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68 must be found to throw off these feelings. Already in Lucius's journal we find reference to the fact that Quimby sometimes found himself enveloped in mental atmospheres. Later, we find Quimby hesitating to take a patient with fits, because of the difficulty he experienced in keeping himself mentally free. In their letters, his patients sometimes inquire about his health, because they too realized that it was difficult for him to throw off his patients' troubles.

These difficulties are instructive to us, however, since they indicate that in thus gradually learning to keep his own spirit free by realizing the protective presence of “Wisdom,” as he briefly called God's power with us, he passed through a period of analyzing his patient's feelings by making himself receptive, allowing those feelings to impress themselves upon the sensitive-plate of his mind (his own illustration, drawn from his experience with photography), and then comparing them with the Divine ideal. For this contrast was essential to his Science. It led the way to his view that there is a part of us, namely, the spirit, that is never sick, never sins; but is what he called “the scientific man,” the man of Christ or Science, in his articles on this subject. Had he not possessed exceptional sympathy, so sensitive a sympathy in fact that it was difficult at times to put a patient's atmosphere aside, he would not have developed so sure a view of the whole situation in the inner life. Even in the last years of his practice in Portland he found difficulties in this respect, and had to leave his practice for brief periods of rest at his old home in Belfast. The sick often tended to overwhelm him. Yet one of the secrets of his remarkable cures is found in this willingness even to bear the burdens of the sick and sorrowing, that he might see through their miseries to the end and establish a science of right living which all might know and all could live by.

Those who, in recent times, have acquired the art of mental healing by standing apart from the patient and putting the mind through a series of affirmations, meanwhile keeping themselves comfortably free from all atmospheres, should hesitate to conclude that they possess a method superior to Quimby's, because he found difficulty in keeping free. Very few mortals are willing to undergo such sacrifices as the pioneer had to make to blaze the way for the use of his