Overview

Christian Science is a 1907 book by the American writer Mark Twain (1835-1910). The book is a collection of essays Twain wrote about Christian Science, beginning with an article that was published in Cosmopolitan in 1899. Although Twain was interested in mental healing and the ideas behind Christian Science, he was hostile towards its founder, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910). Twain's first article about Christian Science was published in Cosmopolitan in 1899. A work of fiction, it describes how he fell over a cliff while walking in Austria, breaking several bones. A Christian Science practitioner who lived nearby was sent for, but could not attend immediately and so undertook to provide an absent healing. Gillian Gill, a biographer of Mary Baker Eddy, has argued that Twain was ambivalent towards Christian Science, and that passages of the essay were in fact pretty unambiguously pro-CS. In response Caroline Fraser writes that Gill has misread the text, and that Twain praised Christian Science in the most backhanded and ironic way. Fraser writes that whatever Twain's view of Christian Science, his view of Eddy herself was overwhelmingly hostile. He called her rasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees-money, power, glory-vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish.

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