News
Insight and Inspiration from History
September 26, 2011
As a curatorial intern at Longyear Museum, I work primarily with photographs from the Museum’s collection, helping to preserve the images digitally. Connecting faces with the names of many early workers is expanding my knowledge of and curiosity about the early Christian Science movement. As I go through the collection, I often get a sense that there are many stories connected with the photographs. One photo of Mrs. Mary Armstrong, labeled, “M.E.A. after being healed by CS, Irving Kansas,” particularly intrigued me. I was compelled to do further research in Longyear’s archives and publications and discovered that a great experience lay behind this inscription.
—Barbara Palmer
This photograph of Mary Armstrong was made in 1886, shortly after she was healed in Christian Science of a case doctors had pronounced incurable by medicine. Mary Armstrong and her husband Joseph Armstrong were two pivotal early workers in the Christian Science movement, both making significant contributions to Christian Science in the west and in Boston.
In 1886, Mary Armstrong wrote to an aunt, telling of her grief from losing her mother and a longstanding physical ailment. Family physicians had informed Mary that unless a higher power healed her, she would never be well. Mary’s aunt wrote back telling of her daughter who had been an invalid for fifteen years who had been healed by Christian Science. The letter encouraged Mary, and “this word about my cousin being healed by Christian Science showed me that my case was no worse than hers and I began to take courage that I could be healed.”1 Mary’s husband Joseph encouraged her to go visit her aunt and learn more about Christian Science, and in a few days she was at her aunt’s home and being treated by the practitioner in town. She was completely healed in a short number of treatments, and when her husband came to see her, he was so surprised at her improved condition that he “began his incessant inquiry, investigation, study, and practice of Christian Science.”2
This healing turned the Armstrong’s lives around, impelling them to increasingly dedicate their lives to the study of Christian Science. Mr. Armstrong was a very successful banker in Kansas, but the inspiration of Mary’s healing led them both to take class instruction from a student of Mary Baker Eddy’s, Janet Colman, later that same year, in 1886. They then took Primary class in 1887 and Normal Class in 1889 from Mary Baker Eddy herself, and both went into the full-time practice of Christian Science.
The lives of Mary and Joseph Armstrong serve as pillars of devotion and faith in Christian Science, for they both went on to serve the growing church in many ways.3 From the first healing that freed Mary from suffering, they endeavored to share this extraordinary Science with others and help it grow in perpetuity. Reading Mrs. Armstrong’s words of joy and conviction after she left Mrs. Eddy’s Normal Class in 1889 illustrate her inspiration and full healing:
“I saw beyond the material sense of things; beyond all doubt as to what the Science could do and the one Creation. Everything was so clear and all I wanted was an opportunity to prove my faith in Christian Science. It was no trouble to heal. … O! what joy and strength of love for God and all mankind filled my whole thought. I rejoiced to know I had found a God of perfect peace.”4
1 Longyear Museum. Biographical Files, “Biographical Sketches,” Mary E. Armstrong, C.S.D., page 1.
2 Longyear Museum. Biographical Files, “Biographical Sketches,” Mary E. Armstrong, C.S.D., page 1.
3 Longyear Museum Quarterly News, 1994, Vol. 31, No. 1, “Mary E. Armstrong, C.S.D.: Faithful Worker and Witness”; Pioneers in Christian Science, biographical sketches, “Joseph Armstrong, C.S.D.” and “Mary E. Armstrong, C.S.D.” Longyear Foundation 1972; Longyear Museum Film, The Onward and Upward Chain, 2004
4 Longyear Museum, Biographical Files. Mary Armstrong Reminiscence, June 14, 1918, #188(B), p. 4.
