From home classes to public teaching
Mills’s own introduction provides much of the surviving account of her development. She recalls fearing eternal punishment as a child, then finding a different understanding of Christianity through metaphysical teaching. Her husband, James Porter Mills, was a physician. She describes the difficulty of beginning classes in rooms above his medical practice while advocating a spiritual approach that challenged the need for medicines.
According to her account, those home classes expanded into public Bible teaching at Chicago’s Masonic Temple and the Truth Students’ Association. A report in Freedom in 1901 independently places Anna and James together as travelling teachers, recently returned from an extended foreign tour and preparing to leave for California. The writer praises her ability as a speaker, even while noting that James had received the invitation to lecture. Her exact life dates and early family background remain uncertain.
A book made from teaching
The held 1896 edition names publishers in both Chicago and Brisbane and includes a foreign-edition preface by James Porter Mills. Anna explains that students had asked to read the ideas she presented in classes. The result combines an account of spiritual reality with chapters on thought, words, prayer, intuition and concentration. Its subtitle, The Way to Save Both Soul and Body Now, expresses her ambition to bring spiritual transformation into present life.
She treats the teachings of Jesus as the foundation of her philosophy and describes a change of thought as a route to bodily as well as moral renewal. The preface and introduction make sweeping claims for healing. Those claims show the confidence and medical opposition within this strand of New Thought; they are assertions of the book and its advocates, rather than evidence that its methods cure disease.
