Mary Baker Eddy

America was already developing one of its most pronounced characteristics, the conviction that no problem is without a solution. Faith-healing flourished in the American mid-century, and Mary Baker Eddy, who suffered dreadful pain in her youth, for which the doctors could do nothing, believed she had been relieved by a Mesmerist, P. P. Quimby; and from this she created her own system of spiritual healing based upon the belief that mind is the only reality and all else an illusion. She opened the First Church of Christ Scientist in Boston in 1879, followed by the Metaphysical College in 1881 and what became one of America's greatest newspapers, the Christian Science Monitor. It quickly spread into 3,200 branches in forty-eight countries.

Even the most bizarre of these sects founded schools, training colleges for teachers and evangelists, and even universities. Some of America's greatest institutions of higher education have their origins in the Second Great Awakening.

Ralph Waldo Emerson moved into Unitarianism from Calvinism.