Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/126

88 this seems to have been the feature upon which he laid the greatest stress. But he now embellished these magnetic treatments with conversation, endeavoring to account for the origin of disease in opinions and notions, oscillating between weirdly speculative and practical points of view and nowhere confining himself to stringent definition.

It was expedient to survey Quimby’s life up to this point and it is now necessary to arrive at a clear conception of what sort of thinker he was. Unless we are quite clear here, we shall stray into a quagmire and find ourselves believing that all that follows in the life of Mary Baker Eddy was the result of her meeting with this man. This argument is advanced only by those who have a vague and confused idea of Quimby. Its claims are these: that Quimby cured Mary Baker of her invalidism, that he gave her the germ ideas of her philosophy, that he presented her with manuscripts which she afterwards claimed as her own, that he focussed her mind, that he was the impetus of all her subsequent momentum. Were these contentions just, none but a perfidious ingrate would deny them. But not to deny them, circumstantially and in totality, is to leave open the gate to the quagmire that Christian Science is mesmerism religionized. For to interpret Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science by Quimbyism is to lose sight forever of the unique and powerful significance of her life.

Summarizing Quimby, therefore, it may be stated that though he was no scientist, he was trained by over twenty years’ experience in practising mes-