● ● ●  to the State of Washington, she became a Christian Scientist without once suspecting that Mary Baker Eddy was the Mrs. Patterson she had known in Portland. Eventually she learned that this was so and wrote out her memories of the earlier period. One of these memories concerned an evening she had spent with Mrs. Patterson at the home of a friend, a homeopathic doctor by the name of Burr.

The conversation had inevitably turned on the subject of healing. As they were leaving, Mrs. Patterson had remarked that “if all diseases are unreal, and are not good, God who is good and real should be our only healer, and I believe if we only knew how to ask Him we should need no other.”⁷⁵

The remark, casual as it is, indicates that even then she was having difficulty in identifying Quimby’s deified “wisdom” with the God of Hebrew-Christian tradition. Theism has always insisted on the transcendence of God, and in this respect Mrs. Eddy the Christian Scientist would be as thoroughgoing a theist as Mary Baker the Congregationalist. The majesty of a God who made and ruled the universe was not to be translated into the mere energy of human mind and will; the creator was infinitely greater than the individual to whom He revealed Himself as the source of all being.

In the New Thought writers who went back to Quimby for inspiration the one common element is an emphasis on the “God within” or the “Christ within,” whereas Mrs. Eddy’s writings constantly insist that God is not in man.⁷⁶ “Is not our comforter always from outside and above ourselves?” she would ask, and in her theology God necessarily transcends every expression of His own being.⁷⁷

In Quimby’s writings, on the other hand, God is absorbed into man as a principle to be used by the individual, almost as a technique to be learned, in order to bring about healing. Although Quimby gives passing mention to God as First Cause, his “theology” is almost wholly subjective and empirical. God, Christ, “scientific man,” and science are used as synonyms, and they all refer essentially to the higher processes  ● ● ●