Christian Science, founded by Mary Baker Eddy, teaches that God is divine Mind and that matter, sickness, and death are errors of mortal mind, overcome by understanding the spiritual reality Christ Jesus demonstrated.
Christian Science began with Mary Baker Eddy's recovery from a serious injury in 1866, which she dated as the discovery of a divine law of healing, and the publication of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in 1875. The Church of Christ, Scientist, organized in Boston, keeps its services in the form Eddy ordained: readings from the Bible and Science and Health, delivered by readers rather than preachers, in churches and reading rooms worldwide.
Ultimate Reality
God is incorporeal divine Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, and Love — the only reality. Matter is not a second substance but the objectification of mortal mind, an error about reality: all is infinite Mind and its manifestation. Evil, on this account, has no more reality than a mistake in arithmetic has when the sum is worked correctly.
The Human Condition
The human problem is false belief: the mesmerism of mortal mind that presents sickness, sin, and death as facts. Jesus's healings were not miracles suspending law but demonstrations of it — proofs that the real man is spiritual, harmonious, and untouched by matter's claims. Suffering is therefore an error to be corrected, not a cross to be interpreted.
Knowledge and Truth
Science and Health is the key: Eddy held that the Bible, read spiritually, yields a demonstrable Science, testable in healing as mathematics is testable in sums. The Christian Science Monitor, which she founded at eighty-seven, applies the same discipline to news — to injure no man, but to bless all mankind. Practitioners devote themselves to prayerful treatment, and testimonies of healing are published weekly.
Right and Wrong
Right is the demonstration of Truth in character and health: overcoming sin because sin and sickness are the same error in different dress. The church's discipline is self-government by the Golden Rule; there are no clergy, no sacraments beyond the spiritualized baptism and communion of daily life, and healing is sought through prayer rather than medicine — the point on which the movement has faced its sharpest public and legal tests.
Human Destiny
Death is not a door but the last error to be overcome; Eddy's system relocates heaven and hell to states of mind, here and now. What lies beyond physical death the textbook treats with reserve — probation continues until every error is destroyed and man is found in God's likeness, perfect and forever intact.
The Conversation
Christian Science asks medicine and materialism whether matter has ever been shown to think, and it asks the churches why they expect less healing than Jesus promised his followers. Its critics ask the hardest counter-question at the bedside: what the doctrine says to the parent whose child dies untreated — and the movement's own history is in part its long, careful attempt to answer that honestly.