● ● ● from even the theory, much more the practice of it. I do not even help my wife out of her troubles, if she has serious ones, & of all in the world I could help her quickest & easiest, owing to the greater interchange of mind.
My wife has lately given birth to a son, . . . and I have a good opportunity to know whether I could easily become a Dr. or not. But I am not even Dr. for them. How then could I cure those to whose minds I have little or comparatively no access at all?26
It was clear that Quimby was irretrievably gone. There was no person to whom Mrs. Patterson could turn. She might cling for a while to some of the things she had learned from Quimby; but if she was going to heal herself or others, she would have to trust to the truth she had glimpsed that Sunday afternoon. There was only one place she could go to understand it better. That was the Bible, and to the Bible she turned.
Events, however, did not allow her at once to give herself wholly to the study and thought which now seemed all-important. The next six months or so were a transitional period in which inspiration and mental distress were juxtaposed in startling chiaroscuro.
The Armenius Newhalls, who owned 23 Paradise Court and lived on the first floor beneath the Pattersons, wanted to sell their house. Mrs. Patterson was glad to help them by writing a lyrical article on Swampscott for the Lynn Reporter, ending it with a frank puff for the Newhall residence. “The skies of Swampscott,” she wrote, “are unvailed. We can see them! and O! they are spiritually bright, beautifully blue, and wondrous in their change.”27 But the change in residence which she and Patterson were forced to make late in March because of the Newhalls’ plans was anything but wondrous.
26 Julius A. Dresser to Mary Baker Patterson, 2 March 1866, IC632.64.008, MBEL.
27 M. M. Patterson, “Swampscott,” Lynn Reporter, 4 April 1866, p. 2. Written March 19. The Newhalls’ nephew, George Gilbert, in a 1935 interview, stated that after Mrs. Patterson’s fall “Mrs. Newhall was very much concerned for fear that Mrs. Patterson would be an invalid and that they would be unable to rent their house for the summer as they usually did. Then, one day about a week after the fall, she looked out of the window and saw to her relief Mrs. Patterson walking across the lawn.” George Gilbert, interview, 14 June 1935, 1935.060.001, LMC. The recollection of this old gentleman sixty-nine years after the event may not be correct in every detail, but it does link Mrs. Patterson’s recovery with the renting or selling of the Newhall house.