Mary Baker Eddy and her students establish…

Mary Baker Eddy and her students establish the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879, “to commemorate the word and works of our Master [Jesus], which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.” (Eddy, Mary Baker (1910), Church Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass, Boston: The First Church of Christ, Scientist.)

Born Mary Baker Grove Patterson, she claims to have found healing power through a higher sense of God as Spirit and man as God's spiritual "image and likeness."

She has become convinced by her own study of the Bible, especially Genesis 1, and through experimentation, that illness can be healed through an awakened thought brought about by a clearer perception of God and the explicit rejection of drugs, hygiene and medicine based upon the observation that Jesus did not use these methods for healing.

She eventually calls this spiritual perception the operation of the Christ Truth on human consciousness.

Claiming to have first healed herself after a fall in Lynn, Massachusetts in February 1866 caused a spinal injury, and then others, and having learned from these experiences, Eddy feels anyone can perceive what she called "the Kingdom of Heaven" or spiritual reality on earth.

For her, this healing method is based on scientific principles and can be taught to others.

This positive rule of healing, she teaches, results from a new understanding of God as infinite Spirit beyond the limitations of the material senses.

By the 1870’s, Mary had begun telling her students “Some day I will have a church of my own.” (Peel, Robert (1971), Mary Baker Eddy, The Years of Trial, Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society)

Mary has became well known as a healer, and firsthand accounts survive claiming that miracles occurred similar to miracles performed by Jesus, who calmed a storm and raised people from the dead.

She divorced Daniel Patterson in 1873, Mary for adultery, to which he readily admitted.

After several years of testing the effectiveness of her healing method, Mary published her discovery in 1875 in a book entitled Science and Health (years later retitled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures), which she calls the textbook of Christian Science.

The first publication run was one thousand copies, which she self-published.

In the final edition, she will write "In the year 1866, I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science" (p. 107).

During these years, she teaches what she considers the science of "primitive Christianity" to at least eight hundred people.

Many of her students become healers themselves.

The last one hundred pages of Science and Health (the chapter entitled "Fruitage") contains testimonies of people who claimed to have been healed by reading her book.

She will make numerous revisions to her book from the time of its first publication until shortly before her death.

In 1877, Mary weds Asa Gilbert Eddy.

Taking his surname, Mary Baker Eddy will devote the rest of her life to the establishment of her church, writing its bylaws, The Manual of The Mother Church, and revising Science and Health.

While Eddy is a highly controversial religious leader, author, and lecturer, thousands of people flock to her teachings.