Modern Religious Cults and MovementsAtkins, Gaius Glenn
Religion
Modern Religious Cults and Movements
Atkins, Gaius Glenn
Christian Science; New Thought; Religion; Spiritual healing
Mrs. Eddy and the Dressers were the outstanding members of this little
group of disciples. Mrs. Eddy soon dissociated herself from the others
and she supplied in "Science and Health" a distinctive philosophy to her
movement. She organized it into a church; she imposed upon it a
distinctive discipline. No little of the power of Christian Science is
due to this narrow rigidity which is itself the projection of the
personality of Mary Baker Eddy. But Christian Science did not carry with
it the whole of the group which had come under Quimby's influence, nor
indeed all of those who came under Mary Baker Eddy's influence. There
was during all the formative period of these modern cults a perpetual
process of schism.
We have as a result, then, two divergent movements related in
underground ways, though as marked in difference as in resemblance, both
of them beginning about the same time, both of them reactions against
accepted religious forces and validations, both of them with a marked
therapeutic content, both of them adventures in the conduct of life.
In the summary which follows I am in debt to Dresser's recent "History
of the New Thought Movement." The name New Thought was chosen as the
title of a little magazine devoted to mental healing, published in 1894
in Melrose, Mass. "The term became current in Boston through the
organization of the Metaphysical Club in 1895. About the same time it
was used by Mr. C.P. Patterson in his magazine _Mind_ and in the title
of two of his books." Other names were suggested--in England, Higher
Thought; in Boston, Higher Life; in New York the little group was for a
time known as the Circle of Divine Ministry; in the west the movement
was known as Divine Science or Practical Christianity. There were groups
also which called themselves the Home of Truth or the Society of Silent
Unity.
_New Thought Takes Form_
New Thought, as has been said, lacks the definite direction which
Christian Science has always had. Its organizations have grown up
quietly, more or less irregularly and have had always a shifting
character. "The first New Thought Society with a regular leader and
organization in Boston was the Church of the Higher Life established in
1894."[62] The Metaphysical Club was an outgrowth of the New Thought
group in Boston. Dresser gives a list of the original members, chiefly
significant through the presence among them of some of Quimby's
disciples and others whose books have since held a high place in New
Thought literature. There were manifest connections between the
movement and liberal (particularly Unitarian) theology.
[Footnote 62: All citations in this section are from Dresser's "History
of New Thought," unless otherwise indicated.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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