● ● ● write for his widely read journal: “But I am not strong enough to step out upon the waves yet. I fear at least wetting my feet. . . . I long, long to be strong!” (April 10). And again:
I have a strange feeling of late that I ought to be perfect after the command of science, in order to know and do the thing right. So much as I need to attain before that, makes the job look difficult, but I shall try. When men and above all women, revile me, to forgive and pity. . . .
. . . I can love only a good, honorable and brave career; no other can suit me. (April 24)
The most important part of her two months in Warren was her experience in helping Miss Jarvis get over her ailments. In this task her own reliance on God was still weighted down by the Quimby theory of transference, by which the healer took on his patient’s sufferings.141 “My dear friend does all in her power to make me enjoy my stay here,” she wrote, “but you know her body of belief ‘is full of wounds and bruises’ which in getting her out of I stumble,” and she asked Quimby to treat her for two symptoms “that Miss Jarvis has just got rid of and saddled on to me” (April 24).
Even when she experienced what later seemed to her a real spiritual breakthrough and healed Miss Jarvis of one of her major troubles without any transference of symptoms, she immediately gave the credit to Quimby.142 Her lack of assurance at that time is apparent in her letters. In the middle of a passage pungently expressing her own views, she broke off suddenly to exclaim, “Jesus taught as man does not; who ● ● ●
141 This “penalty doctrine,” as it has been called, was to haunt her for a number of years. In the third edition of Science and Health she wrote: “In years past we suffered greatly for the sick when healing them, but even that is all over now, and we cannot suffer for them.” Mary B. Glover Eddy, Science and Health, 3rd ed. (Lynn, MA: Asa G. Eddy, 1881), vol. 2, p. 38.
142 See Eddy, Science and Health, pp. 184–185. The reference to her “metaphysical treatment” seems to indicate that in retrospect she considered this a genuinely spiritual healing in line with her later development after 1866. Seen in this light, her 1866 experience becomes only the most decisive of several steps taking her toward the point of development represented by the first edition of Science and Health in 1875. In that edition she gave 1864 as the year of discovery and continued to do so for several years afterward until she had sorted out her ideas more thoroughly. [Glover, Science and Health, 1st ed, p. 4.] Cf. Eddy, Science and Health, pp. viii, 460.