The Promise and Perils of Ernest Holmes
The Yankee mystic was poised to become America’s great metaphysical voice — but complexities intervened
Could 20th century America — the land of positive-thinking, recovery movements, and self-help — produce the morally persuasive, mass transcendental religion for which many seekers yearned?
The answer seemed to lie within one of the era’s most unique and persuasive metaphysical thinkers: Ernest Holmes (1887–1960). In the early 20th century, the stout, rotund Yankee journeyed from his native Maine to Los Angeles to spread his version of the positivity gospel or New Thought, the umbrella term for modernity’s disparate mind-power theologies. For a time, Holmes’s Religious Science or Science of Mind movement showed promise of developing into the great American metaphysical faith.
In actuality, the last thing the intellectual and spiritual seeker wanted was to start a religion. From Holmes’s early days on the metaphysical speaking circuit in the 1910s until his death in Los Angeles in April 1960, he mounted plaintive resistance to enthusiasts who transformed his mind-power philosophy into a network of churches replete with textbooks, rule-making bodies, and enough factional splits and infighting to populate a New Thought version of I, Claudius. At the January…
