Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [43]
But Mrs. Eddy would have no comparisons between Christian Science and the more freewheeling Hopkins philosophy, with its openness to Theosophical and occult ideas. By the early 1890s, after fighting off a range of factional splits and internal challenges, Eddy succeeded in copyrighting the term Christian Science, suing anyone who used it without her permission. Searching for alternate names, practitioners and teachers outside the Eddy camp used terms like Divine Science, Mental Science, and the Science of Right Thinking. The last term came from the nation’s doyenne of inspirational poetry, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who is best known for her 1883 lines: “Laugh and the world laughs with you; Weep and you weep alone.” Wilcox, a combination of social-reform activist, occult explorer, and Hallmark-style homilist, was an early student of Emma Curtis Hopkins.
Eventually one term gained dominance: New Thought. It may have entered the culture through Emerson, who wrote in his essay “Success” in 1870: “to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.” In 1887, a capitalized reference to New Thought appeared in a pamphlet, “Condensed Thoughts about Christian Science,” written by another Swedenborgian, William Henry Holcombe. By 1894, New Thought became the title of a Massachusetts mental-healing magazine. And in 1899, the gavel fell on a “New Thought Convention” in Hartford, Connecticut. The movement had found its name.
As for Eddy’s Christian Science, it continued on its own way, attracting hundreds of thousands of members. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the nation had no standard system of medical licensing, and some doctors persisted in prescribing dangerous and painful treatments, like bloodletting or the ingestion of mercury. For many Americans, Eddy’s message of spiritual healing represented a gentler (and ultimately safer) alternative. Flush with members, the Eddy movement purchased magnificent properties on which it built enormous, stately churches, many of which dot America’s eastern cities today. But Eddy placed her metaphysical movement squarely within the folds of the nation’s orthodox Christian congregations, much like the new religion of Mormonism. Christian Science would tolerate no individual experimentation, nor would it seek to move with the times. To guard against future heresies, in 1895 Eddy forbade sermons in her churches, instead requiring that weekly passages from Scripture and her 1875 Science and Health be uniformly recited from each pulpit on Sunday mornings, not by pastors but by rotating “Readers.”
Although New Thought gave rise to its own thriving network of metaphysical churches—under the names of denominations such as Unity or Religious Science—it became a kind of antireligion, its borders porous and open to every idea and individual (including many who retained membership in mainline churches), and its philosophy adaptable to a wide range of viewpoints. Ironically, or perhaps inevitably, New Thought is a term that few Americans would hear after World War II. Its ideas were so widely adopted—a sociological study of the 1950s found that most inspirational literature published in America between 1875 and 1955 had some kind of New Thought bent—that the source itself became obscured. Secularized elements of the New Thought philosophy successfully vied for influence with the more religiously inspired variants. In the 1930s, nonreligious figures like Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People) and Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich) rode the wings of New Thought to worldwide fame. The popularity of mind-power philosophy hit its peak in the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 megaseller, The Power of Positive Thinking, which reached into churches and living rooms across America. As