Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/145

Rh its breath and asked in amazement, “What, this Quimby compared to Christ! well, what next?” In her attitude toward Quimby she was like a daughter idealizing a father whom all the world knows to be other than she thinks him. Controlled by her search for the ideal, Mary Baker was to this extent controlled by mesmerism.

On arriving at her sister’s home she talked to the various members of her family and all their intimate friends about Quimby’s power to heal, talked until she really excited in her sister Abigail a curiosity to know something of Quimby. The handsome boy, Albert, whose birth had been largely responsible for the banishment of Mary’s son, George Glover, had grown up into a rather wayward young man. Abigail wanted her boy cured of his habits and she instructed Mary to write “Dr.” Quimby to come to them, as he professed himself able to do, spiritually, or in his “condensed identity,” or by his “omnipresence,” and give Albert the benefit of his magnetic “wisdom.” As nothing resulted from the writing to change Albert’s habits, Mrs. Tilton determined to go herself to Portland. She made the journey with a woman friend about a month after Mary’s return, but she returned home confirmed in her own mind that Quimby was exactly what she had previously supposed him to be, an ignorant quack with a jargon of cant which made no impression upon her. She was gratified that Mary was cured, but what had cured her she failed to comprehend from her experience with Quimby. Abigail Tilton came near to the truth, however, when she