The Preface is the doorway into Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, a book that reframes healing not as miracle but as natural spiritual law. In a few compact pages it announces the whole enterprise: that sickness, sin, and death are not ordained by God but are false beliefs to be corrected by right understanding. For the curious browser, the Preface is where a nineteenth-century New England woman stakes an audacious claim, that she has recovered the lost Science by which Jesus healed, and that anyone can learn it. It is brief, declarative, and disarmingly personal, written by someone convinced she has found the key to a locked door.
Origins
The Preface is attributed to Mary Baker Eddy, and here attribution and authorship are not seriously in dispute: she wrote and repeatedly revised it between the first edition of 1875 and the final authorized text of 1910. What scholars debate is not who wrote it but what shaped it. Eddy claimed the insight arrived through sudden recovery from a severe injury in 1866, followed by years of scriptural study. Critics have traced influences to the mental healer Phineas Quimby, under whom she studied, and to the broader currents of mesmerism and American metaphysical religion. The honest range, then, runs from a wholly original revelation (her own account) to a synthesis of mid-century healing movements refracted through an unusually determined religious imagination.
The World Behind It
Post-Civil-War America was saturated with sickness, loss, and experimental religion. Medicine was crude and often harmful, orthodox Calvinism still preached a punishing God and inherited guilt, and spiritualism, mesmerism, and homeopathy competed for the suffering. Eddy herself was chronically ill, widowed, and poor when her recovery convinced her she had glimpsed something the churches and the doctors had both missed. The Preface is written out of that double disappointment: with a theology that made God the author of affliction, and with a materia medica that could not heal. Against both she sets a God who is wholly Good and never wills suffering (compare James 1:17, KJV), and a human person who is already the spiritual likeness of that God. The concreteness of the crisis matters: this is a book born from a sickroom, not a seminary.
The Shape of the Book
The Preface moves in discernible waves rather than numbered parts. It opens with a meditation on time and expectancy, the famous image of the hours bearing their freight, signaling that a new idea has arrived whether or not the age is ready. It then turns autobiographical, recounting the author's long search and the discovery she dates to her recovery. From there it shifts to apology in the old sense, a defense of the book against anticipated ridicule, insisting that spiritual Science is demonstrable and not mere speculation. It closes by positioning the work as a key, a companion to Scripture rather than a replacement for it, promising that the reader who tests these ideas will find them true in practice, not only in theory.
Themes
First, God as sole reality and absolute Good: the Preface insists that divine Love never sends disease, echoing the conviction that "God is love" (1 John 4:8, KJV). Second, healing as Science, lawful and repeatable, a restoration of what Jesus demonstrated when he said "Rise, take up thy bed" (John 5:8, KJV) without pleading for an exception to nature. Third, the primacy of thought: correction of the mind precedes and produces correction of the body, so that to be healed is to awaken to what was always spiritually true (Romans 12:2, KJV). Fourth, Scripture read through discernment rather than deference, the book presenting itself as a Key that unlocks meaning Jesus himself drew out when he deepened the old law (Matthew 5:27-28, KJV). Fifth, the present availability of the Kingdom, not a future reward but a reality to be entered now (Luke 17:21, KJV).
How It Entered the Bible
The Preface never entered the biblical canon and does not claim to. It belongs instead to that wider body of writing which stands beside Scripture and asks to be weighed against it. Its own canon story is institutional: Science and Health was accepted by the Church of Christ, Scientist, which Eddy founded, and was eventually paired with the King James Bible as the church's dual "pastor," read aloud in services without human sermon. Mainstream Protestant bodies denounced the work sharply, Mark Twain mocked it and clergy condemned it as heresy, much as earlier gatekeepers denounced texts that made priestly mediation unnecessary. Yet the community that embraced it treated the Preface as a settled and authoritative threshold, revised by the author's own hand until 1910, and so fixed by her final edition rather than by any council.
How to Read It
Begin where Eddy begins, with the image of the hours as couriers of their own freight, and let that set the tone: this is a book that believes its time has come. Watch for the double register throughout, the personal testimony of a healed woman braided with sweeping metaphysical claim, and notice how she anticipates your objections before you can raise them. Read it, as she asks, through the lens of the Christ who corrected received tradition rather than merely repeating it (Matthew 5:21-22, KJV), and bring your own inner discernment to bear, for the Preface invites testing, not submission. The common misreading to avoid is treating her "Science" as positive thinking or willpower over matter; it is nearer to a claim that matter was never the ground of reality at all, and that healing is simply seeing the spiritual fact that was always true (Gospel of Thomas 33.5-9). Questions open this door; be slow to close it with easy answers.