The book enjoyed great popular acclaim,
and it has become a classic of American biography. I n explanation of his title,
Dakin wrote that Mrs. Eddy’s “was a virginal mind which is never married to
reality-a mind that, whatever its sorties in the world of experience, always returns
t o sleep with its dreams” (p. 222). By the late twenties, muckraking had given
way t o ‘(debunking”. The fashionable technique was no longer direct attack in
the interest of social betterment but oblique innuendo for the entertainment of
sophisticates. Readers were less interested in the intricacies of financial manipula-
tion than in the eccentricities of personal behavior. Economics took second place
t o psychology. Where Milmine’s style was matter-of-fact, Dakin’s was apt t o be
tongue-in-cheek.
As suited this early exercise in psychohistory, Dakin delved into his subject’s
early years for clues to her later development. One reads of her “delusion of per-
secution” and “delusion of her personal grandeur’’ (p. 147), and, of course, of (la sup-
pressed sexual urge” (p. 315). Yet Dakin’s work was, in the main, a sensitive por-
trayal, singularly free of psychiatric jargon: “So,” he concluded, ‘(it was in her
gallant struggle to achieve despite every human limitation that Mary Baker Eddy
revealed whatever divinity may glow in man” (p. 523).
Two books of the early thirties, each bearing a very different stamp, round out
the first phase of inquiry. Lyman P. Powell, an Episcopalian clergyman, published
Mary Baker Eddy: A Life Size Portrait (New York, 1930) in which he took explicit
exception to the then curyent enthusiasm for debunking in biographical literature.
Although the book was written with the cooperation of Christian Science officialdom,
Powell maintained that he preserved full independence. It is, nevertheless, scarcely
less uncritical than the Wilbur book, and scholars have been at a loss t o account
for the author’s motivation.2 Two years later, Ernest S. Bates and John V. Ditte-
more published Mary Baker Eddy, The Truth and the Tradition (New York, 1932).
Bates, a former literary editor of the Dictionary of American Biography, was prin-
cipally responsible for the composition of the work, while Dittemore, a disenchanted
former director of the Mother Church, contributed his large private collection of
documentary sources. The co-authors took exception to a few minor points in
Milmine and Dakin, but their book as a whole reinforced those earlier studies.
Until the early thirties, most of the principal authors, with the exception of
James, had not been professional scholars investigating popular mind cure within
. -

21n 1907 Powell had published Christian Science: The Faith and Its Founder, a rather broad
minded clerical critique (such m were not uncommon at the time), in which he relied upon Milmine’s
articles for biogra hical material and praised “the singular accuracy of the articles and the thorough-
ness with which txey have been prepared” (p. v),
 BOOK REVIEWS 301

the framework of an academic di~cipline.~Thereafter, the reverse became the

norm. Altman K. Swihart’s Since Mrs. Eddy (New York, 1931) originated as a
doctoral dissertation in religious studies a t Columbia University and Union Theo-
logical Seminary. The monograph is concerned with the dissident groups led by
Augusta Stetson and Annie Bill, through which the author hoped to “throw light
on the general process which gave rise to denominations . . .” (p. viii). Two other
studies examined the mind cure as an expression of medical sectarianism: (1)
Louis S. Reed, The Healing Cults: A Study of Sectarian Medical Practice-Its
Extent, Causes, and Control (Chicago, 1932) and; (2) Richard H. Shyrock, “Cults
and Quakery in American Medical History,” Proceedings of the Middle States
Association of History and Social Science Teachers, 1939, 37, 19-30. Shyrock, a
prominent medical historian, presented the thesis that the expansion of nonscientific
mental healing in the last decades of the nineteenth century was a direct response
t o the neglect of psychotherapy by alienists and neurologists.
The scholar who has given the most sustained attention to popular religious
therapeutics in America is Charles S. Braden, professor emeritus of the history
and literature of religion at Northwestern University. His first effort was a series
of articles on sundry cults in the Christian Century in January and February 1944.
A few years later, he published These Also Believe: A Study of Modern American
Cults and Minority Religious Movements (New York, 1949), which has chapters
on Christian Science and New Thought (including Unity, Psychiana, and related
cults) and which remains a standard work.4 This was followed by two more thorough
treatments: Christian Science Today: Power, Policy, Practice (Dallas, 1958) and
Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (Dallas, 1963).
The dominant trait of Braden’s work is his scrupulous pursuit of objectivity
and his determined refusal to strive after literary effect. In the first of these two
major studies, Braden’s focus, unlike that of earlier writers, was not upon the l i e
of Mrs. Eddy or of her church in its most formative years, but upon the develop-
ment of Christian Science organization, thought, and practice subsequent to the
founder’s death. He was not given the unrestricted access that he sought to the
Mother Church archives, but he was able to make full use of the wide range of
source materials that have become available over the years. Braden allowed himself
only an implicit criticism of his subject in confessing “to a prejudice in favor of
democracy as over against autocracy of any kind, either fascist or communist,
of freedom as over against authoritarian control, in religion as well as in these
other fields . . .” (p. xv). The result is a careful, well-documented institutional
study.
Although not the earliest account of its subject, Braden’s Spirits in Rebellion
was the first full-scale history of the New Thought movement by a trained scholar.6
3An exception is the analysis of Christian Science by the philosopher, Woodbridge Riley, in his
American Thought: pram Puritankrn to Prq+.iSn (New York, 1915). Riley viewed Christian
Science &s a latter-day manifestation of the Amencan mystical strain reaching back through Emerson
t o Edwards and thence to the English Neo-Platonists.
“arlier and later works of similar purpose are Gaius G. Atkins, Modern Religious CuUs and
Mooentents (New York, 1923) and Walter R. Martin, The Rise of the Cu&s (Grand Rapids, Mich.,
1955).
6Theearliest history was Horatio W. Dresser, A History ofthe New Thought Movement (New York,
1919). Dresser was editor of the co:n?versial Quimby Manumipts and indefatigable opponent of
Mary Baker Eddy’s claim to have discovered” Christian Science.
302 BOOK REVIEWS

Decentralized, individualistic, and nonauthoritarian, New Thought presents a

sharp contrast to Christian Science. By the same token, it does not lend itself to
easy generalization or definition. Braden, however, accepts the following statement
of principle as representative: “To teach the Infinitude of the Supreme One;
the Divinity of man and his infinite possibilities through the creative power of
constructive thinking and obedience to the voice of the indwelling Presence,
which is our source of Inspiration, Power, Health and Prosperity” (p. 12). Once
again, the author eschewed interpretation, but as a comprehensive, factual treat-
ment, his study is essential. Coverage includes the nineteenth century pioneers,
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Warren Felt Evans, such representative twentieth
century proponents as Ralph Waldo Trine and Emmet Fox, and quasi-New Thought
exemplars outside the movement such as Glenn Clark and Norman Vincent Peale.
The International New Thought Alliance (whose remote origins date to 1899)
receives a chapter, as does each of the major variant New Thought groups such
as Unity, Divine Science, and Religious Science.
Braden’s attention to Peale summons up the pervasive peace-of-mind strain
in American society and religion in the years after World War 11. Most academic
critics have dealt severely with “psychological religion,” as the sociologist, Peter
Berger, has called it,6 but its undeniably wide influence partly accounts for the
publication of pertinent studies by recent scholars.’
Popular Religion: Inspirational Books in America (Chicago, 1958) by the
sociologists, Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch, is an examination, based
on content analysis, of 46 best-sellers of this genre published between 1875 and
1955. Among the sources subjected to analysis were books by Trine, Peale, Rabbi
Joshua Liebman, and Bishop Fulton Sheen. The authors, however, were only
peripherally interested in historical context. Their chief purpose was to isolate
and identify themes and to show their significance for American popular culture.
Their conclusions, which are highly specific, do not lend themselves to easy sum-
mary, but one finding at least may be noted: “the theme that religion brings wealth
has declined since the end of the depression, but health, physical and emotional,
has received considerably increased attention in recent years” (p. 33). Among pos-
sible explanations for this shift, these sociologists offered the observation that
“diffuse anxiety, being baffled at one point by reason of evident objective securities,
translates itself elsewhere . . .” (p. 32).
Within the last ten years, studies of popular mental therapeutics have been
published by four historians: (1) Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: A Study
of the American Quest for Health, Wealth and Personal Power from Mary Baker
Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale (Garden City, N.Y., 1965); (2) Richard Weiss,
The American M y t h of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (New
York, 1969); (3) Richard M. Huber, The American Idea of Success (New York,
1971) and; (4)Gail T. Parker, Mind Cure in New England: From the Civil W a r t o
BE. g., Peter L. Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religiouc
Establishment in America (Garden City, N. Y., 1961, pp. 90-104); Sydney E. Ahlstrom, “The
Pieties of Usefulness: Religion in American Culture at Mid-Century,” Stetson Uniuersity Bulletin,
1957, 67, 1-15.
7For an earlier instance, see Alfred W. Griswold, “New Thought: A Cult of Success,” Americar,
Journal of Sociology, 1934, 40,309-318.
 BOOK REVIEWS 303

World War I (Hanover, N.H., 1973). Taken together, all four books shed impor-
tant light on their common subject.
Meyer’s study is both chronological and thematic. I n the pre-1900 phase
the focus is on the primary theological and psychological assumptions and the
secondary social and political assumptions of such familiar figures as Quimby,
Eddy, and Trine; they are set against the background of George Beard’s discovery
of “nervousness” and William James’ fascination with the “subconscious.” For
the period ca. 1900-1945, attention is on the disintegration of the Protestant
economic ethic of scarcity under the impact of economic abundance and bureau-
cracy, and on the functional relationship of mind cure psychology to a new economic
ethic more appropriate to the era of the organizational man. I n the years since
1945, the central concern is the preoccupation of the Protestant churches with
popular psychotherapy and Norman Vincent Peale’s “ascent to sensational promi-
nence” (p. 262). A postscript treats of mind cure among Catholics and Jews in
postwar America. Meyer holds that the mind cure tradition originated as a meaning-
ful protest against inadequacies in medicine, theology, and feminine social roles,
but that ultimately “ ‘Health’ was a fatal ideal” (p. 314). “Telling legitimately
discontented people to find the source of their discontent in themselves was t o
tell them to shrink further from testing their powers in the society around them”
(p. 313).
Richard Weiss discerned two broad schools of success-thought by the end of
the last century. There was the older tradition, expressed in Horatio Alger’s no-
tion of rags-to-riches, which was rooted in the Protestant ethic of industry and
thrift. By 1900, both these virtues and their reward were becoming increasingly
irrelevant to the actualities of economic and social life. But there was also the newer
tradition, expressed in Ralph Waldo Trine’s notion of achievement through mind-
power, which was founded on the Transcendentalist ethic of idealism and opti-
mism. After World War I, this psychological version of the success myth became
predominant and eventually carried all before it in the positive-thinking of Peale
and his confreres. Weiss, like Meyer, sees mind-power as symptomatic of the
passing of the “ascetic virtues” and their replacement by a gospel of “ease, relaxa-
tion, and comfort” (p. 15). Unlike Meyer, however, Weiss is inclined to give more
weight t o the reform impulse which he found in mind-power thinking. He argues
the commitment of such New Thoughters as Trine and Benjamin 0. Flower to
Progressive aims.
Richard Huber painted a broader canvas than either Meyer or Weiss, but
his work closely parallels theirs. His analysis led him to posit three interacting
but distinct expressions of the success-idea, two of which are central to this essay.
Until the end of the nineteenth century and after, an entrepreneurial society derived
success chiefly from the “character ethic” of a Benjamin Franklin or an Elbert
Hubbard. After 1890, however, large numbers of Americans for whom success-
through-character was increasingly unreal and unattainable eagerly espoused
more novel concepts of success founded upon the “mind power ethic” of Trine,
C o d , and Peale, or upon the “personality ethic” of Dale Carnegie and his fellow
“experts” in human relations. Although Huber thus distinguished two modes of
the American quest for psychological well-being and success where Meyer and
Weiss treated them as one, he agreed with them in viewing the mind cure psychology
as a reaction against the once-dominant “character ethic.”
304 BOOK REVIEWS

Parker’s book is more restricted in scope than Meyer’s, Weiss’, or Huber’s,

confined as it is to New England popularizers of mental therapeutics between 1870
and 1920. The focus is on a dozen or so mind curists, more than half of whom were
women. Her principal concern is with their admittedly inconsistent ideas, but
some psychoanalytic portraiture is hazarded and the role of mind cure as a pre-
cursor of Freudianism is suggested. Parker rejects the Meyer-Weiss-Huber view
that the philosophy of mental therapeutics amounted to a repudiation of the
Protestant ethic. Rather, the appeal of mind cure lay precisely in its “muddle-
headed” coupling of “self-help and self-abandon” (p. 20). “Encouraged by Marden
and Trine and Towne they [the devotees of mind cure] could trust themselves to
let go occasionally without fearing that they would fall apart” (pp. 167-168).
Christian Science has continued to occupy center stage. The most interesting
recent scholarship here is the work of Robert Peel. An active Christian Scientist
and a trained intellectual historian, Peel is the first serious scholar to have been
granted full access to the Mother Church archives. I n 1958, he published Christian
Science: Its Encounter with American Culture, the central theme of which is a com-
parison of Transcendentalism and Christian Science as “related but distinct”
cultural phenomena (p. xi). Peel considers the unbridgeable gulf between them to
be the failure of Transcendentalism to have perceived “that evil is literally and
demonstrably nothing” (p. 93)-the “demonstration” being healing.8
Peel’s 1958 essay was the prelude to a much more ambitious undertaking,
viz., a three-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy. Two volumes have appeared
thus far: Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (New York, 1966), which brings
the narrative to 1875, and the publication of Science and HeaZth; Mary Baker
Eddy: The Years of Trial (New York, 1971), which covers the period 1876-1891,
during which she shaped and guided her organization, first from Lynn and Boston,
Massachusetts, and then from Concord, New Hampshire. Peel accepts, for the
most part, all the claims and assertions made by and/or for Mrs. Eddy. (“The
letters she received tell of healings that sometimes took place while she talked with
a person, unconscious of his needing help” [11,p. 2501). He also is inclined to place
the most favorable construction on the more ambiguous aspects of her career.
But his grasp of the cultural and intellectual forces of her time and place is impres-
sive, and he has located the evolution of her thought and character firmly within
their New England matrix. No biography of so elusive and complex a person can
be definitive, but Peel’s work is an indispensable complement to the best earlier
studies.9
Another facet that has been explored in some detail by recent scholars is the
influence of Christian Science on American religious life generally and upon specific
church groups such as Episcopalians‘* and Jews.l’ The fullest attempt to account
for the growth and appeal of Christian Science as a new religious synthesis in the
years between 1885 and 1910 is Stephen Gottschalk’s The Emergence of Christian
8A more technical anal sis by a Christian Scientist scholar is Henry W. Steiger, Christian Science
and Philosophy (New Yo$ 1948).
QAnotheruncritical treatment in the Wilbur-Powell tradition appeared with Norman Beasley,
Mary Baker Eddy (New York, 1963). He is also the author of The Cross and the Crown: The History
of Christian Science (New York, 1952).
10See Raymond J. Cunningham, “The Emmanuel Movement: A Variety of American Religious
Experience,” American Quarterly, 1962, 14, 48-63.
1lSee John W. Appel, “Christian Science and the Jews,” Jewish Social Studies, 1969, 31, 100-121.
 BOOK REVIEWS 305

Science in American Religious Life (Berkeley, Calif., 1973). Gottschalk places

particular emphasis on the attractiveness of Christian Science as a serious religious
alternative to the beleaguered Protestantism of the Gilded Age. He is also con-
cerned to distinguish Christian Science intellectually from the broader mental
therapeutics movement that preceded or derived from it by stressing its specifically
Christian theological associations. Contrary to most scholars, Gottschalk mini-
mizes the philosophical idealism of Eddy’s teachings in favor of relating them to
the popular and philosophical pragmatism of American culture. I n this connection
he goes so far as to suggest that “since Christian Science was formulated a decade or
more before the emergence of pragmatism, Mrs. Eddy’s teaching may be said in a
limited sense to have anticipated its development” (p. 276). Meanwhile, findings
of a different sort have been presented in Harold W. Pfauta, “A Case Study of an
Urban Religious Movement : Christian Science,” in Contributions to Urban Sociology,
eds. Ernest W. Burgess and Donald J. Bogue (Chicago, 1964, pp. 284-303). Pfautz
studied the “natural history” of Christian Science as a social movement emanating
from a culture increasingly characterized by urban values and demands. “The
language and imagery of its organization,” he points out, “reflected the language
of bureaucracy-presidents, boards of trustees, committees, associations, etc.”
(pp. 287-288).
This survey of literature highlights an indigenous American social movement
of multiple dimensions which has produced a heritage of values and attitudes that
remain very much a part of the national scene. It will not be lost upon readers of
this journal that the psychologist, William James, was the first academician to
dwell upon the significance of mind cure in its broad cultural bearings. James
recognized popular religious and philosophical ideas as providing important material
for behavioral science. So, too, the historian of the behavioral sciences might range
more widely in the area of popular culture than perhaps he has been accustomed
to heretofore.

Bibliography and Research Manual of the History of Mathematics. Kenneth 0. May.

University of Toronto Press, 1973. Pp. 818. $20.00. (Reviewed by ROBERT
I. WATSON)
ROBERT I. WATSON i s the former editor of the JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF
THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES and Professor of Psychology at the University of N e w
Hampshire, where he was h&umenZal in organizing the pioneer Ph.D. gradwte
program in the history of psychology. H i s books include The Great Psychologists, now
in its third edition, and the recently published reference volume, Eminent Contributors
to Psychology, Vol. 1, A Bibliography of Primary References. His theoretical
position has stressed what has been called prescriptive theory.
This volume is a bibliography of some 31,000 entries under about 3,700 topics
drawn from what the author estimates to be about 500,000 titles. This is preceded
by a concretely informative essay on historical methodology in mathematics. The
bibliographical citations are divided into several major categories : biographical,
mathematical, epimathematical, historical, and information retrieval. Illustrations
that follow are designed not only to illuminate the meaning and scope of these
categories, but also to show their relevance to the readers of this JOURNAL.
At first glance a bibliography directed to mathematicians and historians of
mathematics might seem either irrelevant or at least only of peripheral interest
to historians of behavioral science. This is emphatically not the case. Biographical
citations are supplied by approximately 3,000 individuals. Of these, fifty who are