Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/133

Rh combined and arranged by wisdom. As thought is always changing, so man is always throwing off particles of thought and receiving others. Thus man is a progressive idea; yet he is the same man, although he is changing all the time for better or for worse. As his senses are in his wisdom, and his wisdom is attached to his idea or body, his change of mind is under one of the two directions either of this world of opinions or of God or Science, and his happiness or misery is the result of his wisdom.

Though Mary Baker’s own pure stream of religious thought wrought such confusion to Quimby’s materialistic theories as to make his utterances sound like philosophy gone mad, her cure, whether a temporary one wrought under hypnotism, or a permanent one achieved through a momentary realization of God, was secure. She consistently maintained that God was the “wisdom” Quimby brought to his patients. Quimby never told her so, and the hypnotist to-day would say that Quimby may have allowed her to hypnotize herself with that thought. However that may be, by seeing God as the principle of her cure, she stood safe on her own foundation, laid in the years of orthodox religious experience, though she was not to understand this until Quimby the hypnotizer lay in his grave.

Quimby really seemed to desire to adopt the idea of bringing God to his patients and would declare with all the wisdom he had that God was the great mesmerizer. Continuing to mesmerize his patients, he began to occupy the position of a lesser god in the minds of many who gathered round him. They