Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/113

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HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
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in a letter to the Boston Post (February 24, 1883), advanced Quimby's claim. It was in a reply to this letter, written March 7, 1883, published in the same paper, that Mrs. Eddy first asserted: "We made our first experiments in mental healing about 1853."

Four years later (February 6, 1887), Mr. Dresser delivered an address upon "The True History of Mental Science," at the Church of Divine Unity, in Boston, in which he declared that Quimby was the originator of the present science of mental healing, and that Mrs. Eddy did not understand disease as a state of mind until she was his patient and pupil. This address caused such comment and discussion, that four months later (June, 1887) Mrs. Eddy answered it through the Christian Science Journal by asserting: "As long ago as 1844, I was convinced that mortal mind produced all disease. . . . In 1862 . . . I was proclaiming . . . that science must govern all healing."