Mary Baker had performed certain cures from which she argued as from the sure ground of experience, but these healings were incidental and accidental and she scarcely knew how they had occurred except that she knew they had happened when her thoughts were associated with God. She pondered after this fashion: Laws of God are immutable and universal. Then because His laws are so fixed and so infinitely operative, man by studying them has built up the sciences, as mathematics and mechanics. But in physics he is still crying out for the philosopher’s stone and in medicine for the elixir of life. “I know there is cause and effect in the spiritual world as in the natural!” she would exclaim to herself. “I know there is a science of health, a science of life, a divine science, a science of God.”
But it did not enter Mary Baker’s mind in that hour that by this assertion she had declared herself the discoverer of a great truth, that by this affirmation of faith she had pledged herself to find the way and prove what she had declared. She was to herself only a woman in extremity, hungering for truth. In Portland, Maine, was a man whom she now began to endow with her own faith. If she could get to him, she would question him and find out if he had come close to God’s heart. If he had, how humbly she would beg him to teach her and guide her and how joyfully would she follow! In May of 1862 she wrote a letter to Dr. Quimby, a letter which doubtless surprised that gentleman. She stated her confidence in his possession of a philoso-
