Emma Curtis Hopkins

Emma Curtis Hopkins was in her mid thirties, married and living in Connecticut, when she took a course in Christian Science and impressed Mary Baker Eddy enough to be made editor of the Christian Science Journal in 1884. The appointment lasted about a year. She was reading and citing sources outside Eddy's authorised material, including work by other mental healers, and she was dismissed.

She went to Chicago, and within a few years had made it the second capital of metaphysical religion in America. Her seminary taught in intensive classes, and the roll of students is the reason her name matters: Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who founded Unity; Ernest Holmes, who founded Religious Science; Annie Rix Militz of the Home of Truth; and a long series of others who founded churches, magazines and training schools across the country and abroad. Almost no branch of surviving New Thought fails to pass through that classroom within two generations.

She also did something almost no religious body of the 1880s was doing: she ordained women, in numbers, and sent them out as ministers. The movement that resulted is unusual among American religions in having had female leadership from the beginning rather than as a later reform, and that is traceable directly to her.

Hopkins published comparatively little under her own name, and the little she did publish is dense, allusive and hard to use as an introduction. Her teaching happened in the room, in twelve lesson courses given orally to students who then went away and wrote the books. The consequence is that she is the least visible important figure in the history of the movement, and that histories written from printed sources tend to leap from Quimby and Eddy to Unity and Religious Science without her in between.

Her theology drew the movement away from Christian Science in a definite direction. Where Eddy held to a closed system with a single authorised text, Hopkins read widely and taught a comparative frame, drawing on scripture, on Hindu material, and on whatever she judged to be describing the same thing. She emphasised the indwelling divine in every person and, in her later work, a doctrine of the Holy Spirit as the age now beginning, which gave her students a warrant for teaching independently rather than reproducing a founder.

She withdrew from institutional work around the turn of the century and taught privately in New York until her death in 1925. Her last well known student, taught late and privately, was Ernest Holmes.