Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/231

Rh to her she says: “As long ago as 1844 I was convinced that mortal mind produced all disease and that the various medical systems were in no sense scientific. In 1862, when I first visited Mr. Quimby, I was proclaiming to druggists, Spiritualists, and mesmerists that science must govern all healing.”

Her life, her acts, her conversations all sustain this statement, though mortal mind belongs to the terminology of later years. Before meeting Quimby the conception of that which “sins, suffers, dies” was growing in her thought, though as a vague apprehension. While in Groton she astounded the old man who visited her to pray with her by rising to meet him in no other strength than a faith groping blindly. In Rumney she healed the diseased eyes of a child instantaneously, and as a further proof that she was acquiring a more definite hold of this great truth, she was herself healed by her own religiosity while under Quimby’s magnetic treatment and in spite of his manipulations. No one should be confused by these facts concerning the definite discovery in 1866. Mrs. Eddy says: “The first spontaneous motion of Truth and Love, acting through Christian Science on my roused consciousness, banished at once and forever the fundamental error of faith in things material; for this trust is the unseen sin, the unknown foe, — the heart’s untamed desire, which breaketh the divine commandments.”

If she was thus prepared for her discovery, indeed re-prepared through experiencing the workings of