● ● ● belief. Jesus entered into his water or belief, and understood it, and when He came out of the water, the Heavens were opened to Him alone, and the Holy Ghost descended like a dove and lit on Jesus and a voice said to Him alone, “This is my beloved Son (or Science), in whom I am well pleased.”123
The passage suggests interesting possibilities, if John and Jesus are taken as representing two different orders of thinking and not merely two persons in a particular historical situation. Further reflections on the ambiguities of the master-disciple relation are suggested by a passage from Ernest Renan’s sensationally successful Life of Jesus which was published in 1863:
On the whole, the influence of John had been more hurtful than useful to Jesus. It checked his development; for everything leads us to believe that he had, when he descended towards the Jordan, ideas superior to those of John, and that it was by a sort of concession that he inclined for a time towards baptism. . . . It seems also that his sojourn with John had, not so much by the influence of the Baptist, as by the natural progress of his own thought, considerably ripened his ideas on “the kingdom of heaven.” His watchword, henceforth, is the “good tidings,” the announcement that the kingdom of God is at hand.124
The interesting suggestion here is that the temporary discipleship of a superior mind to an inferior may have both a retarding and a ripening effect, but that what counts essentially is the natural progress of a man’s own spiritual genius.
During the winter months of 1863–64 Mrs. Patterson spent hours with Quimby almost every afternoon, observing his cases, talking with him, discussing the notes he jotted down on his cases. Mrs. Sarah G. Crosby, a Quimby patient who roomed in the same boardinghouse with her, told later how Mrs. Patterson would come home at the end of the afternoon and sit up until late at night writing.125 As she had been ● ● ●