Did Mary Baker Eddy write it? “Keep your eye single”

(Updated March 17, 2025)

Our research staff sometimes receives questions about a document containing this statement: “It is necessary to keep your eye single to light.” Some versions also include the admonition “refuse to look at the darkness, and your whole experience will be full of light.”

The document in question is often said to be part of correspondence from Mary Baker Eddy to her student James A. Neal, although we are also aware of versions that claim the recipient to have been Adam H. Dickey, Frances Thurber Seal, or Irving C. Tomlinson. Portions have even been found in a piece titled “Article on Supply.”

We have not been able to find any evidence in our collections to authenticate Eddy’s authorship of a letter (or essay) with this content, and we can confirm that she did not write it. In fact, we are unable to identify any author for the piece.

A letter that we know Eddy did write to James Neal is numbered L03524 in our collections. It speaks of the sacred calling of a Christian Science practitioner and indicates their close relationship as teacher and pupil:

Jan. 29, 1897.

 

My beloved Student,

 

Your letter is my best New Year’s gift. I had felt for sometime the fitness you possessed for healing. I knew it when you were a member of my College class. It looked a waste of your talents to have you in a counting room. Now, thank God, I have at least one student in Boston that promises to be a Healer such as I have long waited and hoped to see. Oh may the Love that looks on you and all guide your every thought and act up to the impersonal, spiritual model that is the only ideal ― and constitutes the only scientific Healer.

 

To this glorious end I ask you to still press on, and have no other ambition or aim. A real scientific Healer is the highest position attainable in this sphere of being. Its altitude is far above a Teacher or preacher; it includes all that is divinely high and holy. Darling James, leave behind all else and strive for this great achievement. Mother sighs to see how much her students need this attainment and longs to live to see one Christian Scientist attain it. Your aid to reach this goal is spiritualization. To achieve this you must have one God, one affection, one way, one Mind. Society, flattery, popularity are temptations in your pursuit of growth spiritual. Avoid them as much as in you lies. Pray daily, never miss praying, no matter how often: “Lead me not into temptation,” ― scientifically rendered, ― Leave me not to lose sight of strict purity, clean pure thoughts; let all my thoughts and aims be high, unselfish, charitable, meek, ― spiritually minded. With this altitude of thought your mind is losing materiality and gaining spirituality and this is the state of mind that heals the sick. My new book [Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896] will do you much good. Do not purchase one, Mother wants to give you one. I welcome you into the sanctum of my fold. God bless you.

 

Your loving Teacher

 

M B Eddy

To learn more about James Neal, check out his biographical sketch in the Amplified Edition of Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer (pages 478–480). This book is available in Christian Science Reading Rooms.

If you would like more information on a document that we have authenticated, or would like to suggest a new entry, please contact us at [email protected].

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