Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/127

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HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
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or law, then my kingdom or law will stand, for it is not of this world. When others cast out disease they cured by ignorance, or Beelzebub, and there was no science in the cure, although an effect was produced, but not knowing the cause, the world was none the wiser for their cures. At another time when told by his disciples, that persons were casting out devils in his name, and they forbid them, he said, they that are with us are not against us, but they that are not with us, or are ignorant of the laws of curing, scattereth abroad, for the world is none the wiser. There you see, he makes a difference between his mode of curing and theirs. If Christ's cures were done by the power of God, and Christ was God, he must have known what that power or science was, and if he did, he knew the difference between his science, and their ignorance. His science was His Kingdom, therefore it was not of this world, and theirs being of this world, he called it the Kingdom of Darkness. To enter into Christ's Kingdom, or science, was to enter into the laws of knowledge, of curing the evils of this world of darkness. As disease is an evil, it is of this world and in this kingdom of darkness. To separate one world from another, is to separate life, the resurrection of one is the destruction of the other.[1]

Mrs. Eddy, to prove that Quimby was merely a mesmerist, emphasises the fact that he frequently rubbed his patients' heads. According to the present Christian Science belief, that is the cardinal sin. Physical contact with the patient implies that the treatment is of this world; in order that healing be Divine, Christ-like, its only instrument must be mind. On this one point the controversy has been long and bitter. It figures as conspicuously in this dispute as did the word filioque in the contentions of the early Christian Church. Mrs. Eddy, in the Christian Science Journal of June, 1887, says:

If, as Mr. Dresser says, Mr. Quimby's theory (if he had one) and practice were like mine, purely mental, what need had he of such physical means as wetting his hands in water and rubbing the head? Yet these appliances he continued until he ceased practice; and in his last sickness the poor man employed a homeopathic physician. The Science of Mind-healing would be lost by such means and it is a moral impossibility to understand or to demonstrate this science through such extraneous aids. Mr. Quimby,


  1. From a manuscript written in 1859.