● ● ●  said. Every religious development must be explained as evolution—or, utilizing an analogy from later genetic theory, as mutation—from an unbroken line of natural ancestors.

The compulsion on intellectual historians has therefore been strong to interpret Christian Science as an evolutionary development from Quimbyism, which in turn can be traced back to Mesmer. The trouble is that Mrs. Patterson’s notes on Genesis can be fitted into this theory only by a most unscientific manipulation of the facts. For the germ of a new idea, alien to everything in Quimby, is already present in these notes: the concept of man as a perfect spiritual idea, made in the image and likeness of a God who is wholly good and wholly Spirit.

Christian Science in its completed form would present God not as acting through history to create man but as acting on history to reveal man. Rejecting the relativities of history as in any true sense determinative, Mrs. Eddy would write, “No advancing modes of human mind made Jesus; rather was it their subjugation, and the pure heart that sees God.”⁵⁴ In the virgin birth she found the perfect symbol of a creation that was really revelation, the archetypal illustration of reality breaking through appearance in defiance of material modes of generation. As she saw it, the “seed” that produced Jesus was Mary’s faint glimpse of Spirit as the only creator, the source of all true being. And it was this seed, she held, rather than his human heredity and environment, that decisively shaped the events of his later life.

The point is significant for the historian of Christian Science because it suggests that an understanding of that which is unique to Mrs. Eddy’s thinking may be of first importance in understanding the final shape her system took. In one sense every original idea is of virgin birth, an element of pure novelty whose importance may be gauged by the degree to which it transforms its environment, including the mind to which it first appears.

Only the germ of Christian Science was present in Mrs. Patterson’s early writings on Genesis. She herself later wrote of them in the preface to Science and Health: “These efforts show her [the author’s] comparative ignorance of the stupendous Life-problem up to that time, and the degrees by which she came at length to its solution; but she values  ● ● ●