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10 the Divine purpose. Yet there is an advantage in being known by one's fellow townsmen as honest, upright, dedicated to practical pursuits, and by no means peculiar. For when Quimby took up a study that was unpopular, he was a prophet with honor in his own country. From his home town he went forth to engage in public experiments, well recommended. And in his own town he began the practice of spiritual healing, winning there the reputation which led him to move to Portland, in 1859, and enlarge his work.

Was he a religious man? In one of his articles he says, “I have been trying all my life, ever since I was old enough to listen, to understand the religious opinions of the world, and see if people understand what they profess to believe.” Not finding spiritual wisdom, he was inclined to be sceptical, and later spent much time setting his patients free from religious beliefs. George Quimby tells us emphatically that his father was not religious in the sense in which one might understand the term religion as applied to organizations, churches and authorized text-books. We shall see reasons for this distinction as we proceed. But if to believe profoundly in the indwelling presence of God as love and wisdom, if to live by this Presence so as to realize its reality vividly in the practice of spiritual healing, is to be religious, then indeed few men have been more truly religious than he. Those of us who have known his chief followers have felt from them a spiritual impetus coming from his work which surpasses what we have elsewhere met in actual practice.

After he ceased to experiment with mesmerism, and began to study the sick intuitively, he took his starting-point in religious matters from the state in which he found his patients. He found many of them victims of what we now call the old theology. The priests and ministers of that theology were to him blind guides. Hence, as he tells us, he made war on all religious opinions and on all priestcraft. Jesus was to him a reformer who had overcome all his religion before beginning to establish “the Truth or Christ.” Quimby was very radical in opposing doctrinal conceptions of Christ. He uniformly called Jesus “a man like ourselves,” that he might win for the Master new recognition as the founder of spiritual science. To him “the Science of the Christ” was greater than a religion.