The Canon / Pillars / New Thought
Pillars · 1888
Scientific Christian Mental Practice
New Thought (founding teacher)Scientific Christian Mental Practice presents mental and spiritual healing as a teachable science grounded in the indwelling divine. Its central claim is that the same truth healers in every tradition have drawn upon is one universal principle, and that conscious recognition of God's omnipresence is itself the curative act.
The work is systematic, organized as a graded course of instruction, and unusually catholic in its sources: it weaves Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Emerson, and the world's scriptures into a single framework of metaphysical practice. In doing so it frees the method from the institutional control of its Christian Science origins and offers it as a universal discipline.
Hopkins is remembered as the teacher of teachers, and the text records the system she transmitted to the founders of Unity, Divine Science, and Religious Science. It thus stands near the hidden source of nearly every later New Thought denomination.
In its words
The honest statement that 'My Good is my God' has the power to set the mind to a key which is nearer to its normal tone than it is now thinking.
By Mind alone we are taught we are to live and be strong. By Mind alone we are supported and defended.
All reasoning has the effect of controlling the environment. Your whole life conditions change if you change your modes of reasoning.
Things and objects and people are the records now of ways we have thought in the past, also of ways we think now.
If we did not greatly believe something, but should keep speaking it, or thinking about it, we would construct an artificial faith in our words, and make conditions like our persistent ideas.
The power of God is freedom. Jesus Christ said that all who knew Truth would be free.
Love is another name for life.
Love is God. Do not forget to say, "The Good I am seeking is Love."
Practices it teaches
High Mysticism Treatment — Hopkins's denial-and-affirmation method
Emma Curtis Hopkins — the "teacher of teachers" who trained Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Ernest Holmes, H. Emilie Cady and others — taught mental healing as a paired discipline of denial and affirmation, organized…
The Affirmations of Science — 'There Is Good for Me and I Ought to Have It
Lesson III of Hopkins's course is the Affirmation — the second stroke of her denial-then-affirm method. Once the mind has been cleared of error by the denials (Lesson II), you write the truth onto it: bold…
The Denials of Science — Erasing Error Before Affirming
In Emma Curtis Hopkins's twelve-lesson system, the Denial comes before the affirmation. Lesson II teaches a set of vigorous mental denials — deliberate, spoken refusals to grant reality or power to fear, evil…
The Statement of Being — Writing Your Idea of the Good Daily
Emma Curtis Hopkins — the "teacher of teachers" of New Thought, who trained Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (Unity), Ernest Holmes's circle, and many founders of the movement — opened her twelve-lesson course with the…
Lineage
The author
Emma Curtis HopkinsScientific Christian Mental Practice — the teacher of teachers
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Key terms
Kindred books