● ● ● process of their cure. The truth which he establishes in the patient cures him (although he may be wholly unconscious thereof ) and the body, which is full of light, is no longer in disease. At present I am too much in error to elucidate the truth, and can touch only the key note for the master hand to wake the harmony. May it be in essays instead of notes, say I. After all, this is a very spiritual doctrine—but the eternal years of God are with it and it must stand firm as the rock of ages. And to many a poor sufferer may it be found as by me, “the shadow of a great Rock in a weary land.”73
Mrs. Patterson had glimpsed—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, had sensed—her goal afar off, but around it the mist swirled thickly. For one thing, she had accepted unquestioningly Quimby’s view that since he did not produce the mesmeric sleep there was nothing of animal magnetism in his practice. His linking of his theory with the Christ had aroused in her an elated expectation of spiritual insights which his earnest but earthbound speculations would inevitably fail to satisfy. When finally she penetrated the opacities and ambiguities of his language, she was to find that the “Rock” on which her future life would rest stood starkly apart from the basic assumptions of his psychology.74
A hint of this is conveyed by an incident that occurred about this time. Mrs. Patterson was boarding in Portland with a Mrs. Martha Hunter, who had known and loved Quimby from childhood. Almost forty years later, long after Mrs. Hunter had remarried and moved ● ● ●
73 [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.] This letter proves neither as much nor as little as polemicists have claimed. It shows without question that she believed she had received both the cure and the explanation for which she had been searching, but it shows that she felt there was a “principle” which still eluded her grasp. At that time she had no doubt that Quimby could impart it to her. Later she came to feel that only in his reiterated injunction not to place intelligence in matter did he approach Science but that this negative insight was useless without a revelation of the true nature of Mind, Spirit, or God, for otherwise intelligence was simply shifted from matter to what she came to call “mortal mind.” Mary Baker Eddy, manuscript, n.d., L09659, MBEL.
↑74 Cf. Eddy, Science and Health:
The starting-point of divine Science is that God, Spirit, is All-in-all, and that there is no other might nor Mind,—that God is Love, and therefore He is divine Principle.
To grasp the reality and order of being in its Science, you must begin by reckoning God as the divine Principle of all that really is. (p. 275)