One Simple Idea

by Mitch Horowitz

  She assumed editorship in September 1884, but by October 1885, little more than a year later and without any obvious warning, Hopkins found herself dismissed from the Journal and expelled from her room at the Metaphysical College’s women’s dormitory. All support was pulled out from under her—without even a clear explanation as to why. In an undated letter to Eddy, Hopkins complained: “I received a peremptory message from Dr. Frye [Eddy’s secretary] to vacate my room at the college, accompanied by a notification from Mrs. Crosse that my services were no longer necessary on the Journal in view of the lack of funds.”

  The attractive and intelligent Hopkins came to believe that she had crossed Eddy’s unwritten rule: never to make references to having your own communication with the Divine. This was something that Hopkins had fleetingly done in a September 1885 Christian Science Journal editorial, which otherwise defended Eddy from critics. In the offending piece, “Teachers of Metaphysics,” Hopkins wrote: “I was made to know Him face to face of whom I had heard by the hearing of the ear as a name only.” It was the kind of reference, however oblique, that could make Eddy uneasy.

  “You remember that it was said the article Teachers of Metaphysics would get me in trouble,” Hopkins wrote her friend Julia Bartlett on November 4, 1885. She went on to describe a chilling atmosphere:

  Everything I said and did after that was watched and exaggerated and reported. I really was under heavy fire mentally. If I were to report what the students said to me I could get them into trouble, but I never did, for deep under all sudden resentments, I heard the sweet chord strike in every student—worshipful, reverent love for their teacher. But they could not understand my complex way of expressing myself, nor know that I was digging for facts.

  By “digging for facts,” Hopkins was apparently referring to the Eddy-Quimby controversy. And in that matter she came down squarely on Eddy’s side. “I saw all the letters said to be written by Mrs. E. to Dresser and Quimby and not one of them could be held as argument against her supreme originality,” Hopkins wrote Bartlett. Yet a subtler conflict simmered below her inquiries.

  The Freethinker

  Hopkins was digging not only for facts but for ideas. She was apparently reading broadly in metaphysics, Eastern religions, and the occult. This, possibly more than her editorial, cut against the culture Eddy was establishing within the church. Perhaps wary of the slapdash manner in which Quimby’s manuscripts had been handled, and the confusions and controversies that later resulted, Eddy strove for order and discipline within her fold.

  By the 1880s, Christian Science had become a strict church, with a liturgy composed of prayers and readings dedicated to revealing the healing power of Christ. Eddy decreed that the church’s core texts and practices would be subject to no adjustments, innovations, or outside influences. In the months following Hopkins’s arrival, Eddy made it clear that students were not to go sampling the varieties of metaphysical literature that were abounding on the New England scene, from Theosophy to mind-cure.

  Yet even before Hopkins was made editor of the Christian Science Journal, she had been forthright about her eclectic spiritual interests—and in the Journal’s pages, no less. In a short article Hopkins wrote for the Journal in April 1884, “God’s Omnipresence,” she stated: “There is Truth in every religious system of the world, else it would find no followers.” Diffuse faiths, Hopkins argued, are “blessed evidence of the universal goodness and impartiality of God, that to every people and nation of the earth He has manifested Himself as Life, Truth, Holiness—and Health.” To drive home her point, she hailed the common truths expressed through “the Buddhist Nirvana,” “Algazel [or Al-Ghazali], a Mohammedan philosopher of the twelfth century,” Spinoza, Confucius, the Zend-Avesta of Zoroastrianism, the Chandogya Upanishad, Hebrew and pagan traditions, and the Desatir, a collection of ancient Persian sacred writings that had been popularized by late-nineteenth-century Theosophists.

  At an early stage Hopkins was openly, even insistently, eclectic. This adds another layer of perplexity to her expulsion. Eddy was obviously aware of the breadth of Hopkins’s outlook—indeed, it could be argued to Eddy’s credit that Hopkins’s article proved no barrier to her being named editor. Why then the split? It may have arisen from Eddy’s growing concern to curb some of the larger personalities in the movement. These included women such as Ursula Gestefeld, an energetic student of Eddy’s and contemporary of Hopkins, who in 1888 published her own interpretation of Christian Science. Eddy deeply disapproved of the move, which led to Gestefeld’s public feud and split with the founder. Eddy would tolerate no unorthodox interpretations of Christian Science, and especially not from students setting up independent followings or experiments of their own. On this count, Eddy was unyielding. Shaped by the brunt of court battles, and by the widespread pilfering of her vocabulary, Eddy eventually copyrighted the term Christian Science and by the mid-1880s effectively expelled any follower—no matter how gifted—who hinted at independent directions or committed the heresy of studying work from figures in the Quimby circle, especially Warren Felt Evans.

  For violating these parameters, many of her most intrepid students were frozen out. Indeed, by the late 1880s disputes and faction splits cost Eddy an estimated one-third of her movement. It may be difficult for spiritual seekers today, who select freely among a vast array of offerings and ideas, to see why dedicated and growing numbers of people would have flocked into such a conservative, if not stringent, atmosphere. For all Eddy’s rigidity, her ideas could also reflect great humanity and compassion. The bedside prayer treatments she devised and taught to Christian Science practitioners were vastly gentler than the often-harmful practices of late-nineteenth-century medicine. Christian Science practitioners did something that would remain almost unheard-of in medicine through much of the early twentieth century: When sitting and praying at the bedside of patients, they paid attention to the moods, fears, and emotional needs of the individual. For suffering people, it was a radically new experience. In a sense, Eddy’s theology formed an unrecognized influence on the growth of humanistic medicine in the late twentieth century.

  Moreover, American medicine in the nineteenth century had no standard licensing procedures, and late into the century backwoods physicians persisted in the “heroic” remedies of bloodletting, narcotics, alcohol, weeping wounds, and mercury ingestion, methods that were used even on children. The routines of heroic medicine were especially dangerous for women. In Victorian-age America the diagnosis of hysteria, or neurasthenia, was frequently applied to women and implicitly cemented the idea of female health as inherently fragile. Physicians sometimes regarded the uterus as the seat of the symptoms of depression or hysteria, and they subjected female patients to almost inconceivably grim protocols. In such cases, noted historian Gary Ward Materra, “treatments might include leeching, injections, ovariotomies, and/or cauterization of the clitoris. Leeches were placed on the vulva or on the neck of the uterus, and sometimes the leeches progressed into the uterus itself, causing acute pain. Cauterization was accomplished by chemicals such as nitrate of silver or hydrate of potassa, or by a white-hot iron, and cauterization treatments were performed several times at intervals of a few days.”

  Eddy sought to keep women out of what may have been the least healthy place for them in the Victorian age: the examination room. While Christian Science was never a politicized movement, Eddy presented an impressive, even extraordinary, figure as the first female leader, both intellectually and spiritually, of a major American faith.

  Women, in particular, flocked into Eddy’s movement.*1 Often they were deeply intelligent, independent, and driven by the liberating atmosphere of a female-led church. Those who remained within the Eddy fold, either long or short term, often experienced a sense of personal agency. Anyone who found relief through Christian Science treatments could, in turn, train to become a practitioner. This summoned up feelings of equality not only in matters of health but often in religious and social matters, as wel
l.

  Ironically, when Eddy shunned those followers who were deemed overly ambitious or unorthodox, she unintentionally created a cohort of ardently curious, dedicated—and churchless—experimenters, many of whom had come to believe that divine laws could be experienced, and wielded, in modern life. Set loose from a congregational setting, this brigade of spiritual freethinkers included a large number of women who had once been drawn to Eddy as a model of female leadership.

  This was the backdrop for the arrival, and sudden departure, of Emma Curtis Hopkins, at one time among the most promising and magnetic of Eddy’s converts. If Hopkins had come and gone quickly, she just as swiftly developed into an independent and popular teacher on her own terms. Indeed, Hopkins’s post–Christian Science career formed a wave of influence that is still being felt on the spiritual scene today.

  The Metaphysical Midwest

  Forced onto her own resources in 1885, Hopkins ventured to Chicago, where she established herself as an independent teacher of metaphysical healing. Chicago was an exciting and natural destination for maverick spiritual seekers in the late nineteenth century.

  When Hopkins settled there, the midwestern city already hosted large circles devoted to mind-cure and Christian Science, stocked with followers and ex-followers of Eddy’s. Chicago also had thriving subcultures in Theosophy, occultism, and metaphysical publishing. The city was home to A. J. Swarts’s Mental Science Magazine, the journal that had featured the final interview with Warren Felt Evans. Ironically, Hopkins had criticized Swarts from the pages of the Christian Science Journal in July 1885 for synthesizing sundry metaphysical methods into Christian Science, the very thing that she was later suspected of. Hopkins was quick to patch things up with Swarts, and the two ex–Christian Scientists were co-editing his magazine by March 1886.

  Chicago offered one more attractive feature—it took Hopkins far away from her New England roots, where there would be no explaining to do over departing her family, only to see her relations with Eddy wither. While Hopkins visited her siblings at High Watch Farm in Kent, Connecticut, she never again settled in New England.*2

  For the next ten years the enterprising seeker threw herself into Chicago life. By Hopkins’s side was another freshly minted apostate of Christian Science, former Eddy student Mary H. Plunkett. Plunkett was a fiercely independent figure whose multiple marriages, children outside of wedlock, and advocacy of free love made her an anomaly in the buttoned-up Eddy world. An outspoken spiritual experimenter, Plunkett was fated to last no longer than Hopkins within Eddy’s circle.

  Historian Stephen Gottschalk reckons that Plunkett, who had befriended Hopkins while she was editing the Journal, encouraged the new convert in expanding her spiritual horizons. The women’s friendship may have deepened Eddy’s suspicion. In any case, Plunkett served as a source of encouragement to Hopkins after they relocated to Chicago. The two women collaborated in independent Christian Science classes and healing sessions, and in 1887 they launched a journal, Truth: A Magazine of Christian Science. Hopkins, like other ex-students, continued to use the term Christian Science, to Eddy’s deep chagrin.

  But Hopkins and Plunkett drifted apart within three years of landing in Chicago. Plunkett traveled to New York, where she frenetically embarked on new metaphysical ventures and schools. After a botched effort to patch things up with Eddy in 1889, and a new marriage to a younger man (who turned out to be a bigamist and embezzler), Plunkett departed America for New Zealand. Following further marital breakups, and factional splits within the metaphysical movements she had started, Plunkett took her own life there in 1901 at age fifty-three.

  Hopkins remained rooted in Chicago, where she built a growing and respected reputation as a teacher. In classes, lectures, and mental-visualization sessions, she instructed seekers, first from the Midwest and soon from many other parts of the nation, on how to use the divine power of thought. She fostered an atmosphere of encouragement, openness, and possibility. Hopkins’s theology edged away from Eddy’s focus on health and illness, and she began to expound her own variant of “Christian Science”—remaking the philosophy as an overall metaphysical approach to happiness.

  In a manner inconceivable to Eddy, though foreseen in Hopkins’s earliest articles, the ex-disciple employed ideas from Kabbalah, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as occult teachings from Theosophy. Theosophy was an esoteric spiritual movement cofounded in 1875 by the widely traveled Russian noblewoman Madame H. P. Blavatsky, who claimed tutelage under hidden spiritual masters, and spoke compellingly of an occult philosophy that formed the basis for the world’s faiths. This ideal seems to have struck a chord with Hopkins. The Chicago teacher at times seemed to struggle in her class notes to make reference to every esoteric or Eastern tradition one could possibly cite. At one point she validated the insights of mental science through “the written statement of Eadras,” “the oral teachings of the Hebrew lawgiver Moses,” “the Christian Bible and Hindu Sacred Books, Egyptian Ancient Teachers, Persian Bibles, Chinese Great Learning, Oriental Zohar, Saga, and many others.” The many others included “Hermetic philosophy, Chaldean inner laws, the Vedanta, Brahmin tenets, and Pythagorean conclusions.” Given that these references appeared in 1888—three years after Hopkins left the Eddy fold—it is not always clear how deeply read she really was in such material.

  While Eddy would not have recognized the Hopkins philosophy, the former student still venerated Eddy and echoed key concepts of her work, such as the illusory nature of evil, illness, and the material world. “There is no matter,” Hopkins told students, in the classic Eddy vein, and continued: “There is no sensation in matter.… There is no sin, sickness, or death.” All that we perceive as matter or reality, she insisted, is permeable to the ever-flowing power of thought, which Hopkins saw as a divine instrument belonging to mortal men and women—a fissure with the Eddy approach, which held that God alone was reality and man was an illusion.

  Nonetheless, Hopkins continued to apply the term Christian Science to her classes and publications, and for years continued to see Eddy as her inspiration, if not her teacher. If Hopkins had hoped for reconciliation, though, it never came. “Oh, if you could only have been mental enough to see what I might be and do,” she wrote Eddy, for the last time, on Christmas Day of 1886, “and given me time to work past and out of the era through which I was passing when Mrs. Crosse suddenly ordered me to leave.” There was no reply.

  But Eddy had her ear to the ground about Hopkins and her ventures. She wrote in the Christian Science Journal in April 1887: “If one half of what I heard of Mrs. Hopkins teaching on the subject of Christian Science is correct she is deluding the minds she claims to instruct.”

  In what may have been a reaction to the Hopkins episode, Eddy that same year amended the constitution of her Christian Scientist Association to stipulate that no one could be a member “who does not use for his textbooks The Bible and Science and Health, or who uses any other textbooks in this cause.” The following year Eddy published in the Journal a set of rules that prohibited teachers or students from studying books on mind-healing other than Eddy’s own.

  “These teachers shall supply themselves and their students with no literature, on Christian Science Mind-healing,” Eddy wrote in April 1888, “except such as is used by my College, and shall require their students to abide by this condition.”

  Hopkins’s departures, meanwhile, grew increasingly radical. She encouraged the use of affirmations for personal happiness, which had been pioneered by Warren Felt Evans. She gamely expanded upon Evans’s idea that the mind is an engine of well-being. “The day is plastic to you,” she told students. “Write on its still walls your decree that the good and true are victorious already. Be explicit. Name the special good you would see through to pass. Declare that it is brought to pass already.” (While Hopkins’s phraseology could sound surprisingly contemporary, it partly echoed earlier works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in his 1836 essay “Nature” wrote of “the plastic power of the
human eye.”)

  In addition to vesting powers of manifestation to the individual, Hopkins extolled Evans’s concept that within man dwells an Inner God, an extension of the Divine. In terms that would have repulsed Eddy—and that became familiar lexicon of the New Age movement in future years—Hopkins spoke freely of a “God-Self” within. “When the judgment faculty awakens,” Hopkins wrote, “then the divine Self of you shines and puts all the dark pictures, which the senses make, quite away.”

  Eddy again made her displeasure known in the pages of the Christian Science Journal in March 1888 where she assailed the “dishonesty—yea, fraud” in the “verbose lectures of Mrs. Emma Curtis Hopkins. She adopts my ethics, or talks them freely, while departing from them.”

  By the time Eddy made those statements Hopkins’s following had grown beyond Chicago. She had taught classes across the West, from Kansas City to San Francisco, and had also made tours of Milwaukee and New York City. In 1888, alumni of Hopkins’s classes could be found in seventeen branches of the Hopkins Metaphysical Association, from Maine to California. Hopkins not only offered a looser atmosphere than the Eddy classes, but evinced an ability to remake mystical ideas as tools for personal fulfillment and problem solving. She seemed to provide immediate solutions, without Eddy’s demanding and radical metaphysic of viewing all of material life as illusory.