Christian Science in the Age of Mary Baker Eddy

The thesis of this study is that Christian Science was a manifestation of the unrest gripping the United States after the Civil War. The age in which the movement flowered was at once sordid and gilded commercial and optimistic. The stormy way through which the new religion passed was in a sense the road upon which all new ideas and schemes are tried. Mrs. Eddy''s vision was subjected to reasoned and irrational scrutiny for 40 years. In truth Christian Science belonged only tenuously to a modern era. It reflected the prevailing optimism progressivism utopianism and feminism of the Gilded Age but did not illuminate the stage with a unique light of its own.