WHEN MARY BAKER EDDY experienced spiritual healing after a severe fall in February 1866, her life could have turned out very differently from what it did.

That healing could have simply confirmed her religious faith. She had always had a deep regard for the Bible and the power of prayer, and she could have taken the healing, which recovered her from injuries that were considered life-threatening, as proof of the efficacy of turning to the Bible and God. That would have been remarkable on its own. Even if Mrs. Eddy had just expressed her heartfelt gratitude for her healing and then went back to her normal life, it still would have been significant.

But Mary Baker Eddy sensed something more behind her healing; she wanted to find out what had healed her. So she spent the next three years of her life studying the Bible and recording what was revealed to her about the book of Genesis. And as she learned, she began to apply her findings by healing people in her community through prayer. What Mrs. Eddy ultimately discovered during this time of prayer and study, and through her initial healing work, was that there was a system behind spiritual healing.

At that point, Mrs. Eddy could have lived her life solely as a successful healer. She could have improved and saved the lives of numerous people. Her healing work would have lasted as long as her life, and this would have been a considerable contribution to society.

But, again, she pursued a different path. After she figured out that her healing was based on divine laws, a way of understanding God and her relationship to Him, she didn’t keep it to herself, and she didn’t share it in a way that made the healing work dependent on her as an individual. Instead, she chose to teach her system of healing to others and to record it in a textbook so that anyone could learn how to practice Christian Science, to heal themselves and others. She taught her first student in early 1867 and published the first edition of Science and Health in 1875. She founded her Church, then called “Church of Christ (Scientist),” in 1879, to provide the literal and figurative structure for her discovery. She chartered the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881. Although Mrs. Eddy dissolved the college in 1889 to devote her time to a major revision of Science and Health, she reopened it in 1898 under the auspices of her Church’s Board of Education. Today the Board of Education continues to prepare those who will teach classes on Christian Science healing.

But what made her discovery teachable? What made a textbook the right form to share her discovery? Why did she refer to spiritual healing as a Science? In her autobiography,Retrospection and Introspection, Mrs. Eddy explained her experience in that initial period of search and study:

“The Bible was my textbook. It answered my questions as to how I was healed; but the Scriptures had to me a new meaning, a new tongue. Their spiritual signification appeared; and I apprehended for the first time, in their spiritual meaning, Jesus’ teaching and demonstration, and the Principle and rule of spiritual Science and metaphysical healing,—in a word, Christian Science” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 25).

She continued, “The miracles recorded in the Bible, which had before seemed to me supernatural, grew divinely natural and apprehensible; though uninspired interpreters ignorantly pronounce Christ’s healing miraculous, instead of seeing therein the operation of the divine law.” The next paragraph adds, “Jesus of Nazareth was a natural and divine Scientist” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 26).

She concluded that if the healings weren’t miraculous, then they were repeatable and available to all. What Jesus did was scientific, and Mary Baker Eddy felt that as the discoverer of these truths about his healing work, she had a duty to share them with the world.

Her discovery of the Science of the Christ also included an understanding of scientific prayer. She made it clear that prayer in Christian Science does not include petitioning God to take away sickness and it does not involve formulas. Mrs. Eddy discussed prayer throughout her published writings, as well as in her letters and manuscripts, and she even devoted a specific chapter to the subject in Science and Health. Looking back years later on her experience in 1866, she wrote, “My experience of the effects of faith was no miracle and nothing impossible to all who have that faith which is followed by spiritual understanding and is equal to avail itself of Christ’s promise, not to a select number, but to all who exercise it” (A10234B, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection).

Here Mrs. Eddy made an important distinction: Healing in Christian Science is not the result of prayer through faith alone. This point is key to understanding the importance of her choice to write a textbook and teach Christian Science to others: She saw that spiritual healing was systematic and reproducible. Later in Retrospection and Introspection, she made plain the difference between faith-cures and healing in Christian Science:

“It is often asked, Why are faith-cures sometimes more speedy than some of the cures wrought through Christian Scientists? Because faith is belief, and not understanding; and it is easier to believe, than to understand spiritual Truth. It demands less cross-bearing, self-renunciation, and divine Science to admit the claims of the corporeal senses and appeal to God for relief through a humanized conception of His power, than to deny these claims and learn the divine way,—drinking Jesus’ cup, being baptized with his baptism, gaining the end through persecution and purity” (Retrospection and Introspection, p. 54).

Mrs. Eddy made it clear that true healing—which not only restores the body but also brings greater understanding of God—comes from living according to the teachings of Jesus and following his example. She returned to the message of the Christ and the importance of spiritual understanding in a piece she dictated to Calvin Frye in October 1901. Here she very specifically pointed to the kind of scientific prayer that heals in Christian Science:

“Christ Jesus said, ‘Ask and ye shall receive, seek & ye shall find’ and ‘When ye stand praying, believe that ye have the things ye ask for & ye have them.’ The apostle James writes, ‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.’ What authority have we superior to the aforesaid on prayer healing the sick? We have none and the only possible failure to demonstrate the rule of healing according to the Master’s words and those of the Apostle must proceed from praying amiss. The Master made perfect faith or faith founded on spiritual understanding the condition for the prayer that heals the sick and added the full realization ‘It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.’ That Spirit is all and the flesh profiteth [nothing],—even that matter is not to be taken into account pro or con on the subject of Christ’s prayer that heals the sick.

“This conclusion is corroborated by the scriptural demand ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Likewise, the Apostle made the condition of the mind of him who prays, that is, the righteous man or the good man, to be he who heals by prayer and none other can, for the prayer of the unrighteous availeth not ….

“On this rock of Christ’s prayer Christian Science plants its standard of healing in contradistinction to all other form of mortal mind cure, faith cure or any other mental or material process of healing the sick” (A10312, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection).

Righteousness and spiritual understanding are the keys to reliable healing. Mary Baker Eddy proved the effectiveness of Christian Science by demonstration, by Christly living. She saw that what had healed her was a repeatable, provable Science that all could employ, rather than an anomalous application of personal faith. She healed via this system and taught others to do the same. And because she shared her discovery with the world, Christian Science is available to all for all time.