What is the background on “Watching versus Watching Out”?

We are sometimes asked about Mary Baker Eddy’s article “Watching versus Watching Out,” included in her book The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany (see pages 232–233).

This article first appeared in the Christian Science Sentinel of September 23, 1905. It was a correction to an editorial titled “Watching vs. Watching Out,” written by Associate Editor John B. Willis, which had been printed in the previous week’s issue.¹

Biographer Stephen Gottschalk summarized the difference between these two articles in his 2006 book Rolling Away the Stone:

Willis’s editorial was built around the distinction between the two types of watching named in the title: “watching,” which Willis characterized as calm, quiet, and confident, and that “minimizes the manifestations of evil,” and “watching out,” which is troubled and perturbed because it makes too much of evil. “The one knows the lions are chained, and goes forward with freedom and inward rejoicing; the other peoples the air with dragons and indulges in a strained and elaborate caution.”

 

Willis’s editorial was a brief on behalf of a version of Christian Science in which adherents are depicted as perpetually calm, buoyant, undisturbed in the face of evil. But this approach to Christian Science flies in the face of Eddy’s actual teaching and its demands. In a tightly worded comment published the week after Willis’s editorial, Eddy undertook to correct his soft-grained version of Christian Science. In doing so she again advocated the point stressed throughout her writings: that the true practice of Christian Science involves directly naming and facing whatever errors seem threatening and need to be overcome. If self-examination or any other form of watching becomes frightening and discouraging, then one deals with and puts out whatever is frightening and disturbing. One does not put out one’s watch. “One should watch to know what his errors are,” she wrote; “and if this watching destroys his peace in error, should one watch against such a result? He should not.”²

Eddy had received a copy of the Sentinel containing Willis’s editorial in advance of its printed date. After reading it, she wrote to Sentinel Editor Archibald McLellan on September 15:

It has become my duty to say to you that Mr. Willis’ article in this week’s Sentinel misstates Christian Science and will tend to mislead its readers. All the factions in our denomination have commenced in just this way. I had great occasion to rebuke his wife [Ella Lance Willis] while she was with me and I fear that she is misguiding his thought but in a recent answer to my letter his reply was good and gave me hope and I said this in my answer to him. But now I am again shocked by his article in this week’s Sentinel.

She continued:

His article is in line with the “evil one” viz. to scare folks with truth and to content them in error. In substance it directly contradicts the sayings of Jesus “Go tell thy brother his fault.” “Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father, the devil” “He that covereth iniquity shall not prosper” &c &c.

 

Also it is the very opposite of the teaching in Science and Health which says “To put down the claim of sin you must detect it, remove the mask, point out the illusion, and thus get the victory over sin, and prove its unreality.”

 

This letter is confidential and written that you may see how to help him and save him from the leading of the enemy to which he and his wife seem to be blind.

Eddy closed the letter by saying that “no more such misteaching as his last article must be allowed to appear in our periodicals.”³

McLellan responded on September 18:

I am sorry that this article has slipped by me, and I wish to right the wrong so far as possible. If you see that it would be wise for me to specifically repudiate the article in the next Sentinel, I will do so, or, if you see that it is better for me to write an article stating the truth as taught in Science and Health, but without specifically mentioning Mr. Willis’s article, I will do that.⁴

Eddy wrote her own corrective, and submitted it to McLellan that same day, asking that it run in the next issues of the Sentinel and The Christian Science Journal.⁵

The following day, Willis and William B. Johnson, a member of the Christian Science Board of Directors, visited Eddy. Calvin Frye, one of Eddy’s secretaries, recorded this:

W. B. Johnson & Mr Willis called today by appointment for Mrs Eddy to show Mr Willis his sin in publishing the article ‘Watch’ versus ‘Watching Out.’⁶

Eddy evidently saw the need for further preventative steps. On September 26, she wrote again to McLellan:

I hope that no such stuff as “Watching vs. Watching Out” will ever again pass your inspection into our periodicals.⁷

Then on September 28, she asked McLellan to produce a brief apologetic—but not explanatory—article “relative to my article and to Mr. Willis’” for the next issue of the Sentinel.⁸ The next day, she wrote this to McLellan:

This is what I now beg to have done. Tell Mr. Willis for me that I desire him not to refer in writing to “Watching vs. Watching Out.” again. When I requested him to give us a few words on that subject like those he had written to me in his letter, I did not desire a long article or anything but his kind apology. It is too late now to bring it up. Ask him to please drop the subject. It has done its work all over the field.⁹

Following Eddy’s letter, McLellan wrote an apology for “Watching versus Watching Out,” which appeared in the September 30 Sentinel.¹⁰

Annie Knott, at that time an Associate Editor of the Christian Science periodicals, wrote about this incident in her reminiscence. She recalled that, along with McLellan, Willis, and the Board of Directors, she had been called to Eddy’s home in Concord, New Hampshire, on October 5:

Mrs. Eddy turned to Mr. Willis and spoke of a recent editorial by him entitled, “Watching Versus Watching Out,” and what she said respecting it is so ably given in her article with this title on page 232 of “The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany,” that I need not undertake to repeat any of it. I, however, received another rebuke for having allowed that editorial to go through unchallenged. I did not even venture to offer the poor defense that I did not know that I was at all responsible for what my fellow-workers may have written, but she left it very clear that we were each individually responsible for keeping our periodicals distinctly and unmistakeably scientific, and that if one made a mistake the others should be sufficiently alert to see that it was corrected.¹¹