Ernest Holmes, the Science of Mind founder, was born on a farm in Maine in 1887. Even as a teenager, “he sought knowledge from every source and turned it over in his mind, accepting and rejecting it at will,” wrote his brother and biographer, Fenwicke Holmes. “He never had any use for authority as such and always claimed that if he had to have a hell he would make his own.” When he stumbled upon a relative’s volume of Emerson’s essays, “he read all day and late into the night…. He returned the next day to read more. It was at that moment that life really began for Ernest Holmes.” While studying theater and public speaking in Boston, he discovered Mary Baker Eddy and was intrigued by the Christian Science approach to healing prayer. On a visit home, he claimed to heal his mother of heart trouble. “I changed my own consciousness about her and in some way it reached her,” Holmes explained. “I didn’t know then how it happened but it did.”
In 1912, Holmes moved to California and began preaching his ideas to small groups. Growing interest led to a national speaking tour, and then to the Institute of Religious Science (later incorporated as the Church of Religious Science, and now known as Centers for Spiritual Living). He taught that with the right kind of thinking—particularly affirmative prayer—we can change ourselves, other people, and the world around us.
“Thousands today are using the silent power of Mind to heal their bodies and bring prosperity into their affairs; and the Law is always working in accordance with the belief of those seeking to use it,” Holmes wrote in his 1927 book Science of Mind. Centers for Spiritual Living still use his book to train prayer practitioners, people of “high spiritual consciousness” who are licensed by the CSL parent organization. They follow a five-step prayer method, the Spiritual Mind Treatment, to help others—whether in conversations after church, during walk-in appointments at their congregation’s prayer center, or in private practice as a life coach or spiritual counselor.