The reason for not assigning this letter definitely to Julius Dresser is that when his widow published her book The Philosophy of P. P. Quimby in 1895 she attributed the letter to Emma Ware. This, however, cannot safely be taken as conclusive evidence that Julius Dresser did not write it, for the two ladies may have decided that the attribution to Miss Ware was called for under the circumstances then prevailing.

By 1895 the Quimby controversy was in full swing, and it was an embarrassment to the Quimby proponents that so much had to rest on the word of the two Dressers. In an 1887 lecture Julius Dresser had stated that he and his wife had owed their lives to Quimby for almost twenty-seven years and that “thousands of others could make a similar testimony,” but of those “thousands” only Dresser had come forward publicly. His son Horatio, who was born the day after Quimby’s death and who later became the outstanding champion of Quimbyism, frequently quotes in his writings “a Quimby patient” or “a former student of Dr. Quimby’s,” but upon investigation these ambiguous references usually seem to indicate his father or mother.

If Miss Ware did write the March, 1862, letter in the Advertiser signed “D,” she would seem to have been the most intelligent and articulate of the little group, and she might consequently have been expected to play a larger role in the activity in the 1880s leading to the formation of New Thought. Yet on January 9, 1883, she wrote Edward J. Arens: