From the Papers: “Instructions, rebuke and encouragement”—Eddy’s letters to Daisette and William McKenzie

Mary Baker Eddy took great care in counseling her students. Her letters often reveal her sincere efforts to help them progress in understanding Christian Science and increase their ability to apply its healing method. She also helped guide the growing Christian Science movement as her students became teachers themselves, established churches, lectured publicly, and filled many other organizational roles.

Daisette D. S. McKenzie (1864–1952) and William P. McKenzie (1861–1942) often benefitted from Eddy’s counsel. They married in 1901, although they had first met a decade earlier, when Daisette introduced William to Christian Science. At the time he was a patient at a sanatorium, and this encounter resulted in his healing of a nervous breakdown. Both he and Daisette went on to play important and numerous roles in the movement, which included serving together as Readers in the Christian Science branch church that Daisette helped start in Toronto, Canada. Eddy took time to write letters intended to ensure their success, encouraging them even as she might also deliver notes of caution and urge them to work at a slower pace.

Daisette had become interested in Christian Science after the infant son of her sister Leila Stocking Blossom (1854–1892) was healed of an unnamed condition. She helped establish Christian Science in Cleveland and Toronto, before moving with her husband to Boston at Eddy’s request. She was a Christian Science practitioner for more than 50 years and a teacher for nearly two decades.

Referencing the first letter she received from Eddy, Daisette wrote this in her reminiscence: “This first wonderful communion with the love and the life of our beloved Leader, shed an enduring warmth and joy over all the years which were to follow, and which proved to be mingled shade and sunshine.” She added, “From this date onward followed letters of instructions, rebuke and encouragement, and always accompanied by the most tender love and marvellous insight.”¹

For example in a May 15, 1894, letter to Daisette, Eddy cautioned against looking to a person or human concepts for healing: “Your letter of glad tidings duly received[.] I can only thank you with my heart and pen and do you a service in correcting you on some important points.”² She proceeded to give corrections regarding a patient of Daisette’s who claimed to have seen cherubs all around her. This Eddy described as a form of mesmerism, and therefore a barrier to healing. She also shared the importance of not looking to Eddy herself. “It turns your thought away from the Divine Principle,” she advised, “which alone should govern you and does no Science to person, and props your faith in person rather than Principle and the understanding of Christian Science.”³

Daisette received another letter from Eddy, which she described in her unpublished reminiscence as a prelude to Eddy’s invitation to her Normal class. In that letter Eddy wrote that she already saw Daisette and William as her students, because of their devoutness:

May I not occasionally call you mine? Class — teaching is not all that constitutes a student, mine. You were mine under the fig tree. Dear Prof. McKenzie was at his net mending it when Christ called him to me.⁴

She was comparing Daisette to Nathanael, whom Jesus recognized under the fig tree as having no guile, and William to James and John, the disciples who were willing to leave their work as fisherman and follow him. Then she added:

Now dear ones, I have not the time to see you and talk face to face as I would love to. But of this rest assured that Christ will tell me when to speak through my pen to you both[.]⁵

Working side by side with Daisette, William was one of the most accomplished early workers in the Christian Science movement. Early on, however, Eddy encouraged him to grow in his understanding before he took on more roles. “I see the wisdom of the delay of any movement of mine[.]” she wrote in April 1895. “God tells me you had better have more experience in the field before I locate you.”⁶

William ultimately went to Boston in 1896, at Eddy’s request, to serve on the Christian Science Bible Lesson Committee and to help organize a branch church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the decades that followed, he served in many more roles: trustee of the Christian Science Publishing Society (19 years); member of the Christian Science Board of Lectureship (17 years); co-founder of the Christian Science Sentinel; president of The Mother Church (three separate years); and member of the Christian Science Board of Directors (10 years). Like Daisette, he also worked as a Christian Science practitioner and teacher.

The correspondence between the McKenzies and Eddy would grow to number hundreds of letters over the course of the couple’s long careers in serving the cause of Christian Science. As Daisette stated simply in her reminiscence, “We were in receipt of a number of letters guiding and sustaining us in our work….”⁷ The Mary Baker Eddy Papers will continue to publish their thoughtful exchanges.

Please note: Quoted references in our “From the Papers” article series reflect the original documents. For this reason they may include spelling mistakes and edits made by the authors. In instances where a mark or edit is not easily represented in quoted text, an omission or insertion may be made silently.