'Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. These words of Christ Jesus, which encircle the Cross and Crown seal on this book, are a sweet promise that an understanding of the truth he taught can overcome every kind of adversity. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures explains that the healings and transformative experiences of the Bible were the natural effect of spiritual laws that comprise the Science of Christ, which anyone can apply to bring harmony to individual lives, as well as hope and progress to the wider world.
Author and religious reformer Mary Baker Eddy made a profound discovery that the nature of reality is wholly spiritual. She challenged conventional matter-centred views of science, theology, and medicine, and found in the Bible a God who is all-powerful Love, operating invariably for good.
For well over a century, readers have found that Science and Health helps them understand their relationship to God, which results in moral and physical healing. One wrote, 'I have found a God whom I can love and worship with my whole heart, and I now read my Bible with interest and understanding. I was healed of very bad rheumatism simply by reading Science and Health.' The last hundred pages include many other first-person accounts of life-changing healing from reading this book.
Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) considered herself a spiritual pioneer whose work encompassed the disciplines of science, theology, and medicine.
A lifelong student of the Bible, she gained a powerful insight in 1866 when she experienced a dramatic recovery from a life-threatening accident after reading Jesus healings. From that pivotal moment, she sought an understanding of how she had been healed. She returned to the Bible and prayed for answers. It became clear to her that spiritual healing was based on divine laws of God, Spirit, and that these laws could be applied by anyone to heal every form of human suffering and sin.
In this light, spiritual healing wasn't miraculous, but an effect of understanding God s omnipotence and love, which are as real and provable today as in biblical times. For the next four decades, Mary Baker Eddy devoted herself to practising, teaching, and sharing this healing Science of Christianity.
As she became known as a Christian healer, she was often called on to cure cases physicians had given up. Once she went to the bedside of a patient whom a well-known attending physician had pronounced dying of pneumonia. She wrote, On seeing her immediately restored by me without material aid, he asked earnestly if I had a work describing my system of healing... he urged me immediately to write a book which should explain to the world my curative system of metaphysics (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 105).
At the time, she was already writing notes that would expand into her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which contains the full explanation of Christian Science and its biblical foundation of spiritual healing. For well over a century, readers have shared how reading and studying this book have given them a new spiritual sense of the Bible and of their unchangeable relationship to God. And these new insights resulted in physical healing and moral regeneration that have transformed their lives.
Mary Baker Eddy went on to establish the Church of Christ, Scientist, as a Christian denomination and worldwide movement of spiritual healers. She published 15 more books and started several weekly and monthly magazines the Christian Science Sentinel, The Christian Science Journal, and The Herald of Christian Science that feature articles on Christian Science practice and verified testimonies of healing. In 1908, at the age of 87, she founded The Christian Science Monitor, a global newspaper that provides balanced, humane coverage of world news, and that is as alert to progress and promise as to humanity s need to address suffering and conflict. It was established to injure no man, but to bless all mankind (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 353).
