Ernest Holmes

Ernest Holmes read Emerson at nineteen and said afterwards that everything he later taught was in there somewhere. He studied Christian Science, then took classes with Emma Curtis Hopkins, lectured on mental healing in Los Angeles through the 1920s to audiences that outgrew every hall he hired, and in 1926 published The Science of Mind, which is at once a philosophy, a textbook and a manual of practice.

Its centre is a technique he named spiritual mind treatment. A treatment is not a petition and is not addressed to a listening deity who may or may not consent. It is a structured affirmative statement, worked through in stages, whose purpose is to change the practitioner's own conviction about the situation, on the premise that a universal creative Mind responds impersonally and lawfully to the thought held in it. Holmes drew the metaphor from science on purpose: he wanted a method that could be stated, taught and used by anyone, and tested by whether it worked.

He was a synthesiser rather than a revelator, and said so. He drew on New Thought healing, on transcendentalism, on the idealist philosophy he had read, and on whatever contemporary psychology he found useful, and he was open about the borrowing in a way that founders often are not.

Holmes founded the Institute of Religious Science and School of Philosophy in Los Angeles in 1927 and spent the next two decades resisting what his own success was doing to it. He had built, as he saw it, a teaching that anyone could take back into their own tradition, and he was reluctant to charter churches, ordain ministers or acquire the machinery of a denomination, on the ground that all of that would harden a method into a creed.

The machinery arrived anyway. Chapters became churches, practitioners were licensed, ministers were trained and ordained, and the movement eventually divided into two organisations that spent decades apart before partially reuniting. Holmes accepted the outcome late and without much enthusiasm, and the movement's literature is candid about his hesitation.

His wider influence runs well past his own congregations. The vocabulary of affirmative prayer, of thought as causative, and of a lawful rather than a bargaining relation to the divine passed from Religious Science into the American self help and prosperity literature of the mid twentieth century and from there into common speech, usually without attribution. The atlas records him as the founder of a specific movement and as one of the more traceable sources of a much larger and vaguer body of popular belief.