CHAPTER XX
WITHDRAWAL FROM THE WORLD
WHILE the “jubilee of spirit” was being celebrated in Chicago during June, 1888, a quite different order of mental activity was causing fomentation in the Christian Scientist Association at Boston. Some of Mrs. Eddy’s students had become inoculated with the theories of Mr. Julius Dresser and Dr. Warren F. Evans. Both of these men had been patients of Quimby during the early sixties and both undertook to establish systems of healing. Both men printed and issued books on mental science. They attracted a small following which in later days came to be known as the New Thought Movement.
It was not so much the teaching of these writers on mental suggestion which attracted Mrs. Eddy’s students, — for those who had passed through her classes well knew that mental suggestion and Christian Science were as divergent as a chimeric dream and a scientific discovery, — but rather was it the thought that they might carry Christian Science itself outside the walls of its citadel and become writers and teachers and leaders among the philistines. Christian Science within the fold was too stringent in its demands. Not satisfied with manna, they would return to the flesh-pots of Egypt. The
