Religion: Universal Design

Those dissident Christian Scientists who in 1912 organized the Christian Science Parent Church in opposition to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science Mother Church (The First Church of Christ, Scientist) in Boston, last week changed the name of their organization to the Church of Universal Design. More, they renounced Mrs. Eddy as discoverer of their cult. In her place they put Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Portland (Me.) clockmaker and “mental healer,” from whom (they profess) Mrs. Eddy got her ideas. Reason for these shifts of reverence and name was given by John Valentine Dittemore, onetime director of the Christian Science Church, deputy leader of the Church of Universal Design*: “The term Christian Science has been brought into widespread disfavor through the recent discovery of Mrs. Eddy’s extensive plagiarisms, her secret use of drugs while instructing her followers to discard them and the claim that the discoveries in metaphysical healing of P. P. Quimby were her own.” Contributing causes of the “widespread disfavor” were two recent books: Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher’s Our New Religion and Edwin Franden Dakin’s Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind, whose sale and review “regular” Christian Scientists have tried to suppress.

*Mrs. Annie C. Bill of London is world leader of the new-named body.