Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/112

78 discovery. This is now the generally accepted date. Her enemies have naturally made much of the seeming inconsistency of these statements. To disprove her claim that she had a knowledge of mind healing as far back as 1844 or 1853, they quote Mrs. Eddy's own words in the Christian Science Journal of June, 1887. She there says that before her visit to Quimby in 1862, "I knew nothing of the Science of Mind-healing. . . . Mind Science was unknown to me."

It is scarcely necessary to remark that each of these dates might be intrinsically correct, as each might mark an important advance in Mrs. Eddy's mastery of her science. It would be extremely difficult for any discoverer to date exactly the inception of an idea which eventually absorbed him completely. Doubtless these seeming inaccuracies on Mrs. Eddy's part would have been passed over as due to mere inexactness of expression, had not each date been given to meet some specific charge as to her indebtedness to Quimby—and given, as it would seem, mainly for the purpose of extricating herself from the difficulty of the moment.

As shown above, in the first edition of Science and Health (1875), she said that it was in 1864 that she first discovered that "science mentally applied would heal the sick."

Eight years after Mrs. Eddy had announced 1864 as the correct and authentic date of her discovery, Julius A. Dresser, Julius A. Dresser was born in Portland, Me., February 12, 1838. He was in college in Waterville, Me., when his health failed. He had a strongly emotional religious nature and intended to become a minister in the Calvinistic Baptist Church. When he went to Mr. Quimby in the summer of 1860, he apparently had only a short time to live. Quimby told him his "religion was killing him." Quimby treated him successfully for typhoid pneumonia, according to Mr. Dresser's son, Horatio W. Dresser of Cambridge, and "gave him the understanding which enabled my father to live thirty-three years after his restoration to health."