[14] This includes the view that disease is a mental error rather than physical disorder, and that the sick should be treated not by medicine but by a form of prayer that seeks to correct the beliefs responsible for the illusion of ill health.

The supreme cause was referred to as Divine Mind, Truth, God, Love, Life, Spirit, Principle or Father–Mother, reflecting elements of Plato, Hinduism, Berkeley, Hegel, Swedenborg, and transcendentalism.

This provided fertile soil for the mind-cure groups, who argued that sickness was an absence of "right thinking" or failure to connect to Divine Mind.

His advertising flyer, "To the Sick" included this explanation of his clairvoyant methodology: "he gives no medicines and makes no outward applications, but simply sits down by the patients, tells them their feelings and what they think is their disease.

If the patients admit that he tells them their feelings, &c., then his explanation is the cure; and, if he succeeds in correcting their error, he changes the fluids of the system and establishes the truth, or health.

[39][40] Most significantly, she dismissed the material world as an illusion, rather than as merely subordinate to Mind, leading her to reject the use of medicine, or materia medica, and making Christian Science the most controversial of the metaphysical groups.

"[45] When founding the Church of Christ, Scientist, in April 1879, Eddy wrote that she wanted to "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing".

The process involves the Scientist engaging in a silent argument to affirm to herself the unreality of matter, something Christian Science practitioners will do for a fee, including in absentia, to address ill health or other problems.

[57] Wilson writes that Christian Science healing is "not curative ... on its own premises, but rather preventative of ill health, accident and misfortune, since it claims to lead to a state of consciousness where these things do not exist.

[59] Eddy accepted as true the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis up to chapter 2, verse 6—that God created man in his image and likeness—but she rejected the rest "as the story of the false and the material", according to Wilson.

They believe it is a Christianity that is in the New Testament; that it has always been there, that in the drift of ages it was lost through disuse and neglect, and that this benefactor has found it and given it back to men, turning the night of life into day, its terrors into myths, its lamentations into songs of emancipation and rejoicing.

[73] She married again, and her new husband promised to become the child's legal guardian, but after their marriage he refused to sign the needed papers and the boy was taken to Minnesota and told his mother had died.

[77] She was later accused by critics, beginning with Julius Dresser, of borrowing ideas from Quimby in what biographer Gillian Gill would call the "single most controversial issue" of her life.

Evidence suggests she had severe injuries, but a few days later she apparently asked for her Bible, opened it to an account of one of Jesus' miracles, and left her bed telling her friends that she was healed through prayer alone.

[86] During Eddy's lifetime, Christian Science spread throughout the United States and to other parts of the world including Canada, Great Britain, Germany, South Africa, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Australia, and elsewhere.

[91] The suit fell apart after Eddy was interviewed in her home in August 1907 by the judge and two court appointed masters (one a psychiatrist) who concluded that she was mentally competent.

[92] The McClure's and New York World stories are considered to at least partially be the reason Eddy asked the church in July 1908 to found the Christian Science Monitor as a platform for responsible journalism.

[103] This included attempts to make practicing Christian Science illegal in the United States and elsewhere;[104] a period known as the Great Litigation which involved two intertwined lawsuits regarding church governance;[105] persecution under the Nazi and Communist regimes in Germany[106] and the Imperial regime in Japan;[107] a series of lawsuits involving the deaths of members of the church, most notably some children;[108] and a controversial decision to publish a book by Bliss Knapp.

They offer no medical services; the nurses are Christian Scientists who have completed a course of religious study and training in basic skills, such as feeding and bathing.

[128] Philosopher Margaret P. Battin wrote in 1999 that the seriousness with which these testimonials are treated by Christian Scientists ignores factors such as false positives caused by self-limiting conditions.

[129] The Massachusetts Committee for Children and Youth listed among the report's flaws that it had failed to compare the rates of successful and unsuccessful Christian Science treatment.

[123] In 2010 the New York Times reported church leaders as saying that, for over a year, they had been "encouraging members to see a physician if they feel it is necessary", and that they were repositioning Christian Science prayer as a supplement to medical care, rather than a substitute.

[147] It includes "The Golden Rule": "A member of The Mother Church shall not haunt Mrs. Eddy's drive when she goes out, continually stroll by her house, or make a summer resort near her for such a purpose.

In addition to readings, members offer testimonials during the main portion of the Wednesday meetings, including recovery from ill health attributed to prayer.

[151] Christian Science has been well represented in the film industry, including Carol Channing and Jean Stapleton;[152] Colleen Dewhurst;[153] Joan Crawford, Doris Day, George Hamilton, Mary Pickford, Ginger Rogers, Mickey Rooney;[154] Horton Foote;[155] King Vidor;[156] Robert Duvall, and Val Kilmer.

Her mother, known as Mama Jean, was a recent convert to Christian Science and did on at least two occasions attempt to block conventional medical treatment for her daughter.

[172] Roy M. Anker, 1999: "Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science (denominationally known as the Church of Christ, Scientist), the most prominent, successful, controversial, and distinctive of all the groups whose inspiration scholars trace to the healing and intellectual influence of Quimby.

Like Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy added too much new religious culture for her movement to qualify fully as a member of the Christian family—as all the leading clerics of the time repeatedly and vociferously pointed out.

Roy M. Anker, "Revivalism, Religious Experience and the Birth of Mental Healing", Self-help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture: An Interpretive Guide, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1999(a), (pp.

Claudia Stokes, The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, p. 181 Archived 2022-11-01 at the Wayback Machine.