● ● ● of the evil I loaded you down with in a belief. This is the way God or Wisdom takes to get rid of a false belief: the belief is made in the heavens or your mind, it then becomes more and more condensed till it takes the form of matter. Then Wisdom dissolves it and it passes through the pores, and the effort of coughing is one of Truth’s servants, not error’s. . . . So hoping that you may soon rid yourself of all worldly opinions and stand firm in the Truth that will set you free, I remain your friend and protector till the storm is over and the waters of your belief are still.64
The recipient of such a letter might well feel that an electric storm had burst about his ears, and in the general excitement he might even get well!
In later life Mrs. Eddy recalled that when she found herself in Quimby’s office she felt remarkably improved in health even before he gave her a treatment, so great was her faith in him.65 The improvement continued with a rapidity that seemed like a miracle. A week later she was able to climb the one hundred and eighty-two steps that led to the dome of the City Hall, and every day she gained in strength and freedom.66
For the moment it looked as though Mary Baker Patterson had emerged at last from the endless, weary years of suffering.
A flood of gratitude to Quimby swept away all doubt, all caution. “I was never luke-warm but always fervid,” she explained years later;67 and in her unbounded fervor she wrote to the Portland Evening Courier a month after her first meeting with Quimby: “[He] speaks as never man before spake, and heals as never man healed since Christ, is he not identified with truth, and is not this the Christ which is in him?”68
66 Mary M. Patterson, “What I do not Know, and what I do Know,” Evening Courier (Portland, ME), 7 November 1862, clipped in Mary Baker Patterson, scrapbook, n.d., SB001A, p. 12, MBEL.
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