One Simple Idea by Mitch Horowitz

terms that would have repulsed Eddy—and that became familiar lexicon of the New Age movement in future years—Hopkins spoke freely of a “God-Self” within. “When the judgment faculty awakens,” Hopkins wrote, “then the divine Self of you shines and puts all the dark pictures, which the senses make, quite away.”
    Eddy again made her displeasure known in the pages of the
Christian Science Journal
in March 1888 where she assailed the “dishonesty—yea, fraud” in the “verbose lectures of Mrs. Emma Curtis Hopkins. She adopts my ethics, or talks them freely, while departing from them.”
    By the time Eddy made those statements Hopkins’s following had grown beyond Chicago. She had taught classes across the West, from Kansas City to San Francisco, and had also made tours of Milwaukee and New York City. In 1888, alumni of Hopkins’s classes could be found in seventeen branches of the Hopkins Metaphysical Association, from Maine to California. Hopkins not only offered a looser atmosphere than the Eddy classes, but evinced an ability to remake mystical ideas as tools for personal fulfillment and problem solving. She seemed to provide immediate solutions, without Eddy’s demanding and radical metaphysic of viewing all of material life as illusory.
    “Her instruction not only gives understanding to the student by which he can cure the ills of himself and others,” wrote one early follower, “but in many instances those who enter her classes confirmed invalids come out at the end of the course perfectly well. She dwells so continually in the spirit that her very presence heals and those who listen to her are filled with new life.”
    Many of Hopkins’s students noted the encouragement and possibility they experienced in her presence. Wrote another: “Her brilliance of mind and spirit was so marked that the very few could follow in her metaphysical flights, yet she had marked power in quickening spirituality in her students.”
    In a further counterpoint to Eddy, Hopkins urged followers to write, teach, and freely spread the word. In this way, her students became the driving figures of the New Thought movement in the next generation. They included Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, founders of Unity, a widespread Kansas City–based healing ministry of magazines, books, and classes; Ernest Holmes, the founder of Science of Mind, an influential twentieth-century mind-power philosophy; Malinda Cramer, who spearheaded the Divine Science movement, which gained popularity in San Francisco and Denver; *3 the widely read prosperity author andsuffragist Helen Wilmans; writer William Walker Atkinson, who built a robust metaphysical publishing business in Chicago; Annie Rix Militz, who founded Homes of Truth spiritual centers throughout the West Coast; Frances Lord, an energetic British student who devised some of the earliest mental wealth-building methods in the late 1880s; Alice Bunker Stockham, one of the nation’s first female physicians and a widely read feminist who advocated a new model of sexual parity in Victorian-era marriages; and the inspirational poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who penned the world-famous lines: “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.”
    These were the foundational figures of mind-power spirituality—what would later be known as New Thought.
“Woman’s Hour Has Come”
    Hopkins and her many female students inherited from Eddy a sense of feminine social mobility as much as a spiritual philosophy. “It is not an exaggeration,” wrote feminist scholar Margery Fox, “to describe Christian Science in the early years as largely a religion in which women helped other women overcome suffering.” As such, Christian Science and the early mind-power movement provided some of the nation’s earliest and most visible forms of independent female leadership.
    The Christian Science church had a pronounced awareness of having a woman at its helm, and of the maternal qualities of God.