Centers for Spiritual Living · Centennial
A Century of
Science of Mind
1927 — 2027
A century ago, a self-taught farm kid from Maine stood up in a Los Angeles hotel theater and said something radical: change your thinking, and you change your life. People are still finding out he was right. Scroll on. The whole story is below, and the little blue buttons are hiding the good stuff.
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Part One · The Roots
Before the Beginning
Every big idea has grandparents. Ours include a Concord philosopher who found God in the present tense, and a Maine clockmaker who suspected that what his patients believed had everything to do with whether they got well.
The Grandfather of the Whole Idea
Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes Self-Reliance and preaches a God found here and now, in every person. Transcendentalism becomes the seedbed of American metaphysics and, sixty years later, the lightning bolt that wakes a Boston shop clerk named Ernest.
The Clockmaker of Portland, Maine
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby opens his healing practice in Portland. No medicine and no ceremony, just a conviction that the mind runs deeper than anyone guessed. New Thought historians call him the father of the movement.
A Rival School Is Born
Mary Baker Eddy, once a Quimby patient, publishes Science and Health and builds Christian Science into a national force. The family tree of American metaphysics starts branching fast.
The Teacher of Teachers
Emma Curtis Hopkins strikes out on her own in Chicago and starts training the people who will found nearly every branch of New Thought. Remember her face. She shows up again at a very important moment in 1924.
Unity Opens Its Doors
Charles and Myrtle Fillmore found Unity in Kansas City, and Malinda Cramer’s Divine Science takes root out west the same era. Hopkins’ students are building institutions now.
The First Runaway Bestseller
Ralph Waldo Trine’s In Tune with the Infinite sells by the millions and puts New Thought on nightstands across America.
Harvard Takes Notice
Philosopher William James devotes part of The Varieties of Religious Experience to the young movement, dubbing it “the religion of healthy-mindedness.” The movement was barely forty years old and already had Harvard’s attention.
The Judge Rules for Mind
Judge Thomas Troward, retired from the bench in India, delivers his Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science, metaphysics argued with a jurist’s precision. Holmes will later study him line by line. When CSL classes speak of “the Law,” Troward is in the room.
The Family Gets a Name Tag
The International New Thought Alliance forms, uniting the independent streams under one banner. Its Declaration of Principles follows in 1917. The stage is set, and out in California a young man named Ernest is filling notebooks.
How the Teaching Traveled
One idea, many hands. The teal lines lead to our branch of the family. Tap the blue buttons for the stories.
Part Two · The Founding
A Farm Boy from Maine
Ernest Holmes left school at fifteen, read Emerson until the pages wore soft, and never stopped asking one question: what do we already know that we haven’t put to work?
The Journey West
Four stops, one idea gathering steam. Tap a station for the story.
1927 · The Anchor Year
Science of Mind Arrives
1927 is the founding year. The Science of Mind is in print: part philosophy, part practice manual, all confidence that the universe responds to how we think. Holmes’s Sunday lectures are filling the Ambassador Hotel’s 625-seat theater, and in February he incorporates the Institute of Religious Science. The teaching now has a book, a crowd, and a home.
His one-line summary still holds up: Religious Science is “a correlation of laws of science, opinions of philosophy, and revelations of religion applied to human needs.”
1927 · The Year Keeps Giving
A Theater and a Magazine
Before the year is out Holmes also marries Hazel Durkee Foster, moves his overflowing Sunday crowd to the 1,295-seat Wilshire Ebell Theatre, and launches Science of Mind magazine that October. The magazine has come out every month since. That is nearly 1,200 issues and counting.
The Rooms Kept Getting Bigger
Seats filled on a Sunday morning, until radio made seats beside the point.
Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.Ernest Holmes · The Science of Mind
Part Three · The Movement Finds Its Voice
From Lecture Hall to Living Room
Through depression and war the teaching kept traveling: into print, over the airwaves, and out into the wider culture, often without a return address.
Meanwhile, in New York…
Emmet Fox packs Manhattan halls with Depression-era crowds and writes The Sermon on the Mount and The Mental Equivalent, books CSL classrooms still dog-ear today.
The Textbook Takes Final Form
Holmes releases the revised and expanded Science of Mind, the edition on the shelf of nearly every practitioner since. If you own one book in this whole story, it is probably this one.
Honors from Half a World Away
Andhra University in India awards Holmes an honorary doctorate. The farm boy from Maine is now Dr. Holmes on two continents.
On the Air, and Officially a Movement
The radio program This Thing Called Life begins, and the affiliated churches organize as the International Association of Religious Science Churches. What started as one man’s lecture series now belongs to thousands.
Positive Thinking Goes Mainstream
Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking tops the bestseller lists. The ideas sound familiar, and Peale himself knew exactly whom to thank.
Growing Pains
The Institute reorganizes as the Church of Religious Science. Not every congregation signs on, and the field divides into two branches. Keep this moment in mind. The story circles back in 2011, and it has a happy ending.
There is a power for good in the universe, greater than you are, and you can use it.Ernest Holmes · This Thing Called Life
Part Four · The Last Chapter, and the Best One
A Sermon by the Sea
In eighteen months at the end of his life, Ernest Holmes gave the movement its most treasured talk, its grandest home, and its hardest goodbye.
August 15, 1959
Asilomar
At the summer conference on the Monterey Peninsula, Holmes delivers what everyone simply calls the Sermon by the Sea: unscripted, personal, and quoted at CSL gatherings ever since. Asilomar itself becomes hallowed ground for generations of conference-goers.
January – April 1960
The Church That Ernest Built
Founder’s Church of Religious Science opens in Los Angeles in January 1960, a great round sanctuary with no corners to hide in. At its dedication Holmes quietly tells friends he has had a profound mystical experience. He passes on April 7, 1960, at seventy-three. The movement he never meant to start now numbers in the hundreds of congregations.
Find me one person who is for something and against nothing… and I will find another savior.Ernest Holmes · Sermon by the Sea, 1959
Interlude · The Listening Room
Hear the Century
No microphone followed Ernest around in 1919, but his words survive, and volunteers have read them into the public domain. Press play and let the founding era talk. Every track here is free to hear and free to share.
Where to Hear the Real Thing
The tracks above are volunteers giving voice to public domain pages. Ernest’s own voice was recorded too, hundreds of times over: lectures, meditations, and the radio years. Those recordings remain under copyright, so we cannot stream them on this page. They live with the Science of Mind Archives in Golden, Colorado, which shares them through its shop and subscriptions.
- ListenHundreds of recordings of Ernest speaking (opens in new tab): lectures, meditations, and talks in his own warm baritone.
- ExploreThe story of his radio ministry (opens in new tab), This Thing Called Life, with surviving broadcasts from the 1950s.
- ReadThe Sermon by the Sea itself. No recording of the Asilomar talk has ever been released; his most treasured address survives as a transcript (opens in new tab), in the words of those who wrote it down.
There is One Life, that Life is God, that Life is perfect, that Life is my life now.The classic Science of Mind affirmation
Part Five · Two Branches, One Teaching
The River Splits
For half a century the movement flowed in two channels: United Church of Religious Science on one bank, Religious Science International on the other. Same headwaters, same destination.
Divided — and Reunited
One stream becomes two in 1954, and two become one again in 2011. Tap the confluence.
Both Branches Keep Planting
Churches open across North America and beyond: Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, Cleveland, Sacramento, Seattle. Whatever the letterhead said, the teaching was the same.
The Teaching Goes Global (Again)
Louise Hay, who trained as a Religious Science practitioner and minister in New York, publishes You Can Heal Your Life and reaches tens of millions of readers. In 1986 Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith founds Agape in Los Angeles. The family tree keeps growing new branches.
A New Name Takes Hold
One by one, local churches adopt the warmer, wider name “Center for Spiritual Living.” The home office moves to Golden, Colorado in 2006, and by 2008 both parent organizations have “Centers for Spiritual Living” in their names. You can see where this is headed.
Part Six · Whole Again
One Hundred Years of Yes
The split healed. The teaching endured. And in 2027, a movement born in a hotel theater celebrates its first full century.
The Reunification
After more than fifty years apart, the two organizations vote to become one: today’s Centers for Spiritual Living. Dr. Kenn Gordon is elected the unified movement’s first Spiritual Leader in 2012.
A New Leader, and a Fast Pivot
Dr. Edward Viljoen is elected Spiritual Leader in February 2020, weeks before a pandemic sends every center on earth online almost overnight. A teaching about adaptable consciousness got a very practical exam. It passed.
The Centennial
One hundred years since Science of Mind arrived: the Institute incorporated, the magazine launched, and the teaching set loose in the world, all in 1927. Not one anniversary but three, and a worldwide community celebrating all of them.
We have launched a Movement which, in the next 100 years, will be the great new religious impulsion of modern times.Ernest Holmes, 1958
A Loving Conjecture
What Would Ernest Say Today?
We don’t know, of course. No one does. But after a century of reading him we can make an affectionate guess. It might sound something like this. What do you think?
A hundred years! And yet Life does not count birthdays; It is forever announcing Itself new. So let us not congratulate ourselves too long. The Principle we teach is no older and no younger than it was when the universe first thought of Itself.
I said we had launched a Movement that would become the great new spiritual impulsion of modern times. I still say it. But hear me: a movement is not buildings, nor books, nor even this fine long timeline you have made. A movement is people using a Principle. The proof was never in the crowds at the Ambassador; it was in the one man or woman who walked out changed.
Your century has machines that think faster than we ever dreamed. Good. Then it needs, more than ever, people who think truly. That is your work. Do not merely admire what we built; use what we found. Treat, and then move your feet.
The next hundred years belong to whoever is for something and against nothing. I should very much like to see it. Perhaps, in some way I always suspected, I shall.
— ErnestAs imagined by his students, with gratitude. Not his words, but our best listening. Tell us what you think he’d say.
The second century starts with you.
Find a community anywhere in the world at csl.org (opens in new tab).
For the Curious and the Hurried
The Century at a Glance
When was Centers for Spiritual Living founded?
The movement counts its beginning from 1927, when Ernest Holmes incorporated the Institute of Religious Science in Los Angeles and Science of Mind magazine began publishing, with his textbook The Science of Mind newly in print. Today’s Centers for Spiritual Living took its present form in 2011, when the movement’s two branches reunited after more than fifty years apart.
Who was Ernest Holmes?
Ernest Holmes (1887 to 1960) was a self-taught philosopher from Lincoln, Maine who founded Religious Science, wrote The Science of Mind, and taught weekly in Los Angeles for over three decades. His radio program This Thing Called Life carried the teaching to a national audience.
What does the centennial celebrate?
2027 marks one hundred years of Science of Mind: the Institute of Religious Science was incorporated in February 1927, and Science of Mind magazine has published every month since October 1927. Centers worldwide are celebrating through 2026 and 2027.
What is the difference between Science of Mind and Religious Science?
Science of Mind is the teaching; Religious Science is the movement built around it. The two names are used almost interchangeably, and Centers for Spiritual Living is the organization that carries them forward today.
How big is Centers for Spiritual Living now?
More than 300 spiritual communities worldwide, with a home office in Golden, Colorado. CSL San Jose, host of this timeline, is one of them.
Photo Credits & Sources
Historical photographs via Wikimedia Commons: Ernest Holmes by Johan Hagemeyer (CC BY 4.0); Founder’s Church by Downtowngal (CC BY-SA 3.0); Ebell of Los Angeles (CC BY-SA 3.0); Merrill Hall, Asilomar (CC BY-SA 3.0); portraits of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Judge Thomas Troward, P. P. Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Myrtle Fillmore, William James, and Norman Vincent Peale, and the Ambassador Hotel postcard, are in the public domain. Timeline drawn from Centers for Spiritual Living histories, the Science of Mind Archives, and published references on the New Thought movement. Prepared for the CSL Centennial, 2026.