Charles Fillmore

Charles Fillmore was born in 1854 near St. Cloud, Minnesota, and endured a difficult childhood marked by poverty and a skating accident that left him with a permanently injured, shortened leg and chronic ill health.

He became a real-estate and mining businessman in Kansas City, but his life changed decisively in the 1880s when his wife, Myrtle, was healed of tuberculosis after embracing New Thought healing—an experience she summarized in the affirmation “I am a child of God and therefore I do not inherit sickness.” Investigating the ideas that had healed her, the initially skeptical Charles studied with teachers in the Emma Curtis Hopkins lineage and experienced improvement in his own condition.

In 1889 the Fillmores began publishing Modern Thought magazine, and over the following years they built what became Unity, eventually the Unity School of Christianity headquartered at Unity Village, Missouri.

Fillmore’s intellectual contribution was to wed New Thought metaphysics firmly to Christian scripture and devotional practice, developing a system of affirmative prayer, metaphysical Bible interpretation, and “spiritual mind action” while remaining within a recognizably Christian frame.

Living to 1948, he presided over the growth of one of the largest and most enduring New Thought institutions, distinctive for its prayer ministry (Silent Unity) and mass-circulation devotional Daily Word.