About Mary Baker Eddy
Mary Baker Eddy is the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science.
She was born in 1821 and was raised in a very religious household in New England. An invalid for most of her childhood and early adult life, Mary Baker Eddy not only had a firm faith in God and His love for her, but she constantly sought to find permanent solutions to her many ills and challenges.
In 1866 Mrs. Eddy slipped on an icy street and sustained a critical life-threatening injury. It was at this moment that she turned fully to God in prayer and opened her Bible. She read an account of Jesus healing a man instantly. As a result, she was immediately healed of her injuries.
Mary Baker Eddy spent the next few years studying and exploring the Bible with her newfound sense of God and His healing power. It was during this time that she wrote the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
Mary Baker Eddy devoted the rest of her life to establishing and maintaining her religion and system of healing.
Along the way, she wrote many books, became a public speaker, created a publishing society with numerous magazines and publications, and she established her own church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, MA — also known as The Mother Church.
Additionally, Mary Baker Eddy saw the necessity for news to be reported without the "yellow journalism" of her day, and so she established the award-winning international newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor.
Mary Baker Eddy is considered to be one of the great spiritual thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her teachings remain radical and relevant to today’s world.
To find out more about Mary Baker Eddy, you can find many wonderful biographies written about her in our Reading Room and through online resources.
In speaking of her place in history, Mrs. Eddy wrote this:
“Those who look for me in person, or elsewhere than in my writings, lose me instead of find me. I hope and trust that you and I may meet in truth and know each other there, and know as we are known of God.”
~The First Church of Christ, Scientist and Miscellany, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 120:2