One Simple Idea by Mitch Horowitz Page B

pioneer’s massive revision of Scripture. (I consider Stanton’s forays into mind-power in the next chapter.)
    But Hopkins chiefly focused her energies on producing new graduates from her seminary. In so doing, she laid tracks that went beyond establishing a congregation or a new breed of spiritual practitioners. Rather, Hopkins’s students began to transform the makeup of the Americanministry. Historian J. Gordon Melton estimates that “approximately 90 percent of Hopkins’s students were women who left her classes to assume roles as professionals in the religious community. She actually ordained over 100 ministers who moved on to create centers and mobilize a mass following (and in the process became the first female in modern history to assume the office of bishop and ordain other females to the ministry).”
    The students that Hopkins ordained in 1889 and in the years ahead, as well as the pupils whom the Hopkins graduates in turn tutored, formed a cohort of women’s religious leadership from Massachusetts to the Pacific Coast. This body of workers established ministries, publishing houses, spiritual learning centers, journals, and metaphysical churches. Their efforts made female religious leadership into a gradually accepted fact of American life. By the time the dramatic and nationally known Protestant evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson began her rise to fame with tent revivals in 1915, female graduates of the Hopkins seminary had already been on the American spiritual scene for more than twenty-five years.
The Dawn of New Thought
    As the influence of Hopkins and other mind-power practitioners grew in the early 1890s, Mrs. Eddy tightened control on the term
Christian Science
. She wanted it forever out of the hands of apostates, and sometimes sued people who used it without her permission.
    The Hopkins brand of mind-power philosophy started to be called by different names. Inventive and original labels popped up, usually from her students: Divine Science, Mental Science, Science of Right Thinking, Christian Healing, Christian Theosophy, Faith-Cure, Truth-Cure, and Thought-Cure.
    Yet a phrase used by Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to capture the movement’s broadest ideals:
New Thought
. In December 1858, Emerson began delivering a lecture called “Success,” which he published as anessay in 1870. In it he wrote: “To redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.”
    Emerson had loosely used “new thought” earlier. “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts,” he wrote in “Nature” in 1836. But it was in the context of “Success,” and the broader exposure it received in 1870, that the phrase seemed to stick.
To redeem defeat by new thought
. The precept seemed not only to define the goals of the burgeoning movement but also the life path of Hopkins and its progenitors.
    By the mid-1880s the term “new thought” began circulating in mental-healing books and journals. Eddy’s ex-student Edward J. Arens used it several times in his 1884 book
Old Theology in Its Application to the Healing of the Sick
, writing, “we live the new thought, and it becomes attached to us as a part of us” and “we enter into a new thought,—a spiritual thought of things that are real and eternal.”
    A key reference to “new thought” appeared in 1887 in
Condensed Thoughts About Christian Science
, a pamphlet by a Chicago homeopathic physician and Swedenborgian named William Henry Holcombe. Holcombe, who had studied with Hopkins’s student Frances Lord, wrote: “New thought always excites combat in the mind with old thought, which refuses to retire.” *4
    In 1892, journalist Prentice Mulford fatefully and prominently featured the term in his essay “The Accession of New Thought,” in which he described the new metaphysical perspective. In 1894,
New Thought
became the title of a Massachusetts mental-science journal. The following year, a prominent group of