Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority

Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority. Vol. 3 of 3. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977.

Volume three of Peel’s trilogy covers the final chapters of Mary Baker Eddy’s life—1892-1910—a time when the perpetuity of her Church and the safeguard of her vision weighs heavily on her mind. Eddy will struggle to balance her movement’s need for organization and preservation with its life-giving inspiration and revelation. Moving beyond the traditional congregational model, Eddy lands on a strong central government for The Mother Church and democratic congregational forms for its branches—the governing authority, parameters and discipline of which are now formally constituted in her 1895 Church Manual. She establishes weekly and monthly magazines, sets up a Committee on Publication to provide accurate responses to public challenges, and inaugurates, in an age of yellow journalism, the daily newspaper The Christian Science Monitor. As productive as these final decades were, Eddy’s life would continue to be plagued by personal attacks and legal suits by former students such as Dresser, Woodbury, Stetson, as well as the painful 1907 ‘Next Friends’ suit which was “no picnic for Mrs. Eddy, who saw in it a climactic attempt to discredit her whole lifework” (282). The suit would collapse in six months, but Eddy’s divine Science would remain as a prophetic alternative to the “voracious scientism” (4) of the 20^th century.

ISBN-10: 0875101429
ISBN-13 (Softcover): 978-0030567094
ISBN-13 (Hardcover): 978-0875101422

See also annotations:

Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery by Robert Peel (Volume 1 of 3)

Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial by Robert Peel (Volume 2 of 3)