● ● ●  which had returned and were causing her much suffering, she wrote: “I would like to have you in your Omnipresence visit me at 8 o’clock this Eve if convenient. But consult your own time, only come once a day until I am better.”⁸⁵

The ills and the appeals both continued. One year after the “healing” she had so fervently announced in the Portland Courier she wrote her brother-in-law: “I hope soon to be better[;] the Dr’s patients tell me all difficult cases are worse after a time some with divers maladies[.] I have lost no faith even if I am worse.”⁸⁶ But she was not soon better. The same story continued through another two years up until Quimby’s death.

On several occasions in the last two decades of her life Mrs. Eddy made careful evaluations of the part the Quimby episode played in her development. She told of asking him one day why he kept wetting his hands when he rubbed her head and of his answering to the effect that “friction evolved electricity & water was a good medium for conveying this electricity throughout the system.”⁸⁷ This manipulation constituted what Mrs. Eddy later called his practice, or method, as distinct from his theory, and she elsewhere indicated that this was the only explanation he gave her of this practice.⁸⁸

But his theory was another matter. Even in her last years she referred to him as “a deep thinker” and “an advanced thinker” whose ideas were compounded of truth and error.⁸⁹ In one place she wrote that as homeopathy was the intermediate step from allopathy and matter to mind, so Quimbyism was the intermediate step from animal magnetism and matter to mind. But homeopathy, she added, was inconsistent in believing that a drug cured while diluting the drug till it sometimes disappeared entirely; and Quimby, she pointed out, “used to repeat, ‘There is no intelligence in matter.’ While at the same time he used water and manipulation to heal his patients.”⁹⁰