Science & Tech Quote by Mary Baker Eddy

“Chastity” here isn’t pitched as private virtue; it’s sold as infrastructure. Mary Baker Eddy frames sexual restraint as literal binding material - “the cement” - holding together “civilization and progress.” That metaphor does heavy lifting: cement is invisible when it works, taken for granted, and catastrophic when it fails. She’s not arguing for modesty so much as for social engineering, turning intimate behavior into a public utility with measurable consequences: stability, progress, and access to truth.

The line also reveals Eddy’s theological strategy. “Without it one cannot attain the Science of Life” folds moral discipline into epistemology. Chastity becomes a prerequisite for knowledge itself, not just holiness. That’s a power move: it places spiritual authority and moral authority on the same axis, implying that those who dissent aren’t merely disobedient but intellectually unfit to grasp reality. In a movement that branded itself as “Christian Science,” the word “Science” is a rhetorical bridge to modernity, borrowing the prestige of empirical certainty while keeping the gate controlled by purity.

Context matters. Eddy is speaking from a 19th-century Protestant culture anxious about urbanization, women’s shifting roles, and the perceived loosening of sexual norms. Her emphasis on chastity functions as reassurance: a promise that order is still possible, that progress won’t dissolve into chaos. The subtext is less about sex than about authority - who gets to define “life,” who counts as “stable,” and which bodies must behave to keep the social world from cracking.