5. A New Apostle

Go back to reading about the unhappy turn of events for the Riverside Sulcers.

Church Dedicated by A.A. Sulcer in 1901

There was a knock on the boarding house door, and Emma Davis opened it to see two wagons carrying 17 native Californians who had come to her for healing. They had heard about her from a religious Spaniard named Alvarado whose granddaughter had come to see her about faith healing, and was translating for them now. She was a powerful woman, in her mid-50s that that time, and truly “on a mission”. Emma prayed and “treated” them in the manner taught to her back in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy. According to her own story, the word spread, and soon 40-50 natives were coming to experience her brand of “Christian Science”, based around the idea that Christ’s commandment to heal the sick was inseparable from that of teaching the gospel. The natives undoubtedly thought of it as a kind of magic.

Indian women, with blankets on their heads, and bare feet, came also and without an interpreter, but made me understand by putting their hand wherever their trouble was. I recall one who came, in very apparent distress; tears raining down her face. After treatment the lady of the house gave her something to eat and drink, and she went away seeming very thankful. But she did not forget what had been done for her. She came back later, not for help, but to tell me that she was well. Putting her hand on my shoulder and pointing upward, she said, in her broken tongue, “Good Spirit.” What a reward there was in this for me, when I remembered that this woman belonged to the class that the Master mentioned when he said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Emma Stanton Davis

Eventually the local priest put a stop to it. Indeed, the white Christian community was not as fast to accept her, and even tried to prosecute her. She persevered, a woman on a mission, holding “reading sessions” and other services in her room at the YMCA. Gradually well-to-do “patients” sought her out and eventually her services found better venues and more acceptance from the town.

Within 10 years, none other than A.A. Sulcer, former town doctor of Riverside, would be standing next to her, giving the dedication address of the beautiful (now historic) building at 6th and Lemon Street, first Christian Science Church on the west coast, having grown from 10 members to over 200.

By the time of the death of Cullen, the young Christian Science Church was already on its way to becoming the fastest growing religion in America. Its roots lay in the work of metaphysical healers such as Phineas Quimby, and Franz Mesmer (whose work inspired the term “mesmerize”). Unlike similar, more amorphous movements like “New Thought”, Eddy and her early followers developed it into a durable mainstream religion, with brick and mortar churches, legitimatized by reference to the healing powers of Jesus, boasting over a quarter of a million followers at its peak. It remains a vibrant institution today, despite many detractors who consider it neither very “Christian” nor “scientific”.

Mark Twain, a contemporary of A.A – also a bereaved father struggling with bitterness – recognized Eddy’s achievement, though he remained profoundly critical of it:

She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with a break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into eternity as fancies of the waking day melt into the dreams of sleep…

Closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the planet, and, in several ways, as easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it.

Mark Twain

In his grief, mixed with a profound disillusionment with his own vocation, A.A. embraced the spiritual balm and key ideas of Mary Baker Eddy: health and happiness can only be achieved through practices based on the mind – not through material means, or even simple faith in superstitious beliefs. Pain and suffering, and even death, is a mere illusion, a hell on earth that we create with our “Mortal Mind”; rational insight frees us from worldly troubles and brings us closer to the “Divine Mind”, that is, God.

Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures, the central text of Christian Science, first published in 1875 by Mary Baker Eddy

A.A. became completely committed. He would eventually write,

It is within the reach of all who can set aside their false beliefs and with perfect reliance upon the Divine promise come into the Light, and that no real and permanent cures, no perfection of body or mind, can ever be attained without it.

A. A. Sulcer

He withdrew from his medical practice and began working with Emma as a healer, referring cases to her such as a young girl who had drunk gasoline, and another child who had been bitten by a spider; these cases became part of the testimonials that were published in the Journal. By 1895, A.A. was a member of the “mother Church” in Boston and was a regular contributor of his own articles. Bringing the perspective of a “born-again” physician, with strong rational arguments as well as an emotional appeal that spoke from the heart, his voice began to draw attention within the highest circles of the Church, including Mary Baker Eddy herself.

Mary Baker Eddy

By 1898, Eddy decided to organize and control the increasingly articulate messages being promulgated by her vocal followers. Modeling herself after Jesus, she decided to create a group of twelve, called the Board of Lectureship. Based on Davis’ recommendation, and A.A.’s reputation as a writer, she summoned both Davis and Sulcer to Concord for personal training, soon afterward naming him as an official lecturer, one of two covering the West Coast. Meanwhile, Christian Science was increasingly under attack by mainstream church leaders.

A few months later, “Mother Eddy” read an account of A.A.’s lecture in Santa Barbara, and praising his “logic, truth-told, and manner of impressing it on the minds of men”, offered Sulcer the leadership post in the brand-new church in London, England. Despite that fact that she offered him a generous salary, and urged him to accept it as a mission directly from God, A.A. declined the job after discussing the opportunity with his family.

We don’t know what A.A.’s reasons were. He must have been conflicted to go against the wishes of the leader of the church who was, in a real sense, worshipped by her followers. Perhaps he was trying to keep a struggling family together.

Becoming an apostle of a renegade religion can cause a strain on any family. Although it is true that the death of children was more common A.A.’s time than ours, they were a small family and had gone through this ordeal twice now. The Sulcers’ marriage went through a crisis. Since arriving at Riverside she had kept her connections with Vermilion County, spending a summer with her sister-in-law Hannah Sulcer Timmons. Now, in the closing years of the century, with A.A. following his new obsession, they divorced, and she took Henry back East, where they settled around her relatives in Indianapolis where Henry would attend high school. To anyone who asked, she described herself as a widow.

A.A. remained in Riverside, alone, in his 60s, profoundly dedicated to the mission of promoting Christian Science in California, having passed up the opportunity to start the church in London. He became a sought-after lecturer; it is interesting to note that his son Henry, grandson Sandy, and even some of the following generation, themselves became known as prolific public speakers. That gene seems to run strong in the Sulcer clan.

The Loring Opera House, Riverside, A.A.’s hometown venue

Over the next four years he frequently spoke to large audiences. Introduced by a mayor, doctor, or other notable figure in the town, usually not a Christian Science member, he would walk onto garlanded stages of local opera houses and meeting halls in San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Jose, Chino, Portland, Fortuna, Salem, Spokane, and even Phoenix, Arizona. These same stages were often hosts to great performers and speakers of the time. For example, he was a frequent speaker at the Loring Opera House in Riverside, a stage familiar to Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, and John Phillips Souza; it also held the memory of the community skit he and Mary Jane had put on together in happier times.

Now his purpose was different: to introduce Christian Science to a skeptical public. He always began speaking in a measured, sober tone, developing his theme in a way designed to get permission from the audience to keep an open mind. First, he would suggest that “things are not what they seem”, meaning that we cannot simply trust our senses recognize truth, giving numerous examples of this.

Next, he would solicit sympathy by describing the Church as a much-misunderstood underdog, and its members as noble sufferers of persecution. He turned the tables on medical science by pulling out his trump card – it was the traditional doctors, he claimed, that somehow got a free pass in public opinion despite their dismal performance in actually curing disease.

Drugs are useless and are only resorted to because to the world’s blinded sense there seems to be nothing better; and today I most unhesitatingly aver, as I review the past with its drawn battles and its defeats by disease and death, that I greatly doubt if doctors can, by the mere administration of drugs, cure anybody of anything… Medicine is a conspicuous failure. The world has sought in vain a remedy for material ills through material laws and means.

A. A. Sulcer

Here with a kind of dreadful authority Dr. Sulcer could bring all the power of his bitter experience; conjuring up the image of a doctor standing powerlessly by the bedside of his own children:

If death comes to one of the unfortunates, and some physician of the “old school” who has previously inspected the tongue, felt the pulse, and looked wisdom as doth the owl, writes the mortuary certificate, the public rolls its eyes heavenward, bows to the will of God, announces that everything has been done which can be done, and praises the powerless medical attendant for keeping the patient alive so long.

A. A. Sulcer

Once the audience had been primed to be open to alternative ideas, he would then change gears and connect the subject to the Christianity of his listeners – which he easily assumed. He openly addressed the “elephant in the room”: was Christian Science just another fad? Here he actually cited facts and figures to refute this, and demonstrated the legitimate nature of the church, dating back to the nature of Jesus as a healer. If health is a factor of the “divine mind”, then there is a strong incentive for the ill – or “worried well” – to seek out the message of Mrs. Eddy.

In addition to lectures, Dr. Sulcer was frequently quoted in the press defending the church against its many detractors. He was a keen debater and not to be trifled with. He had particular fun mocking a Canadian doctor who promoted milk and raw eggs as a sure-fire cure for drug addiction. In another case, when a local evangelist declared illness to be “as real and dangerous as the mighty sea”, A. A. countered by asking whether he thought evil and sin itself to be “real”. If it was, and could not be fought with physical remedies, then why should we expect disease to respond to them either?

He took an intellectually energetic approach to winning over skeptics, which began to be questioned by the Church leadership. For example, the director of publications was not comfortable with his comparison of the spiritual aspects of Christian Science with Hindu mystics who had similar teachings about a single metaphysical reality. He painstakingly defended his reference to Eastern religions:

Deny error and our association with it unhesitatingly, but recognize Truth wherever found. If Hindooism has in it something which is good and much that is bad be no readier to acknowledge the one than the other…There are, too, those who have delved into philosophies and have been brought by those philosophies to see powerful arguments and sound reason beneath the statement that there is no Reality but God. This they have found stated clearly and with indisputable definiteness…
To deny that such had been the teaching would make them feel that we were either ignorant or untrustworthy, we would antagonize and lose them, and they would lose the grandeur and beauty of our message.

A. A. Sulcer

By the time A.A. Sulcer had become fully committed to the Christian Science message, it had become his life, and he had lost just about everything else that mattered to him: his profession and his family. The question would become – what if he lost Christian Science, too? It turned out that his trials were not over.

Go on to read the final chapter in his remarkable story.

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