Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/442

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438
APPENDIX

learned from him, not as a student receiving a regular course as she taught in her college, but by sitting in his room, talking with him, reading his Mss., copying some of them, writing some herself and reading them to him for his criticism. In that sense she and many others of his patients were his pupils, in the same way that the disciples were pupils of Jesus. I have heard him talk hours and hours, week in and week out, when she was present, listening and asking questions. After these talks he would put on paper in the shape of an essay or conversation what subject his talk had covered. These writings we would then copy into blank books. . . . Five or six were written before Mrs. Patterson came to Portland.

“Now, I have had since the article appeared in The Times several letters from Mr. Wentworth, who claims to have the document from which The Times gave extracts. I wrote him and asked him to give me the ‘Questions and Answers’ of which there purported to be fifteen, and also the beginning of the ‘Answers.’ He did so. I have in my possession the original of these questions and answers.

“Mrs. Eddy did live in Stoughton. She did board with those people. And it does not seem possible nor probable to me that they would absolutely lie about this matter—I mean as to where they obtained the paper. If they did not get it from Mrs. Eddy, where did it come from? They never saw father, and father wrote the original article, and I have it before me now, and it is dated Portland, Feb. 1862. . . .

“If he was a mesmerist or spiritualist, what did he write that for? And why did he say in his Circular to the Sick, which he issued from 1860 to 1865, ‘I give no medicine and make no outward applications. I tell the patient his feelings, and my explanation is the cure’? Why did he do this? Because that was his method and no one knew it better than Mrs. Eddy.

“In your statement of Mrs. Eddy's offer to print father's writings, if any such existed, and because her offer was not accepted it proved there were no such writings, you did not give her whole offer which was, ‘provided’ she first be allowed to examine them and see if they were not some she left with him! Just think of it! my letting her, or any one else, have Mss. I knew were father's because I saw him write them, and copied many of them myself, to see if she didn't write them and leave them with him.”