Science for not being Jesus-centered enough, and Elizabeth Towne, who in 1910 started the widely read New Thought magazine Nautilus.
While the New Thought movement did a great deal to make an individual feel more responsible for his outcome, it also had the side effect of disconnecting the individual from a greater causality. Not everything can be traced back to personal and individual actions, and there are some things out of the realm of possibility for any individual to change. Take for example slavery in America, or the Armenian Holocaust in Turkey or the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. In his book, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls, Robert C. Fuller explains how he thinks New Thought ideology separates people from one another:
As an orientation to life, the New Thought philosophy aggravated rather than assuaged the emotional distance between people. Since the psychological model of human fulfillment New Thought borrowed from the mesmerists completely lacked any interpersonal variables, it couldn’t demonstrate the strength-bestowing importance of such traditional virtues as cooperation, compromise, or delay of personal gratification . . . . Thus, the nation’s first popular psychology degenerated into an ideology that taught its adherents to systematically exclude the needs or opinions of others as illusory obstacles to self-actualization. The New Thought projected values which ironically prevented confused individuals from coming in touch with the most valuable healing resource of all—each other.
While New Thought reinforces the idea that sickness and poverty reveal the individual’s incapacity to connect with a higher purpose, other Christian beliefs taught that Jesus said that sickness had a divine purpose, usually to encourage one’s spiritual evolution, and that sickness was not caused by sin alone.
With the man born blind, Christ gives to his disciples a surprising reply: It was not that this man sinned, or his parents [had], but that the works of God might be made manifest in him. We need not assume that Christ denies that sin is at the root of this blindness too. However, he reveals here another aspect of sickness . . . . Every sickness has two aspects: one of the past, the cause; one of the future, [which] meaning shall be made manifest. The disciples learn to see that this illness, indeed that every illness, is for the manifestation of the works of God. Every illness is given in order that man may grow into a further manifestation of the divine in him.27
All that we know of matter is force, as all its properties are only modifications of force. Its inmost essence may be spiritual, and what we call matter may be only the outward clothing, or ultimation, or external manifestation of some spiritual reality. The properties of matter are reduced to the single idea of force. Mind is a higher and diviner force, approaching many degrees nearer the Central Life. All force, in its origin, as well as all causation, is spiritual. Mind is a manifestation of force entirely distinct from that we call matter. Between color and thought, there is a broad distinction. They are not identical. One belongs to matter, the other to mind. One is a material, the other a spiritual property or force.
—Warren Felt Evans, The Mental Cure
Warren Felt Evans was a farmer’s son, born to Eli and Sarah Edson Evans in Rockingham, Vermont, on December 23, 1817, the sixth of their seven children. Evans, along with the Dresser family, wrote extensively on the teachings of Phineas Quimby. Evans didn’t quite establish a movement like Mrs. Eddy; instead he set up a healing practice in Salisbury, Massachusetts. Evans quickly gained notoriety due to his skill as a healer, and he published several books that were widely popular. These include The Mental Cure: Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the Body, Both in Health and Disease, and the Psychological Method of Treatment (1869); Mental Medicine (1872); Soul and Body, The Divine Law of Cure (1881); The Primitive Mind Cure (1885); and Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics (1886).
Evans’ first work was released three years prior to Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. Aside from Mrs. Eddy, Mr. Evans was the only person who actually made a cohesive philosophical system of mental healing immediately after Quimby’s passing. One of the most interesting aspects of Evans’ written works is that he integrated the work of Phineas Quimby and the spiritualist inspiration of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, Christian mystic and theologian. Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist, and was another in the line of Hermetic prophets who claimed to receive information from angels. According to Swedenborg, he had developed a technique which allowed him to converse with angles clairvoyantly, whenever he wished. This method, which he called “Testicular Breathing”28 was performed during intercourse.
According to Swedenborg, after a theophanous vision (during sex), he was allowed to enter freely into Heaven and Hell, and communicate with angels, demons, or any other spirit he should happen across. The narratives in Conversations With Angels have been ably translated by Swedenborg scholars David Gladish and Jonathan Rose, and have been selected from three of Swedenborg’s works, Conjugal Love, Apocalypse Revealed, and True Christian Religion. The Hermetic inspirations and nature of Swedenborg’s writings have been examined by many scholars, but are best made plain in Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s Swedenborg, a Hermetic Philosopher: Being a Sequel to Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists. This work shows that Swedenborg writings may be interpreted from the point of view of Hermetic philosophy.
Along with the New Thought movement, the works of Swedenborg inspired a church of worshippers (The New Jerusalem Church), the Spiritualist movement in America, and such literary figures as William Blake, August Strindberg, Charles Baudelaire, Balzac, Waldo Ralph Emerson (and the Transcendentalist movement), William Butler Yeats and Carl Jung.
Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925) was a student of Mary Baker Eddy’s, and some credit her with founding the New Thought movement. She worked closely with Mrs. Eddy for several years, but eventually had a falling out with the Church of Christian Science and began teaching and lecturing on her own.
Following Eddy, Hopkins conceptualized the Trinity as three aspects of divinity, each playing a role in different historical epochs: God the Father, God the Son and God the Mother-Spirit. Hopkins believed that the changing roles of women indicated the re-emergence of the Mother aspect of God.
Hopkins went on to inspire a good number of New Thought writers and founders of their churches. Two of her better-known students were Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who founded Unity School of Christianity, the largest denomination with members in the New Thought movement.
The difference between Jesus and us is not one of inherent spiritual capacity, but in difference of demonstration of it. Jesus was potentially perfect, and He expressed that perfection; we are potentially perfect, [but] we have not yet expressed it.
—Charles Fillmore
Charles Fillmore was born to a Chippewa trader on an Indian reservation near St. Cloud, Minnesota, in 1854.
