Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/136

102 The explanation by which she seeks to account for her early expressions of devotion and gratitude to Quimby is not one which tends to lessen the perplexities of the historian. She simply asserts that she wrote these tributes to Quimby while under mesmeric influence and is not properly responsible for them at all.

In the Boston Post, in a letter dated March 7, 1883, after Julius A. Dresser had made public some of the letters already quoted, she wrote as follows:

Did I write those articles purporting to be mine? I might have written them twenty or thirty years ago, for I was under the mesmeric treatment of Dr. Quimby from 1862 until his death in 1865. He was illiterate and I knew nothing then of the Science of Mind-healing, and I was as ignorant of mesmerism as Eve before she was taught by the serpent. Mind Science was unknown to me; and my head was so turned by animal magnetism and will-power, under his treatment, that I might have written something as hopelessly incorrect as the articles now published in the Dresser pamphlet. I was not healed until after the death of Mr. Quimby; and then healing came as the result of my discovery in 1866, of the Science of Mind-healing, since named Christian Science.

In 1887, when Julius A. Dresser published his True History of Mental Science, the Quimby-Eddy controversy reached its climax. Mrs. Eddy, says Horatio W. Dresser, requested her literary adviser, Rev. James Henry Wiggin, to answer the pamphlet. Mr. Wiggin asked Mrs. Eddy if she had written the letters in the Portland newspapers, the letter to Dresser, the poem on Quimby's death, and other effusions. Mrs. Eddy admitted that she had. "Then," replied Mr. Wiggin, "there is nothing to say," and declined the task. In a personal letter Mr. Wiggin says:

What Mrs. Eddy has, as documents clearly prove, she got from P. P. Quimby, of Portland, Me., whom she eulogised after death as the great