The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 324

and healing power of early Christianity. Without clergy or ornate ritual, her church encourages members to read its publications (including The Christian Science Monitor and religious periodicals) and to study the Bible and Mrs. Eddy's own writings. Members are expected to treat their ills through prayer, either by themselves or with the help of church healers known as practitioners. These 18 businessmen and housewives in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, have watched Mrs.

Eddy's church distance itself from her legacy and drift into chaos. Exiled from the Mother Church, they Church CONTINUED FROM PAGE 16 founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879. In that era of post-Darwinian skepticism, her mission was to rekindle the spiritual fervor ft i. ji -i 1 -y If 1 WB, see themselves as keepers of the faith, the last custodians of Mrs. Eddy's heritage.

Until three years ago, their church was one of 3,000 branches of the Boston-based Mother Church of Christ, Scientist, suffering like many others from dwindling attendance and an ebbing of faith. Then, members broke away to form their own denomination: the Church of Jesus Christ and Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science. Unlike most Christian Scientists, who regard Mrs. Eddy as a spiritual discoverer, they believe she was literally the Second Coming of Christ The Surfside services recapture the early years of Christian Science. While standard services take their Bible lessons from current church periodicals, the Surfside lesson comes from a 1915 article by one of Mrs.

Eddy's students. Afterward, the congregation discusses the lesson in a room adorned by a 1902 painting that depicts two people healing the sick: Jesus Christ and Mary Baker Eddy. One couple have driven 75 miles from their home to attend services. In their town they belong to a Christian Science church and teach Sunday school. Fearing excommunication, they tell almost no one in their church about their trips to Surfside.

As children, this couple learned that Mrs. Eddy was prophesied in the Bible, only to be told as adults to unlearn it. They grew up reading Mrs. Eddy's newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, only to see it supplanted by television. Worst of all, they say, healings have degenerated into uninspired recitations.

And because of that, the couple say, many members of their church, prohibited from seeking medical care, have died before their time. "You can't separate the revela-tor and the revelation," says the woman. "Otherwise, Christian Science becomes mental science, cold and lifeless. If things keep on this way, the religion will atrophy. They won't have any members.

They'll have these huge edifices with no one in them." RHrs. Eddy herself agonized over her relationship to bibli-lllcal prophecy. Biographer Robert Peel wrote that some of her "severest struggles" were "to clarify for herself and others her place in the history of Christian thought and revelation." Although she warned against personal adulation, she allowed followers to refer to her as "Mother" a nickname that Mark Twain hhled lanes. F( or a novel approacJ to this year vacation, discover our From the topmost turret of the fairytale chateau to a quayside cafe outside the Old Port, time here simply seems to stand still. Midden from view it lingers behind stone walls and down id Iree vacation or consult your Be travel ai len come sa- igent used to satirize her.

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