From “Scientific Thinking and its Healing Results, Association Address of 1935”, pg. 2, by Martha Wilcox:
“Instruction that is Truth removes from us the belief that we are not perfect now. Truth, or spiritual sense, dispels the mist, or thins the cloud of material sense by showing us its nothingness, and the individual beholds his real self at hand, here and now. Instruction that is Truth is a divine message to man. Truth is God Himself. Truth is the I AM of every individual here today. Truth is not a procedure of the human mind, and while our method of scientific thinking enables the individual to see what is already perfect, it is not the thought or the thinking that makes us perfect. No, the knowing of truth is Truth itself, and is the perfection. To really know the truth is being Truth.”
Orderliness, Neatness and Dispatch. Inset: Martha Wilcox, Housekeeper.
Adam Dickey observed that orderliness, neatness, and dispatch were among Mrs. Eddy’s leading characteristics, and that to her, rooms and decorative objects represented conditions of thought. He recalled, “It was a law with Mrs. Eddy that everything had its rightful place and must always be in that place.” Martha Wilcox and Katherine Retterer were among the housekeepers who accomplished those goals day in, day out.
In November 1910 Mrs. Eddy called Martha to her study. Martha later commented, “I wish you might have heard her expressions of gratitude for her home and her gratitude to those who were caring for her home … and what it meant to her to have such a place in which to do her work and carry on the movement of Christian Science.” Martha also served, at times, in specific prayerful support of the work. At Mrs. Eddy’s suggestion Martha was admitted to the Normal class in December1910, and went on to serve as a Christian Science practitioner and teacher for the next thirty-six years.
All was not labor at Mrs. Eddy’s home. Here
some members of the household set out for a
drive. From left to right: Frank Bowman,
John Salchow, Jonathan Irving, Mrs. Salchow,
Mrs. Bowman, Martha Wilcox, Lula Phillips,
Elizabeth Kelley, Katherine Retterer.
* Martha Wilcox
Martha Wilcox was a prominent teacher during the years when the Christian Science organization was at its peak of prosperity. She grew up on a farm in Kansas, under the influence of a religious family life. She studied privately for a teacher’s certificate and became a teacher in the local schools. Before finding Christian Science, she was an active member of the Methodist Church. In 1902, through a series of events, in which she sought medical aid for her ailing husband, she was presented with a copy of Science and Health. As she studied and pondered this book, she was healed of a physical problem of long-standing. While her husband was not interested in Christian Science, she definitely was.
Within the next six years, she had Primary class instruction, became an active member of a branch church in Kansas City, Missouri, and managed to devote much of her time to the healing work, in addition to caring for her family. In 1908 she received a call from The Mother Church in Boston asking her to serve Mrs. Eddy at her home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
In Mrs. Wilcox’s first interview with Mrs. Eddy, it was impressed upon her that everything in one’s experience is subjective or mental. Mrs. Wilcox writes of this interview: “[Mrs. Eddy], no doubt, realized that at my stage of growth, I thought of creation — that is, all things — as separated into two groups, one group spiritual and the other group material. But during this lesson I caught my first glimpse of the fact that all right, useful things — which I had been calling ‘the unrighteous mammon’ — were mental and represented spiritual ideas. She showed me that unless I were faithful and orderly with the objects of sense that made up my present mode of consciousness, there would never be revealed to me the ‘true riches,’ or the progressively higher revealments of substance and things.”
Mrs. Wilcox later wrote: “I well remember when for the first time I understood that everything of which I am conscious is thought, and never external to or separate from what I call my mind, and that which I call my mind is not always seeing things as they actually are.”
In 1910, Mrs. Wilcox was recommended by Mrs. Eddy for Normal Class instruction, with Bicknell Young as teacher. This was the beginning of a long and successful career for Mrs. Wilcox as a practitioner and teacher. In 1911, she taught her first class. Until her passing in 1948, she was dedicated to serving the Christian Science movement, and became one of the most respected teachers in the field. She was the author of many profound papers on Christian Science that were given each year to her association of students.
Mrs. Wilcox’s two years with Mrs. Eddy equipped her to understand so well the subjective nature of all things. She explains how to shift the focal point of thought from the objective world of people, things, happenings, to the subjective world of intuitions, thoughts, ideas. Although she stresses the mental cause of disease and discord, she goes beyond an analysis of the human mind and explains how to relate to God subjectively through prayer, how to develop an understanding of Him that spiritualizes consciousness and heals.
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