How did Mary Baker Eddy view the Sermon on the Mount?

We are sometimes asked about this statement by Mary Baker Eddy: “To my sense the Sermon on the Mount, read each Sunday without comment and obeyed throughout the week, would be enough for Christian practice.” Why did she name Sundays specifically? And what else did she write about these words of Jesus from chapters 5–7 in the book of Matthew?¹

Eddy included that statement in her 1901 address to The Mother Church. It was read by John W. Reeder at each of four Communion services on Sunday, June 23, and soon published as a pamphlet on August 1.

For context, the statement relates to church pastorship and preaching. Here is the full passage:

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS’ PASTOR

True, I have made the Bible, and “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” the pastor for all the churches of the Christian Science denomination, but that does not make it impossible for this pastor of ours to preach! To my sense the Sermon on the Mount, read each Sunday without comment and obeyed throughout the week, would be enough for Christian practice. The Word of God is a powerful preacher, and it is not too spiritual to be practical, nor too transcendental to be heard and understood. Whosoever saith there is no sermon without personal preaching, forgets what Christian Scientists do not, namely, that God is a Person, and that he should be willing to hear a sermon from his personal God!²

We have been unable to find any documentation in our collections explaining Eddy’s reasons for naming Sunday in particular to read the Sermon on the Mount. While sermons are commonly associated with Sundays, by 1901 Christian Science Wednesday meetings also included readings from the Bible and Science and Health, in addition to Sunday services.

Eddy referred to the Sermon on the Mount many times in her published writings, emphasizing it as foundational to her teachings:

• “When the Science of Christianity appears, it will lead you into all truth,” she wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. “The Sermon on the Mount is the essence of this Science, and the eternal life, not the death of Jesus, is its outcome.”³
• In her 1891 biography, Retrospection and Introspection, she wrote,“No purer and more exalted teachings ever fell upon human ears than those contained in what is commonly known as the Sermon on the Mount….”⁴
• In the Manual of The Mother Church, she wrote that the Sermon on the Mount should be among the first lessons that children learn in Christian Science Sunday Schools.⁵
• In her book Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, she wrote that teachers of Christian Science “must themselves practise, and teach others to practise, the Hebrew Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, and the understanding and enunciation of these according to Christ.”⁶ She also stated that “every man and woman should be to-day a law to himself, herself, — a law of loyalty to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.”⁷

Further sources also show Eddy’s emphasis on these words of Jesus. Clara M. S. Shannon, who served on Eddy’s staff at times from 1894 to 1903, wrote this in her reminiscence: “Another lesson on January 31, 1902. Mother told us to study daily The Sermon on the Mount.”⁸

Also, the 2009 edition of Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer, by Yvonne Caché von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck, refers to an interview Eddy gave to a newspaper reporter in April 1901:

When asked “On what is Christian Science based?” she replied, “I can tell you on what I based my conception of religion and on which, so far as in me rests, I have laid its foundation in Christian Science: The Ten Commandments, The Ninety-First Psalm, The Sermon on the Mount, The Revelation of St. John the Divine.”⁹