● ● ●  his system for God’s grace.⁸⁰ Put in more metaphysical terms, there was nothing comparable to the distinction she later made between the divine Mind, or God, and what she would call mortal mind, or the mind of mortals.

It is evident that very soon after her first acquaintance with Quimby Mrs. Patterson began to try to sort out her ideas in writing, and this inevitably meant some effort to see Quimby’s ideas in the light of her own biblical religion. After returning home, she recommended Quimby to her sister Mrs. Tilton, who soon took her son Albert to him for treatment.⁸¹ In the final preface to Science and Health she would write, “As early as 1862 she [the author] began to write down and give to friends the results of her Scriptural study, for the Bible was her sole teacher.”⁸² Even in 1862 the Bible was fighting for ascendancy over Quimby’s influence. On the surface she was still engaged in an enthusiastic attempt to reconcile the two, but a deeper struggle was going on—perhaps at a largely unconscious level.

Something of this may be reflected in the rapid decline of her health again. Although she wrote Quimby after leaving him, “I am to all who once knew me a living wonder, and a living monument of your power”;⁸³ she soon found her old ills returning, as did so many of his patients when away from his magnetic presence. In one letter she announced that his “angel visit” had removed her gastric pains; in the next she reported their return and added, “Please come to me to remove this pain and tell me your fee.”⁸⁴

This was an appeal not for a personal visit but for another treatment, though Quimby usually described such treatments as a projection of his spirit form to the patient’s side at a given hour. This accounts for her request in another letter when, after giving a catalogue of old ills  ● ● ●