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The Institution Behind the Teaching

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The Institution Behind the Teaching

Divine Science stayed small and did not fragment, and the reason is Nona Brooks. Where other New Thought teachers taught classes and left the graduates to do as they liked, she built a college in Denver, presided over it, edited the magazine, and ordained ministers under a recognised standard before sending them to found churches elsewhere. That is an ordinary denominational apparatus, and in this movement it was unusual.

The teaching she transmitted is the omnipresence of God worked out consistently: if God is all and is everywhere, then there is no place for a second power, so evil, sickness and lack are not things to be fought but errors to be seen through. Her own emphasis was less on technique than on the practice of turning attention, deliberately and repeatedly, to the presence she held to be already there.

Among those who came through the Denver church was Emmet Fox, who went on to fill the largest halls in New York and to reach an enormous readership, and whose writing carried Divine Science formulations to people who never heard the name. Others in her orbit fed into the wider culture of self help and recovery that grew in mid century America.

She retired from the pastorate in the 1930s, continued teaching, and died in 1945. The Divine Science churches that exist today descend from the Denver institution rather than from the San Francisco one.

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