Prayer is the opening chapter of the foundational textbook of Christian Science, and it is a deliberate first word: before anything is said about God, matter, or healing, the reader is asked to examine what prayer actually is. The chapter dismantles the transactional model (ask, flatter, receive) and replaces it with something quieter and more demanding: the lifting of thought into alignment with a God who is already wholly Good. For a curious browser it rewards attention because it treats prayer not as a religious formality but as an inner discipline, a practice of honest self-examination and desire. It asks whether our prayers change God or change us, and it insists on the second.
Origins
Prayer is the first chapter of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, written by Mary Baker Eddy, whose authorial voice is also indexed here under the slug MBE. Eddy published the first edition in 1875 and revised the work repeatedly until her death in 1910, so the chapter as it now stands reflects decades of refinement rather than a single sitting. Traditional attribution within the movement credits Eddy alone, and here there is little scholarly dispute about authorship itself. What scholars do debate is the degree of influence from Phineas Quimby and from the broader New Thought current of nineteenth-century America. A fair statement of the range: Eddy drew on the mental-healing climate of her time but gave it a distinctively theological, Christ-centered form that the sources around her did not possess.
The World Behind It
This chapter was forged in a specific American crisis of faith. Nineteenth-century Protestantism still largely preached a God who punished, a hell that waited, and a body that medicine could barely help. Eddy wrote as someone who had suffered chronic illness and who claimed recovery through a sudden spiritual understanding drawn from reading the Gospel healings. The chapter argues against a culture of petitionary prayer that treated God as a reluctant sovereign to be persuaded. It is also a quiet polemic against clergy who recited eloquent prayers in public while living otherwise. The concrete target is hypocrisy: the gap between the words of the lips and the condition of the heart. Behind the chapter is a woman building a movement that would make professional intermediaries unnecessary, teaching ordinary people to pray in the closet rather than the pew.
The Shape of the Book
The chapter moves in discernible stages rather than numbered sections. It opens by defining prayer as desire, insisting that "the prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God." From there it confronts audible prayer, questioning whether vocal repetition accomplishes anything beyond self-satisfaction. The middle movement turns to motive and honesty, pressing the reader to ask whether their desire is genuine or merely spoken. A further movement distinguishes true prayer from vain supplication, aligning itself with Jesus' instruction to pray in secret (Matthew 6:6, KJV). The closing movement treats the Lord's Prayer as the model, offering a spiritual interpretation of each line, and it ends by framing all right prayer as submission to the Good that God already is.
Themes
The first theme is that prayer is desire, not words: "Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires," so that the inmost longing, not the spoken formula, is what rises to God. This resonates with the teaching that true seeking happens within (Gospel of Thomas 32.10-11). A second theme is that God does not change and therefore need not be persuaded; prayer corrects the one praying, not the One prayed to, for God is Love and requires no appeasement (1 John 4:8, KJV). A third theme is the futility of audible display, echoing the warning against those who "love to pray standing in the synagogues" to be seen (Matthew 6:5, KJV). A fourth theme is honesty of motive, the demand that our lives confirm our petitions, since "not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom" (Matthew 7:21, KJV). A fifth theme is the present availability of the Kingdom, the conviction that spiritual harmony is to be realized now rather than awaited, as the inner voice is found in stillness (Psalms 46:10, KJV).
How It Entered the Bible
Prayer is not a canonical book of the Bible, and it was never considered for inclusion in any scriptural canon; it belongs to the nineteenth century, not the first. Its authority within Christian Science rests on a different claim entirely. Eddy designated Science and Health together with the Bible as the "pastor" of her church, so that in Christian Science services passages from this chapter are read alongside Scripture rather than instead of it. Mainstream Christian bodies, Catholic and Protestant alike, rejected and still reject this pairing, regarding the canon of Scripture as closed and Eddy's text as human commentary at best. The chapter therefore occupies a candid middle ground: deeply dependent on the Bible it interprets, yet never pretending to be part of it. This fits Eddy's own stated principle that no human writing stands beyond examination and that even the biblical record must be read through the lens of the Father Jesus knew.
How to Read It
Enter through the opening sentence, where prayer is defined as desire and faith that "all things are possible to God," and let that definition reorient everything that follows. Watch for the steady contrast Eddy builds between the lips and the heart, between performance and sincerity; she is far less interested in what you say than in what you actually want and how you actually live. Watch too for her reading of the Lord's Prayer, which she treats as a spiritual key rather than a recitation. The common misreading to avoid is the assumption that she is dismissing prayer as useless; she is not. She is relocating its power from the act of asking an external deity to the inner work of awakening to a Good that is already fully present (Luke 17:21, KJV). Read it, in short, as an invitation to pray less at God and more into the truth of what you already are.