Mrs. Patterson stood at a crucial point in her career. She was only a little more than three years away from the event that would bring her whole life into focus. From that new perspective the years of suffering and searching would seem only the necessary discipline for her real life task.

The period of her life between October, 1862, and February, 1866, was one of tremendous stimulus and tremendous hazard. Quimby’s insistence that disease was both caused and cured by the mind confirmed the position she had long been groping toward, but beyond that lay the crucial question as to what mind was. Mrs. Patterson was familiar enough with the Pauline admonition to “let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus,” but to have this mind defined as spiritual matter was to be launched into an area of thought both startling and bewildering.⁶⁹

On one occasion a little later she was to write Quimby asking him to include a certain trouble in his treatment “when you send the subtle fluid of mind, or spirit, to govern matter.”⁷⁰ The phrase sits oddly in the context of the Christianity to which she was committed by training and temperament. There would inevitably be a violence to Christian convictions involved in any serious attempt to reconcile the “subtle fluid” emanating from Portland with the transcendent power implied in Jesus’ words: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”⁷¹

The words that Quimby spoke to her had an almost electrifying effect, but they left her groping for a meaning that eluded her. He insisted emphatically that intelligence was not in matter and then placed it in a “mind” which he described at various times as a sort of odor, vapor, or mist arising from matter. So far as can be judged today, Mrs. Patterson swept aside this part of his theory and tried for a time to give his terms a genuine Christian content. Seen in retrospect it was an impossible task, but so long as the warm, humanitarian figure of Quimby was present the contradictions might be swallowed up in his own intense convictions.