Ahhh Mary Baker Eddy
The dilapadation of their HQ has started. Within 20 years some developer will buy it all and turn it into condos.
Why
condos? In London it was converted into a relatively high-brow concert
venue which, I might add, I've been too, and more than once.
For those interested, below is the WT's take on Mary Baker Eddy from the 1st April 1964 Watchtower
The Inspiration Behind Christian Science
“When I was about eight years old, I repeatedly heard a voice, calling me distinctly by name . . . I thought this was my mother’s voice, and sometimes went to her, beseeching her to tell me what she wanted. Her answer was always, ‘Nothing, child! What do you mean?’ . . . One day, when my cousin, Mehitable Huntoon, was visiting us, and I sat in a little chair by her side, in the same room with grandmother,—the call again came, so loud that Mehitable heard it.”
Young Mary Baker continued to be susceptible to spirit influence, as Sibyl Wilbur notes in her church-approved biography: “Mary Baker’s spiritual experiences continued to be grave and unusual, as had been her ‘Voices.’” But in order to appreciate the nature of these experiences it is necessary to understand the circumstances at that time.
“There are people living who remember very distinctly the spiritism craze in Tilton, and who witnessed Mrs. Glover’s manifestations of mediumship. One elderly woman recalls a night spent with Mrs. Glover when her rest was constantly disturbed by the strange rappings and by Mary’s frequent announcements of the ‘appearance’ of different spirits as they came and went.”
“Mrs. Glover told us, as we were gathered there, that, because of her superior spiritual quality, and because of the purity of her life, she could only be controlled in the spirit world by one of the apostles and by Jesus Christ. When she went into the trance state and gave her communications to members of the circle, these communications were said by Mrs. Glover to come, through her as a medium, from the spirit of one of the apostles or of Jesus Christ.”
“Mrs. Patterson conceived and put into practise an admirable though harmless hoax. One day, as Mrs. Crosby has described it, while they sat together at opposite sides of a table in the big nursery, Mrs. Patterson suddenly leaned back in her chair, shivered from head to foot, closed her eyes, and began to talk in a deep, sepulchral voice. The voice purported to be Albert Baker’s [Mary’s deceased brother] . . . Mrs. Patterson expected Mrs. Crosby would shortly recognize the pretense and laugh with her over it. Not so. . . . [Therefore] Mrs. Patterson, with a gaiety which she has rarely indulged, continued the hoax. She pretended to go into another ‘trance’ the following day.”
“There is one simple subject to which we will allude; the current opinion that we must be a Spiritualist or medium . . . But we never were a Spiritualist; and never were, and never could be, and never admitted we were a medium. We have explained to the class calling themselves Spiritualists how their signs and wonders were wrought, and have illustrated by doing them; but at the same time have said, This is not the work of spirits and I am not a medium.”
“Man is not matter; he is not made up of brain, blood, bones, and other material elements. . . . Man is spiritual and perfect . . . he must be so understood in Christian Science. . . . Man is incapable of sin, sickness, and death. The real man cannot depart from holiness . . . In divine Science, God and the real man are inseparable as divine Principle.” “In reality man never dies.”
“To the five corporeal senses, man appears to be matter and mind united; but Christian Science reveals man as the idea of God, and declares the corporeal senses to be mortal and erring illusions. Divine Science shows it to be impossible that a material body, though interwoven with matter’s highest stratum, misnamed mind, should be man.”
DarK SpilveR
That's all folks!
