A Teacher
Malinda Cramer
Divine Science: the omnipresence of an all-good God realized through healing
The transmission
Malinda Elliott Cramer (June 12, 1844 – August 2, 1906) was an American faith healer, teacher, and a principal founder of Divine Science, one of the early organized churches of the New Thought movement. After years of chronic invalidism, she described an 1885 experience of healing that came in prayer through the realization of the indwelling presence of God, an event she treated as the practical proof of her later teaching.
Like many first-generation New Thought leaders, she studied with Emma Curtis Hopkins, the “teacher of teachers,” and out of her own recovery she built a systematic teaching of divine omnipresence and healing.
In San Francisco she established the Divine Science Home (Home College of Divine Science) in 1888 and began publishing Harmony, among the earliest and most significant New Thought periodicals. She organized the International Divine Science Association in 1892, linking the independent metaphysical workers of the era, and set out her doctrine in Lessons in the Science of Infinite Spirit, and the Christ Method of Healing (1890), later revised as Divine Science and Healing (1902).
Cramer’s San Francisco work merged with the parallel efforts of the Brooks sisters in Colorado to form the Divine Science denomination. She died in 1906 of complications following the San Francisco earthquake.
What they gave
Co-founded Divine Science: built one of the lasting New Thought churches on the principle of the omnipresence of an all-good God.
- Healing from realization: taught that healing follows from recognizing an ever-present divine wholeness, not from petition to a distant deity.
- Organized the movement: founded the International Divine Science Association (1892), networking the scattered early metaphysical teachers.
- Published a foundational text and periodical: Divine Science and Healing (1902) and the influential magazine Harmony (from 1888).
In their words
Divine Science, the truth of Infinite Spirit and of its creations, is a knowledge of God, and of the method of generation and re-generation.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Emma Curtis Hopkins; the Quimby-derived mental-healing current; Christian metaphysical thought.
- Influenced: the Divine Science Church and its teachers, including Nona Brooks and Fannie James; later Divine Science practitioners.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- Lessons in the Science of Infinite Spirit, and the Christ Method of Healing1890
- Divine Science and Healing1902