● ● ●  of the human mind rather than to the “Wholly Other” of Christian encounter. It is not surprising that, dazzled though Mrs. Patterson was by Quimby the healer, he still seemed to block for her a fuller reliance on the God to whom she had prayed from childhood for healing.

Quimby’s son George, who wrote in 1908 that he believed Mrs. Eddy had “finally landed in prayer cure, pure and simple,” declared proudly of his father’s system: “There were no prayers, there was no asking assistance from God or any other divinity. He [Quimby] cured by his wisdom.”⁷⁸ What is involved here is the distinction traditionally made between religion and magic, or theism and theurgy. This distinction effectively separates the prophet who waits for God’s commands from the magus who commands God to act or arrogates divine power to himself.

Mrs. Hunter, although she remained firm in her praise of Quimby’s sincerity, expressed astonishment in her reminiscences—as did various others of the Portland healer’s patients who later became Christian Scientists—that anyone should think there was anything basically in common between the two systems.⁷⁹ Yet the distinction between Christianity and Quimbyism was far from plain to Mrs. Patterson in 1862 or for some years afterwards. For Christianity uses the language of immanence as well as of transcendence to describe its God, and the line between theological immanence and psychological subjectivity was not at first clear to her. In Christianity the immanence of God necessarily grows out of His transcendence, as the New Testament grows out of the Old and the Son proceeds from the Father; but when Quimby borrowed the terms of Christian immanentism to give theological force to his psychotherapy, they had no root in the vision of a God utterly transcending the natural world and the forces of the human personality.

Many years later Mrs. Eddy would still remember with gratitude Quimby’s “rare humanity and sympathy,” but there was no place in  ● ● ●