Growing in stature to the throne of God;
Rest should reward him who hath made us whole,
Seeking, ’tho tremblers, where his footsteps trod.”
M. M. Patterson.
Comment cannot add to the force of these verses. Inferior as poetry, they constitute proof and argument not all the falsehoods and sophistries in the imagination of Mrs. Eddy and her corps of official defenders can meet and overcome.
In 1866, Mrs. Eddy reverently declared that Dr. Quimby had “healed the sick as Jesus did;” today speaking slightingly of the good old man, she says, “his healing was never considered anything but mesmerism.” Then she gratefully acknowledged that he had made her “whole”; now she says that his mesmeric treatment gave her but slight, temporary relief. Then, not having contemplated the great theft, she spoke of the “earnest, solemn, sacred trust” delivered to her and others by the trustful man; now she repudiates him altogether, and denies that she received any helpful suggestion from him. Then she spoke of herself as “seeking, though a trembler, where his footsteps trod;” now she scornfully says, “I used to take his scribblings and fix them over for him and give him my thoughts and language which, as I understand it, were far in advance of his.”
Can anything Mrs. Eddy says be believed, after this? Could ingenuity contrive a more violent contradiction in human speech? Standing absolutely alone, would anything more be needed to convict her, out of her own mouth, of the basest ingratitude and the most reckless fraud? But this is only one of a thousand items in the accumulated proof!
If Christian Science healing is, as Mrs. Eddy and all other Christian Scientists claim, a revival of the method employed by Jesus, then Mrs. Eddy here, in her own handwriting, admits that she learned it from Quimby. There is no possible escape from one horn or the other of the dilemma—either it is not Christian, or it is not Mrs. Eddy’s. It requires even less intelligence than Mrs. Eddy’s friends bring to bear upon her teachings to comprehend the conclusiveness of this demonstration.
Mrs. Eddy did not discover the Christian Science method of attempting to heal. Let me make this a little clearer by demonstrating the falsity of her story as to the manner in which she made the discovery.
Dr. Quimby died on January 16, 1866, and the first day of February, 1866, Mrs. Patterson-Eddy, then living in Swampscott, a suburb of Lynn, fell upon the icy sidewalk and injured herself; and she now fixes upon her alleged miraculous recovery from this injury as the precise way in which she made her great discovery and received her revelation.