This is a question about the so-called “man of integrity” passage, a portion of Mary Baker Eddy’s 1895 letter to the First Members of The First Church of Christ, Scientist. 1 This passage is from a sermon written by Hugh Blair, an eighteenth-century Scottish minister, later published in The Lindley Murray Reader. Eddy was deeply familiar with the Reader, for it was one of her childhood schoolbooks; her copy of the Reader was a part of her library at the time of her passing in 1910.
Was Eddy’s use of this plagiarism? It seems far more likely that Eddy quoted Blair without intentionally committing plagiarism. In fact, Eddy’s use of passages from other authors—“verbal echoes” as her biographer, Robert Peel, terms them—would have been considered a sign of her culture. Her fluency in quoting Shakespeare in one line and the Bible in the next validated (for her audience) her intelligence and learning. It is possible that her audience was familiar enough with the passage to make any citation unnecessary.
Unfortunately we have no statements from Eddy herself on this controversy, for though she was accused of plagiarizing the works of others in writing Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the “man of integrity” allegation was never leveled at her during her lifetime. It first appeared several decades after her passing.