● ● ● in which the allness of God, or Spirit, began to give every detail of experience a radically new dimension.
But all around her lay the stubborn, cloddish world of material appearances, waiting to claim her back. While some of her friends accepted her healing with delight, others expressed dark forebodings that she would suffer a relapse. The ruins of her marriage, the uncertainties of the future, the magnetic hold of the past—all these challenged her momentary glimpse of Life and Love unbounded. She was, in her own later words, but “a trembling explorer in the great realm of mental causation.”23
Describing this period in 1883 (when she habitually used the editorial “we” in public statements) she wrote, “One individual of strong intellectual power, and little spirituality even occasioned us some momentary fears of our ability to hold on to this wonderful discovery.” It was at such a moment of fear, she went on, that she sent an appeal to Julius Dresser, Quimby’s erstwhile disciple.24
Some years were to elapse after her discovery before she would realize that her trembling explorations had already led her far beyond Quimby’s mental world. It is a human tendency to try to fit the new into the old, and Mrs. Patterson had still to discover the impossibility of reconciling her new vision of reality with his attempted science of suggestion. In the sudden reaction that can follow the birth of a revolutionary idea, she wrote to Dresser for help. The backwash of past attitudes was evident in every word, even to the recrudescence of Quimby’s emphasis on will, as the vision seemed temporarily to be obscured.
The letter was dated February 15 and read in part:
I am constantly wishing that you would step forward into the place he has vacated. I believe you would do a vast amount of good and are more capable of occupying his place than any other I know of.
Two weeks ago I fell on the sidewalk and struck my back on the ice, and was taken up for dead, came to consciousness amid a storm ● ● ●