Two Founders, One Teaching

Divine Science formed from the convergence of two separately developed lines of New Thought teaching: Malinda Cramer's work in San Francisco from the 1880s, and the parallel teaching of the Brooks sisters in Denver, who joined their own instruction with Cramer's under a single shared name once they recognized how closely the two systems agreed. This dual origin, unusual among New Thought bodies, which more typically trace to one individual teacher, gave Divine Science an early institutional structure built around cooperation between independent teaching centres rather than around a single founding figure's personal authority, a pattern some later historians of the movement read as part of why Divine Science trained so many teachers who went on to lead separate, larger organizations rather than concentrating its own growth.

Cramer had herself experienced a claimed healing that turned her toward the teaching she developed, the same origin pattern found across nearly every major New Thought body, suggesting the movement's recurring shape, a personal healing experience generalized afterward into a transmissible teaching, rather than any single founder's biography being the more fundamental thing to explain. Its core teaching holds that God is omnipresent and wholly good, that this presence constitutes the only ultimate reality, and that health and material sufficiency follow from recognizing that presence rather than from petitioning an external power for them.