New Thought : Part 4

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 12 of 19)

New England Transcendentalism. Quimby Again and the Dressers

Curiously enough this quotation from a book which nowadays nobody likely reads save perhaps in some college course on early Victorian literature, brings us within sight of the beginnings of New Thought. A little group of English and American thinkers, part philosophers, part poets, part rebels against the established order, anticipated trained students in their return upon the higher and more positive side of an older philosophy. They made much of the inner life, its powers and its possibilities; they affirmed the creative power of the soul; they conceived life to lie plastic to the touch of vision and desire; they thought themselves to be standing upon the threshold of a new world. They were impatient of discipline; they dreamed impossible things and gave their dreams the authority of reality. They were hard enough to understand and they sorely tried practical plodding folk, but they kindled their time and released forces which are yet in action.

New England, through a group of adventurous thinkers of whom Emerson was the most distinguished, responded strongly to Transcendentalism. Another group, as has been said, responded strongly to mesmerism and spiritualism, which were also a part of the ferment of the time in which Christian Science and New Thought (I use New Thought here in the technical sense) find their source. And finally, Quimby, who is a rather unexpectedly important link in a long chain, - important, that is, to the student of modern cults - reacted against mesmerism, felt and thought his way toward some understanding of the force of suggestion in abnormal states, applied his conclusion to faith and mental healing and gathered about him - as has been said before - a little group of disciples who have between them released far-reaching movements.

Mrs. Eddy and the Dressers were the outstanding members of this little group of disciples. Mrs. Eddy soon dissociated herself from the others and she supplied in "Science and Health" a distinctive philosophy to her movement. She organized it into a church; she imposed upon it a distinctive discipline. No little of the power of Christian Science is due to this narrow rigidity which is itself the projection of the personality of Mary Baker Eddy. But Christian Science did not carry with it the whole of the group which had come under Quimby's influence, nor indeed all of those who came under Mary Baker Eddy's influence. There was during all the formative period of these modern cults a perpetual process of schism.

We have as a result, then, two divergent movements related in underground ways, though as marked in difference as in resemblance, both of them beginning about the same time, both of them reactions against accepted religious forces and validations, both of them with a marked therapeutic content, both of them adventures in the conduct of life.

In the summary which follows I am in debt to Dresser's recent "History of the New Thought Movement." The name New Thought was chosen as the title of a little magazine devoted to mental healing, published in 1894 in Melrose, Mass. "The term became current in Boston through the organization of the Metaphysical Club in 1895. About the same time it was used by Mr. C.P. Patterson in his magazine Mind and in the title of two of his books." Other names were suggested - in England, Higher Thought; in Boston, Higher Life; in New York the little group was for a time known as the Circle of Divine Ministry; in the west the movement was known as Divine Science or Practical Christianity. There were groups also which called themselves the Home of Truth or the Society of Silent Unity.

New Thought Takes Form

New Thought, as has been said, lacks the definite direction which Christian Science has always had. Its organizations have grown up quietly, more or less irregularly and have had always a shifting character. "The first New Thought Society with a regular leader and organization in Boston was the Church of the Higher Life established in 1894." The Metaphysical Club was an outgrowth of the New Thought group in Boston. Dresser gives a list of the original members, chiefly significant through the presence among them of some of Quimby's disciples and others whose books have since held a high place in New Thought literature. There were manifest connections between the movement and liberal (particularly Unitarian) theology.

The first New Thought convention was held in Boston in 1899 (there had been earlier conventions of the Disciples of Divine Science - a related movement - in western cities) and the second in New York City in 1900. The New York convention was the first to make any general statement of the "purposes" of the League. We find on the New York program one Swami Abhedananda, lecturer on the Vedanta philosophy. Here is an early indication of the return of Eastern religions upon the West which is also one of the marked characteristics of the religious development of our time. We do not need to follow through in detail the list of successive conventions with their topics and their speakers. The group is not so large but that the same names reappear. There are marked attempts in the earlier conventions to associate leaders in recognized schools of philosophy and theology with the movement. One does not discover this tendency in the later convention lists.

The local groups throughout the country have had varying fortunes. They have from time to time changed their names and naturally their leaders. The west has responded perhaps more strongly than the Atlantic seaboard. The movement is particularly strong on the Pacific Coast. There are no available statistics and generalizations are of doubtful value. The Cincinnati and Kansas City groups are offered by Dresser as typical organizations, but they seem on the whole to be exceptional rather than typical. The strength of the New Thought movement is not in its organization but in its influence.

"In England as in America interest was aroused by Christian Science, then came a gradual reaction and the establishment of independent branches of the movement." "It is difficult," says Dresser, "to obtain information pertaining to the influence of New Thought literature in foreign languages." The more significant New Thought books, however, have been variously translated and widely sold. New Thought leaders sometimes advise their disciples to retain their old church associations and the movement has naturally tended to merge in religious liberalism generally and to become only an aspect of the manifold religious groping of a troubled time.

In the Constitution and By-Laws of the New Thought Alliance, published in 1916, the purposes of the society are "to teach the infinitude of the Supreme One, Divinity of Man and his Infinite possibilities through the creative power of constructive thinking and obedience to the voice of the Indwelling Presence which is our source of Inspiration, Power, Health and Prosperity." We discover here the same tendency toward the deification of capital letters which we have already noted in Christian Science.

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company