A Living Tradition of the Americas
Ernest Shurtleff Holmes was twenty-four years old, working in a grocery store in Venice, California, when he read Thomas Troward's Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science and recognized, in its pages, the philosophical framework for everything he had been groping toward. Troward was a retired British judge who had served in the Punjab and spent his retirement years producing a set of lectures on the mechanics of mental causation — dry, rigorous, grounded in the psychology and physics of his era, unlike anything in the popular New Thought literature of the time. Holmes had already read Mary Baker Eddy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Hindu scriptures. He had a self-educated mind of unusual breadth and a temperament constitutionally incapable of accepting easy answers. What Troward gave him was the logic. The universe, Troward argued, operates through impersonal law at all levels — physical, mental, and spiritual — and the human mind, properly oriented, can consciously cooperate with those laws to produce definite results. God was not a personality issuing favors and denials. God was the Infinite Intelligence that was the ground of all existence — and that Intelligence was available to every human being, not as a petition to an external power but as a recognition of an internal truth.
Holmes spent the next fifteen years building this recognition into a system. He called it Religious Science — or, equivalently, the Science of Mind — and in 1926 he published its textbook: a dense, carefully organized work that drew on Troward, Emerson, the Hindu Vedanta, Christian mysticism, idealist philosophy, and the New Thought healing tradition, synthesizing them into a coherent account of how the universe works and what a human being can do with that knowledge. The book was not devotional literature. It was a philosophical argument, complete with a glossary, an index, and supporting quotations from world religious traditions across forty centuries. Holmes intended it to be taken seriously as intellectual work. It was also, unmistakably, a work of spiritual power — the product of a man who had spent years testing his ideas in weekly lectures and private healing sessions and found that they worked.
Religious Science is the most intellectually systematic of the American New Thought traditions. Where Christian Science dissolved matter into divine Mind, and Unity softened New Thought's edges into a practical, livable Christianity, Holmes aimed for something more ambitious: a complete account of the relationship between Spirit, Law, and the individual soul that could stand alongside the great philosophical and mystical texts of human history. That he did not entirely succeed — that the edifice shows the marks of one man's eclectic reading — is less important than that he tried. The movement he founded is today centered in roughly four hundred communities worldwide under the banner of Centers for Spiritual Living, publishing the oldest continuously running New Thought magazine in America, training practitioners in methods of affirmative prayer that have shaped the modern self-help and positive psychology landscape in ways that are often unacknowledged.
I. The New Thought Lineage — Where Holmes Began
Religious Science is the most philosophically developed branch of the New Thought movement — that diffuse nineteenth-century American current that arose from the intersection of Transcendentalism, Mesmerism, Protestant individualism, and the healing tradition associated with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866). The lineage's central conviction was that the mind is causally prior to the body, that consciousness shapes material reality, and that health, prosperity, and peace are the natural conditions of a life properly aligned with spiritual law.
Holmes entered this tradition through multiple doors simultaneously. Born in 1887 in Lincoln, Maine, the youngest of nine sons in a poor family, he left school before completing any formal education and arrived in Boston around 1905, educating himself voraciously in the public libraries. There he encountered Emerson — whose essays on self-reliance, the Oversoul, and the correspondence between inner and outer reality became the philosophical bedrock of everything Holmes would later build. He worked in a store from 1908 to 1910 to pay tuition at the Leland Powers School of Expression in Boston, where he was introduced to Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health and to Christian Science; he absorbed its central insight — that disease is mental in origin and can be treated mentally — while ultimately rejecting its metaphysical radicalism, its ecclesiastical structure, and its claim to unique authority.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1912, where his brother Fenwick was working as a Congregationalist minister. Together they studied widely: Troward, Emerson, William Walker Atkinson, Christian D. Larson, and the Hindu scriptures in translation. Then Holmes found Troward's Edinburgh Lectures, and the encounter reorganized everything. Thomas Troward (1847–1916) was not a popular writer. His prose is technical and his arguments demanding. But Holmes found in him the one New Thought-adjacent thinker who had worked out the philosophical mechanics rigorously — who had asked not just "does mental causation work?" but "what is the structure of mind and law that makes it work?" — and had answered with a framework that Holmes spent the rest of his life elaborating.
II. The System — One Infinite Intelligence
The core of Holmes's thought is a metaphysics of radical unity. There is one Life, one Intelligence, one Power in the universe. Holmes used the word God for it, but the God of Religious Science is not the personal deity of biblical theism. It is the Infinite Intelligence that is the ground of all existence — immanent in everything, constituting the very substance of reality, accessible to every person not through prayer to an external being but through recognition of an internal truth.
Holmes organized his system into three levels, which he called The Thing Itself, The Way the Thing Works, and The Thing Itself Made Manifest. The Thing Itself is God/Spirit/Universal Mind — the absolute, unconditioned Infinite Intelligence that is all there is. The Way the Thing Works is Law — the creative medium through which Spirit operates, the mental-causal mechanism by which thought becomes form. The Thing Itself Made Manifest is the world of experience — physical reality, health, relationships, abundance, everything we encounter — which is the result of the Law's operation on the patterns given to it by Spirit and by individual human minds.
This structure has a crucial implication: the universe is not a place where petitions may or may not be granted by a sovereign deity. It is a responsive medium. The Law operates impersonally, the way gravity operates impersonally — it does not pick favorites, does not require pleasing, does not demand worthiness. It simply responds to whatever consciousness is given to it. "The Law is like the soil," Holmes wrote — it grows what you plant. The individual mind, as an expression of Universal Mind, participates in this creative process whether it intends to or not. The task of Religious Science practice is to make that participation conscious, deliberate, and aligned with good.
Compared to the other New Thought traditions, this represents a distinct theological inflection. Mary Baker Eddy had argued that matter is an illusion — that disease, limitation, and death are errors of mortal mind, not real at all. Holmes rejected this. Matter for Holmes is not an error; it is spiritual substance taking material form through the operation of Law. It is real, it is good, and it is fully responsive to consciousness. The distinction matters practically: Religious Science does not oppose medicine, does not ask practitioners to deny physical reality, and does not generate the conflict with conventional healthcare that has shadowed Christian Science. For Holmes, healing is not the correction of an error but the alignment of consciousness with its own spiritual nature — from which physical results naturally follow.
III. The Founder — Ernest Holmes (1887–1960)
Holmes's biography is one of the more improbable in the history of American religion. He had almost no formal education. He spent years in obscurity, working ordinary jobs in Boston and Los Angeles, reading in every spare hour. He arrived in Los Angeles with no credentials, no institutional backing, and no more than a self-educated theology still being assembled in notebooks.
In 1916 he was invited to speak at the Metaphysical Library in Los Angeles. He spoke on Thomas Troward and the Edinburgh Lectures. Enough people came — and stayed — that he found he had a public. He began lecturing regularly, and his audiences grew. By the early 1920s he was filling theatrical venues, a tall, warm, intellectually commanding presence who could hold a Sunday audience with the combination of systematic rigor and personal warmth that distinguished him from most New Thought lecturers of the era.
He published his first books in 1919 — Creative Mind and Creative Mind and Success — which circulated his ideas in popular form. Then he spent the early 1920s writing the major work. The Science of Mind was published in 1926: a comprehensive, densely cross-referenced philosophical and spiritual system, the only New Thought text that could genuinely be called a summa. Holmes was thirty-nine years old.
In February 1927 he incorporated the Institute of Religious Science and School of Philosophy and began publishing Science of Mind magazine — the oldest continuously published New Thought periodical in America, still in print nearly a century later. He was now a public figure in Los Angeles, lecturing every Sunday morning at a theatre in the Ambassador Hotel to audiences of 625 and more.
Holmes was personally warm, intellectually eclectic, and constitutionally suspicious of institutional religion. He had no interest in founding a church. The Institute was explicitly not a church — it was a school, a publication house, a healing center. The organizational tension this created would eventually produce a split that haunted the movement for decades.
He revised The Science of Mind in 1938 — a substantially expanded edition that became the standard text for the movement — and continued writing, lecturing, and training practitioners until his death. He died on April 7, 1960, at seventy-three, having watched the movement he had never wanted to institutionalize grow to 100,000 members in sixty-two churches. He had spent the last decade of his life, with mixed feelings, providing the institutional infrastructure it had created for itself.
IV. The Intellectual Architecture — Troward, Emerson, and the Hindu Vedanta
Holmes was not an original philosopher in the technical sense — he was a great synthesizer, and the materials he synthesized were explicitly acknowledged. The Science of Mind includes a long "Supporting Evidence" section at the back, consisting of parallel passages from the world's religious and philosophical traditions organized by theme, demonstrating that the central insights of Religious Science are found independently across human history. This was not mere decoration. Holmes genuinely believed he had identified the perennial philosophy — the universal metaphysical truth that underlies all authentic spiritual traditions — and the supporting evidence was his demonstration.
Thomas Troward provided the philosophical framework. Troward's two-level theory of mind — the objective (conscious, reasoning, initiating) mind and the subjective (creative, impersonal, law-like) mind — became the architectural core of Holmes's system. The subjective mind, for Troward and Holmes alike, does not reason; it creates. It takes whatever the conscious mind impresses upon it and works to manifest that impression in physical reality. This made prayer not a petition but an impression — a planting of seed in the soil of creative Law.
Ralph Waldo Emerson provided the philosophical aesthetics: the Oversoul, the correspondence between the inner and outer, the confidence that the individual consciousness participates in and expresses the universal. Holmes never stopped quoting Emerson. The Science of Mind opens with an epigraph from Emerson and returns to him throughout.
The Hindu Vedanta provided the metaphysical categories: the unity of Brahman and Atman, the individual soul as an expression of Universal Soul, the relationship between the Infinite and the finite. Holmes had read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita carefully, and their influence on his understanding of the relationship between God and the individual mind is pervasive. He was also influenced by Blavatsky's Theosophy, though more in background than in foreground — the Theosophical idea of universal spiritual laws operating through inner planes of existence runs through his system without being explicitly named.
What made Holmes's synthesis unusual — and more intellectually serious than most New Thought writing — was his willingness to engage with German idealism, with Hegel and Berkeley, with the claim that Mind is the ultimate reality and matter its expression. Most New Thought writers borrowed the practical language of mind-cure without engaging its philosophical foundations. Holmes built from the foundations up.
V. The Practice — Spiritual Mind Treatment
The distinctive practice of Religious Science is the Spiritual Mind Treatment (SMT) — sometimes simply called "treatment" — a formalized method of affirmative prayer that Holmes developed from Hopkins's "Scientific Christian Mental Practice" and Troward's framework of mental causation.
A treatment is not a petition. The practitioner does not ask God for help on behalf of the person being treated. The practitioner — whether praying for themselves or for another — moves through five stages that constitute a complete act of spiritual recognition.
The first stage is Recognition: the practitioner grounds their consciousness in the one Infinite Intelligence, recognizing that God is all there is, that the universe is spiritual in nature, that there is no condition beyond the reach of this Intelligence. The second stage is Unification: the practitioner recognizes that they — and the person being treated — are inseparable from this Infinite Intelligence, expressions of it, not separate from it. The third stage is Realization: the practitioner states the specific good being claimed — health, harmony, abundance, clarity — with specificity and conviction, declaring it as already present at the level of spiritual truth. The fourth stage is Thanksgiving: the practitioner accepts and gives thanks for what has been realized, moving out of effortful claiming into relaxed reception. The fifth stage is Release: the practitioner releases the treatment into the Law, trusting that it will manifest, the way a planted seed is released to the soil.
The logic of treatment rests on one premise: that the practitioner's own consciousness is the variable. The Law responds to the level of spiritual conviction carried by the mind giving direction. A half-hearted treatment, one clouded by doubt or limitation, gives the Law a doubtful, limited pattern to work with. A treatment carried in complete recognition — the practitioner fully knowing, in Holmes's language, that "it is done" — gives the Law a clear, complete pattern. This is why Religious Science invests heavily in training practitioners: not because special powers are conferred by certification, but because the quality of consciousness in treatment is cultivatable and teachable.
The Practitioner system is Religious Science's distinctive institutional contribution to the healing tradition. Practitioners complete formal training in Science of Mind philosophy and treatment methodology, pass examinations, and are licensed by their center. They work professionally — performing treatments for clients, much as a Christian Science Practitioner does, but without the Christian Science imperative to refuse medical care. A Religious Science Practitioner treats alongside medicine; the claim is that consciousness and body are both real, both responsive to spiritual practice, and that the two approaches reinforce rather than contradict each other.
VI. The Science of Mind — The Textbook
The Science of Mind (1926, revised 1938) is the movement's founding document and primary scripture. The 1926 first edition is in the public domain and available at archive.org and sacred-texts.com. The 1938 revised edition — substantially expanded, reorganized, and the version used in virtually all Religious Science centers today — is still under copyright but widely available commercially.
The book is organized in three parts. The first is "The Thing Itself" — the metaphysical argument, establishing the nature of God, the nature of mind, and the relationship between them. The second is "The Way It Works" — the applied theology, explaining how the Law of Mind operates and how conscious direction of thought produces results in experience. The third, "What It Does," is practical — applying the theory to healing, abundance, relationships, and other areas of human concern. Each chapter ends with a model treatment illustrating the preceding principle.
The 1938 revised edition is the one Holmes spent the later part of his life elaborating in weekly lectures and publications. Science of Mind magazine, founded 1927 and still published monthly, functions as a continuous commentary on the textbook — Holmes's weekly explorations of its principles in the context of contemporary life, supplemented after his death by contributions from practitioners and teachers in the tradition.
VII. The Founder's Church and the Institutional Ambivalence
Holmes built a school. He did not want to build a church. The distinction mattered enormously to him. A school teaches principles and releases students to apply them. A church creates dependence on an institution, defines orthodoxy, guards its authority, and ultimately becomes, in Holmes's view, precisely the kind of limiting belief system that Religious Science was designed to dissolve.
The problem was that his students wanted a church. By the late 1940s, independent Religious Science centers — some trained by Holmes's Institute, others working from the textbook alone — had proliferated across the country. In 1949 these independent centers established the International Association of Religious Science Churches (IARSC) to coordinate their work. Holmes regarded this development with mixed feelings, understanding the practical need for community and organization while fearing the institutional calcification that inevitably follows.
The crisis came in 1953. The IARSC wanted formal denominational structure. Holmes responded by founding the Church of Religious Science — in 1954 proposing that IARSC churches join the new organization. Forty-six did. Nineteen did not, eventually forming Religious Science International (RSI) in 1972. The Founder's Church of Religious Science — a striking Paul Revere Williams–designed building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles — was dedicated in 1956, Holmes's flagship congregation.
Holmes spent his last years in paradoxical position: founder of a church he had never wanted, lecturing to audiences of thousands, watching the institutional structure he had built with ambivalence grow in directions he could not entirely control. After his death in 1960, the two branches — United Church of Religious Science and Religious Science International — developed along different lines for nearly sixty years, united by the textbook and the Practitioner system but divided by governance and culture.
VIII. The Reunion — Centers for Spiritual Living
The reunion came slowly. Beginning in the early 2000s, the two branches began conversations toward reintegration. After an eight-year process involving nearly four hundred volunteers across both organizations, they formally merged in 2011 under the name Centers for Spiritual Living, with headquarters in Golden, Colorado.
The merged organization includes approximately four hundred centers in twenty-nine countries. It operates with a deliberately non-hierarchical structure, reflecting Holmes's original suspicion of institutional authority: individual centers have substantial autonomy; the central organization provides training, credentialing, educational materials, and the shared magazine. Science of Mind magazine, under the Centers for Spiritual Living umbrella, continues to publish monthly and reports a readership of approximately 100,000.
Several significant organizations trace their lineage to Holmes but operate outside the CSL structure. The Affiliated New Thought Network serves as a loose alliance of independent centers. Global Religious Science Ministries and various regional associations provide community for centers that prefer independence to denominational affiliation. The movement Holmes founded is, by his own design, theologically centripetal but organizationally centrifugal — the textbook holds the center while the institutional forms remain plural.
IX. The Public Domain Texts — Archival Opportunity
Holmes published prolifically in the early years of the movement, and several of his works are firmly in the public domain.
Creative Mind (1919) and Creative Mind and Success (1919) are his earliest works — shorter, more popular treatments of the Science of Mind principles, both firmly public domain and available at archive.org. They introduce the core ideas without the full philosophical elaboration of the 1926 text and remain accessible introductions.
The Science of Mind (1926 first edition) is the major archival candidate. This is the original form of the textbook — more concise than the 1938 revision, more closely tied to Holmes's immediate engagement with Troward and Emerson, and philosophically cleaner in some respects than the later expanded form. Available at archive.org (multiple editions) and at sacred-texts.com. The 1938 revised edition remains under copyright and should not be archived.
The Voice Celestial (1960, co-authored with Fenwick Holmes) — posthumous; copyright status requires checking. Various early essays and magazine contributions may be public domain depending on registration and renewal history.
The 1938 Science of Mind is the version the movement actually uses. Archiving the 1926 first edition would serve the archive's mission of preserving the original form of a significant American religious text.
X. Religious Science and the Aquarian Phenomenon
Religious Science occupies a specific and philosophically significant position in the Aquarian genealogy. It is the tradition in which New Thought's central intuition — that consciousness is causally prior to experience — was developed with the most intellectual rigor, carried to the furthest logical elaboration, and placed most explicitly in the context of the world's religious traditions.
The Aquarian phenomenon, as this archive understands it, is the global response to disenchantment: the attempt, across all cultures simultaneously, to reestablish contact with the sacred in a world where the old institutional mediations have broken down. What distinguishes the American New Thought current — and Religious Science most clearly within it — is that it treats the reenchantment itself as a law-governed process. The sacred is not a mystery to be approached with awe and uncertainty; it is an Infinite Intelligence that operates according to discoverable principles, available to every person who learns those principles and applies them. Holmes was not a mystic in the traditional sense — he was an applied metaphysician. Where the mystic surrenders to the unknown, the Scientist of Mind identifies with the Infinite and proceeds.
This is both the tradition's strength and its characteristic limitation. The strength is accessibility and practicality: Holmes democratized transcendence, made the Infinite available at every economic level and educational background, trained generations of Practitioners in methods that produce documentable results in people's lives. The limitation is what Mitch Horowitz, the most thoughtful contemporary critic of New Thought, calls the "selectivity problem" — the tendency to explain successes by law and failures by inadequate consciousness, a circular structure that can become a source of suffering when someone uses it to explain a child's death or a cancer that does not respond to treatment.
Holmes himself was honest about the limits. "We should be careful not to make a magic out of treatment," he wrote, and the careful reader of The Science of Mind finds a more nuanced thinker than the popular image of New Thought suggests — willing to acknowledge that the Law has parameters, that human consciousness operates within a larger field, that not every problem is simply a matter of better thinking. But the popular reception of the tradition, especially as it filtered into the late twentieth-century self-help industry, often loses these qualifications.
What remains indisputable is the breadth of Holmes's influence, much of it unacknowledged. The language of affirmations — the practice of stating positive truths about oneself in present tense, declaring a desired condition as already real — enters contemporary mainstream culture through the Religious Science / New Thought pipeline, primarily through Holmes and Unity. The concept of "consciousness creating reality" as used in popular psychology is downstream of Holmes, through many intermediaries. The very structure of positive psychology — the emphasis on what is working, on strengths rather than deficits, on the mind's role in shaping experience — traces part of its genealogy to the New Thought tradition Holmes synthesized.
The tradition completes the Americas New Thought cluster: American Spiritualism, which opened the channel to the immaterial; New Thought proper, which systematized mental causation; Theosophy, which globalized the synthesis; Christian Science, which pushed the idealism to its radical limit; Unity, which made the synthesis livable as daily devotional Christianity; and Religious Science, which built the most philosophically ambitious scaffolding for the entire project. Together they constitute one of the most significant movements in American religious history — a movement that has shaped the interior lives of millions without ever achieving the scholarly attention its influence warrants.
Colophon
This profile was researched and composed for the Good Work Library's Living Traditions series, drawing on Holmes's original writings, the Religious Science Wikipedia article, the Centers for Spiritual Living organizational records, the biography at the Science of Mind Archives, and contemporary scholarship on the New Thought movement including the work of Mitch Horowitz. No copyright holder's material was reproduced.
Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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