Mrs. Eddy claims discovery, and commits herself not only as to the time of her “discovery,” but as to the manner of it, and each claim, that of discovery, that of the time and that of the manner, is wholly and demonstrably false.
In October, 1862, Mrs. Mary M. Patterson (now Mary Baker G. Eddy) placed herself in the hands of Dr. Phineas P. Quimby of Portland, Maine, for treatment, with the result described by herself over her own signature in the Portland Evening Courier, of November 7, 1862, as follows:
“Three weeks ago I quitted my nurse and sickroom en route for Portland. The belief of my recovery had died out of the hearts of those who were most anxious for it. With this mental and physical depression, I visited P. P. Quimby, and in less than one week from that time I ascended by a stairway of one hundred and eighty-two steps to the dome of the City Hall, and am improving ad infinitum. This truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if received understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their normal action and the mechanism of the body goes on undisturbed. That this is a science capable of demonstration, becomes clear to the minds of those patients who reason upon the process of their cure. The truth which he establishes in the patient, cures him (although he may be wholly unconscious thereof), and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease.”
This was Mrs. Patterson-Eddy’s professed understanding of Dr. Quimby’s “science,” in 1862, after having been three weeks under his treatment, and any one familiar with Christian Science will not need to be told that it is the same thing. This “truth,” which Mrs. Patterson-Eddy in 1862 said Quimby opposed to the “error” of placing intelligence in matter and which, when established in the patient, cured him, is the very same “truth” which in her book, with tireless iteration, Mrs. Eddy opposes to the very same alleged “error,” which thereupon effects the same alleged “cure.” Every “Scientist” will at once recognize the A B C of “divine science.”
Dr. Quimby, who is spoken of by a lady, who knew him well at the time Mrs. Patterson-Eddy was taking his treatment and stealing his system, as a man of “absolute sincerity and purity of thought and life,” died in January, 1866, and Mrs. Eddy, then Mrs. Patterson, not having conceived the plan of appropriating to herself the ideas and theories she had learned from him, almost immediately after his death wrote and published some verses about him, in which she compared Quimby with Jesus. She now speaks of him as a vulgar mesmerist or magnetic healer whose scribblings she put into grammatical form; she then, in 1866, glorified him as the Christian glorifies only the Saviour.
These verses, as here presented, are copied from a copy in Mrs. Eddy’s own handwriting, now in the possession of Mrs. Sarah Crosby of Waterville, Maine, to whom, in 1866, upon the death of Dr. Quimby, she sent them:
“Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, who Healed the Sick as did Jesus, in contradistinction to all Isms.
“Did Sack-cloth clothe the sun, and day grow night,
All matter mourn the hour with dewy eyes,
When Truth receding from our mortal sight,