|
When Quimby passed on, he left no successor. However, Julius Dresser and
his wife, who had been his patients, took his notes and set up as
“mental healers” using his system. They worked directly from
Quimby’s notes, seeing individual patients with some success, for
many years.
In 1883, they began to teach classes, based on
those notes, calling them “The Quimby System of Mental Treatment of
Diseases.” Many of their students were patients who, having been
healed, wanted to understand how it was done. Some were former (or
rejected) students of Mary Baker Eddy, through whom the Dressers
came to understand that the system Quimby had called Christian
Science was being taught by her as a personal revelation. The
Dressers responded to her claims with a circular:
“ . . . [It is]
natural and right to be well, and the simple truth understood and
applied destroys the error of disease.
“There is a truth
not generally known, the understanding of which tends to avoid
sickness and leads to health and happiness. It is no man's belief;
it is an eternal truth.”
One student of Mrs. Eddy’s who apparently read
that circular was Emma Hopkins.
Having participated in the Christian Science practitioner
class of December, 1883, she was, by September of 1884, appointed
the editor of the Christian
Science Journal. Although there’s no clear account of what
happened, piecing together a few references from later issues gives
us a hint. From Mrs.
Eddy’s writings, it looks as if Emma was in some sort of difficulty
when she took that first class, and, it appears, began working on
the Journal in lieu of
paying tuition. Being an able thinker and ready reader, she probably
shone in that work, and was quickly promoted to the editorship.
That Emma thought highly of her teacher during
this period is made clear by the tone of her articles and
editorials, one of them praising Mrs. Eddy as late as September,
1885. But she made the mistake of reading other metaphysical writers
(and referring to them in the Journal), which practice was
not acceptable in Mrs. Eddy’s church. By the next issue, she had
been summarily dismissed as editor.
There is no record describing the event or her
reaction to it, but it cannot have been pleasant. To have been on a path and
suddenly be shifted off it is always a challenge. But Emma practiced what she
wrote—and soon began to teach it, as well. In the years to come her
“sweet spirit of charity . . . with never a word of criticism of any
sect or any school” would become a model for many.
Spring of 1886 found Mrs. Emma Hopkins in
Chicago, setting up on her own to teach the principles and practices
of this method, Popularly known as Christian Science. (Mrs. Eddy was not pleased,
and wrote several articles against her teachings over the next few
years, declaring her “incapable of teaching” Christian Science and
lumping her with the Dressers as spreading “false compendiums of my
system.”) In time, Emma began to receive patients, advertising in
the Chicago papers and inviting “a select few” to stay in her home
for board and treatment.
She also gave public lectures on various topics of Christian
Science.
In 1887, she opened the Christian Science
Theological Seminary in Chicago, with a board of directors and
faculty, and daily healing services. Its statement of purpose
included the following:
The Bibles of all
times and nations are compared; their miracles are shown to be the
result of one order of reasoning, and the absence of miracles
shown to be the result of another order of reasoning . . . . We
perceive there is one judgment in all mankind alike. It is restored by the
theology taught here.
With its restoration we find health, protection, wisdom,
strength, prosperity.
Later that year, she began a series of lectures
in other cities around the country, the first of many such tours.
That she was a beloved teacher in San Francisco, New York, Boston,
and Kansas City, as well as Chicago, is well documented. In later years, she worked
in London, as well.
Initially, Emma called her classes Christian
Science, as had Quimby and Eddy before her. Later, she began to use
the term Higher Mysticism to describe her work. Under whatever name she
used, though, she was remarkable. In an article in Modern Thought announcing
one of her classes in Kansas City, she is described as
Undoubtedly the most
successful teacher in the world, her instruction not only gives
understanding to the student by which he can cure the ills of
himself and others, but in many instances those who enter her
classes confirmed invalids come out at the end of the course
perfectly well. . . . all who listen to her are filled with new
life.
Successful, indeed. Though she made it a point
not to speak of her successes, her classes touched far more lives
than even those who attended the lectures could imagine. Virtually
all of the founders of New Thought schools and churches were Emma
Hopkins’ students. In
San Francisco, her 250 member classes included Melinda Cramer, who
with Nona Brooks of Pueblo, Colorado, founded the Church and School
of Divine Science, which later ordained the popular writer and New
York minister, Emmet Fox (to whom Norman Vincent Peale attributed
much of his understanding).
In Kansas City, the classes included Myrtle and
Charles Fillmore, who went on to found the Unity School of Practical
Christianity, with its worldwide ministries of Silent Unity, Unity
churches, and the monthly reader, Daily Word. Attending
classes in New York was Emilie Cady, the physician who wrote Lessons in Truth, which has
become the fundamental text for Unity students around the
world. Even Religious
Science, founded in the 1930s, is based in part on Emma’s teachings,
for Ernest Holmes managed to persuade her to work with him in the
last years before her passing in 1925.
We know little of her past or her private life,
but in all her work, one thing is clear: Mrs. Hopkins was remarkably
well read and comfortable with a wide range of classical and early
historical philosophies. For example:
Plotinus (A.D. 250)
lost himself seven times in a trance of ecstasy by thinking over
the word “God” in his mind.
… The use of the word by Plotinus, Porphyry, and Spinoza
did not solve the mystery of life for them, however …
Jesus Christ had
quite a different idea from these men, … “In my name preach the
gospel, in my name heal the sick.” …
It has been taught
from the remotest times that we have the Name stored within us as
concealed energy. … The Zend-Avesta tells us that it is by the
Divine Word that the sick are most surely cured.
… Cornelius Agrippa
of Cologne (1486), ascribed to numbers an efficacy. But no mathematician is a
healer because of his mathematics. He must use the Healing
Word, or the reasoning which brings down somewhat of the power of
the Healing Word.
Her supporters
suggest she was something of a genius, saying that at 15, having
entered Woodstock Academy in Connecticut as a new student, Emma
Curtis was appointed to the faculty within the year.
Emma had developed a system for presenting her
material, based on what she called “the twelve doctrines of Jesus
Christ” which she later compiled in a book, Scientific Christian Mental
Practice. Her goal in all was that each student (or reader)
would “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus”
(Philippians 2:5).
In her teachings, the first doctrine, or
lesson, is called “The Statement of Being.”Hopkins says, “The first lesson in Truth is the word
‘God.’ ” She tells us
that most people have an inadequate understanding of the nature of
the divine, as indicated by the use of the term “God.” She tells us
not to be confused by Jesus’ use of the phrase “in my name:”
. .
. that Name . . . is certainly not the word “God,” for these men
who used that word continually were not mighty healers. . .
.
The first lesson
finds out what your mind is seeking and names it. . . . The naming
of what the mind of the whole world is seeking is the foundation
thought . . . It is the GOOD. . . .
. . . the Good which
you are seeking is your God. . . . The Good which you are seeking
created you. . . . The honest statement that “My Good is my God”
has the power . . .
The first name of God is
Good, and the first name of Good is God. “There is Good for me and
I ought to have it,” says the unconscious instinct . . . When you
look at the worm . . . the drunkard, or miser, you will say he is
seeking his Good. His heart will be better satisfied the instant
you speak . . . If he should say so, his life would come nearer to
being a satisfying one.
To acknowledge God
is to admit we are seeking our Good. It is well to give one day
a week to acknowledging that we are seeking for our Good. . .
.
When you speak for
yourself you speak for the world. . . .
You can name your
Good as free health. . . . The moment you feel this truth, and
speak it, . . . You
catch a new breath of health and your neighbor catches a new
breath of health.
Sometimes when you say to the sick man, mentally, that the
Good he is seeking is his God, and God is free health, he will get
well in five minutes. . . .
Mind speaking truth
through the lips, or thinking Truth consciously, can bring all the
satisfaction to the world which the world is seeking. No material process can
bring health. By a
metaphysical process health will quicken and thrill
mankind.
Another name for God
is support. . . . It is not Truth to say that man depends on any
kind of work for his support. His work is not the Good
he is seeking. He
must tell the Truth and God will work for him.
Support is another
name for substance. All metaphysicians have called God the One
Substance. . . . If you name your Good, do not fail to say: “My
Good is my unlimited support, my unfailing support.” The Good will soon bring
you marvelous support . . . your old business will not be
interesting to you.
It will leave you, yet you will have your living. By and by you will have
great and wonderful miracles of support come to you. . .
.
. . .
Metaphysicians, in tracing the cause of evil conditions, have all
agreed that fear of evil is the only evil. . . . in every place
where we proclaim that defense, there is the Good we are seeking.
. . .
“God is our love. .
. . Love is another name for life. . . . Do not forget to say “The
Good I am seeking is Love.”
“How shall we get
hold of our Good? Not
by working with our hands, for countless ages of labor have
failed. . . . The Jesus Christ method brings the fulfillment of
all our expectations. . . .
To expect Good and to be very definite in the mind that it
IS coming, is to see it coming. . . .
“The word Good is
the only word that can make all things. . . . Let the magic name
Good be the name of all names in your mind. It is the name that Jesus
Christ comes to be understood by. . . . The Statement of Being was
continually in the mouth of Jesus Christ. Let it be in your mouth
also. . . . Expect to see it work quickly. Truth is not slow. . . .
With Truth, all is NOW.
“Truth does not have
to make things new for you.
In Truth it was so from the beginning . . . All Truth is
waiting for you to say plainly what is your Good. The speaking out
continuously what we have felt and thought intuitively, is the
first movement toward demonstration, toward manifestation, toward
satisfaction. . . .”
These excerpts summarize the first, foundation
lesson in Emma Hopkins’ classes. From there she went on to
explain the use of “denials” of illusions and “affirmations” of
Truth. She explained
that Faith is in the expectation of the Good, the realization of the
Truth in spite of any temporary illusions.
Our way of believing
deep down in our convinced mind is our faith. We are sure to speak out
from that faith. If we
. . . do not quite believe that the health principle is
most powerful and yet we keep on talking for health and will not
admit that we are afraid of the sickness, we surely will find our
faith coming around to the side of omnipotent health. . . . If . .
. everything seems against us and everything hurts us greatly, we
must put great vehemence into our saying, “I do
not believe in sickness, I believe in health. I do not believe, or
think, that misfortune has any power whatsoever. I believe in
prosperity and success.”
Drawing heavily on the Bible as well as
historical philosophers and well-chosen anecdotes, Emma broke
through old, culturally accepted, expectations and planted in the
student new ideas about the reality of being. “ . . . our reasonings
based on the premise of matter being real, are not enduring . .
.”
“The sixth lesson .
. . is all about the quickening power of the Spirit in
understanding. . . .
We speak of that Spirit within ourselves which is exactly like His
Spirit, and of it we say, ‘I understand the Secret of Jesus
Christ.’ . . . We abide in the light by acknowledging only our
Christ nature. We are torn in the conflict of change, and ups and
downs, by acknowledging two natures. We abide in the darkness by
yielding to the idea that we are matter and intellect. . . .
Spirit is all in all and the only Reality. . . . ‘As Spirit I
perceive that all is Good.’ ”
In her references to the Bible, Emma used a
metaphorical interpretation. This practice was based in part on the
fact that Hebrew is a language of images and multiple meanings, and
in part on the realization that inspired writing is always
communicating at the unconscious, as well as the conscious, level.Her approach was developed even further by her
student, Charles Fillmore.
Like most masters of metaphysics, Emma chose
not to document her life.
She believed that talking about her practice would weaken it.
She even avoided writing down her teachings for many years, until,
toward the end of her life, she realized she was being recorded
anyway. Then she
selected and formulated the most effective combination of words and
ideas for calling forth the experience her students would need to be
effective.
|