Charles Fillmore (Unity Church)

American mystic, co founder of Unity Church

Charles Sherlock Fillmore (August 22, 1854 – July 5, 1948) was an American religious leader who founded Unity, a church within the New Thought movement, with his wife, Myrtle Page Fillmore, in 1889. He became known as an American mystic for his contributions to spiritual interpretations of Biblical Scripture. Fillmore promoted vegetarianism for three decades of his life.

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.

In a pamphlet called "Answers to Your Questions About Unity", poet James Dillet Freeman says that Charles and Myrtle both had health problems and turned to some new ideas which they believed helped to improve these problems. Their beliefs are centered on two basic propositions: (1) God is good. (2) God is available; in fact, God is in you. The pamphlet goes on to say that:
About a year after the Fillmores started the magazine Modern Thought, they had the inspiration that if God is what they thought – the principle of love and intelligence, the source of all good – God is wherever needed. It was not necessary for people to be in the same room with them in order for them to unite in thought and prayer. The Fillmores taught reincarnation. In his later years, Fillmore felt so young that he thought that he might be physically immortal, as well as believing that he might be the reincarnation of Paul the Apostle.

Charles's wife Myrtle became a vegetarian in 1895 for ethical reasons. Charles later became a convert through his wife's influence and made his first public statement about vegetarianism in an article titled "As to Meat Eating", in 1903.