Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/130

96 Divine Principle alone heals, what is the human modus for demonstrating this? . . . My students at first practised in slightly different forms. Although I could heal mentally, without a sign save the immediate recovery of the sick, my students' patients, and people generally, called for a sign a material evidence wherewith to satisfy the sick that something was being done for them; and I said, "Suffer it to be so now," for thus saith our Master. Experience, however, taught me the impossibility of demonstrat ing the Science of Metaphysical Healing by any outward form of practice.

Other pupils of Quimby, among them Mr. Julius A. Dresser, resented his being presented to the world by Mrs. Eddy as a mesmerist and magnetic healer. They asserted again and again that he healed by mental science purely, and that Mrs. Eddy had misrepresented him and his methods. Mr. Dresser made a statement to that effect in the Boston Post, February 24, 1883. Mrs. Eddy replied to this letter (Boston Post, March 7, 1883), admitting that Quimby "may have had a theory in advance of his method," but making the claim that it was she who first asked him to "write his thoughts out," and that she would sometimes so transform his manuscripts that they were virtually her own compositions. She says:

We never were a student of Dr. Quimby's. .. . Dr. Quimby never had students, to our knowledge. He was an Humanitarian, but a very unlearned man. He never published a work in his life; was not a lecturer or teacher. He was somewhat of a remarkable healer, and at the time we knew him he was known as a mesmerist. We were one of his patients. He manipulated his patients, but possibly back of his practice he may have had a theory in advance of his method. . . . We knew him about twenty years ago, and aimed to help him. We saw he was looking in our direction, and asked him to write his thoughts out. He did so, and then we would take that copy to correct, and sometimes so transform it that he would say it was our composition, which it virtually was; but we always gave him back the copy and sometimes wrote his name on the back of it.