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#  New Thought 

 





August 03, 2026

 

 

 

Dawn Hutchinson | Edited by Aaron Ullrey

The New Thought movement includes American religions whose members believe that the physical world can be shaped by a person’s thoughts, and that ordinary people have the power to shape material reality by structuring their thoughts to attract healing and prosperity. New Thought theologians are read by a range of audiences, from everyday people to entrepreneurs. Some American businesses have picked up prosperity theology and rebranded it as a success strategy.[\[1\]](#_edn1) Few scholars have written complete histories of the movement, with the exception of Charles S. Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion* (1963), Beryl Satter, *Each Mind a Kingdom* (1999), and Catherine Albanese, *A Republic of Mind and Spirit* (2008). This entry draws upon consensus among the debated threads in prior scholarship and my own research—especially my book *The Secret of Success: The Link between American prosperity theology and business self-help literature* (2019)—to propose a history of New Thought in three currents that correspond to three historical, sequential periods: (1) New Thought currents attracting healing, particularly mental healing due to aligning individual thoughts toward healing and wholeness as modeled by the healings of Jesus and the natural divine purity and health of individuals, (2) New Thought traditions that attract healing and prosperity in the world through mental alignment, especially toward the whole person aligned with the whole divine vision of the world, and (3) the predominantly evangelical versions of New Thought that attract not only health but place an emphasis on attracting prosperity through personal faith in God and God’s promises as well as the power of scriptures. These currents appear below under the headings in this entry as (1) Healing current, (2) Healing and Prosperity current, and (3) the Word and Faith current. Important figures in each current are presented chronologically in the sections below.

The New Thought movement began with mental healing, hence the label “Healing current.” In this current, teachers healed themselves and others using their minds, but their central message was that their patients needed to change their minds to attract healing. This current is exemplified by thinkers like Phineas Quimby and his students. Practitioners in this movement minimized the distinction between what they mentally visualized and the material body, establishing that the mind and the body were inherently connected. This overlapped with the next movement led by Emma Curtis Hopkins’ students, which I call the Healing and Prosperity current. Figures in this movement not only focus on healing but also on attracting and materializing prosperity. Hopkins’ students more liberally added Christianity and other religious elements than the prior Healing current; they believed that health and prosperity come from God or Divine Mind. Finally, Emma Curtis Hopkins’ teachings and followers further developed into the Word and Faith current, and these figures and groups were the most overtly evangelical Christian among the currents. The relationship with God and the understanding of scriptures was instrumental for the Word and Faith Current, and that relationship enabled the transformations of believers. Some, even most, of the thinkers in the third and last movement would not agree to being categorized as New Thought, but from the start, all of them are linked to the New Thought movement by their founders’ reliance on New Thought concepts.

In New Thought writings, authors make a distinction between human minds and their connection with what they call the “God Mind.” So, when the word “mind” is capitalized, writers are referring to a mystical connection to the Mind of God that is transformational. All these writers argue it is possible to give a thought substance and transform that concept into a person’s desire, whether for health or wealth in the material world. Many New Thought thinkers demonstrate Transcendentalist tendencies, especially an Emersonian and Thoreauvian version of Transcendentalism. This is particularly the case in their understanding of the divine as underlying all things, God as Mind, and the ability of humans to transcend their situations.[\[2\]](#_edn2) Both Transcendentalism and New Thought argue, to a certain degree, against rationalism and share a belief in the goodness of humankind and an intuitive understanding of God.

New Thought has produced a remarkable amount of printed literature. Most New Thought leaders were historically also writers; starting in the late 1800s and continuing into the present, hundreds of New Thought books, pamphlets, and other literature became widely distributed and easy to access, even if these groups, writers, and books might not have known or used the term New Thought to describe themselves. In some cases, like for Christian Science with Mary Baker Eddy’s *Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures* (1875) or for the Religious Science of Ernest Holmes’ *Science of Mind* (1926), these printed texts are central instructional texts for the followers of the religion and religious movements encapsulated in the books. In other cases, such as Ralph Waldo Trine’s *In Tune with the Infinite* (1896) or Florence Scovel Shinn’s *The Game of Life and How to Play It*, the texts are for anyone with an interest in the topic, regardless of their religious affiliations or connections to any New Thought organization. New Thought literature was readily consumed by general audiences who were not necessarily aware of the New Thought movement. Though they were generally Protestant Christians, New Thought-affiliated ministers were not exclusive, not requiring their congregation members to practice only New Thought. Many people practiced New Thought beliefs alongside their own religions without committing to any new identity or any specific denomination.

For the most part, New Thought religious groups do not consider themselves self-contained or discrete religions. Christian Science, on the one hand, expects its adherents to participate only in its practices because Mary Baker Eddy was particular about how scriptures are to be read and interpreted. She would not have wanted any additional influences on her followers. On the other hand, New Thought leaders like Ernest Holmes were open to multiple religious influences and believed that New Thought teachings complemented other religious traditions and proposed no conflict with them. This inclusive worldview was held by many of the religious leaders, and this inclusivity is a characteristic of New Thought; it did not seek to convert people away from their own religions but encouraged its adherents to bring New Thought to their own religions, albeit ones that were mostly Protestant Christian. Additionally, there is an interesting interplay between the roles of the individual and the community in spiritual transformation: Some thinkers and groups are only focused on the healing and prosperity of individuals, while others aim to bring healing and prosperity to entire congregations and communities.



 

##  Defining New Thought 

Scholars apply the term *New Thought* to mental-healing and prosperity religions within new religious movements in America, specifically movements that express and are a part of a metaphysical tradition that teaches mental healing and harmony with Divine Mind. These religions posit an interconnection between material and ideal worlds: people can affect the external world by changing how they think about it.[\[3\]](#_edn1) A physician, spiritual thinker, and student of Emanuel Swedenborg, Dr. William H. Holcomb explains that the term “New Thought” refers to a new way of understanding reality: “New Thought always excites combat in the mind with old thought, which refuses to retire.”[\[4\]](#_edn2) According to Horatio Dresser, a student of Phineas Quimby and author of *A History of New Thought* (1919), “Old Thought” focuses on sin, darkness, and suffering, while “New Thought” reorients a person toward light, life, and mastery over sorrow and suffering.[\[5\]](#_edn3) American philosopher and psychologist William James—who did not endorse the movement but was interested as an observer—called New Thought the “religion of healthy-mindedness.”[\[6\]](#_edn4)

When people perceive reality through the lens of the New Thought way of thinking, individuals can draw upon the interconnection of mind and wellness and the law of attraction, explained below, to take more control of their lives, actively effecting immediate change instead of hoping for a better far-off future that they cannot control. If people perceive reality through the lens of the “Old Law” before New Thought, they might think themselves helpless to effect changes in their lives, or that change can only happen if circumstances happen to align in their favor. In the novel paradigm of New Thought, if one wants to change one’s condition, then one needs to adopt the attitude of one who wants to attract that change. Attraction is harnessed by New Thought adherents toward individual transformations. If a person wants to be successful, that person should adopt the habits, practices, and mindset of a successful person. Mental attitudes are the key to attracting health, success, or failure.[\[7\]](#_edn5)

According to the “Declaration of Principles” (1917) of the International New Thought Alliance, an umbrella organization for New Thought, the mental states of humankind are “carried forward into manifestation and become our experience through the Creative Law of Cause and Effect.”[\[8\]](#_edn6) After attending a workshop held by spiritual teacher Emma Curtis Hopkins, Unity Church co-founder Myrtle Fillmore walked out of the hall with the following statement repeating in her head: “I am a child of God, and therefore I do not inherit sickness.” This, she said, changed her whole outlook on life, altering the “very cells of her body.”[\[9\]](#_edn7) After years of illness, Fillmore determined that visualizing her body as fully functioning and healthy would heal her, and she declared that it did eventually heal her. Fillmore’s determination captures the New Thought movement in a nutshell: If you can visualize it, you can make it happen.

New Thought practitioners share a commitment to the profound truth that God is Mind.[\[10\]](#_edn8) Practitioners believe that when human beings think, they share in the Mind of God, and they become one with God. New Thought aims to transform the individual through visualization and mental techniques, what might now be called mindfulness. While Mesmerism inspired New Thought practitioners and writers, there was a shift in the early history of New Thought away from Mesmerism and other forms of mental healing toward the connection between the mental process or mind and God, rather than on the attunement of magnetic fluids by an individual or a magnetic healer. In New Thought, God can heal through a person’s thoughts; thus, people can have creative and healing power through a connection to God through their minds. If a person believes something strongly enough, then that belief gives the idea substance, taking root and affecting the material world. What appears to be sickness can be resolved by the healer visualizing the whole, perfected, and healthy body, and then the healer teaches their patient to do the same.

Many New Thought teachers were inspired by the Transcendentalist movement, especially the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and several New Thought figures declare him to be a specific inspiration. Both Transcendentalism and New Thought argue, to a certain degree, against rationalism, positing a shared belief in the goodness of humankind and in a union with the divine. When New Thought pastor Charles Fillmore explains the divinity within humankind, he correlates the teachings of Emerson with those of Jesus.[\[11\]](#_edn9) Fillmore draws upon Emerson to articulate metaphysics as the ability to shift between solely material realities and spiritual realities.\[12\]

There is little scholarly agreement about who “started” the New Thought movement, and a timeline of the movement and its groups proves difficult. The history of New Thought in this entry is organized by three schools of thought or currents presented chronologically: Healing, Healing and Prosperity, and Word and Faith. The three currents also represent three periods in the history of New Thought. I present key historical New Thought figures for each current in boldface type below. The three categories are not complete or discrete, and they overlap or completely diverge; as such, they may be considered trajectories or currents of New Thought rather than as discrete schools. There were many mental healers utilizing New Thought in America, but those presented below are representative of nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Thought.



 

###  The Healing Current 

In what is called mental science or mental science religions, practitioner-healers urge patients to visualize the affected area of the body and the entire body as whole and healthy; this healing method is often called “mind cure.” Generally, patients work to accept that illness is a false belief and that healing comes from accepting this truth. In Christian versions of the mental sciences, and thereby in New Thought, which is predominantly Protestant Christian, scriptures are authoritative. Christian mental science figures draw upon scripture to assert a connection between the mind of the practitioner and the Mind of God, and that connection allows patients to accept that their bodies are whole and healthy. In some cases, scriptures are quoted and interpreted within the framework of the religion, while in others, the scriptures are only briefly referenced. Some healers suggest that if God could heal or create with a thought and if humans are created in the image of God, then humans can heal or create like God.[\[13\]](#_edn1) Christian mental healers explain that when patients are healed, they either need to realize they were healthy all along or that they had only needed to visualize a fully healthy body to achieve that healthy body. Key mental healing figures presented below include Phineas P. Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, Warren Felt Evans, Annetta Dresser and Julius Dresser, and, finally, Ralph Waldo Trine.

**Phineas P. Quimby** (1802-1866) was a noted mesmerist and mental healer, but Quimby’s conceptions of healing and healing treatments are based on his own history with illness and disease rather than on drawing upon mental sciences.[\[14\]](#_edn2) A history of New Thought in America requires starting with Quimby and his students, because many mental science theories in New Thought trace back to him. He explains that “Disease and its power over life, and its curability, are all embraced in our belief.”[\[15\]](#_edn3) Quimby taught his patients that their maladies were an affliction of the mind, and he instructed patients to visualize their healthy body, their body fully and capably, which would thereby transform the way individuals understood the relationship between their minds and bodies in matters of mental healing. Phineas Quimby’s son George served as his clerk and secretary. He made an effort to preserve his father’s original writings, working with some former patients.

Quimby’s interest in mental healing was kindled by his experience with tuberculosis. By his own accounts, physicians told Quimby that his liver was affected, his kidney was wasting away, and the disease nearly consumed his lungs.[\[16\]](#_edn4) He had very little energy to move. One day his carriage broke down, yet despite his usual weaknesses, he found himself miraculously walking next to his horse, urging the horse on. He went from walking to running, and he kept going, doing other things around the farm that day as his physical vitality returned.[\[17\]](#_edn5) This experience made Quimby question the accuracy of medical diagnoses. Later, he began to question the very nature of disease, and he began to believe that the very concept of “disease” was an error of the mind.[\[18\]](#_edn6) He came to the conclusion that “Man is made up of truth and belief; and, if he is deceived into a belief that he has, or is liable to have, a disease, the belief is catching, and the effect follows it . . . My theory teaches man to manufacture health; and, when people go into this occupation, disease will diminish, and those who furnish disease and death will be few and scarce.”[\[19\]](#_edn7) This concept of recognizing the error in belief about illness was adopted by his students and expanded upon.

**Mary Baker Eddy** (1821-1910) founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1879, and she became one of the most prominent figures in New Thought mental healing. For Baker Eddy, sickness, which was in the material body, was an erroneous perception about the body; ideally, healing could lead a person to overcome this misperception in order to fully realize their spiritual self. Healing and personal transformation require re-orienting a person’s understanding of the nature of reality.

Baker Eddy claimed she had been sick most of her life. Her parents sought doctors to relieve her symptoms, but her relief was always temporary, and she would soon fall sick again. Her mysterious illnesses were variously identified as pleurisy, spinal injuries, or simply hypochondria. This pattern of relieved symptoms and recurring illness continued into her adult life, and she did not suffer alone, for her family members, too, experienced bodily afflictions. Her first husband died, and her second husband took over the care of her son due to her poor health, causing her to despair.[\[20\]](#_edn8)

According to the New Thought historian Charles S. Braden, Eddy’s husband wrote to Phineas P. Quimby, seeking an appointment for healing treatments. Later, Baker Eddy lectured on Quimby’s system in a series titled, “P.P. Quimby’s spiritual science healing disease as opposed to deism or Rochester Rapping Spiritualism.” (1864)[\[21\]](#_edn9) According to her own accounts, Baker Eddy reported relief after Quimby’s treatments, but she relapsed into illness. She decided that Quimby’s methods were not reliable because they relied on hypnotic suggestion, and she critically theorized that his earlier training in Mesmerism influenced his approach to mental healing.[\[22\]](#_edn10) Yet, her session with Quimby reminded her of Biblical accounts of Jesus’ healing methods; she began to study the Bible intently, particularly passages about Jesus as a healer. After nine years of study, quietly healing people, and taking on a few students, Baker Eddy published *Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures* (1875).[\[23\]](#_edn11) She founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879 and, in 1882, started a school for her system of healing, called the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Baker Eddy established the *Journal of Christian Science* (1883), a publication to communicate her ideas.

Baker Eddy claimed Jesus’ healing was so effective because he understood the true relationship between matter and spirit: “God and his idea are all that is real, primitively; mind produces all that is real . . . we name matter, error, it being a false claim to Life and Intelligence . . . ”[\[24\]](#_edn12) While the mind is real, she claimed, matter is in error. She rejected that a person is part soul and part body, stating, “When will the error of believing that there is life in matter, and that sin, sickness, and death are creations of God, be unmasked? When will it be understood that matter has neither intelligence, life, nor sensation, and that the opposite belief is the prolific source of all suffering? God created all through Mind, and made all perfect and eternal.” God and the Spiritual self are real; matter and the material body are not. [\[25\]](#_edn13)

**Warren Felt Evans** (1817-1889) contended that disease was an error in thinking, and it could be corrected by connecting through the mind to a healthier state of being and ultimately connecting to the Divine Mind in and of the heavens. Evans focused on the connections found in the spiritual and material worlds in an individual’s transformative experience, claiming that an individual can be transformed by God who flows through all things, by connecting the human mind and Divine Mind. Like Quimby and Baker Eddy before him, Evans was convinced that disease resulted from mistaken thinking, that errors in perception lead to disease, but in contrast to Baker Eddy’s inspiration from the teachings of Jesus, Evans drew heavily upon the vast metaphysics of Emmanuel Swedenborg, especially his concept of correspondence that suggests God is the source of all life, and that He flows through all things, arguing that healing comes from connecting to God. He argued there was a connection between the mind and the body, stating in his journal that “All diseases . . . have correspondence with the sp(iritual) world & with diseased mind there. States of health,” he explained, “have correspondence with the heavens & with the spirits of the blessed.”[\[26\]](#_edn14)

Evans was initially a Methodist lay preacher in New Hampshire, but after he became interested in Swedenborgianism, he asked in 1864 to be withdrawn from the Methodist roles.[\[27\]](#_edn15) Around the same time Evans began to study Swedenborgianism, he visited Phineas P. Quimby in Portland, Maine, for treatment of a chronic health issue that he believed was related to a nervous disorder.[\[28\]](#_edn16) Later in his life, Evans mentioned that Quimby embraced the view that the cause of the illness was “wrong belief.”[\[29\]](#_edn17) The person suffering from disease is experiencing a poor or faulty connection to the divine and the heavens.

Evans theorized that the correspondence between the human and the divine actually flows across time and throughout the universe, shaping the physical world and the spiritual world and, thereby, shaping reality.[\[30\]](#_edn18) Disease was an error in thinking that could be corrected by connecting human minds to the Divine Mind and to a healthier state of being. Connections between spiritual and material worlds demonstrate balance with the divine, and those states of balance and imbalance shape reality. Evans posited that every person had a material and spiritual body, which were separate. He believed that life in all its forms was pervaded by spirit.[\[31\]](#_edn19) He conceded that we can’t prove that a spiritual body exists, though he thought that when there was a disturbance in a person’s spiritual or mental state, the physical body of that person also was affected. So, although the physical and material parts of a person are separate, Evans argued that it was reasonable to assume that a person might be able to influence the physical through their mental processes.[\[32\]](#_edn20)

**Annetta Dresser (1843-1935)** and **Julius Dresser (1838-1893)** were patients and students of Phineas Quimby who, after being healed through Quimby’s methods in Portland, Maine, set up shop as mind-cure healers in Boston. A difference between Quimby and the Dressers is that the Dressers asserted that healing does not come from within the individual but from divine wisdom and connecting with Divine Mind; similar to Evans, they argued that a connection with Divine Mind is necessary for individual transformation. In regard to the agency of the human being in the healing process, Quimby placed a higher value on the human being, while others placed a higher value on Divine Mind. Despite these differences, the Dressers intended to preserve the writings of Quimby and secure his status as an important forerunner in New Thought, mental healing, and mental science; their writing on Quimby provides a rich and nuanced description of New Thought in this time period.

Fifteen years after Quimby died, the Dressers were distressed by Mary Baker Eddy’s claim that Christian Science had replaced and should replace Quimby’s methods. The couple decided to set the record straight by publishing accounts of Phineas Quimby’s methods. Julius Dresser wrote *The True History of Mental Science* in 1887, and Annetta Dresser published *The Philosophy of PP Quimby with Selections from his Manuscripts and a Sketch of His Life* in 1895. Both books took excerpts from Quimby’s writings to argue that his version of mental healing predated Baker Eddy’s mental healing. Eventually, New Thought practitioners generally accepted the chronological argument that Quimby influenced the other schools of thought, though the Dressers continued to feel the need to protect Quimby as one of, if not the most pioneering mental-science healer of his age.

To demonstrate Quimby’s contributions to the field of mental science, the Dressers reproduced and published books containing quotes from his patients and supporters, and their works present an expanded viewpoint of the interactions between New Thought healers in this period. Julius Dresser quotes Warren Felt Evans, a later New Thought healer, about Quimby:

> Dr. W. F. Evans pays the following tribute to Quimby in his second volume, entitled “Mental Medicine.” He says: “Disease being in its root a wrong belief, change that belief, and we cure the disease. . . . The late Dr. Quimby, of Portland, one of the most successful healers of this or any age, embraced this view of the nature of disease, and by a long succession of most remarkable cures . . . proved the truth of the theory.[\[33\]](#_edn21)

Julius and Annetta Dresser wanted to support the idea that mental science was not unique to Mary Baker Eddy and that mental science had been embraced earlier by Phineas P. Quimby. The Dressers reminded people that it was Quimby who favored the view that individuals could heal themselves by rejecting illness as an illusion or erroneous thought.

The Dressers’ son, Horatio Dresser (1866-1954) edited the *Quimby Manuscripts* (1921) that presented Quimby’s writings as collected by Julius and Annetta Dresser. His introduction to the *Quimby Manuscripts* claims that Phineas P. Quimby was the founder of the overall New Thought movement and was the inspiration for Christian Science.[\[34\]](#_edn22) In her early writings, Mary Baker Eddy, according to Horatio Dresser, contrary to her later denials that she depended on Quimby’s knowledge, hailed the importance of the man who healed by mental or spiritual means.[\[35\]](#_edn23) Horatio Dresser wrote *A History of the New Thought Movement* (1919), tracing New Thought’s development back to the German Idealist Transcendentalists Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, through Swedenborg and Warren Felt Evans.[\[36\]](#_edn24) He explains that Idealism influenced the New Thought movement in that it emphasized thought as an organizing idea, with the material world as “a mere phenomenon in comparison.”[\[37\]](#_edn25) Further, while German Idealists inspired New Thought, they only set up the foundation on which New Thought was built.[\[38\]](#_edn26)

Horatio Dresser claims in the introduction of his New Thought history that, since he has known most of the founders of the movement, he can give a factual overview of the beginnings of the movement from an objective perspective, but he does not actually mention his relationship to his parents, Julius and Annetta, who so fiercely guarded Quimby’s legacy and who play a large role in his study. The final words of the introduction are: “My part is that of the appreciative historian, not that of the ardent advocate or devotee of a special cause or organization. Consequently, I have not brought forward any views of my own.”[\[39\]](#_edn27) Dresser’s narrative plainly supports his parents’ argument in favor of Quimby as the founder of the New Thought movement. In each chapter, he adds supporting evidence about each New Thought figure that he presents as being heavily indebted to Quimby’s intellectual contributions.

**Ralph Waldo Trine** (1866-1958) is not known to have been a mind healer, prosperity theologian, or a New Thought adherent, but his extensive written contributions to New Thought, especially his 1897 tome *In Tune with the Infinite*, make him a key figure in the Healing current.[\[40\]](#_edn28) Trine was well-educated, taking classes and eventually teaching rhetoric at Emerson College in Boston. For most of his life, Trine and his small family lived in a remote area near Oscawana, New York, where his poet wife Grace Hyde Trine could write in peace. Trine’s concept of Divine Mind included living in harmony with a conscious union of man with the Father, a concept based on his own interpretation of Christian scriptures that heavily influenced Christian rhetoric in New Thought.[\[41\]](#_edn29)

His clear writing style made him popular with readers, and *In Tune with the Infinite* sold over two million copies. In this popular book written early in his career, Trine describes New Thought’s metaphysical concepts of the law of attraction and manifesting and explains that individuals build each of their worlds with thought from within themselves and what they attract from without: "We both build from within and we attract from without. Thought is the force with which we build for thoughts are forces. Like builds like and like attracts like.”[\[42\]](#_edn30) Thought is the force with which we build. So, in this way, “manifesting” means that thoughts can help a person to “build” or bring an idea into material existence. Trine profoundly influenced New Thought pastor and writer Charles Fillmore, the founder of the Unity School of Christianity, who quoted Trine’s interpretations of Christian scriptures found in many parts of *In Tune with the Infinite* in order to support Unity’s teachings about infinite supply and the power of thought. Later New Thought writers widely expanded on Trine’s teachings.

Trine wrote many other books influential in the New Thought tradition: *What All the World’s A-Seeking* (1896), *Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit* (1917), and *Character Building Thought Power* (1899). His later writing considers success in life to be a state that readers can visualize and attain through thought, aligning with later New Thought writers who were oriented toward prosperity and realizing prosperity in life by aligning their minds with scripture and God.



 

###  Healing and Prosperity Current 

Like the Healing current, the Healing and Prosperity current emphasizes that a person visualizing a goal through Divine Mind will “manifest” that goal, making it come into being in the physical world. The Healing and Prosperity current adds the generation of worldly prosperity to New Thought teachings about generating health and healing, hence the name of the current. Figures in the Healing and Prosperity current were either students of Emma Curtis Hopkins, or they were affiliated with her school. As this current developed, practitioners began to shift their focus from the agency of the self toward the agency of Divine Mind and away from the curative gifts of mental healers, differing from the Healing current above. In the Healing and Prosperity current, healing emerges from a shift in perception rather than a physical change, but they emphasized that focusing on Divine Mind helps a person see these errors in perception that cause illness and prevent well-being. The theological basis for the Healing and Prosperity current is that God wants His children to be healthy, abundant, and successful.

By 1895, there was a noticeable division in New Thought between two types of teachers: One set of teachers stressed the rational powers of the human mind that could heal disease and also attract prosperity and success, and a less influential set of teachers stressed the intuitive powers of the mind and was more focused on love, union with the God Mind, and denial of the self.[\[43\]](#_edn1) Many prosperity theology groups use the term “metaphysical” to refer to an “idea” that translates from concept to manifestation in the material world. The following section highlights Healing and Prosperity figures from both sets whose writings target the religious transformation experiences of individuals and who largely were teachers at the head of religious groups: Emma Curtis Hopkins, who influenced all the figures below; Charles Fillmore and Myrtle Fillmore, founders of the Unity School of Christianity and the Unity Movement; Ernest Shurtleff Holmes, who founded the Religious Science movement and the Religious Science Institute; and the minister Melinda Cramer who, with the sisters Nona Lovell Brooks, Althea Brooks Small, and Fannie Brooks James together founded Home Church of Divine Science.

**Emma Curtis Hopkins** (1849-1925). Outside the Quimby-inspired groups noted throughout this entry, many New Thought denominations were started by students of Emma Curtis Hopkins. While Hopkins taught healing in ways similar to the Healing current, the teachings she articulated moved her students toward prosperity theology, a theology particularly oriented toward attracting worldly wealth and prominence in addition to attracting health and healing. She thought that God wanted people to be the best version of themselves, and, for her, prosperity theology was not about God granting a person untold wealth; instead, it was about a person learning to be in harmony with God’s will for their life. In order for one to obtain “the Good,” she taught, one ought to decree “There is Good for me, and I ought to have it.”[\[44\]](#_edn2) She encouraged her students to use affirmations, short statements that decree what a person visualizes would manifest in their life.[\[45\]](#_edn3) Her concept of manifesting is similar to Ralph Waldo Trine’s: Thoughts can build things in the physical world; however, her process differed in that one has to speak the idea, decreeing or affirming it, for that idea to take material shape. Hopkins’ teachings are what can be called an affirmation philosophy based on New Thought principles and practices.

Born and raised in Connecticut, after claiming to have been healed by a Christian Science practitioner, Hopkins became interested in and entered the Christian Science movement, moving to Boston to take classes with Baker Eddy.[\[46\]](#_edn4) After becoming a student of Baker Eddy, Hopkins served as the editor of the *Journal of Christian Science*. After some time, and for unclear reasons, Baker Eddy dismissed Hopkins, and she opened her own school in Chicago, introducing other influences than Eddy into her own version of Christian Science. She taught in or around Chicago, where she opened a seminary; after the 1880s, she taught in New York City. All of Hopkins’s students attended her school in Chicago, took individual lessons with her, engaged in correspondence courses with her, or attended classes from her students. Hopkins claimed that her educational philosophy was to teach about “ . . . the spirit that giveth life—awakening in man the realization of the Christian principle—the God in them and in all things.”[\[47\]](#_edn5) The published works of Hopkins were mostly in pamphlet form, and the only surviving fragments are snippets students saved and later published as part of their own teachings.[\[48\]](#_edn6) The exception to this is her one text, *High Mysticism*, completed just prior to her death (1925) and published in its complete form posthumously (1974).[\[49\]](#_edn7)

According to Hopkins, humankind is connected to God through Mind, and, thereby, all people are connected to God, the divine Source of all things, through their thoughts. This was the basis of her affirmation philosophy: If people affirm something, they connect to God, the Divine Supply, through their thoughts. In chapter four of her *High Mysticism*, published posthumously in 1974, she explains that when we fully trust God, we can consider our work accomplished. “Let mind no longer claim creative powers or accomplish energies. The true work is already complete in Spirit, the Self that we praise. ‘I am all that and more,’ it answers our highest mandates.”[\[50\]](#_edn8)

In Hopkins’ version of New Thought, personal transformation requires a person to connect to God, the Divine Supply, in order to manifest abundance. Nuancing other Healing and Prosperity current figures’ conception of the “metaphysical” as an idea translating from concept to manifestation in the material word, Hopkins taught that the mind is not capable of bringing forth anything except that which is brought about by inward visioning. Turning inward, for Hopkins, is essential to communicating with God before anything could be manifested or “brought forth into the material sphere.”[\[51\]](#_edn9)

A common objection to this Hopkinsian movement, and for other currents of New Thought and prosperity theology, regards explanations of failure. If a person visualizes success or health but does not achieve success or continues to be sick, did that person fail in their visualization or did God fail them? Hopkins would likely have answered that the person who fails to manifest health and success had erred in their perception, for it is only through a mistaken understanding of life that people suffer.

**Charles Fillmore** (1854-1948) and **Myrtle Fillmore** (1845-1931) are founders of the Unity School of Christianity and the Unity Movement, and both institutions continue to exist today. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore asserted the Christian roots of their Unity movement. In his book *Christian Healing* (1922), Charles Fillmore equated the “Word, Logos” with thought in metaphysical religions: “Divine Mind (Logos) creates under law; that is, mental law. Man may get a comprehension of the creative process of Being by analyzing his own mind. First is mind, then the idea in mind of what the act shall be, then the act itself . . .”[\[52\]](#_edn10) People can tap into the creative aspect of God through their minds and can bring something into being in the world by visualizing it.

Charles Fillmore’s definition of prosperity was inclusive, meaning that while he centered his faith on Christianity, he also included other faiths and he was open to other religious expressions. He argued that prosperity was the “recognition of supply and in the knowledge of free and open access to an inexhaustible storehouse of all that is good or desirable.”[\[53\]](#_edn11) Since the Fillmores did not want to pull anyone away from their existing religion, they chose the name “Unity” for their church, movement, and their prominent magazine. The Unity Movement was and is the hub for the international Unity community and is the central authority on Unity philosophy. Unity churches operate autonomously, reflecting an orientation toward being Unified but respecting individual churches.

The Fillmores were students of Hopkins and focused their writing and teachings on personal transformation through visualization, extending New Thought mental healing to Prosperity Theology. If God is within a person, they explained, then that person has the creative power of God. Thus, if people affirm something and visualize it, then their connection with Divine Mind will make it manifest in the world. According to Charles Fillmore, God wants abundance for his children: “It is the law of love that we have whatsoever we desire. As a father giveth his child gifts, so the Lord gives to us, because of love.”[\[54\]](#_edn12) Charles left a sizeable theological legacy in the approximately twenty books that he wrote, and Myrtle’s most lasting legacy is her prayer group Silent Unity, which meets once a week at eleven o’clock every morning. Silent Unity is still active, with a 24/7 prayer line for prayer requests by phone or online.

Earlier in her life, Myrtle Fillmore struggled with tuberculosis. After attending New Thought classes conducted by Dr. E. B. Weeks in Kansas City, Missouri, Myrtle began praying, “I am a child of God, and therefore I do not inherit sickness.”[\[55\]](#_edn13) Weeks was a representative of Emma Curtis Hopkins’ Illinois Metaphysical College, and he was teaching classes in Missouri at the time. Soon after taking classes with Weeks, Fillmore claimed to be healed after years of suffering. Charles and Myrtle later took classes together with Emma Curtis Hopkins in Chicago, and the three became good friends, exchanging letters for many years.[\[56\]](#_edn14) From their experiences with Hopkins, the couple was inspired to begin their ministry of publishing and prayer.

The Fillmores were both from Kansas City, Missouri, and they began their organization there with the hopes for future growth and expansion. The couple started the Unity School of Christianity in the late 1880s, and they later established the Unity Movement, which widely distributed prosperity-oriented New Thought literature. They visualized the future of their organization from the start. Eventually, they moved their organization fifteen miles away, settling it in nearby Unity Village. The Unity School of Christianity became the publishing arm of Unity, including their prayer organizer and their center for education. In 1904, Unity School of Christianity created a publishing house in Kansas City to handle the large number of publications they were creating. In 1924, Unity began publishing the *Daily Word,* a daily devotional publication that had an early subscriber base of over 400,000 and has grown to over a million subscribers today. Today, the *Daily Word* has an online version published in multiple languages.

Around 1889, shortly after Charles Fillmore began publishing his influential publication *Modern Thought*, presented below, Myrtle’s group, Silent Unity, was formed in Kansas City, Missouri, and it would continue in Unity Village and eventually maintain a geography-spanning influence. Based on Charles’ concept that praying at the same time every day, particularly a repeated prayer, would enrich and expand a person’s faith, her group prayed together at the same time every day at eleven in the morning.[\[57\]](#_edn15) Myrtle Fillmore reasoned that multiple people praying at the same time every day would add power to that prayer. This gradually developed into what they called the Unity Movement, which they moved to the property for Unity Village, just outside Kansas City, Missouri. In 1919, the church bought the property on which they gradually built Unity Village, and the church continued to grow.

The Fillmores published a range of titles through Unity School of Christianity to disseminate their teachings and practices; their history and influence are closely connected to their publishing practices. In 1889, Charles began publication of a magazine called *Modern Thought* that included an eclectic mix of articles on religious and philosophical ideas of the day. In 1894, Mytle started a magazine for children titled *Wee Wisdom*, but she ran into financial problems. Also in 1894, the Fillmores asked Dr. Emilie Cady, the homeopathic practitioner and metaphysician, to write a series of lessons that became known as “Lessons in Truth,” the first one titled “Statement of Being.”[\[58\]](#_edn16) Lessons in Truth were published by Unity and became educational material for practitioners. Cady had also studied with Emma Curtis Hopkins and was a contemporary of the Fillmores. In 1898, the Unity Movement began publishing a monthly magazine titled *Unity,* which was distributed internationally. While *Modern Thought* magazine was meant for a wide, general audience interested in metaphysical religions, *Unity* magazine had a narrower focus with the express purpose of building a community for New Thought.

Because the Fillmores saw the *Unity* magazine as a ministry, articles on metaphysical topics took center stage in the pages.[\[59\]](#_edn17) Rather than traditional commercial advertisements, Unity magazine contained advertisements for metaphysical healers and other metaphysical publications. Although Unity was based in Kansas City, the ads included healers mostly from the Midwest; however, many ads for pamphlets and books from various locations were also included. Because these ads took up more and more space as the issues came out, *Unity* became and functioned as a kind of directory for healers. *Unity* magazine focused on healing prayers, reached out to many people, and published devotions on healing, which inspired the Fillmores to feel affinity with mental healers of all kinds, especially those that they came into contact with through their ads.

Charles Fillmore is another New Thought figure inspired by Transcendentalism, especially by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, reading Emerson’s work throughout his life and quoting Emerson more than any other writer.[\[60\]](#_edn18) In his *Talks on Truth* (1926, revised 1934), Fillmore notes Emerson’s admiration of Plato, who “was born to behold the self-evolving power of the Spirit, endless generator of new ends; a power which is at once to the centrality and the evanescence of things.”[\[61\]](#_edn19) According to Fillmore, Emerson paired this Platonist sensibility with the saying of Jesus, “The kingdom of God is within you, and, in doing so, Emerson’s ostensible goal, according to Fillmore, was to illuminate the divine within each person.[\[62\]](#_edn20) In *Prosperity* (1940), Fillmore alludes to both Emerson and Jesus to emphasize determination in affirmations:

> The word *determined* is a good word, a strong, substantial word with power in it. Jesus said that His words were spirit and life and would never pass away. Emerson says that words are alive and if you cut one it will bleed. Use the word *determined* and emphasize it in your affirmations. If things do not seem to come fast enough, determine that you will be patient. If negative thoughts creep in, determine to be positive. If you feel worried about the results, determine to be optimistic.[\[63\]](#_edn21)

Christianity is clearly prevalent in the Unity version of New Thought.

**Ernest Shurtleff Holmes** (1887-1960) founded the Religious Science movement, also known as Science of Mind, in 1927, and that same year he established the Religious Science Institute, located in Los Angeles, California, in order to teach his philosophy. Holmes was an eclectic student, reading widely, and many of his notions track across world religions. Today, versions of Holmes’ Religious Science groups call themselves Centers for Spiritual Living rather than Religious Science. In his Religious Science Institute, Holmes asserts that personal transformation could be accomplished by union with God or the Cosmic Consciousness, and that such union unlocks a person’s creative potential. Holmes’ own teachings are succinctly presented in his book *Science of Mind* (1926), which was accompanied by a supplemental magazine of the same title (1927). He articulates his main teachings in the opening chapters of *Science of Mind*, with practical applications in later chapters. These main ideas included his version of coming into harmony with Divine Mind, affirmation, and working through Divine Mind to manifest one’s thoughts.

Holmes argues that human beings have free will and can choose a relationship with God. When we speak the words “I AM,” God encourages us to explore, to think, to understand the relationship between thinking and effects: this is the God Mind.[\[64\]](#_edn22) Holmes considers the “I AM” relationship to be a union between the human mind and the Mind of God.[\[65\]](#_edn23) Most of Holmes’ teachings addressing the connections between thought and matter are consistent with New Thought metaphysics, but his teachings are also mystical, for through union “the (subconscious) can be set in motion as a creative force by the conscious state. Man has thus at his command limitless power because he is one with the whole on the subjective side, for there is but one subjective Mind.”[\[66\]](#_edn24) In this way, Holmes posits that humans can become one with God through Mind.

Holmes’ older brother, Fenwick Holmes, wrote a biography of Ernest (1970) in which he describes the home life of the Holmes family.[\[67\]](#_edn25) Born near Lincoln, Maine, Holmes was the youngest of nine sons in a family that did not succeed in their agricultural ventures. The children moved from family to family until Holmes’ teenage years. Holmes eventually became interested in New Thought through the works of Thomas Troward (1847-1916), a British metaphysical writer whose books were source material for many New Thought metaphysicians, and whose lectures and writings, especially the published version of his 1909 Edinburgh and Dore lectures, present the relationship between spirit and matter.[\[68\]](#_edn26) After becoming interested in New Thought practices, Holmes asked several practitioners to give him courses in their methods, became a member of the International New Thought Alliance,[\[69\]](#_edn27) and contributed for many years to New Thought magazines such as *Creative Thought* and *Science of Mind*.

Holmes did not go to college, but he was an avid reader, and, like other New Thought figures, he was profoundly influenced by his early exposure to Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially his essay “Self-Reliance” (1841). It is possible that Ernest Holmes heard Emerson speak during one of his lecture series.[\[70\]](#_edn28) Holmes considered Emerson to be among one of the great mystics, in the company of Jesus, Plato, Buddha, and Plotinus.[\[71\]](#_edn29) In his *Science of Mind* textbook (1933), Holmes makes several references to Emerson, especially mentioning Emerson’s understanding of friendship: “Emerson said, ‘If you want a friend, be a friend,’ and so, as the idea of friendship dawns on the consciousness, the law of attraction produces friends; for one is the picture and the other is the thing.”[\[72\]](#_edn30) Following Emerson, Holmes argues, “If one wishes to have friends, one should become friendly; if he wishes love, he should learn to love. There is no excuse for anyone to be without the power of attraction, since it is a mental quality and may be consciously induced through right practice.”[\[73\]](#_edn31) Holmes acknowledged that people have what he called a “mental atmosphere,” which may be at odds with what a person is verbally saying. His favorite Emerson quote addressed this potential discrepancy: “What you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.”[\[74\]](#_edn32) Holmes may have been inspired by Emerson to become a platform speaker, and he took public speaking courses at the John Robert Powers School.[\[75\]](#_edn33)

In his later years, Holmes determined his penultimate work would be an epic poem inspired by many of the readings he had done during his life, including the Bible, Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Troward. This work was entitled *The Voice Celestial*, and it was published in 1960.[\[76\]](#_edn34) The poem’s protagonist undertakes an internal journey to find his place in the universe, learning his agency in the process and finding comfort in God. Also in his later years, Holmes took lessons with Emma Curtis Hopkins, who was featured in the Word and Faith Current, and they became friends. Holmes thought Hopkins was a mystic along the lines of Meister Eckhart, giving her credit for adding a new dimension to his thinking later in life—that of a “cosmic consciousness.”[\[77\]](#_edn35)

**Malinda Cramer** (1844-1906), **Nona Lovell Brooks** (1861-1945), **Althea Brooks Small** (1848-1906), and **Fannie Brooks James** (1854-1914) each experienced profound healing experiences. They were co-founders of the Home Church of Divine Science, which began in the 1880s and still continues today. The women formed different groups and taught classes separately, but they merged around 1899. In Divine Science, personal transformation involves unity with God that accesses healing power through the presence of God in all things and embracing the practice of affirmations.

What differentiates Divine Science groups from other New Thought teachings is an emphasis on God’s will in a person’s life and His omnipotence in this world.For healing to occur and to access healing power, the focus must be on practitioners’ unity with God who is present in everything and in each person. Similar to Baker Eddy and Christian Science, disease or sickness is erroneous thinking. God’s wholeness, according to Divine Science, does not leave room for sickness. So, healing is based on correcting one’s perception of the illness, rather than any medical process.

In *Divine Science and Healing (1922)*, Malinda Cramer emphasizes the omnipotence of God: “The answer to my earnest inquiry as to whether there was any power that could heal me, was an all-absorbing realization of a presence not before realized. This power was more than personal, it was omnipresence . . . ”[\[78\]](#_edn36) God wanted her to be well, and she felt that being well had to do with her connection to God: “I knew that I was one with it (God). I realized it to be my life; the very being, knowledge, health and power that I am.”[\[79\]](#_edn37) For Cramer, health is Truth, and illness is error in thinking. When a person realizes that they are one with God, they understand that God is not illness, so they need to focus on their union with God, rather than any “misperception” that they are ill. Likewise, Fannie Brook James, in her book *Truth and Health: Science of the Perfect Mind and the Law of Its Expression* (1917), recommends the following: “Our first step in Science is to fill our souls with the Consciousness of the One Presence, One knowledge and One Power. This will exclude the belief in any opposite.”[\[80\]](#_edn38) For James, God is so all-consuming that there is no room left for any other type of powers, including evil powers or illness.

Malinda Cramer had been ill most of her life. Doctors pronounced her incurable, and she remained an invalid for the first twenty-five years of her life. She moved to San Francisco from New York to improve her health on the advice of her physician. While she certainly had access to the other New Thought traditions in California, she does not mention these influences in her writings. After decades of failed doctor visits, when a doctor advised her to see a specialist, she suddenly decided that she was done with medicine. Stating “I will not see another physician,” she resolved to get well.[\[81\]](#_edn39) She turned to her faith and describes being healed after practicing intense meditation from 1885-1887. Cramer described an overwhelming sense of the presence of God that was “real and permanent,” and this shifted her thinking about her health. By her own account, she got well gradually, convinced that her mental practice made the difference. By 1888, Cramer was setting aside one afternoon a week for teaching and healing anyone who would come, and she started her magazine, *Harmony.* Cramer founded the Home College of Divine Science that same year. Her concept of the presence of God was similar to Fannie Brooks James’ understanding of God being everywhere and illness as an error in perception.

Nona Lovell Brooks was healed through New Thought in Pueblo, Colorado, and, later, her two sisters, Althea Brooks Small and Fannie Brooks James, were healed through the teachings and practices of Emma Curtis Hopkins. The Brooks family fell on hard times after their father passed away; Fannie and Althea got married, while the other children stayed at home. Althea’s husband invested in real estate holdings for Charles Fillmore’s Unity Village outside of Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to financial difficulties, during this period several members of the family fell ill. A friend invited the three sisters to attend classes with one of Hopkins’ students, in hopes of her help. After attending Hopkins ’ classes and practicing Hopkins’ techniques, the sisters claimed that affirming the presence of the Holy Spirit made them well. This new understanding of the nature of God, namely that God is always present, became the foundation of the Divine Science Church. One of the key New Thought concepts that resonated with Brooks from Hopkins ’ New Thought lectures was affirmations: With the proper conviction, a person can speak and affirm an idea into material substance. The Brooks sisters would continue to seek healing and teachings about healing, which eventually brought them to Malinda Cramer.

Nona Brooks first learned about the teachings of Emma Curtis Hopkins from a friend who recommended Hopkins’ classes in Chicago. Unable to get to Chicago, Nona and her sisters took classes with Kate Bingham, a student of Emma Curtis Hopkins who had studied at Hopkins’ seminary.[\[82\]](#_edn40) Nona Brooks, along with her sisters Althea Brooks and Fannie Brooks James, took classes from Bingham in Pueblo, Colorado, and they began giving healing treatments in Denver. Suffering from throat pain, Brooks found that after Hopkins ’ practices her pain was gone and she was able to eat again.[\[83\]](#_edn41) For Nona Brooks, the simple statement, “God is my health, I cannot be sick,” did not ring true—the pain in her throat belied the words. When she shifted her focus to “God is everywhere, God is all, God is here,” she believed the words, and she felt the healing power of God.[\[84\]](#_edn42) As she explains in her *Mysteries* (1924), illness is a misconception, a “shadow that falls across a sunlit path only to flicker away…emerge into the full light to see that man is a perfect Being. When we realize this, we are healed.”[\[85\]](#_edn43) The sisters opened Divine Science College in Denver for training mental healers and began a magazine titled *Fulfillment* in 1899.

Fannie Brooks James heard about a San Francisco woman named Malinda Cramer, an ordained minister who had similar ideas and methods as Hopkins; she would become the fourth founder of Home Church of Divine Science. Cramer came to lecture and teach a class in Denver in 1889. After Brooks went to California the following year to be ordained by Cramer, the two groups joined to become one united church, allowing them to share resources.[\[86\]](#_edn44) In 1889, Malinda Cramer was on a lecture tour and stopped in Denver, Colorado. Fannie Brooks attended the lecture and talked with her afterward. The two groups agreed to merge, with Cramer teaching well-attended classes in the Mountain West and ordaining Fannie Brooks. The two groups built upon the small movements started in San Francisco and Denver by the Brooks sisters and Cramer.[\[87\]](#_edn45) Cramer used the term Divine Science to describe her system of mental healing, and it would come to be part of the name of the Home Church of the Divine Science, which the four women would found by joining together the groups they had started independently.[\[88\]](#_edn46)

Nona Brooks served the Divine Science Church in Denver, Colorado for thirty years. Her sister, Fannie James, was president of the College for fifteen years. Nona claimed that the reason that the church was so successful was that it was built on the scriptural promise that Jesus gave in Matthew 6:33: “Seek ye first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”[\[89\]](#_edn47) Brooks served the local ministerial alliance and other civic agencies, including the Colorado State Prison Board. The Divine Science movement grew in Colorado and California, and in the early 1920s, opened a church in the Washington, D.C. area. This religion is still active.



 

##  Word and Faith Current 

New Thought authors and groups in the Word and Faith current emphasize the agency of the individuals in attracting healing and gaining prosperity through their relationship with God. Like the Healing and Prosperity current, this current emphasizes prosperity in addition to, and perhaps even more than, healing, which was the almost exclusive concern of the Healing current. The origins of the Word and Faith current in New Thought can be traced to what are called “faith cure” or “faith healing” movements that propose that God, without any medical interventions, may miraculously cure the faithful. The figures below believed that God promised healing and prosperity and that faith in God allowed a person or a church to claim those promises, but more traditional evangelical Christians criticized these figures for their connections being too close to New Thought for them to be conventional Christians.

The Word and Faith current emphasizes the words of the Bible and the faith of those needing healing and prosperity, rather than emphasizing healers, specific practices, and affirmations, and this emphasis aligns with broader evangelical framings of the Word and faith in Christianity. Many of these Word and Faith figures adopted Emma Curtis Hopkins’ focus on the connection between material and spiritual to bring about a person’s transformation and also her focus on the connection between the spoken word and intention, showing that Emma Curtis Hopkins’ New Thought expands into both the Healing and Prosperity and the Word and Faith currents, both of which encompass orientations toward healing as well as prosperity.

Groups and teachers in the Word and Faith current assert a connection between the human being asking for something in the material realm to God in the spiritual realm, but this connection is different than prior currents that assert these connections through cultivating a mental state in harmony with the naturally perfect human or with the Divine Mind. The Word and Faith current is different from the other New Thought currents because that connection to the divine is mediated and even created by individual faith and appeals to the power of scriptures. As in all the currents of New Thought, God’s interventions toward healing or prosperity cause transformation, but in the Word and Faith current most adherents are members of congregations, and, for this reason, transformations may be more than personal and extend to the collective or corporate, attracting healing and prosperity for not just individuals but for Church communities.

The following figures are chronologically presented below. Charles Finney was a Christian evangelist who taught people that they had agency in their salvation. The physician Charles Cullis was one of the first New Thought healers to use the term “faith cure.” George Müller was one of the first missionaries who used prosperity teaching to raise money for his mission. Essek Kenyon is considered the father of the “name it and claim it” paradigm, asserting an emphasis on the scriptural basis for calling on the name of Jesus for fulfilling God’s promises. Kenneth Hagin started the Word-Faith movement, proposing that scriptures allow individuals to call on God to confer whatever is needed.

**Charles Finney** (1792-1875) opens this treatment of the Word and Faith current because he centered his healing ministry and prosperity theology on evangelical faith. A preacher, his vision of Protestant Christianity influences each aspect of his teachings. While Finney was not explicitly a New Thought writer, his emphasis on salvation through free will alone paved the way for later writers and healers in the Word and Faith movement. Finney taught that people had agency in God’s healing powers and in attracting God’s beneficence as material wealth. According to Finney, the universal language of an all-loving and all-knowing God meant that all God’s creatures, including humans, already knew Him.[\[90\]](#_edn1) Following this logic, Finney thought that since all creatures known by God could be blessed, then humans might be able to be blessed as well, and such blessings might refer not only to blessings in this world but also in heaven.[\[91\]](#_edn2)

As a young lawyer in New York, Finney had a crisis of faith, and he left his job to pursue a life in ministry around 1823. He was commissioned as a revival missionary by the Female Missionary Society of New York in 1824 and began preaching. He drew controversy by allowing women into his meetings and using the “anxious bench” at the front for people who were in urgent need of salvation. After a particularly contentious 1831 revival in Rochester, New York, Finney accepted a pastorate at Chatham Street Chapel in New York City. Some of his lectures there were published. In 1835, he became a professor at Oberlin College, while continuing his revivalist preaching activities during the academic breaks. The memoirs of his revivalist days were published after his death.[\[92\]](#_edn3)

Finney was ordained Presbyterian, and his preaching reflected this. He focused on the covenantal relationship between Christians and God, in which both parties are bound by mutual promises and obligations. Reflecting his evangelical religious position, Finney had little patience for people who left their salvation to the will of God, and he implored his listeners to keep their end of the covenant with God. Finney argued that maintaining God’s covenant influences a person’s agreement with Him, for from that agreement flows health and prosperity. Finney believed that personal transformation centered a person’s relationship with God. Finney rejected the Calvinist concept of pre-election, arguing instead that each individual had to confess their sins and choose, and thereby secure their own salvation. People choose exactly how they relate to God, which includes how they might be blessed by God; choosing salvation transforms a person’s relationship with God and others and also attracts well-being and wealth.[\[93\]](#_edn4) While Finney predates New Thought and this Word and Faith current, many of this current’s authors draw from Finney’s understanding of agency, covenant with God, and healing.

**Charles Cullis** (1833-1892) was a homeopathic physician and Protestant evangelist who believed sickness was related to sinful acts. He was one of the earliest New Thought theologians to use the term “faith cure” to advertise himself as a healer. Cullis defined “faith cure” as God answering the prayers of the sick. He believed that the Bible promises that God answers prayers and that people can have faith that God will keep that promise. Cullis asserts that scriptures and faith in God are important aspects in New Thought healing, but he adds that communication with God is instrumental in the healing process. Cullis’s pamphlets touted the scriptural promises made to those who firmly believed in the healing powers of God, and his book *Faith Healing* (1881) proposes personal transformation through faith and prayer.[\[94\]](#_edn5)

Cullis was sick most of his childhood and had given up on many potential professions because of his poor health. One of his physicians suggested that he look into becoming a doctor and offered to take him on as an apprentice in Boston, Massachusetts. Cullis eventually fell in love with the doctor’s sister. He then became interested in homeopathic medicine. Though he never had the money to go to medical school, he used his apprenticeship experiences to help in his father-in-law’s medical practice. Cullis’s health improved after he settled into his marriage and career as a healer. After his wife died of tuberculosis, Cullis vowed to give all that he received to God’s causes—after he paid his own expenses, of course.[\[95\]](#_edn6)

Around 1862, after devoting himself to reading the scriptures and becoming convinced that the Bible held healing promises from God, Cullis felt God’s call to become a spiritual healer, noting that the scriptural accounts of healing were relevant to his healing ministry. Cullis’s healing practice was based on the belief that sickness was related to sin: If a person understands the full nature of their sin, then God will forgive that person and heal their sickness.[\[96\]](#_edn7) Throughout his life, Cullis remained connected to Boston’s medical community, not opposing medicine in his healing practice. A member of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Medical Society, Cullis, as attested by the Society’s records, recorded utilizing a number of homeopathic remedies in his practice, demonstrating that he did not reject medicine.[\[97\]](#_edn8)

In his 1881 book *Faith Healing*, Cullis asserts the Christian origins of his version of New Thought. When elders of the Church pray over sick Christians, the “prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise you up; and if you have committed sins, they shall be forgiven you.”[\[98\]](#_edn9) Throughout the book, Cullis relates stories of people finding confirmation that God promises to heal His people in the scriptures. For example, a woman in Switzerland grieves over her village that suffered an outbreak of typhus, and she prays with many of the villagers, telling them about God, and looks to the Bible for confirmation that God promises to heal his people. The Swiss woman finds healing promises in a passage from the Book of James, likely James 5:14-16, that promises the “prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and if they have committed sins, they shall be forgiven.”[\[99\]](#_edn10) The woman rejoices when many of the sick recover from the illness. *Faith Healing* is full of similar anecdotes that ostensibly demonstrate to the lay reader that the process Cullis advocates works.

In the late 1880s, Cullis started holding “faith conventions” in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire; in these events, large groups of people came to the faith-healing process. Cullis eventually bought land in Intervale Park, New Hampshire, where his group could hold these conventions according to their own calendar. Guest speakers drew even larger crowds than his prior events, but Cullis was always the headliner.[\[100\] ](#_edn11)His success allowed Cullis to build a home to care for people with tuberculosis, and, over the years, he added a workers’ home, a cancer home, a spinal care home, an orphanage, a mission, and a chapel. Further, he founded Faith Training College and established a publishing house called Willard Tract Repository.

Cullis would have agreed with Finney that free will is important, though he was reluctant to accept God’s part in his life at first. After he chose to ask for God’s help in healing, he asserted that God fulfilled His promises. Cullis’s notions about the healing transformations of believers are reminiscent of Melinda Cramer’s understanding of what happens when God heals a person, though she would say that it is because God is omnipresent and we have to come into an awareness of that for healing to occur rather than God’s blessings being dependent on personal faith, as Cullis asserts.

**George Müller** (1805-1898) was a Scottish theologian and Protestant Reformation pastor with a biblical approach who explained that God always provides for the needs of his ministry, including providing food, clothing, and Bibles to the poor, aiding missionaries, building orphanages, and assisting Sunday Schools.[\[101\]](#_edn12) Müller thought that if a person approached God through prayer and asked for what was needed in a ministry, then God would answer that prayer with the support needed to keep it running—if it were His will.[\[102\]](#_edn13) His work at the Abby Down Orphanage in Bristol, England, reflects the ways that New Thought shaped his ministry, especially influencing the ways he acquired the resources needed for his work. The guiding principle at the center of his ministry was that scripture should guide everything he did.

After serving time in jail as a result of his misspent youth, Müller was drawn toward the teachings of Henry Craik, a founder in the Open Brethren, a Protestant group that rejected denominational ties and emphasized accepting God’s will, faith alone, and mission work.[\[103\]](#_edn14) Craik was educated at St. Andrews and earned a divinity degree from St. Mary’s. In 1832, Craik accepted an offer to preach at Gideon Chapel in Bristol, and Müller joined him there a week later.[\[104\]](#_edn15) Müller was new to missionary work, and in a meeting with the missionary board supporting his work, he discussed the ways that he was praying for his needs and fully relying on God. The missionary board did not approve of his new plan to rely solely on God through prayer and wanted to see his proposed budget. He left that group and went to Gideon Chapel in Bristol to work with Henry Craik and the Open Brethren, which allowed him to set his new ministry ideas in motion.[\[105\]](#_edn16)

Faith, for Müller, was turning to the Bible to learn what God promised or permitted and then asking God for what was needed through prayer.[\[106\]](#_edn17) Throughout his lifetime, Müller raised a great deal of money for orphanages and other mission work, such as printing Bibles for those who could not afford them and providing tuition for less fortunate schoolchildren. He also set up a trust, which today continues to support missionaries around the world. Müller thought a person should always be open to receiving God’s abundance, and he was proud to say that he never asked for help from anyone on behalf of his ministries—although he never turned gifts away, seeing donations as unsolicited gifts of God’s bounty.

Müller believed that God provided for more than two hundred children in the orphanage that he founded.[\[107\]](#_edn18) Abigail Townsend Luffe, who spent some time at Abby Down Orphanage, recalls that one morning the breakfast table was empty, but it would soon be filled by God’s blessings. Townsend Luffe’s family lived in Bristol, and her father became an associate of Müller’s in his evangelical endeavors. One day when she was playing in the garden at the orphanage, Müller thanked God for what He was about to provide. A knock at the door announced a baker with baskets full of bread followed by a milkman with milk for the children.[\[108\]](#_edn19) When the orphanage had needs, Müller prayed for specific needs to be fulfilled. He recounted this emblematic story: “But in walking to the Orphan House this morning, and praying as I went, I particularly told the Lord in prayer, that on this day, though Monday, He could send me much. And thus it was, I received this morning $1500 for the Lord’s service, as might be most needed.”[\[109\]](#_edn20) Receiving blessings for his ministry confirmed that God wanted him to continue in his ministries on God’s behalf, and Müller was overjoyed.[\[110\]](#_edn21) At his orphanage, Müller once hosted a guest from Manchester who “expressed surprise that without any regular system of collection, and without personal application to anyone, simply by faith and prayer, \[Müller\] obtained more than $10,000.00 annually for the work of the Lord in (his) hands.”[\[111\]](#_edn22) That same day, according to Müller, this guest was happy to donate ten dollars to the orphanage.

According to Müller, people are transformed through prayer. Fully relying on God and asking God for precisely what one needs and being confident that God will provide, a person’s life is transformed by God’s generosity. While Müller believed that God answered individual prayers, the focus of his teachings was on answering corporate prayer, which is prayer for the needs of a wider body. Returning to Abigail Townsend Luffe featured above, Müller taught her to be specific in praying for her needs, and she prayed for colored wool. She reported that a box came in the mail the next day that included the color of wool that she requested.[\[112\]](#_edn23) Much of Müller’s missionary work was financed by people in religious communities and other like-minded civic people who supported his goals, but Müller contended that God transformed each person who prayed for the success of the ministry each day, similar to Myrtle Fillmore’s Silent Unity prayer ministry that encourages people to individually pray with the whole community at the same time every day for healing. Collective prayer is considered to have more power than individual prayer, and it simultaneously heals the individual and the community.

**Essek W. Kenyon** (1867-1948) is considered the father of the “Name it and Claim It” mode of New Thought in the Faith and Word current. Perhaps due to the influence of Emerson and Baker Eddy, Kenyon was convinced that transformation was a metaphysical process. If a person believes that God will fulfill a promise to them, including for something worldly, and that person prayerfully asks God, then God will fulfill His promises. But for Kenyon, there are conditions on the believer. One has to believe in God and His ability to fulfill His promises and be willing to give of oneself to Him. Kenyon, like Cullis before him, thought disease was connected to sins committed, and he reasoned that if a person repented their sin, then their illness would be healed. According to Kenyon, Christians can be confident that God will heal them because scriptures promise He would heal them, but believers need to actively engage through naming and claiming what God promises. By speaking God’s promises out loud or “naming” them, practitioners can “claim” them, meaning the promises are brought from concept into physical existence; the speakers “manifest” the blessings, as described in earlier New Thought parlance.

In *The Wonderful Name of Jesus* (1927), Kenyon explains that a person needs to “claim” promises of God by having faith and speaking their needed blessings out loud.[\[113\]](#_edn24) Kenyon points to the power of the name of Jesus and the scriptures that give Christians the right to call upon his name as needed. John 14:13-15 is the central scriptural passage for Kenyon: “Whatsoever ye shall ask in My Name, that will I do that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in My Name, that will I do. If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments.”[\[114\]](#_edn25) This passage, according to Kenyon, does not limit what a person can claim by calling on the name of Jesus; the only requirement is that the Christian keeps the commandments in the scriptures. Naming and claiming are not simple actions. In his interpretation of Acts 3:1-6—“Silver and gold have I none, but what I have, that give I thee. In the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk”—Kenyon explains that an individual has to be willing to give of oneself to God but that sacrifice will be rewarded by Him.[\[115\]](#_edn26)

Kenyon studied oratory at Emerson College in Boston for a year, a place that was a good backdrop for the young Kenyon to engage New Thought. Ralph Waldo Trine, the New Thought author, and Charles Wesley Emerson, founder of Emerson College, were teaching during the time Kenyon attended Emerson College.[\[116\]](#_edn27) Trine taught rhetoric, a class in the oratory curriculum; therefore, it is likely that Kenyon took classes with Trine, since the college was so small at the time, and this forged his initial contact with New Thought. Also around this time, Kenyon read and drew inspiration from Mary Baker Eddy’s book *Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures*.[\[117\]](#_edn28) Kenyon read widely, including books from Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, Transcendentalism, Romanticism, the Higher Life Movement, and New Thought.[\[118\]](#_edn29) Although his beliefs were eclectic, he considered himself to belong to the George Müller branch of evangelicalism featured above.

Kenyon founded a number of institutions. Because he thought the church needed revitalization, he founded the Bethel Bible Institute in Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1906 to support his belief that young people needed to revive the church—Bethel would inspire his students to enact such a revival. He started the *Herald of Life* publication in the early 1920s. Around 1923, Essek started a church in Los Angeles that eventually grew to nearly a thousand members. Around 1931, Kenyon moved to Seattle, and there he founded the New Covenant Baptist Church and the Seattle Bible Institute.

**Kenneth W. Hagin** (1917-2003) taught that the incarnation of God dwells in the believer, and believers must focus on this. Like Kenyon, Hagin asserted that a Christian needed to be faithful and to speak the name or word, specifically the name of Jesus, in the understanding that scriptures promised the ability to claim healing and prosperity. By speaking the Words of God or the Word of Faith, Christians have the ability to claim the promises of healing and prosperity from God simply by speaking the words of the scriptures. Hagin was criticized for his connections to Kenyon and downplayed them later in his career.

Because humans are incarnations of God just as Jesus was an incarnation of God, Hagin taught that humans have the creative potential to speak the words to create and shape reality through their faith in God.[\[119\]](#_edn30) This claim is based on his understanding of being “born again,” a process that makes a Christian an incarnation in a similar way that Jesus was an incarnation of God. The incarnation of God dwelling in the believer allows the believer to overcome any seeming material limitations to bring about the change a believer wishes to occur. If one surrenders to God and reads and obeys the Bible, then God would return the favor in blessings.[\[120\]](#_edn31) He explains that “you have to believe first, and then you will receive.”[\[121\]](#_edn32) This can be compared to Kenyon’s conditions that a person has to first believe in God and His promises before claiming those promises made in the Bible. In support of this, Hagin quotes Luke 6:38, which reads “Give and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give unto your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal shall it be measured to you again.” A person needs only to speak the name of Jesus (or God) and the promises found in the Word of God, and that person will be healed or receive blessings, but people must follow God’s laws and biblical prescriptions, for God will bestow healing or blessings.

Reflecting on the Biblical statement, “The Lord is the strength of my life,” Hagin writes that “my life consists of the physical as well as the spiritual, and the Lord is the strength of my life.”[\[122\]](#_edn33) Hagin was sick as a child, and a prolonged illness when he was fifteen years of age caused him to be bedridden.[\[123\]](#_edn34) He converted to Christianity and began reading the Bible regularly. He reported a dramatic recovery after reading Mark 11:22-23, a passage exhorting the believer to have faith in God: “Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, if anyone said to this mountain, ‘Go throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes it will happen, it will be done for them.” Hagin explained his improved health as resulting from his faith and a reading of this scriptural passage; he believed that it applied to his situation.[\[124\]](#_edn35)

Hagin began a small but popular church, and he eventually became an evangelist. In the early 1960s, he formed the Kenneth Hagin Ministries in Garland, Texas. Hagin started Word of Faith ministries in the 1960s along with the RHEMA Bible Training Center.[\[125\]](#_edn36) The name Word of Faith refers to a collection of missions including healing and prosperity that focus on the name of Jesus. In 1974, he founded the RHEMA Bible Training College, just east of Tulsa, Oklahoma. And there, students prepare for various types of ministries in their two, three and four-year programs. Hagin eventually formed Kenneth Hagin Ministries, which continues to function today.[\[126\]](#_edn37) Kenneth Hagin Ministries today includes a radio show, a library publishing company, a television broadcast network, a monthly magazine, traveling evangelical crusades, as well as the RHEMA Prayer and Healing Center.[\[127\]](#_edn38)

Kenneth Hagin was inspired by Essek Kenyon, and he was criticized for this, so he later downplayed this connection. Traditionally evangelical theologians considered Hagin’s connections to New Thought writers too close for him to be a conventional Christian, a criticism they also charged against Kenyon, and he was further criticized for adopting the metaphysical concept that words can have physical consequences in the material world, that words have healing power. Hagin was also criticized for his notions, borrowed from Kenyon, about humans as incarnations of God.



 

##  Conclusion 

New Thought writers are intentionally inclusive, considering their movement a complement to existing religious communities rather than a replacement for them. New Thought’s intentional inclusivity distinguishes it from the exclusivity of other Christian denominations. People who attend New Thought churches and lectures are not expected to be members of New Thought exclusively. All New Thought movements are invested in the transformation of the believer. Each version of New Thought focuses on various ways that the individual can affect the external world by changing how they think about it. Each person has agency in their transformation, whether that entails healing, prosperity, or salvation. Most New Thought writers focus more on the individual transformation of the readers of their texts rather than corporate transformation. While most of the figures in this entry inspired religious movements or wrote within the context of religious institutions, they generally focused on the individual’s transformative religious experience. The idealistic nature of this religion forms the basis of its theology, and it is the foundation for practitioners’ optimistic worldview. As the currents move from Healing to Healing and prosperity to Word and Faith, they grow less individualistic and more corporate, asserting that transformation happens not just for individuals but also for collective groups, especially church congregations.



 

##  Notes 

\[1\] Dawn Hutchinson, *The Secret of Success: The Link between American prosperity theology and business self-help literature* (Nova Science Publishers, 2019).

\[2\] Richard A.S Schumaker, *American Transcendentalism: the Roots of New Thought Christianity* (Richard Schumacher, 2012).

\[3\] For a rich framing of metaphysical traditions in the United States, see Catherine Albanese. *America: Religions and Religion*, 5th edition (Cengage, 2013), 197.

\[4\] Horatio W. Dresser, *A History of the New Thought Movement* (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1919).

\[5\] Dresser, *History of*, Chapter 7.

\[6\] Alan C. Anderson and Deborah G. Whitehouse, *New Thought: A Practical American Spirituality* (Crossroad Publishing Company, 1995), 3. See William James, *Varieties of Religious Experience* (MacMillan Press, 1961).

\[7\] Dresser, *A History*, chapter 7.

\[8\] Anderson and Whitehouse, *New Thought*, 5.

\[9\] James Dillet Freeman, *The Story of Unity* (Unity Books, 1979), 45.

\[10\] Dawn Hutchinson, “New Thought’s Prosperity Theology and It’s Influence on American Ideas of Success,” *Nova Religio* 18, Issue 2 (November 2018): 28–44.

\[11\] Charles Fillmore, *Prosperity* (Unity Village, 1936), 112.

\[12\] Fillmore explains this in his text *Prosperity*, 112. See note 61 and accompanying text.

\[13\] Ralph Waldo Trine*, In Tune with the Infinite* (George Bell & Sons, 1908), 17.

\[14\] Mesmerism is an eighteenth-century healing movement started by Frank Mesmer. It relied on Mesmer’s theory that all living things could be healed by unblocking a magnetic fluid flowing through their body while they were in a trance state.

\[15\] Quimby, *Manuscripts,* 33.

\[16\] See “Quimby’s Restoration to Health” in P.P. Quimby, *The Quimby Manuscripts*, ed. Horatio W. Dresser (T.Y. Crowell, 1921), 28.

\[17\] Ibid., 29.

\[18\] Ibid., 32.

\[19\] Ibid., 35.

\[20\] Stephen Gottschalk, “Mary Baker Eddy,” Britannica, accessed May 20, 2026. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Baker-Eddy>

\[21\] Charles S. Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion: the Rise and Development of New Thought* (Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 130.

\[22\] “Mary Baker Eddy – Deep Read.” Mary Baker Eddy Library. Accessed May 20, 2026. <https://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/mary-baker-eddy/mary-baker-eddy-deep-read/>

\[23\] Ibid.

\[24\] Mary Baker Eddy, *Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures* (Christian Science Publishing Co, 1875), 11.

\[25\] Ibid., 8:6–12.

\[26\] Catherine L. Albanese, ed. *Warren Felt Evans, The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans: From Methodism to Mind Cure* (Indiana University Press, 2016), 247.

\[27\] Ibid.*,* 2.

\[28\] Ibid.

\[29\] Ibid., 6–7.

\[30\] Ibid., 17.

\[31\] Warren Felt Evans,*The Mental Cure*, H.H. and T.W. Carter, 1869, 6–7.

\[32\] Ibid., 24–28.

\[33\] Julius Dresser, *A True History of Mental Science: the Facts Concerning the Discovery of Mental Healing* (Ellis, 1899), 26.

\[34\] Dresser, *Quimby Manuscripts*, 12–18.

\[35\] Charles S*.* Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought* (Southern Methodist University Press, 1987), 137.

\[36\] Dresser only briefly mentions these figures in a sentence in his chapter on Warren Felt Evans. Fichte and Hegel were both in the German Idealist Transcendentalist school of Kant, though Fichte focused on the pure spontaneity and freedom of the subject (I), while Hegel focused on reality as a process of the spirit. Dresser, *Quimby Manuscripts*, Chapter 4.

\[37\] Dresser, *A History*, 3.

\[38\] Ibid., 17.

\[39\] Ibid., viii.

\[40\] Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion*, 168.

\[41\] Ibid., 166–67.

\[42\] Ralph Waldo Trine, *In Tune with the Infinite* (George Bell &amp; Sons, 1908), ix.

\[43\] Catherine L. Albanese, *America: Religions and Religion*. Fifth Edition (University of California, 2013), 197.

\[44\] Albanese, *Republic of Mind and Spirit*, 321.

\[45\] Ibid., 469.

\[46\] Harley, Gail M. *Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought* (Syracuse University Press, 2002), 23.

\[47\] From a pamphlet from Emma Curtis Hopkins’ seminary, *Christian Science Theological Review and Christian Science Catalogue* (1893) mentioned in Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion*, 146–47.

\[48\] Dawn Hutchinson, *The Secret of Success: The Link between American prosperity theology and business self-help literature* (Nova Science Publishers, 2019), 42–43.

\[49\] Harley, 138–39.

\[50\] Hopkins, Emma Curtis. *High Mysticism*. (DeVorss and Company, 1974).

\[51\] Emma Curtis Hopkins, as quoted in John D. Rankin, *The Mysticism of Emma Curtis Hopkins: a Selection of Readings from her Works and Related Writings* (Unity School Library, 1977), 2.

\[52\] Charles Fillmore, *Christian Healing: the Science of Being*, Tenth Edition (Unity Village, 1922), 58.

\[53\] Charles Fillmore, *Prosperity* (Unity Village, 1936), 87.

\[54\] Ibid., 102.

\[55\] James Dillet Freeman, *The Household of Faith: The Story of Unity.* (Unity School of Christianity, 1951), 9.

\[56\] Ibid., 43.

\[57\] Ibid., 54.

\[58\] Ibid., 79.

\[59\] Ibid., 69–73.

\[60\] Paula Coppel, “Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker and Their Influence on Charles Fillmore,” term paper for HTS551, Dr. Thomas Shepherd, 12/10/09, <http://av.unityonline.org/institute/2010Lyceum/Coppel.pdf>.

\[61\] Charles Fillmore, *Talks on Truth* (Unity School of Christianity, 1926 revised 1934), 9.

\[62\] Ibid.

\[63\] Fillmore, *Prosperity,* 112.

\[64\] Ernest Sherleff Holmes, *The Science of Mind: A Complete Course of Lessons in the Science of Mind and Spirit.* Digitalreads, Internet Archive, 1926/2023, 18–21. <https://archive.org/details/scienceofmindthe0000erne/mode/2up>.

\[65\] The emphasis by Holmes on union with the divine is consistent with mystical literature across religious traditions. See Stephen T. Katz, *Comparative Mysticism: An Anthology of Original Sources* (Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–4.

\[66\] Holmes as quoted in Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion,* 292.

\[67\] Fenwick Holmes. *Ernest Holmes: His Life and Times* (Dodd, Mead &amp; Co, 1970).

\[68\] Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion,* 288-289.

\[69\] The New Thought Alliance is an organization that facilitates cooperation and communication between New Thought groups and individuals.

\[70\] Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion*, 287.

\[71\] Holmes, *Science of Mind: a Complete Course of Lessons in the Science of Mind and Spirit* (Robert M. McBridge &amp; Co, 1933), 207.

\[72\] Ibid., 182.

\[73\] Ibid., 237.

\[74\] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Letters and Social Aims,” *The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson*, Vol. 8, Edward W. Emerson, 1875. This online version does not include page numbers. Holmes has misquoted Emerson here. The quote is: “Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.” <https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/emerson-the-works-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-vol-8-letters-and-social-aims>.

\[75\] The John Roberts Powers school, founded in 1923, was a self-development school, focused on social skills, like public speaking, acting, and image-enhancement. Ernest Holmes took public speaking courses with a goal of becoming a platform speaker.

\[76\] Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion,* 289.

\[77\] Ibid.*,* 291.

\[78\] Malinda Cramer, *Divine Science and Healing* (Home College of Divine Science, 1906), 14.

\[79\] Ibid.

\[80\] Fannie B. James, *Truth and Health: The Science of the Perfect Mind and the Law of its Expression; New Light on Old Truths* (The Colorado College of Divine Science, 1917), 55.

\[81\] Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion,* 268.

\[82\] Ibid., 265.

\[83\] Ibid., 264–65.

\[84\] Ibid., 266.

\[85\] Nona Brooks, *Mysteries*, New Thought Library, chapter 8, 97.

\[86\] Braden, *Spirits in Rebellion,* 271–72.

\[87\] Ibid.*,* 272.

\[88\] Ibid., 268.

\[89\] New Thought Archives, 2026. This is a historical and digital repository dedicated to preserving the literature and organizational records of the New Thought movement. Regarding passages from the Bible, I have generally used the King James version because it is what most of the authors have used in their texts. If the authors incompletely cited a verse, I referred to the complete verse in order to clarify it for the reader.

\[90\] Hutchinson, *Secret of Success*, 70.

\[91\] Finney, Charles. “All Things for Good to Those Who Love God,” Romans 8:28, SermonIndex.net. Accessed May 2020 http: sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=article&amp;aid=36439.

\[92\] James E. 2026. “Charles Grandison Finney: Father of American Revivalism.” Christian History Institute, 2026. <https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/charles-grandison-finney>.

\[93\] Johnson, 2026.

\[94\] N.A., “The Man Who Believed in God,” Healing and Revival Press, 2006.

\[95\] Ibid.

\[96\] Hutchinson, *Secret of Success,* 71–72.

\[97\] “Charles Cullis,” (1833–1892), Hahnemann House Trust, 2026, <https://www.hahnemannhouse.org/charles-cullis-1833-1892/>.

\[98\] Cullis, Charles. *Faith Healing* (Willard Tract Repository, 1881; digital copy 2008), 8.

\[99\] Ibid.

\[100\] N.A., “The Man Who Believed in God,” no page numbers.

\[101\] Henry Craik, s.v. Brethren Archive. accessed June 2, 2025, <https://www.brethrenarchive.org/people/henry-craik/>.

\[102\] Andrew Louth ed, s.v. “George Müller” (Oxford Reference, n.d.). Accessed May 20, 2026. [https://www-oxfordreference-com.cnu.idm.oclc.org/display/10.1093/acref/…](https://www-oxfordreference-com.cnu.idm.oclc.org/display/10.1093/acref/9780199642465.001.0001/acref-9780199642465-e-4909).

\[103\] N.A., “Living on a Prayer: George Müller, the Brethren, and Faith Missions,” *Christian History*, Issue 128 (2018), 3.

\[104\] John Dunn, *George Müller, a Biography*, New Creations Publications, 2000, 9.

\[105\] Patsy Stevens, “George Müller,” (2011), [The Life of George Muller - GeorgeMuller.org](https://www.georgemuller.org/devotional/the-life-of-george-muller#:~:text=M%C3%BCller%20had%20a%20speaking%20engagement,year%20life%20of%20the%20orphanage).

\[106\] Jim Elliff, “George Müller, an Introduction,” in *Heart Cry Missionary Society: George Müller, Man of Faith* (Aug/Sept 2005), 5.

\[107\] Ibid.

\[108\] N.A., “Living on a Prayer: George Muller, the Brethren, and Faith Missions,” *Christian History*, Issue 128 (2018), 1.

\[109\] George Muller, “Answers to Prayer,” 1. Online Bible Literature, Christ’s Bible Church, Misc. Articles, <https://www.georgemuller.org/articles.html>.

\[110\] Ibid.

\[111\] Ibid., 2.

\[112\] Abigail Townsend Luffe, “Christian Heroes,” Uplook Ministries, (1994) accessed June 8, 2026, <https://uplook.org/1994/09/abigail-townsend-luffe/>.

\[113\] Dale Simmons, *Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power and Plenty* (Scarecrow Press, 1997), 295-296.

\[1114\] E.W. Kenyon, *The Wonderful Name of Jesus* (Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, 1927), 15.

\[115\] Kenyon, *TheWonderful Name*, 15.

\[116\] Joe McIntyre, *E.W. Kenyon and his Message of Faith: The True Story* (Lake Mary, FL: Creation House Publishing, 1997), 18.

\[117\] D. R. McConnell, *A Different Gospel: A Historical and Biblical Analysis of the Modern Faith Movement* (Hendrickson, 1988), 46.

\[118\] Simmons, *Kenyon and the*, 97.

\[119\] Robert M. Bowman, *The Word-Faith Controversy: Understanding the Health and Wealth Gospel* (Baker Books, 2001), 31–33.

\[120\] Kenneth Hagin, “Investing God’s Way,” (Kenneth Hagin Ministries, n.d.). No page numbers. Accessed May 2026. [https://www.rhema.org/index.php?option=com\_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=2050:investing-god-s-way&amp;catid=49&amp;Itemid=143](https://www.rhema.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2050:investing-god-s-way&catid=49&Itemid=143)

\[121\] Kenneth Hagin, “What is Faith?” *The Mechanics of Faith: Faith, Hope, Prayer*, Lesson 2 (Kenneth Hagin Ministries, n.d.). Accessed May 2026. <https://www.hopefaithprayer.com/faith/kenneth-hagin-faith-lesson-no-2-what-is-faith/>.

\[122\] Hagin, “What is Faith?”

\[123\] Ibid.

\[124\] Kennth Hagin, Kenneth, “Your Believing Affects Your Receiving” (Kenneth Hagin Ministries, n.d.). Accessed April, 10, 2025. [https://www.rhema.org/index.php?option=com\_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=1035:your-believing-affects-your-receiving&amp;catid=46&amp;Itemid=141](https://www.rhema.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1035:your-believing-affects-your-receiving&catid=46&Itemid=141).

\[125\] Rhema, in Greek means spoken word, utterance, or “said.” Hagin uses it to reference the Words uttered in faith, but also the word of God, or the scriptures. [https://www.rhema.org/index.php?option=com\_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=2679:what-is-rhema&amp;catid=267&amp;Itemid=867](https://www.rhema.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2679:what-is-rhema&catid=267&Itemid=867).

\[126\] Bowman, *Word-Faith* Controversy, 8.

\[127\] Kenneth E. Hagin Ministries, <https://www.rhema.org/>.



 

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Author Biography

### Dawn Hutchinson 

 

Dr. Dawn Hutchinson has taught for the Philosophy and Religion department at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia since 2004. She specializes in American Religious History, with particular emphasis on New Religious Movements. Her most recent book is entitled Secret of Success: The Link between American Prosperity Theology and Business Self-Help Literature for Nova Science Publishers, and she is conducting background research for a book on Transcendentalist Women to be published with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Her books include *Antiquity and Social Reform: Religious Experience in the Unification Church, Feminist Wicca, and the Nation of Yahweh* (2010) and *Women of the Transcendentalist Club* (2023).



 



      ![Dawn Hutchinson](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-08/christopher-newport-university-dawn-hutchinson-200x300.jpg?itok=egP3KHzy) 

 

 

  

 



 

 

 

##  Suggested Citation 

Hutchinson, Dawn. "New Thought." *Archive of Mystical Experiences*. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Archive of Mystical Experiences ](/topic-tags/archive-mystical-experiences)