I. Muscular Christianity

The term “muscular Christianity” originated in Great Britain in response to the novels of clergymen Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, whose plots and characters presented a robust version of Christian conduct intended to appeal to the male spirit. Hughes's popular work, Tom Brown's Schooldays, was influential on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1870, when Hughes gave a talk on his work and beliefs before students at Harvard College, “a hearty ‘three times three Harvard’ cheer was given.”Footnote ¹⁰ While the movement had romantic attraction for young men, its deeper purpose sprang from a core theological conviction that a more muscular Christianity was needed to resurrect Protestant religious culture from a condition of “weak pietism” and “identification of Christianity with escape, sickliness, or lack of courage.”Footnote ¹¹ In America, thought leaders in religion, politics, medicine, education, and sports enthusiastically adopted the muscular Christian cause and mantle. Among its most committed American advocates were the United States’ first PhD in psychology and Clark University president G. Stanley Hall; Boston clergyman and social reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson; evangelist Dwight Moody; physician and physical education pioneer Luther Gulick, MD; legendary athlete and college football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg; and “Rough Rider” president Theodore Roosevelt.

While muscular Christianity was never formalized into an institution of its own, it significantly influenced the mission and programming of numerous national and international organizations that rose to prominence in this period, notably the Young Men's Christian Association, the Boy Scouts, and numerous boys’ schools and camps, extending eventually to include women's organizations as well, such as the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA).Footnote ¹² Its social, philosophical, and religious purpose aimed at reawakening masculine energy in America's spiritual life. As Clifford Putney has observed, “In the forty years before 1920, an extraordinary amount of talk within Protestant churches focused on the need to rescue American manhood from sloth and effeminacy.”Footnote ¹³

Muscular Christians supported theories and activities intended to reform and reinvigorate the relationship of mind, body, and spirit within Protestant culture. They challenged theological attitudes that cast the body into a netherworld of shame or as irrelevant to the divine purpose. Instead, they championed bodily vitality as being in harmony with fulfilling one's Christian mission, aiming to inspire a new generation of spiritually and physically charged Christian men. Luther Gulick, MD, described as the “greatest of YMCA philosophers,” enshrined the concept of “Mind, Body, Spirit” into the institution's logo.Footnote ¹⁴ In his design, each of the three terms occupied a separate side of an inverted triangle, with “Spirit” positioned along the top. Framed inside the triangle was an image of a Bible opened to John 17:21 (“That they all may be one: as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us”). In an article in the YMCA publication, Young Men's Era, Gulick cited numerous biblical passages as the inspiration and “authority” for the logo design, among them Deuteronomy 6:5 (“And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might”) and Matthew 22:37 (“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”).Footnote ¹⁵ For Gulick, the work of unifying the physical, mental, and spiritual had biblical sanction and inspiration and was in harmony with modern scientific methodologies. “The scientific grounds for this belief are as certain and well formed as the scriptural,” he argued.Footnote ¹⁶

Gulick combined the Christian missionary commitments of his family upbringing with his work as a physical education advocate and innovator: “He graduated with a degree in medicine in the spring of 1888, but he warned his parents in advance of his graduation that he might not use his degree to become a missionary doctor. Rather than doing the Lord's work overseas, he told them he felt drawn to do the Lord's work in America, spreading the gospel of fitness for the YMCA.”Footnote ¹⁷ For Gulick, modern psychological methods provided a window into seeing a spiritual bond between mind and body. “The modern psychology,” he wrote, “is all in the line of showing that mind and body are not two separate and individual essences, but that each is so wedded to the other that it is impossible for us to see where one begins and the other ends, or for us to trace anything which, affecting the one, does not also affect the other.”Footnote ¹⁸ He singled out the YMCA as “the only great institution of the world which, in a large way, is putting this belief into actual practice. It aims at the salvation and upbuilding of the whole man to a greater extent than does any other institution in the world.”Footnote ¹⁹

Gulick played a defining role in shaping YMCA identity along muscular Christian lines in the Progressive era. As Putney has noted, “It was in connection with the YMCA that Gulick most directly advanced the cause of muscular Christianity. Before Gulick, the ‘Y’ had kept gymnastics subordinate to evangelism. After him, it held physical fitness, no less than religious conviction, responsible for leading men to Glory.”Footnote ²⁰ The notion of health as a focus for glorifying God and creation was deeply embedded in Gulick's vision and in muscular Christian thought more broadly. Likewise, Eddy extolled expression of physical well-being through spiritual healing as illustrative of a vital connection between the divine and the human. Quoting the Apostle Paul, Eddy encouraged her followers to “Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's.”Footnote ²¹ While Gulick and Eddy approached the relationship of spirituality and health differently, they were both committed to redressing visions of the body that had disconnected and alienated it from the life of the mind and spirit.

As discussed later in the paper, Eddy's support of the Boston YMCA at a time when its embrace of muscular Christianity was in full flower suggests that the founder of Christian Science was, at the least, comfortable with the Association's ethos and programs as guided by Gulick. Moreover, it exemplifies that for Eddy, as well as for followers of her religious system, there existed a natural compatibility between civic engagement and the practice of Christian Science.

II. Christian Fitness in Christian Science

In Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920, Putney has identified Christian Science as belonging to a category of belief systems alien, if not antagonistic, to muscular Christianity.Footnote ²² In labeling Eddy as a “latter-day gnostic,” Putney has connected Eddy and Christian Science to a longstanding strain of religious scholarship that sees rejection of the temporal world and the body as a governing concept in Eddy's beliefs.Footnote ²³ For example, religious historian Peter Williams has framed Eddy's metaphysics as based in denial, explaining:

Considering that Eddy laid the groundwork for her chief work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, with an introductory chapter on “Prayer” in which she examined prayer's centrality to the practice of Christian Science, Williams's analysis is both striking and revealing in its narrow reading of Eddy's thought. Still, Williams's vision of Eddy and Christian Science aligns with a steady stream of scholarship, much of it grounded in Sydney Ahlstrom's situating of Christian Science in the camp of “harmonial religions” within the landscape of American religious history.Footnote ²⁵ For Ahlstrom, “harmonial religions” expressed in different ways and through varying points of emphasis a common vision that “spiritual composure, physical health and even economic well-being . . . flow from a person's rapport with the cosmos.”Footnote ²⁶ Certain scholars have contested this view, including Catherine Albanese and Steven Gottschalk. Albanese has argued that “the easy identification of Christian Science as a species of what Sydney Ahlstrom called ‘harmonial religion’ is problematic” and that “it misreads the evidence on almost all counts.”Footnote ²⁷ Gottschalk also has noted that “Eddy's ideal of the Christian life, however, could not be more sharply at variance with the purpose of furthering these harmonial human aims.” In Gottschalk's view, Eddy “placed a far higher value on spiritual striving than on spiritual composure.”Footnote ²⁸

Still, a tendency to interpret Christian Science as gnostic has persisted in academic literature, defining the faith's outlook as essentially otherworldly. As Putney's lens on the faith has adapted to this point of view, it is not surprising to find in his writings the assumption that Christian Science thought and practice would eschew expressions of physical effort, vigor, and manliness, presuming its attraction to be chiefly for women who preferred a more rarefied experience:

Putney's connecting of Christian Science with Theosophy and New Thought would have dismayed, though not surprised, Eddy. She repeatedly sought to disassociate Christian Science from these spheres of thought, which she saw as allied with dubious mental practices. Eddy noted “a great gulf between Christian Science and theosophy,” and she denounced the teachings of New Thought pioneer, Emma Curtis Hopkins, who had previously studied Christian Science with her, and had worked for a brief time as a writer and editor for her publications.Footnote ³⁰ In the same Christian Science periodical in which Eddy had formerly employed Hopkins, Eddy answered the following question about her erstwhile student: “Emma Hopkins tells her students that Mrs. Eddy teaches mesmerism. Is that true?” Eddy responded, “If one half of what I hear of Mrs. Hopkins's teachings on the subject of Christian Science is correct, she is deluding the minds she claims to instruct. She took a Primary Course at my College, but was not permitted to go farther. She . . . is not qualified to teach Christian Science, and is incapable of teaching it.” Eddy equated Hopkins's teachings with the “demonology of mesmerism.”Footnote ³¹

In her passage on “what constitutes true manhood,” Eddy separated Christian Science from what she saw as esoteric spiritual practices that had no real kinship with her belief system, except through misidentified spiritual commonality. In stating that there is “no illusive vision,” “no dreamy absentness,” and “no insubordination to the laws that be,” Eddy was calling out that Christian Science did not include the “illusive visions” inherent in Spiritualism or in the speculations of Theosophy; that it did not lend itself to the “dreamy absentness” of someone placed in a magnetic sleep through hypnotic or mesmeric suggestion.Footnote ³² In her penultimate statement in this passage that there is “no insubordination to the laws that be,” before her assertion that there is “no loss nor lack of what constitutes true manhood,” she was, I maintain, conveying that empowerment in Christian Science stemmed not from a promiscuous manipulation of spirituality but derived from a fuller and deeper integration with God's law—allowing for a commensurate deeper fulfillment of manhood. Moreover, certain accounts from the period portrayed Christian Science womanhood as very much at home with robust physicality. For example, in this newspaper story on the 1895 dedication ceremonies for The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, or The Mother Church, the reporter observed that “two-thirds of the vast congregations which attended the dedication yesterday were women, strong, healthy, muscular women. They were not slow in speaking of this fact as a proof of the value of Christian Science being a gospel of health.”Footnote ³³

The muscular Christian movement placed a premium on the development of physique as a desirable and vital component of Christian manhood. For Eddy, the path was different: spirituality was primary in providing for physical well-being. Eddy's personal experience and formation as a religious thinker and innovator demonstrated a deep commitment to liberating the body from compromised states. The body mattered very much to Eddy. One sees it in the almost constant, sometimes desperate, and disappointing search for health that defined the first half of her life. And then, in contrast, it became a central focus in her commitment to effectual Christian healing after her own healing in her mid-forties, experienced after sustaining serious injuries from a severe fall on the ice in February of 1866. Eddy would describe her first decades as representing “a lifelong invalidism,” from which her healing ushered in “the change to health and usefulness.”Footnote ³⁴

As the Progressive era took hold in American culture in the late nineteenth century, the religious and social activism of the YMCA increasingly identified with a muscular Christian ethos. Its programming and mission undertook to develop Christian men equipped to succeed in the modern secular world. In his 1901 book, published in commemoration of the first fifty years of the Boston Association of the YMCA, L. L. Doggett, first president of the YMCA Training School (later to become Springfield College), articulated the work of the Boston YMCA in this way: “In its plan of operations it embodied the modern religious ideal of development as contrasted with the ascetic ideal. It recognized that all human powers should be developed to their utmost capacity and consecrated to God's service. It agreed with modern science in denying the separation between the sacred and the secular, and it recognized with the new psychology the unity of man in body, mind and spirit.”Footnote ³⁵

In an early edition of Science and Health, Eddy similarly remarked on Christian Science's value in the secular sphere. She noted, “Men of business have said that metaphysical science is important from a secular point of view; that it enhances their physical and mental powers, enlarges their perception of character, gives them aptness, comprehensiveness, and ability to act beyond their normal capacity in business. The mind imbued with the science of Life is more elastic, capable of more endurance, and its body requires less repose.”Footnote ³⁶

Whether intentional or not, Eddy was claiming for Christian Science characteristics that, even if not in total harmony with the vision of muscular Christianity, resonated with important underlying convictions in the movement. Eddy rejected the idea that weakness and passivity provided greater sensitivity for a closer relationship with God, that there was a hidden sacredness in these states to be honored and cultivated, or what was perceived as a feminized approach to Christianity in this period. As Ann Douglas has observed, cultural acceptance of this kind of “feminized” spirituality was linked to a general softening of religious consciousness in American Protestant culture, in which the rigors of Calvinist thought were surrendering to moral and social values based in sympathy and sentimentality.Footnote ³⁷ Within this context a deleterious physical, psychological, and spiritual bargain played out in which, Douglas has argued, “strength, as essential to genuinely feminine as to genuinely masculine social and intellectual structures, is absent,” and where “weakness itself, no matter how unintentionally, is finally extolled.”Footnote ³⁸ In contrast, Eddy's vision and experience testified to an expectation of spiritual practice that was emboldening and fortifying for engagement with the world. “Citizens of the world, accept the ‘glorious liberty of the children of God,’ and be free! This is your divine right,” she declared in Science and Health. “The illusion of material sense, not divine law, has bound you, entangled your free limbs, crippled your capacities, enfeebled your body, and defaced the tablet of your being.”Footnote ³⁹

As in Eddy's theology, muscular Christians embraced a view of Christian spirituality as conducive to nurturing salutary and emboldened conditions of mind and body. While Eddy viewed the strengthening stimulus as primarily spiritual and mental, she rejected bodily mortification as either a necessity or desirable in advancing spiritual growth. Rather, she averred that “neither the Old nor the New Testament furnishes reasons or examples for the destruction of the human body, but for its restoration to life and health as the scientific proof of ‘God with us.’”Footnote ⁴⁰

In his History of the YMCA in North America (1951), Charles Howard Hopkins traced the significance of Luther Gulick in inculcating a muscular Christian ethic into the “Y.” In a chapter titled “The Foundations of Y.M.C.A. Physical Work (1875–1900),” Hopkins observed drolly that “so pervasive was his influence that this chapter might well be divided into two sections, before and after Gulick.”Footnote ⁴¹ Hopkins provided this account of Gulick's articulation of a therapeutic theology for the Young Men's Christian Association:

While Eddy's belief system was far from at one with Gulick's theological formulations in identifying body with the “dust of the earth,” she did advocate for Christian healing that encompassed the whole person. She insisted on what she named a “whole salvation,” addressing issues of soul as well as body that, in her words, “includes man's redemption from sickness as well as from sin.”Footnote ⁴³ Both Gulick and Eddy recognized human redemption as embracing mind, body, and spirit.

III. The Salutary Strenuousness of Christian Science Baptism

In “Pond and Purpose,” Eddy gave a detailed disquisition on baptism from a Christian Science point of view, which she followed with the above noted observations on Christian Science manhood. That her vision of manhood should occur in this context suggests that Eddy understood the requirements and outcomes of baptism as correlating with qualities associated with the achievement of manhood. This is not to imply that Eddy viewed baptism as applying more to male than female experience. Still, in building a vision of baptism as an ongoing internal process of purification and empowerment that related to “what constitutes true manhood,” she was setting Christian Science apart from alternative spiritual systems in which the role of women was significant and controversial in nineteenth-century America. Commonly held cultural perspectives viewed the mental and physical constitutions of women as more passive and hypersensitive than those of men and, as such, as more adept in channeling and experiencing psychic influence. As a result, women attracted both veneration and fascination but also condemnation as spiritualist mediums, as recipients and communicants of mesmeric mental influence, and in the practice of Theosophy.Footnote ⁴⁴ This version of feminine spirituality eschewed expression of physical power and muscularity as inhibiting to interaction with immaterial forms and energies. This depiction, as given in the Spiritualist newspaper Banner of Light, represented such a viewpoint: “Women in the nineteenth century are physically sick, weak and declining . . . the functions depending on force and muscle are weak . . . the nerves are intensely sensitive. . . . Hence sickness, rest, passivity, susceptibility, impressionability, mediumship, communication, revelation!”Footnote ⁴⁵

For Eddy, the baptismal process in Christian Science entailed a spiritual journey that was at cross-purposes with notions of weakness, susceptibility, or passivity. For Eddy, baptism required intensity of focus and consciousness, even stress and strain, to achieve its benefits and blessings. While this process culminated in surrender to the divine, the means by which one arrived at this point of spiritual transformation necessitated striving against and triumphing over self-limiting behaviors and perspectives: overcoming the kind of “illusive visions” or “dreamy absentness” that Eddy outlined as antithetical to manhood.

Eddy deconstructed baptism into three progressive phases. The first phase followed what Eddy biographer Robert Peel has described as “show[ing] its author's debt to the tough-minded Calvinism of her girlhood teachers,” referencing Eddy's upbringing in rural New Hampshire in the early 1800s.Footnote ⁴⁶ For Eddy, purification involved a penitential struggle, what she perceived as “a stricken state of human consciousness, wherein mortals gain a severe view of themselves; a state of mind which rends the veil that hides mental deformity.” This “rending” revealed a state of human consciousness that “seems a monster, a dark, impenetrable cloud of error.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In order to redress this deep-seated state of alienation from the divine, baptism depended upon summoning mental and spiritual energy to “neutralize and destroy” erroneous states of mind and being.

While Eddy understood baptism as ultimately leading to serenity and a heavenly confidence in one's “divine nature,” the words with which she painted the baptismal struggle were stark, imposing, and threatening. One was grappling with “a monster.” Eddy's understanding of the necessity of a fight with the self in order to achieve the requisite spiritual dominion and strength for authentic communion with the divine resonated more with William James's psychological call to arms in the finale to his celebrated lecture, “Is Life Worth Living?,” than with any model of nineteenth-century womanly “passivity” and “susceptibility.”

Interestingly, James first delivered “Is Life Worth Living?” in 1895 at the YMCA at Harvard University, where he brought his talk to its heady summation with an appeal to see the energy of mental and psychological striving as capable of penetrating through the miasma of existential and religious doubt into authentic spiritual belief. James contended that answering the question of the “maybe” of the existence of God or the “maybe” of an eternal dimension to life demanded activism at the innermost depths of human thought to bring these spiritual concepts out of the shadows of “maybe” into lived experience. In describing the passion and energy behind this human yearning, James declared, “It feels like a real fight; as if there were something really wild in the Universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem. And first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Aspects of Calvinism and James's Pragmatism informed Eddy's baptismal vision. For Eddy, God's omnipotence and omnipresence were assured; what was not assured was humanity's capacity to align correctly with the divine presence. She did not endorse ritualistic practice as either sufficient or recommended for restoring human connection with the divine. Instead, like James, she envisioned an activist struggle, or a personal moral and spiritual proving: “a fight,” akin in quality and purpose with James's pragmatic understanding of lived religion.

The second phase in Eddy's progressive approach to baptism built upon the foundation of the first phase's penitential struggle. Here, we witness human effort meeting divine agency to bring about tangible vitalizing results. As Eddy explained, “The baptism of the Holy Ghost is the spirit of Truth . . . giving mortals new motives, new purposes, new affections, all pointing upward.” What emerges out of this trajectory is a “mental condition [that] settles into strength, freedom, deep-toned faith in God. . . . It develops individual capacity, increases the intellectual activities, and so quickens moral sensibility that the great demands of spiritual sense are recognized, and they rebuke the material senses, holding sway over human consciousness.” Through this process, Eddy observed “a purifying [of] human thought” that “brings with it wonderful foresight, wisdom, and power” and “gives steadiness to resolve, and success to endeavor.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The third, ultimate stage of baptism led to “final immersion of human consciousness in the infinite ocean of Love.” In this state, Eddy envisioned identity that “reflects only Spirit, good, whose visible being is invisible to the physical senses: eye hath not seen it, inasmuch as it is the disembodied individual Spirit-substance and consciousness termed in Christian metaphysics the ideal man—forever permeated with eternal life, holiness, heaven.”Footnote ⁵⁰ While Eddy's emphasis on the non-material, especially in the final phase of her baptismal vision, conflicted with muscular Christianity's focus on development of the physique, nonetheless, the outcome resulted in empowerment, as well as purification, gained through intentional concentrated effort to be a fit receptacle for the divine.

In the next paragraph in “Pond and Purpose,” Eddy elaborated upon the impact and practical benefits of baptism with references to Progressive era developments: in this case, connecting spiritual transformation with state-of-the-art technology of her time. She wrote, “Mortals who on the shores of time learn Christian Science, and live what they learn, take rapid transit to heaven.”Footnote ⁵¹ Rapid transit systems were fast emerging in major European and American cities around this time.Footnote ⁵² In the 1890s, Boston went on to develop the nation's first subway system, using the invention of the electric motor as the means for the transportation of its underground cars. For Eddy, spiritual progress was consonant with temporal progress. Together they formed “the hinge on which have turned all revolutions, natural, civil, or religious, the former being servant to the latter, —from flux to permanence, from foul to pure, from torpid to serene, from extremes to intermediate.”Footnote ⁵³

Eddy finished the essay with an invitation and instruction. “Drink with me the living waters of the spirit of my life-purpose,” she wrote, “to impress humanity with the genuine recognition of practical, operative Christian Science.”Footnote ⁵⁴ For Eddy, “genuine recognition” meant appreciation of the operation of Christian Science as a healing and remedial agent for mind and body.

For the pioneering educational psychologist G. Stanley Hall, Jesus's healing work was also a matter of importance and relevance to modern consciousness. Hall's study of adolescent psychology complemented his advocacy of muscular Christianity. Hall identified qualities in male adolescence that he felt required liberation and cultivation for the purposes of generating not only healthy mindedness but also expansiveness of spirit.Footnote ⁵⁵ Hall saw Jesus's healing power as having roots in the primal energies of youth, which he interpreted as deeply soulful. “The adolescence of Jesus must have been a magnificent processional of the highest human evolution,” he theorized.Footnote ⁵⁶ In Hall's view, this formative stage was key to the profound spiritual enlightenment attained by Jesus. In this sense, Jesus's baptism by John the Baptist symbolized the transformation from the vitalities of youth into spiritually endowed maturity. Hall reflected that “unlike Jesus, John was uncouth, laconic, with a simpler and more incessantly repeated message. John did no healing, Jesus no baptizing.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Although Eddy did not apply a psychological lens to Jesus's spiritual development and mastery, she did agree with Hall that Jesus's healing work was fundamentally soteriological, in which resolution of physical ills played a necessary role.Footnote ⁵⁸ Hall wrote, “While Jesus certainly preferred to heal the soul rather than the body, he perhaps accommodated to the demands of those about him to be healed of diseases, because of a growing insight on his part into the closeness of the bond between the psyche and the soma.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Eddy averred, Jesus's “history is emphatic in our hearts, and it lives more because of his spiritual than his physical healing. His example is, to Christian Scientists, what the models of the masters in music and painting are to artists.”Footnote ⁶⁰

IV. Mind, Body, Spirit in Eddy's Healing Journey

Putney has noted that “muscular Christians are undoubtedly best known for their celebration of bodies.”Footnote ⁶¹ While Eddy did not celebrate the body in her theology and writings, she offered a spiritual vision that was liberating and fortifying to mind and body. In Science and Health, she commented upon the case of one Caspar Hauser to illustrate the dangers of estrangement from a salutary relationship of mind, body, and spirit. For the first seventeen years of his life, Hauser apparently had known only the environment of a dungeon or dark cave and a diet of hard crusts of bread. Upon introduction to sunlight and more varied nourishing foods, his response was the opposite of normal human conditioning. In Eddy's account, he found life unbearable outside the cave, and requested return to isolation and meager conditions of living.Footnote ⁶² In citing the Hauser story, Eddy equated escape from the world as inconsistent with progressive spirituality. She argued that a strong moral and spiritual life removed one from benighted consciousness and regressive behavior, as exemplified by Hauser's extreme example, and instead provided for a salutary mental and physical experience. She explained that “the less thought or said of physical structure or law material, and the more that is uttered and depicted of the moral and spiritual, the higher is the standard of manhood, and the further removed from imbecility of mind and body.”Footnote ⁶³

While Eddy valued physical and mental vitality and strength as expected outcomes of a sound and active spiritual life, she challenged anti-modernist stances as the means for their attainment. “The simple food our forefathers ate we are told helped to make them healthy, but that is a mistake: their diet would fail to cure dyspepsia at this period,” she observed. Instead she counseled, “The effeminate constitutions of our time will never grow robust until the individual opinions improve, and their beliefs lose somewhat of error.”Footnote ⁶⁴ For Eddy, the prescription for mental and physical soundness and strength penetrated to a deeper level, calling upon the activation of clarifying spiritual and mental energies to liberate human consciousness from what she saw as its tendency to Hauser-like self-imprisonment, or what she would name “the burial of mind in matter.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Both in the issues it addressed and in featuring the image of the cave, Eddy's treatment of the Hauser story bore striking parallels with portions of Thomas Wentworth Higginson's celebrated essay, “Saints and Their Bodies,” which came to be seen as America's version of a muscular Christian manifesto.Footnote ⁶⁶ For Higginson, America's spiritual men or its “saints,” as represented by the ministry, had become marginal figures in the nation's life through over attention to the otherworldly and inadequate attention to the life of the body and the world. He compared them to one Chittagutta, a Buddhist saint, who lived in a cave for 60 years, oblivious to the beautiful paintings of the life of the Buddha that surrounded him on the cave's walls. As Higginson observed, “In this non-intercourse with the visible world there has been an apostolic succession from Chittagutta, down to the Andover divinity-student.”Footnote ⁶⁷ He began his essay with this arresting comment: “Ever since the time of that dyspeptic heathen, Plotinus, the saints have been ‘ashamed of their bodies.’ What is worse, they have usually had reason for the shame.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Higginson then described a contemporary example: “One of the most potent causes of the ill-concealed alienation between the clergy and the people, in our community, is the supposed deficiency, on the part of the former, of a vigorous manly life. It must be confessed that our saints suffer greatly from this moral and physical anhoemia, this bloodlessness, which separates them, more effectually than a cloister, from the strong life of the age.”Footnote ⁶⁹

For Eddy, participation in “the strong life of the age” necessitated pursuit of better health in the open, diverse, and largely unregulated medical marketplace of nineteenth-century America. In a chapter titled “Medical Experiments” in her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, she recalled this period as one in which she “wandered through the dim mazes of materia medica” and “sought knowledge from the different schools, —allopathy, homoeopathy, hydropathy, electricity.”Footnote ⁷⁰ While these pursuits may not have illuminated a path to permanent health for her, in exploring these “schools” and their approaches to healing, Eddy immersed herself in an emerging landscape of alternative spiritual and philosophical thought that challenged American Protestant orthodoxy. Although “dim” and “maze-like,” they engaged the mind in a quest for mental and physical liberation.

While Eddy would eventually move away from these mind-body health approaches, she made serious forays into the transplanted continental European ideas of homeopathy and mesmerism or animal magnetism that proliferated in nineteenth-century America. The experiments of the German father of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, and those of the Austrian Franz Anton Mesmer and his eponymous theory, suggested that beneath sensible physical reality there existed deeper fields of energy, which had the potential and power to affect and benefit consciousness and health. These alternative medical sects or sectarians offered a therapeutic spirituality that was radically different from the all-powerful but alien and unknowable God that characterized Eddy's Calvinist heritage. Notions of an invisible “vital force” provided the basis and explanation for homeopathic healing as well as for the concept of the electric transference of magnetic fluid in mesmeric healing. Both practices understood their curative outcomes as stemming from connecting or reconnecting the minds and bodies of patients with the therapeutic flow of invisible energy fields.

Practices such as homeopathy and mesmerism, with their emphasis on mental, psychic, and spiritual means for transformation and healing, offered Eddy touchstones for understanding her discovery of a more satisfactory and compelling sphere of metaphysical healing—one based in Christianity and the spiritual import of the Bible. While Eddy separated the spiritual insight she gained through her healing in 1866 from the alternative spiritualities she had previously been exploring, she recognized in her discovery of Christian Science as a healing methodology the attainment of the kind of physical and mental vitalization and liberation she had been seeking in these other philosophies and methods. What was key for Eddy was that her healing experience and discovery united the spiritual meaning and authority of scripture with support and advancement of bodily well-being.

In a recollection recorded by her personal secretary, Calvin Frye, Eddy remembered encountering her minister who had anticipated her decease after her fall and injury in 1866:

For Eddy, spiritual revelation had profound meaning for mind and body—and in her understanding of Jesus's healing ministry. In noting that “the Christ seemed to have come to the flesh & quickened me into newness of life strength and vigor that I never knew before,” she was seeing Jesus in entirely different terms from what Paul Carter has described in The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age as “the sweet and ineffectual Jesus of American Protestant churchianity.”Footnote ⁷² For muscular Christians, this vision of Jesus amounted to a sentimentalized caricature that was undermining Protestant Christianity's relevancy and potency in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. For Eddy, Christianity required a similar bold revolution of values and vision in which humanity could discover, or rediscover, its capacity to at least approximate a measure of Jesus's expression of divine power. “May the Christians of to-day take up the more practical import of that career!” she counseled, emphasizing a version of spirituality that did not result in a distancing from the world but allowed for transformational power within it. She concluded, “It is possible, —yea, it is the duty and privilege of every child, man, and woman, —to follow in some degree the example of the Master by the demonstration of Truth and Life, of health and holiness.”Footnote ⁷³

Eddy's thought and experience contributed to what Heather Curtis has described as a “pursuit of health in this period [that] occasioned both explosive creativity and sharp contestation in the realms of Christian doctrine and practice.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In contending for a dynamic spirituality that addressed core human needs in mind and body—as opposed to minimizing or looking beyond them—Eddy was making the case that Christian Science was at the vanguard of advancing Christian mission and purpose. This led Eddy to articulate points of connection with the reformist concerns of muscular Christianity, as detailed in her passage on manhood in “Pond and Purpose.” In so doing, Eddy distinguished Christian Science from spiritual movements of the time that were seen as non-Christian, pagan, or of an occult nature. Equally, Eddy saw her religious system as an expression of revitalized Christianity that both addressed the therapeutic aims of practices such as homeopathy and mesmerism and superseded them. In this sense, Eddy was a witness to religious experience and revelation born out of deeply world-centered and body-centered concerns and crises.

For Eddy, the practical benefits of Christian Science did not obviate charitable attention to the world. Her philanthropy extended to a wide array of causes and concerns. It included support for education, hospital care, immigrants, temperance reform, victims of natural disasters, and a host of other causes: for example, a significant contribution in 1906 “to the relief fund for victims of the San Francisco earthquake,” financial support for the American Federation of Labor, a sizable donation to the Newton Hospital in Massachusetts to help eliminate its budgetary deficit, and a noteworthy contribution toward a memorial for philanthropists Baron and Baroness de Hirsch, well known for their support of dispossessed Eastern European Jewish immigrants.Footnote ⁷⁵ A letter from Eddy in tribute to de Hirsch was published in the January 1, 1901, evening edition of New York City's The Mail and Express.Footnote ⁷⁶ Eddy's civic engagement and philanthropy also embraced the YMCA, which in her time had become a model of muscular Christianity. As the cultural historian T. Jackson Lears has observed, “By the 1880s, muscular Christians were sweeping across the land, seeking to meld spiritual and physical renewal, establishing institutions like the Young Men's Christian Association.”Footnote ⁷⁷

V. Mary Baker Eddy and the Boston YMCA

In 1909, the Boston Young Men's Christian Association initiated a very public building fund drive to take place over a two-week period. A large money clock was placed outside where people could see how the effort was advancing in raising the needed $500,000 for new quarters. One turning point in the drive came with Mary Baker Eddy's contribution of $1,000, estimated at about $30,000 in today's money.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Boston Traveler gave this account: “Mary Baker Eddy, head of the Christian Science Church, was announced as one of the contributors of $1000 to the Y.M.C.A. building fund at the early afternoon luncheon today. When the members of the committee had recovered from the surprise occasioned by the announcement, a round of cheers was given.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Eddy's donation spurred other contributions from local Christian Scientists. The Boston Journal reported, “After Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy had subscribed $1000 to the fund for the new building of the Young Men's Christian Association, a meeting was called of the business men of the Christian Science Church. It was expected that about a dozen would put in an appearance, but 136 responded. A good deal of interest was manifested, and 1500 pledge cards were asked for. As a result of the efforts of these men a considerable increase to the fund may be expected.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Readers of Eddy's Christian Science Monitor gave generously as well.Footnote ⁸¹ The Boston YMCA's educational director, Frank Palmer Speare, who would go on to become Northeastern University's founding president, wrote to Eddy in thanks for her gift, noting the “support of the Monitor and Church members.”Footnote ⁸²

While Eddy's decision to support the fund drive may have had more to do with a desire to extend respectful public relations to an institution dedicated to Christian service rather than specifically to endorse its physical education programs, nonetheless, the YMCA's adoption of a muscular Christian ethos was well established and well known by this time.Footnote ⁸³ In the case of the Boston YMCA, by the 1870s physical education was deeply embedded in its mission. Doggett noted that “while the Boston Association was not the first to introduce a gymnasium, it is admittedly true that it led the whole Association in the physical work during this early period.” Doggett added that the committee for the Boston Association viewed it as “one of the best and most complete gymnasiums in the country.”Footnote ⁸⁴ With regard to the Boston YMCA's new building, Speare wrote in his thank you to Eddy “that it was felt from the outset . . . that this great organization and its efforts to erect a new building would appeal to you, and your gift shows that this opinion was well founded.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Eddy's donation also spurred the Boston press to opine on Christian Science as a pragmatic faith. The Boston Times wrote:

Considering her prolific writings, Eddy may not have wholly concurred that “Christian Science is not a religion of words,” but her emphasis on practical and demonstrable outcomes from those words did align with the editorial comments of the Boston newspaper. Like muscular Christians, Eddy sought to move Christianity away from the theoretical, imagined, and otherworldly to the practical, tangible, and immediate. While radical in its spiritual claims, Eddy saw the effects of Christian Science as leading “from extremes to intermediate.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Her belief system mediated the spiritual and the worldly in ways that spoke to a progressive vision for religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Just as YMCA historian L. L. Doggett saw the work of the “Y” as in “[agreement] with modern science in denying the separation between the sacred and the secular,”Footnote ⁸⁸ so, too, did Eddy see Christian Science as revealing a holism between the spiritually real and the scientifically real.

In Healing the Nation: Literature, Progress, and Christian Science, Ashley Squires has argued that the Christian Science movement understood itself as a “modernist narrative,” that its revelation of a dynamic spirituality underlying human experience and the universe was in keeping with modern commitments to “the turning back of a bygone era in favor of a new one.” Squires has noted that Christian Science was part of a story of “competing forces contend[ing] over who had ownership over the fundamental narratives of modernity.”Footnote ⁸⁹ For Eddy, advances in human achievement derived their force and inspiration through progressive shifts in spiritual consciousness—whether or not there was a general recognition of this relationship.

In a chapter titled “Physiology” in Science and Health, Eddy explicitly engaged with the concept of muscularity as a form of consciousness with theological relevance. Beginning with a contemporary reference, she described muscles as “thought-forces” in accounting for the French acrobat Charles Blondin's ability to traverse “Niagara's abyss of waters” on a tightrope.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the ensuing paragraph, she further probed the theme in describing the trajectory of Judeo-Christian spirituality from its pagan predecessors. “When Homer sang of the Grecian gods,” she wrote, “Olympus was dark, but through his verse the gods became alive in a nation's belief.”Footnote ⁹¹ In this sphere the muscular predominated as a vital force, eventually superseded by mental and spiritual ascent into the monotheism of Judeo-Christianity. “Pagan worship began with muscularity, but the law of Sinai lifted thought into the song of David,” Eddy explained. “Moses advanced a nation to the worship of God in Spirit instead of matter, and illustrated the grand human capacities of being bestowed by immortal Mind.”Footnote ⁹² For Eddy, this existential leap into “the grand human capacities of being” did not represent a repudiation of muscularity so much as its repositioning within a larger mental and spiritual universe.

Earlier in the chapter on “Physiology,” Eddy noted that the “feats of the gymnast prove that latent mental fears are subdued by him.”Footnote ⁹³ As with muscular Christians, like Gulick, Eddy saw a connection between physical dominion and mental and spiritual development, and she was attentive to their inner workings and interrelation in human achievement and expression. For both muscular Christians and Eddy, the body needed a change of focus in Christian thought. While Eddy did not emphasize therapeutics for the body as did muscular Christians, she recognized that it was in relation to the dynamics of mind, body, and spirit that Christianity could—and should—prove its relevance to modern man.

VI. “Champion Athlete Attributes Great Success to Faith in Christian Science”

The above heading references a headline in the January 3, 1908, sports section of the New York American. A clipping of the article appears in one of Eddy's scrapbooks.Footnote ⁹⁴ The subject of the article is one Harry F. Porter, who at the time was competing for the Irish American Athletic Club in New York City. A graduate of Cornell, Porter would go on that year to set an Olympic record in the high jump, winning a gold medal for the United States at the 1908 Olympics in London, England.Footnote ⁹⁵ Porter also contributed several articles to Christian Science periodicals. One in particular stands out in relation to his view on the relationship of mind, body, and spirit. Written originally for the Toronto Star in conjunction with his joining the Irish-Canadian Athletic Club, Porter addressed and rebutted points made in the somewhat sensationalized New York American feature story on him, which claimed that he “scored special victories without special training.” Porter corrected this view, stating:

Porter became acquainted with Christian Science after graduating from Cornell. He described the first year of post-collegiate life as deeply unsettling to him, “manifest[ing] itself in poor health and low spirits.” For Porter, engagement with and commitment to Eddy's writings reinvigorated his life and his desire for sport. “I felt returned, as it were, to my boyhood days, when I romped and played in sheer abandon to the joy of living,” he wrote. “My fondness for athletics returned with force. I longed again to don the simple attire and sport on the field and track, and with greater keenness than ever before.”Footnote ⁹⁷

In an article printed in The Christian Science Journal in 1911, Porter addressed the question of manhood. “Character is the flower of manhood,” he noted. “It is the perfect conformity of the will of man to the will of God, the coincidence in human experience of Principle and practice.” At the close of the piece, he identified Jesus as “he . . . in whom manhood blossomed at its brightest bloom”Footnote ⁹⁸—a concept that would have resonated at the deepest levels of muscular Christian purpose and vision.

VII. Conclusion

While the question of health was central to muscular Christianity and Christian Science, in neither case was its pursuit an end in itself. Muscular Christianity was not simply “a celebration of the body” in order to be more physically robust as an effectual servant of Christ. In Christian Science, the body was not simply a problem to be avoided in order to achieve a more sanctified spiritual state. At issue for both movements was how a renewed or even revolutionized understanding of how spirituality worked in relation to bodily well-being reconfigured in its totality the relationship of the human and divine. For Luther Gulick and his close friend G. Stanley Hall, organizations like the Young Men's Christian Association were making Christianity relevant both to the individual and the collective in revealing how vitalization of the mind, body, and spirit led to experiencing health as a pragmatic representation of holiness. As Hall stated in his two-volume work, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, “The very word ‘health’ means wholeness or holiness.” In the same passage, Hall referenced Eddy's system in his appraisal of the Messiah's healing purpose, commenting that “in the Kingdom all sickness is driven away, and the fond dream-wish of the folk-soul to be completely and superlatively well is realized in a way beyond the wildest dreams of modern Christian Science.”Footnote ⁹⁹ For Eddy, bodily health was a divine right, wherein she understood Jesus's healings not as miracles but as revelations of how core spiritual identity provided strength and wellness to mind and body. “These mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural,” she wrote. “They are the sign of Immanuel, or ‘God with us,’ —a divine influence ever present in human consciousness and repeating itself, coming now as was promised aforetime.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Christian Science and muscular Christianity emerged at a time when science and secularization were engendering new questions about the role and relevance of religion. Both movements emphasized practical outcomes as essential to proving their validity. They saw the demands of the public square as an opportunity for spiritual development based in the world. Eddy's founding of The Christian Science Monitor as a secular “real” newspaper served this objective.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Boston YMCA in the late nineteenth century saw that its “work must be helpful to young men along every line of their lives—spiritual, social, mental, physical, and business.”Footnote ¹⁰² As someone who developed strong business acumen in the management of her personal finances as well as in the shepherding of her church, Eddy also recognized the merits of demonstrating the utility of religious thought within business culture.Footnote ¹⁰³

When Eddy wrote in “Pond and Purpose” that “the advancing stages of Christian Science are gained through growth, not accretion,” she was signaling that this religious practice aligned with the spirit of science, that it was progressive, requiring ongoing exploration, discovery, and proof. For Eddy, this had broad implications for Christian Science as a transformational agent in the world and in relation to people's minds and bodies. Likewise, muscular Christianity was advancing the idea that new scientific perspectives—often based in the science of the mind or psychology—demonstrated not a division between body and spirit but a holism within them. While they differed in their respective emphases on the body, both Eddy and muscular Christians saw the pursuit of health or physical well-being as not only a part of Christian outreach or care for the world but as inherent to Christian spiritual practice and progress. In Christian Science and muscular Christianity, Christ Jesus's works and character invited deep exploration into how spirituality and the divine worked as an emboldening influence on life and health. In this respect, Eddy made a point of representing how Christian Science addressed the practical needs and idealism of manhood as part of its overall healing and redemptive mission.