Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/138

100 belief, a belief which provokes unjust and invidious suspicion as to the origin of the fundamental principles of Christian Science. To show how baseless is this suspicion, it is necessary to examine the Quimby claim.

Some twenty years after Quimby’s death (which resulted from a tumor of the stomach in 1866), when Christian Science had been placed on a firm foundation, it began to be contended by Quimby’s son and a former patient of Quimby that he had left manuscripts on a number of subjects, setting forth a system of philosophy. Jealously guarding the proof of his claim, the son, by indirect assertion, implied as his reason for not publishing the alleged manuscripts that their authorship would be claimed by the author of “Science and Health” if he published them during her lifetime.

This is a rather strange suggestion, but it sets forth the shadow of a fear justified by circumstances. It has been shown that Mrs. Patterson in 1862 wrote certain manuscripts for Quimby and gave them to him. She repeated this generous, if unprofitable, act in the early part of 1864, when she spent two or three months in an uninterrupted effort to fathom and elucidate “Quimbyism.” It seems almost incredible that a woman of her intellectual and spiritual development should have devoted so long a period to the struggle of formulating a philosophy out of the chaotic but dogmatic utterances of this self-taught mesmerist. But there was a deep-lying reason for this long struggle, which was bound to end in dire failure, and the reason both for