Page:The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany.djvu/334

306 wrong, on falsehood which persistently misrepresents my character, education, and authorship, and attempts to narrow my life into a conflict for fame.

Far be it from me to tread on the ashes of the dead or to dissever any unity that may exist between Christian Science and the philosophy of a great and good man, for such was Ralph Waldo Emerson; and I deem it unwise to enter into a newspaper controversy over a question that is no longer a question. The false should be antagonized only for the purpose of making the true apparent. I have quite another purpose in life than to be thought great. Time and goodness determine greatness. The greatest reform, with almost unutterable truths to translate, must wait to be transfused into the practical and to be understood in the “new tongue.” Age, with experience-acquired patience and unselfed love, waits on God. Human merit or demerit will find its proper level. Divinity alone solves the problem of humanity, and that in God's own time. “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

In 1861, when I first visited Dr. Quimby of Portland, Me., his scribblings were descriptions of his patients, and these comprised the manuscripts which in 1887 I advertised that I would pay for having published. Before his decease, in January, 1866, Dr. Quimby had tried to get them published and had failed.

Quotations have been published, purporting to be Dr. Quimby's own words, which were written while I was his patient in Portland and holding long conversations with him on my views of mental therapeutics. Some words in