What’s the background of the trial allegory in Science and Health?

A patron recently asked us for information on the 13-page section in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, described in a marginal heading as “A mental court case” (pages 430–442).¹ Readers of the book sometimes refer to this as “the trial allegory.” Author Mary Baker Eddy gave it this introduction: “I here present to my readers an allegory illustrative of the law of divine Mind and of the supposed laws of matter and hygiene, an allegory in which the plea of Christian Science heals the sick.”²

This account includes over 20 characters that Eddy used to make her illustration, including “Mortal Man,” “Personal Sense,” and two juries, serving in two different courtrooms with two different judges. It concludes the chapter titled “Christian Science Practice.”

Our questioner asked, “I am wondering if there is any research regarding this segment of Science and Health?” She wondered when it was first written, and asked whether Eddy referred to it in her correspondence. Here is some of what we learned.

Eddy first used the metaphor of court, judge, and attorney in an early manuscript :

Suppose you were an M.D. or a teacher of the laws, or what they call the laws of health, and you happen to find a person who is perfectly ignorant of your laws, and also disease as a consequence; but you call on him and commence explaining to him the great need there is for him to preserve his health, and to become acquainted with those laws of yours will enable him to do it…. Then you tell him he has heart disease, or lung disease…. at no distant day he will acknowledge this very disease of which he in his fright pleads guilty, then you enter a complaint against him, or in other words, tell some one else he is sick, and then he is according to belief arrested and thrown into prison, there to await his trial. You are error’s attorney or the devil’s and he is the judge i.e. Sickness which is the error, and which gives in the judgment and he is brought into the court to be tried by errors tribunal. Now I appear for him, having heard this story unknown to the judge or attorney…. I draw from the judge that a person cannot be tried for a crime that he was forced to commit; this being done I commence my plea for the victim, and show that he never committed any offence against the laws of God, and that he was born free as St. Paul. Then I take up the evidence and show that there is not one word of wisdom in all that has been said of him, also that he has been led into the scrape and made to believe a lie….³

She included the allegory of the trial in the first edition of Science and Health (1875), in the chapter “Healing the Sick.” Beginning with the 16th edition (1886), it appeared in a chapter titled “Healing and Teaching.” It was also in this edition that the account assumed its present format, with the witnesses’ testimonies, attorney’s argument, and judge’s charge appearing in smaller type than the surrounding standard text. By the 16th edition, some of the longer paragraphs in the allegory had also been split into shorter sections.

In the 50th edition (1891), which was a major revision of the book, Eddy omitted the trial allegory. We have found no information as to why she deleted it. But soon she restored it, in the 81st edition (1894). There it appeared, as it does now, at the end of the chapter titled “Christian Science Practice.” After 1902 she made only slight changes to the text, and its format remained the same.

Although Eddy continued to revise Science and Health, including the trial allegory, over the rest of her life, the case in the book’s first edition is strongly recognizable when compared to that of the final version. The overall structure, most of the characters, and even much of the phrasing remain as it was first published. Over time, Eddy added or altered words in some places, shortened text in others, and renamed some of the characters, such as changing the defendant from “Man” to “Mortal Man” and the defense attorney from “Science” to “Christian Science.” These edits to her textbook were part of an ongoing effort to articulate her discovery of Christian Science as clearly as possible.

We have not been able to find any correspondence in which Eddy mentioned the allegory of the trial.