Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/125

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HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
91

and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease."

In 1871, while teaching and practising Quimby's method for a livelihood, she declared that he started "from the stand point of magnetism, thence going forward and leaving that behind."[1]

In 1887, when at the head of a great organisation of her own, she says: "he treated us magnetically. . . . His healing was never considered or called anything but Mesmerism."

Now Mrs. Eddy says that Quimby's method was purely "physical"; then, in 1862, she wrote that, "after all, this is a very spiritual doctrine," and describes it as "the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works." In another communication to the Portland Courier, written November, 1862, Mrs. Eddy specifically declared that Quimby healed after Christ's method. She said:

P. P. Quimby stands upon the plane of wisdom with his truth. Christ healed the sick, but not by jugglery or with drugs. As the former speaks as never man before spake, and heals as never man healed since Christ, is he not identified with truth? And is not this the Christ which is in him? We know that in wisdom is life, "and the life was the light of man." P. P. Quimby rolls away the stone from the sepulchre of error, and health is the resurrection. But we also know that "light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not."

Mrs. Eddy repeated the same thought in the verses which she published, over her own name, in a Lynn newspaper, on February 22, 1866. She entitled them, "Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, Who Healed with the Truth that Christ Taught in Contradistinction to All Isms." The letters written by Mrs. Eddy to Quimby in the years 1862, '63, '64, and '65, extracts from which were printed, express the same conviction.


  1. See extract from letter to Mr. W. W. Wright, p. 101 of this chapter.