One Simple Idea (9 page)

These were the foundational figures of mind-power spirituality—what would later be known as New Thought.

Hopkins and her many female students inherited from Eddy a sense of feminine social mobility as much as a spiritual philosophy. “It is not an exaggeration,” wrote feminist scholar Margery Fox, “to describe Christian Science in the early years as largely a religion in which women helped other women overcome suffering.” As such, Christian Science and the early mind-power movement provided some of the nation’s earliest and most visible forms of independent female leadership.

The Christian Science church had a pronounced awareness of having a woman at its helm, and of the maternal qualities of God. The main sanctuary in Boston was termed the Mother Church. Eddy spoke of a “Father-Mother God.” The cover of each issue of Eddy’s
Christian Science Sentinel
featured two classically robed female figures bearing lamps and gazing at one another from the margins of the page. Beneath each figure were two lines by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Nor was Eddy indifferent to the social dimensions of her work. “Civil law,” she wrote in
Science and Health
, “establishes very unfair differences between the rights of the two sexes” but “Christian Science furnishes no precedent for such injustice.”

“Eddy’s very life,” wrote religion scholar Gage William Chapel, “stood as an example of the emancipated woman.” Yet, for all of the church’s feminine imagery, it would be a mistake to conclude that Eddy’s congregation directly espoused an emancipatory or suffragist outlook. Eddy viewed social equality as a just value but not as a parallel cause or campaign. “Christian Science promoted the exclusive authority of one woman,” noted historian Ann Braude, “rather than promoting women’s leadership as a principle.”

Hopkins, however, was more explicit in devising her movement as an emancipatory vehicle. Still relying upon Eddy’s vernacular, Hopkins in 1888 founded her Chicago-based Christian Science Theological Seminary. When Hopkins’s first class of seminarians graduated on January 10, 1889, the class comprised twenty-two students—of whom twenty were women. To some early feminists, it was a signature moment.

Louisa Southworth, a literary collaborator to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, spoke at the graduation ceremony on Chicago’s South Side. Southworth proclaimed the day “the Ceremony of the New Era, the ordaining of women by a woman, and the sending forth to do both moral and physical healing by the power of the Spirit.”

The graduation ceremony’s main speaker was Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, a suffragist and the women’s editor of the
Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean
. Harbert declared it previously unimaginable to stand before a class of female seminarians. Before that day, Harbert said, “it seemed impossible that our desire to preach (or secure for women the recognized right to tell the unhappy and ignorant of the wonderful love of the Creator)
could ever be fulfilled”—but now “woman goes forth to proclaim the radiant realities of the Good.”

The most stirring oratory belonged to Hopkins—a woman who little more than three years earlier was without home, family, or resources. Hopkins described the students assembled before her in terms she might have once used for herself:

The same month, Hopkins wrote in her magazine
Christian Science
(again, taking her title from Eddy) that a new era of spirit was dawning—a time when “woman’s hour has come,” and all would “see how woman, the silent sufferer and meek yoke-bearer of the world is stepping quite out of her old character or role, and with a startling rebound from her long passivity is hurling herself against the age with such force and bold decision as to make even her friends stand aghast!”

Hopkins allied her movement with political causes. The previous fall she placed her student association in coalition with the Women’s Federal Labor Union to campaign for improved labor conditions for Chicago’s maids and working girls. Several of Hopkins’s female students—who had a strong knowledge of the Bible and a passion for social equity—became editorial collaborators to Elizabeth Cady Stanton on
The Women’s Bible
, the feminist pioneer’s massive revision of Scripture. (I consider Stanton’s forays into mind-power in the next chapter.)

But Hopkins chiefly focused her energies on producing new graduates from her seminary. In so doing, she laid tracks that went beyond establishing a congregation or a new breed of spiritual practitioners. Rather, Hopkins’s students began to transform the makeup of the American
ministry. Historian J. Gordon Melton estimates that “approximately 90 percent of Hopkins’s students were women who left her classes to assume roles as professionals in the religious community. She actually ordained over 100 ministers who moved on to create centers and mobilize a mass following (and in the process became the first female in modern history to assume the office of bishop and ordain other females to the ministry).”

The students that Hopkins ordained in 1889 and in the years ahead, as well as the pupils whom the Hopkins graduates in turn tutored, formed a cohort of women’s religious leadership from Massachusetts to the Pacific Coast. This body of workers established ministries, publishing houses, spiritual learning centers, journals, and metaphysical churches. Their efforts made female religious leadership into a gradually accepted fact of American life. By the time the dramatic and nationally known Protestant evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson began her rise to fame with tent revivals in 1915, female graduates of the Hopkins seminary had already been on the American spiritual scene for more than twenty-five years.

As the influence of Hopkins and other mind-power practitioners grew in the early 1890s, Mrs. Eddy tightened control on the term
Christian Science
. She wanted it forever out of the hands of apostates, and sometimes sued people who used it without her permission.

The Hopkins brand of mind-power philosophy started to be called by different names. Inventive and original labels popped up, usually from her students: Divine Science, Mental Science, Science of Right Thinking, Christian Healing, Christian Theosophy, Faith-Cure, Truth-Cure, and Thought-Cure.

Yet a phrase used by Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to capture the movement’s broadest ideals:
New Thought
. In December 1858, Emerson began delivering a lecture called “Success,” which he published as an
essay in 1870. In it he wrote: “To redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.”

Emerson had loosely used “new thought” earlier. “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts,” he wrote in “Nature” in 1836. But it was in the context of “Success,” and the broader exposure it received in 1870, that the phrase seemed to stick.
To redeem defeat by new thought
. The precept seemed not only to define the goals of the burgeoning movement but also the life path of Hopkins and its progenitors.

By the mid-1880s the term “new thought” began circulating in mental-healing books and journals. Eddy’s ex-student Edward J. Arens used it several times in his 1884 book
Old Theology in Its Application to the Healing of the Sick
, writing, “we live the new thought, and it becomes attached to us as a part of us” and “we enter into a new thought,—a spiritual thought of things that are real and eternal.”

A key reference to “new thought” appeared in 1887 in
Condensed Thoughts About Christian Science
, a pamphlet by a Chicago homeopathic physician and Swedenborgian named William Henry Holcombe. Holcombe, who had studied with Hopkins’s student Frances Lord, wrote: “New thought always excites combat in the mind with old thought, which refuses to retire.”
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In 1892, journalist Prentice Mulford fatefully and prominently featured the term in his essay “The Accession of New Thought,” in which he described the new metaphysical perspective. In 1894,
New Thought
became the title of a Massachusetts mental-science journal. The following year, a prominent group of mental-science thinkers began using the term in their Boston Metaphysical Club. (This circle, which included Horatio Dresser and writer Henry Wood, should not be confused with an earlier Metaphysical Club, a philosophy group formed by William James and
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.) And, finally, in February 1899, a “New Thought Convention” convened in Hartford, Connecticut; a larger follow-up was held in October in Boston.

The movement had found its name. The term
New Thought
encompassed the mind-power culture’s highest aims: The ascension of man through his thoughts. And it suggested none of the old ties to Mrs. Eddy.

The name New Thought did not please everyone. One of Hopkins’s most influential students, Charles Fillmore, founder of the Unity School of Christianity in Kansas City, was an early dissenter. In the published proceedings of the 1899 New Thought Convention at Boston, Fillmore is listed as an officer—but with an asterisk beside his name, denoting that by the time the convention program was at the printer’s the Missourian had resigned. Fillmore wanted no association between his sizable Unity ministry and the movement grouped under New Thought.

“New Thought,” Fillmore wrote in 1905, “is the common denominator of a complex and often contradictory mass of metaphysical doctrines which have sprung up in the past few years.” Nor did he like what he detected about the movement’s focus on acquisitiveness. “What may be termed the Mental Science School,” Fillmore continued, “holds that God is not a being of Love and Wisdom, but a force of attraction.” By contrast, Fillmore saw his Unity movement in more traditionally Christian terms, and wanted his healing philosophy called “Practical Christianity.”

To drive home the point, Fillmore twice separated his large ministry from the International New Thought Alliance, or I.N.T.A., the umbrella organization that grew from the 1899 conventions. The first Fillmore split occurred in 1906, when he complained again about the diffuse qualities of New Thought after attending that year’s I.N.T.A. convention in Chicago. “I asked several people to give me a definition of New Thought,” he wrote, “and they differed greatly in their concepts. It dawned on me that the name ‘New Thought’ had been appropriated by so many cults that … it had ceased to express what I conceived to be absolute Truth.”

Fillmore returned to the I.N.T.A. in 1919, however, and even invited
the organization to hold its next annual meeting in his hometown of Kansas City. It did so in 1920, and Fillmore seemed mollified. He attended the following year’s convention in Denver. Yet just months after expressing his public satisfaction with the relationship, Fillmore once more, and with finality, broke away in March 1922. Many New-Thoughters were dismayed at the reversal—as were a number of Fillmore’s own students, who demanded an explanation.

“We have proclaimed Jesus Christ as the head of our work,” Fillmore wrote that year. “This the I.N.T.A. has refused to do, although it claims to carry out Christian principles. When we advocated a change of name to include the word ‘Christian’ the proposal was quickly hushed up in the executive board meeting. The argument was that, although I.N.T.A. was a Christian movement, it should not put anything in its name to antagonize non-Christians who might otherwise be induced to join.”

Fillmore had been working behind the scenes on this measure and several other doctrinal demands, to which the determinedly loose New Thought alliance would not bend. He cut all ties.

Fillmore’s misgivings aside, most of Hopkins’s students embraced the term New Thought, or proved adaptable to it. Many students and practitioners liked the elasticity and looseness of the term, the very things that gave Fillmore an allergy. What’s more, the name New Thought finally gave the mental-science culture a clear future outside of Eddy’s shadow—with Hopkins celebrated as the young movement’s “teacher of teachers.”

Yet even as all tributaries seemed to be flowing to her, Hopkins grew weary of being the figurehead of a spiritual movement. As seen by the Fillmore kerfuffle, even movements as liberal and porous as New Thought were prone to internal squabbles, doctrinal disputes, and splits. After ten years of playing a public role, Hopkins yearned to spend time alone.

In 1895, the teacher departed Chicago for New York and eventually took up residence in a two-room suite at the Iroquois Hotel on West Forty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. She lived there for much of the remaining
three decades of her life, receiving guests and students, though rarely leaving her quarters or venturing beyond the midtown block. (Her taste for solitude may have factored into her decision years earlier to leave her New Hampshire family.) Hopkins continued seeing students in her reception room, but she wanted few worldly attachments. “I do not want to
own furniture
,” she wrote a friend on September 16, 1919.

Even during the Chicago years when Hopkins inaugurated her freewheeling mental-science philosophy, New Thought did not yet look and sound the way it would to Americans of later generations. Its basic language and methods were in place, but one familiar emphasis was missing: money.

The movement’s dominant aim was thinking one’s way to
health and happiness
—not to riches. Hopkins remained within the gravity of Eddy’s teachings about the corruption of the material world. In 1888 she cautioned students against the “vainglory” of “the riches, profits, and advantages of material transactions.” It was a perspective from which she never wavered. “Life,” Hopkins wrote a friend on November 20, 1919, “is not made up of bric a brac.”