Charles Fillmore (Unity Church)

Biography

Charles Fillmore entered the world on August 22, 1854, in St. Cloud, Minnesota. His father, Henry, was a trader from Buffalo, New York, who dealt with the local Ojibwe people; his mother, Mary Georganna, was born in New Brunswick, then part of British North America. A skating mishap at age ten fractured Fillmore’s hip, leaving him with lasting physical challenges. Though he had scant formal schooling, he immersed himself in the works of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Emerson, and Charles Lowell, alongside texts on spiritualism, Eastern faiths, and metaphysics.

While working as a railroad clerk in Denison, Texas, during the mid-1870s, he met Mary Caroline “Myrtle” Page. After losing that job, he moved to Gunnison, Colorado, to try his hand at mining and real estate. He married Myrtle in Clinton, Missouri, on March 29, 1881. The couple then settled in Pueblo, Colorado, where Charles launched a real estate venture with the brother-in-law of Nona L. Brooks, who would later establish the Church of Divine Science.

Following the births of their first two sons, Lowell and Waldo, the family relocated to Kansas City, Missouri. In 1886, Charles and Myrtle attended New Thought classes led by E. B. Weeks. Myrtle, who had been suffering from chronic tuberculosis, credited her recovery to the prayer and methods she learned there; Charles likewise attributed his own gradual healing from his childhood injury to the same philosophy. He became a dedicated student of religion and philosophy.

In 1889, the couple began publishing a periodical called Modern Thought, notable as the first outlet to accept writings from the then-27-year-old New Thought pioneer William Walker Atkinson. The following year, they announced a prayer group that would become known as Silent Unity. Their magazine, Unity, first appeared in 1891, and H. Emilie Cady’s “Lessons in Truth” ran as a serial in its pages, later collected into a foundational book for the movement.

Though Charles had not intended to form a denomination, followers pushed for more structure, and in 1906 he and Myrtle were among the first ordained Unity ministers. They ran the Unity organizations from a campus near downtown Kansas City.

Tenets and beliefs

The Fillmores' beliefs, as described in a pamphlet by poet James Dillet Freeman, center on two propositions: God is good, and God is available—in fact, God is in you. About a year after starting Modern Thought, they concluded that if God is the principle of love and intelligence and the source of all good, God is wherever needed, making physical proximity unnecessary for united thought and prayer. They taught reincarnation; in later years, Charles felt so young he thought he might be physically immortal and believed he could be the reincarnation of Paul the Apostle.

Myrtle became a vegetarian in 1895 for ethical reasons. Charles converted through her influence and published an article in 1903 arguing that meat eating is unethical and that a vegetarian diet could accelerate spiritual progress. He advocated lacto-ovo vegetarianism. The couple operated Unity Inn, a vegetarian restaurant on Tracy Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri, accommodating 200 guests and among the largest in the world at the time.

In 1924, Unity published The Unity Inn Cookbook with over 300 meatless recipes; Charles contributed an essay titled 'Relation Between Regeneration and Vegetarianism'. After Myrtle's death in 1931, Charles gave up vegetarianism and added fish to his diet.