A Teacher
Emma Curtis Hopkins
Scientific Christian Mental Practice — the teacher of teachers
The transmission
Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925) was an American spiritual teacher widely regarded as the single most consequential organizer of the New Thought movement, remembered as its “teacher of teachers.” She began as an editor for Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science Journal, broke with Eddy in 1885, and established her own seminary in Chicago, where she taught a more universal, less institutional metaphysics.
Her major work, Scientific Christian Mental Practice (1888), drew on Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Emerson, and the world’s scriptures to frame mental and spiritual healing as a teachable science of the indwelling divine.
Her pivotal, often under-credited significance lies in her students. According to the historian Charles S. Braden, Hopkins shaped New Thought “more than any other single teacher,” and modern scholars frequently name her the de facto founder of the movement.
From her seminary came the founders or formative teachers of nearly every major New Thought denomination: the Fillmores of Unity, Nona Brooks and Malinda Cramer of Divine Science, Ernest Holmes of Religious Science, plus Annie Rix Militz and H.
Emilie Cady. She is thus the hidden hinge on which the entire institutional mind-power lineage turns.
What they gave
Trained the founders: Taught the people who went on to found Unity, Divine Science, and Religious Science, seeding the whole denominational lineage.
- Scientific Christian Mental Practice: Authored the systematic textbook of mental/spiritual healing as a universal “science.”
- Universalized the method: Freed metaphysical healing from Eddy’s institutional control, synthesizing it with Platonism, mysticism, and world scripture.
- The seminary model: Built a teaching seminary that ordained and commissioned a generation of metaphysical leaders.
In their 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.”
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science she departed from; the Quimby healing lineage; Platonism and Neoplatonism; Christian mysticism; Emerson.
- Influenced: the Fillmores (Unity); Brooks and Cramer (Divine Science); Ernest Holmes (Religious Science); Militz; Cady; the New Thought movement at large.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- Class Lessons 18881888
- Scientific Christian Mental Practice1888
- High Mysticism1920