In 1931, Nona Brooks, one of Divine Science's three founding sisters, waived the denomination's formal training requirements to ordain a former electrical engineer named Emmet Fox. Within the year he was leading New York's Divine Science Church of the Healing Christ, and within a few more he was filling the 5,500 seat Hippodrome every week, then Carnegie Hall, through the worst years of the Depression.
The Sermon on the Mount, published in 1934, is the book that outlasted the crowds. Fox reads Jesus's teaching in Matthew 5 through 7 as a practical, undogmatic discipline of consciousness, forgiveness and prayer rather than a body of doctrine to be accepted, exactly the reading Divine Science itself was built to teach: that thought directed rightly shapes health and circumstance, and that God is an indwelling presence rather than a being apart from the world, both affirmations already on record for this tradition. The book found an audience Divine Science's own pews never reached. Early members of Alcoholics Anonymous, connected to Fox through his secretary's family ties to co-founder Bill Wilson, attended his lectures and carried the book into the earliest AA meetings, where it stood alongside The Upper Room and Henry Drummond's The Greatest Thing in the World as one of the few texts the fellowship read together before the Big Book existed.
A small New Thought denomination's pulpit produced a text still read for reasons that have little to do with Divine Science by name, which is itself a kind of footprint: not a hymn or a painting bearing the tradition's mark, but a working idea that walked out the door and kept going.