Lably
Skip to content

Charles Fillmore (Unity Church)

American mystic, co-founder of Unity Church

  • 5 min read
  • 3 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Canada, William Shakespeare and Philosophy

Biography

Fillmore was born in St. Cloud, Minnesota on August 22, 1854, to Henry G. Fillmore, a trader originally from Buffalo, New York, who did business with local Ojibwe, and Mary Georganna Fillmore (née Stone), who was born in New Brunswick, then part of British North America, in modern-day Canada.

An ice skating accident when he was ten broke Fillmore's hip and left him with lifelong disabilities. In his early years, despite little formal education, he studied William Shakespeare, Lord Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Lowell as well as works on spiritualism, Eastern religions, and metaphysics.

He met his future wife, Mary Caroline "Myrtle" Page, in Denison, Texas in the mid-1870s, while working as a railroad clerk. After losing his job there, he moved to Gunnison, Colorado where he worked in mining and real estate.

He married Myrtle in Clinton, Missouri on March 29, 1881. The newlyweds moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where Charles established a real estate business with the brother-in-law of Nona L. Brooks, who later founded the Church of Divine Science.

Introduction to New Thought

After the births of their first two sons, Lowell Page Fillmore and Waldo Rickert Fillmore, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Two years later, in 1886, Charles and Myrtle attended New Thought classes held by E. B. Weeks. Myrtle subsequently recovered from chronic tuberculosis and attributed her recovery to her use of prayer and other methods learned in Weeks's classes. Subsequently, Charles began to heal from his childhood accident, a development which he too attributed to following this philosophy. Charles Fillmore became a devoted student of philosophy and religion.

In 1889, Charles and Myrtle began publication of a new periodical, Modern Thought, notable among other things as the first publication to accept for publication the writings of the then 27-year-old New Thought pioneer William Walker Atkinson. In 1890, they announced a prayer group that was later called 'Silent Unity'. In 1891, Fillmore's Unity magazine was first published. H. Emilie Cady published "Lessons in Truth" in the new magazine. This material was later compiled and published in a book by the same name, which served as a seminal work of the Unity Church. Although Charles had no intention of making Unity into a denomination, his students wanted a more organized group. He and his wife were among the first ordained Unity ministers in 1906. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore operated the Unity organizations from a campus near downtown Kansas City.

Myrtle Fillmore died in 1931. Charles remarried in 1933 to Cora G. Dedrick, who was a collaborator on his later writings.

Death

Charles Fillmore died in 1948 in Lee's Summit, Missouri. Unity continued, growing into a worldwide movement. Unity World Headquarters at Unity Village and Unity Worldwide Ministries are the organizations of the movement.

Sign in to keep reading

2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Religious figures

JesusFirst-century Jewish preacher and religious leaderMuhammadFounder of Islam (c. 570–632)The BuddhaFounder of BuddhismMary, mother of JesusMother of JesusPaul the ApostleChristian apostle and missionary (c. 5 – c. 64/65)Pope John Paul IIHead of the Catholic Church from 1978 to 2005