● ● ● dozen other writers, turns up.138 Actually the article may have been written in 1865, since it belongs to the group of writings that included the two on Lincoln’s assassination. The term itself runs counter to Quimby’s generally derogatory use of the word “Christian”—as distinct from the word “Christ”—and it may consequently reflect Mrs. Patterson’s Christian convictions. Yet in its context it is rather casual and vague, as in its earlier usage by other writers, and has no more than a slight prophetic significance.
What is more important is that during the early months of 1864 there was evidently growing in Mrs. Patterson’s mind a strong conviction that there must be such a thing as a real Science of Christianity—so much so that for some years afterwards she looked on this year as crucial in her development. But the figure of Quimby still dominated her own intuitions. Years later she wrote:
I tried him, as a healer, and because he seemed to help me for the time, and had a higher ideal than I had heard of up to that time, I praised him to the skies, wrote him letters,—they talk of my letters to Quimby, as if they were something secret, they were not, I was enthusiastic, and could’nt say too much in praise of him; I actually loved him, I mean his high and noble character, and was literally unstinted in my praise of him, but when I found that Quimbyism was too short, and would not answer the cry of the human heart for succor, for real aid, I went, being driven thence by my extremity, to the Bible, and there I discovered Christian Science.139
But in the early months of 1864 that event lay two years ahead.
Late in March Mrs. Patterson left Portland to visit Mary Ann Jarvis, an ailing spinster of Warren, Maine, who had been to Quimby for help earlier. From Warren she sent him a series of letters full of her ● ● ●
138 [Horatio W. Dresser, Quimby Manuscripts, p. 388.]
139 Mary Baker Eddy, “A Reminiscence,” 3 August 1907, A10242, MBEL.