Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/440

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436
APPENDIX

from the original. Nevertheless this is the only chapter in her book from which her students are taught in classes, today. The course in C. S. consists of a series of talks on this one chapter, which is elucidated and explained to the class. So everybody who is learning C. S. healing today is learning the essential truth almost directly from your father's old manuscript, as in the beginning. The rest of C. S. and all the objectionable part is simply ‘frills’ added by Mrs. Eddy. Of course she has used your father's ideas and many of his phrases all through the book. . . . The Ms. you sent [printed above, Chap. XIII.] is almost word for word, as you have seen, like the one she used to teach from.”

Even Miss Wilbur, in her “interview” with Mrs. Crosby, of Waterville, as reported in Human Life, March, 1907, puts in as fact that “Mrs. Patterson spent most of her time reducing to writing the remembered sayings of Quimby,” while living with Mrs. Crosby.

Turning once more to one who knew the whole history of the production of the Quimby Mss. from within. In a letter dated Belfast, Me., Nov. 11th, 1901, to one of his many inquiring correspondents, George Quimby says: “As far as the book, ‘Science and Health,’ is concerned, Mrs. Eddy had no access to father's Mss. [Save ‘Questions and Answers’] when she wrote it, but that she did have a very full knowledge of his ideas and beliefs is also true. The religion which she teaches certainly is hers, for which I cannot be too thankful; for I should be loath to go down to my grave feeling that my father was in any way connected with ‘Christian Science.’ That she got her inspiration and idea from father is beyond question. In other words, had there been no Dr. Quimby there would have been no Mrs. Eddy. Father claimed to believe, and taught and practiced his belief, that disease was a mental condition and was an invention of man . . . while he held strong views, and acknowledged God as first cause—and no one ever believed in God and Jesus more than he—he differed entirely as to the Bible, and interpreted it in a way entirely original with himself. In curing the sick [conventional] religion played no part. There were no prayers, there was no asking assistance from God or any other divinity. He cured by his wisdom. . . . Don't confuse his method of healing with Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science, so far as her religious teachings go. Disease as a mental condition caused by error or beliefs, and capable of being cured mentally without medicine or appliances or applications—these ideas are embodied in Mrs. Eddy's book—she certainly heard father teach years before she wrote her book. While under his care, off and on for several years, she became deeply interested in his theory of disease and its cure. She heard many of his essays read; wrote many her-