Eddy attempted to respond to his stone with a boulder, writing on February 19—under the initials “E.G.”—that Quimby had been little more than a stage performer, with no clearly enunciated method; his writings mere “scribblings,” she wrote, and Quimby had only a slapdash, Mesmeric method of healing the sick. In the next letter, of February 24, Dresser, now using his real name, played his hand. In a move that must have made Eddy seethe, Dresser aired her private letter to him of winter 1866, in which she had begged Dresser to step forward as her new healer after Quimby’s death. Dresser quoted Eddy, writing at what had probably been the most vulnerable moment of her life, saying that she was frightened and now “find myself the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby.” For a woman now at the helm of a growing religious movement it was a humiliating revelation.
Using her real name, Eddy replied on March 9 in a letter that assumed a more officious and careful tone. Of Quimby’s memory, she wrote: “He was a humanitarian, but a very unlearned man; he never published a work in his life, was not a lecturer or teacher. He was somewhat of a remarkable healer, and at the time we knew him he was known as a mesmerist.… We have no doubt that Dr. Q’s motives were good, for we understood him to be a moral man.” Of greater concern to Eddy was the airing of the “private letter which the gentleman”—after which she added “(?)”—“Mr. Dresser, has on exhibition.”
The chill between the two former Quimby patients was permanently set.
By early 1887, Dresser opened a second front. In February, he issued his most effective polemic against Eddy in a popular Boston lecture, which was quickly issued as a pamphlet called The True History of Mental Science. Dresser’s contentions came to shape how the history of positive thinking has been written and understood, including to the present day. The skillful broadside argued that Eddy had lifted her ideas from Quimby during the time she had his confidence as a patient, and that she was now passing them off as her own without crediting the Maine healer. Dresser singled out Warren Felt Evans for high praise, holding him up as an example of a man who, unlike Eddy, knew how to give proper credit to his old mentor.
Yet Evans himself had actually made no mention of Quimby in his groundbreaking 1869 book, The Mental Cure.*3 Over the course of Evans’s six works on mental therapeutics, written between 1869 and 1886, he made just one reference to Quimby, in his second book on the topic, Mental Medicine, in 1872.
No sooner did Dresser’s pamphlet conclude its praise of Evans than it intoned more darkly: “Amongst those who were friends as well as patients of Quimby during the years from 1860 to 1865, and who paid high tributes to his discoveries of truth, and the consequent good to many people and to the world, was one who, for some strange reason, afterwards changed and followed a different course.” Juxtaposing the good son, Evans, to the thankless offspring, Eddy, Dresser thus began his critique of the Christian Science founder, airing her past statements of praise for Quimby, noting her time spent with him, and finally concluding: “It is now easy to see just when and just where she ‘discovered Christian science.’ ”
Arguments tend to coarsen rather than lighten over time. And the argument that Dresser embarked upon later solidified into a conviction about Eddy, one that got repeated to me this way by a librarian at a metaphysical center in 2012: “She stole all her ideas from Quimby!”
That, in lesser or greater terms, is the judgment many historical writers settled on in the Eddy-Quimby affair, with Evans often cast in a role that he never conceived for himself: the loyal scribe who owned up to his debt to Quimby, versus the less-forthcoming Eddy. In the heat of responding to the charges, Eddy worsened matters by dismissing Quimby’s writing as “scribblings” and calling him “illiterate” in the Christian Science Journal in June 1887. In a term that would assume a life of its own, Eddy described Quimby in a letter in 1886 as an “ignorant Mesmerist.”
Yet Eddy’s attitude could also markedly soften. In the late 1880s, Eddy issued a series of autobiographical pamphlets on the development of Christian Science. With each successive revision, between 1885 and 1890, she grew fonder in her tone toward Quimby. In 1885, Eddy called her former teacher a “distinguished mesmerist” and a “sensible old gentleman with some advanced views on healing.” By 1890, Eddy was referring to Quimby as “a humane, honest, and distinguished mesmerist.… He helped many sick people who returned home in apparently good health.”
For Quimby’s partisans, those branches were considered too small in spirit, and the continued reference to Quimby as a “mesmerist” was considered a tendentious and inaccurate characterization. After Julius Dresser died in 1893, his eldest son, Horatio, became a brilliant and prolific critic and historian of the New Thought movement. In 1902 Horatio began graduate studies at Harvard and became something of a protégé to William James, under whose tutelage he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. Horatio also took up his father’s crusade against Eddy. In a series of handwritten letters, the budding philosopher issued a challenge to Eddy. In a departure from the measured and erudite tone of most of Horatio’s published works, his letters, at times, assumed an almost menacing quality. In 1900—with the Quimby controversy still boiling—Horatio, in elegant handwriting on the stationery of his family’s metaphysical magazine, The Higher Law, addressed Eddy on February 3:
My dear Madame,
You may be surprised to hear from me, but I write to tell you that if you choose you can forestall a great downfall. If you come out frankly and acknowledge that the truth in your “revelation,” the method of healing, etc., came from Dr. Quimby, (as your letters show that you know) the world will respect you and you will go down to history with a reputation. But if it all comes from outsiders, and after your death that which many are now withholding, it will be a very bleak record which will throw you into utter discredit.
I know those who have hunted up the whole history.… I know too of those who are preparing the evidence in regard to your indebtedness to Dr. Quimby, and I know what will come out, little by little, and that nothing can stop it for the people demand it. It is utterly useless to try to head it off, or to reiterate the old statements.
And so I advise you to make a clean breast of it.
If you do, these darker things may not be published.
I make this appeal both for your own sake, and because every day that you delay you are permitting people to believe and to convince others of a falsehood.
Around the same time that Horatio wrote to Eddy, he dispatched two letters, on January 15 and on February 3, to Judge Hanna, a high-ranking figure in the Christian Science church. “Books are being prepared,” he warned Hanna in January, “which will inform people, and the Quimby Mss. are being held in reserve as the climax.” The actual contents of the Quimby manuscripts remained a mystery. Quimby’s son George refused to release his father’s manuscripts. Acting for sometimes inscrutable reasons of his own, George had guarded the manuscripts from view during Eddy’s lifetime, keeping them inside an iron safe, and at one point even shipping them to relatives in Scotland to avoid the possibility of their being subpoenaed. It was not until years later—after the death of George Quimby loosened his grip on his father’s writings—that the climax Horatio foretold finally arrived.
With the cooperation of George’s widow, Horatio succeeded in 1921 in publishing The Quimby Manuscripts, an edited compendium, in which the historian argued—to a good deal of influence—that Quimby alone was the forefather of the mental-healing movement, and the forerunner of Eddy’s ideas. Yet the book settled no controversies. Because Quimby’s manuscripts had been under lock and key for so many years, and given that the collection was composed of edited selections of a vast array of writings, the portions that Dresser published didn’t decisively move the margins of the debate in one direction or another. In some sense the Quimby selections functioned more like a mirror in which either side saw the validation of its own long-held positions.
The book did, however, represent an important piece of scholarship, si
nce prior to it Quimby’s writings were virtually unavailable in any form. With legal wrangling never far away in the Quimby-Eddy debate, Horatio had to revise the book later that year after the Christian Science church objected to his use of some of Eddy’s correspondence to Quimby.
As seen from his handwritten letters, Horatio sometimes seemed to relish playing the part of intellectual cop. Yet Horatio simultaneously wrote with depth and sincerity of feeling, as though he rued the whole mess. Writing to Hanna of his admiration for the mental-healing philosophy and fires of controversy surrounding it, Dresser offered on January 15: “I regret too more than I can say that the movement should have been so hampered. For I love its truth.”
Eddy, too, could blunt the sharpness of her pen and express affection for Quimby in her historical pamphlets. All of the parties seem to have gotten caught up in a debate whose fires raged and engulfed them in ways they had never foreseen.
A Bridge Not Too Far
From the early 1880s to the early 1920s, the Quimby-Eddy debate produced literally hundreds of articles, books, pamphlets, and lectures, and it remains a touchstone in the history of mental healing. Yet the closer one gets to its flames the lesser the differences seem. If either side had moved an inch toward the other—Eddy acknowledging Quimby’s role in preparing her for her later discoveries and the Dressers conceding the distinctiveness of Eddy’s metaphysic—most of the larger points of contention could have been resolved. No really serious observer ever concluded that Eddy plagiarized Quimby, whose writings were sprawling, vast, and unfocused. Nor could any thoughtful person deny that Quimby was anything less than a profound early influence on the onetime anxious and sickly young Eddy, who sought him out at a period of broken marriage, parental death, and a shattered relationship with her only child.
Indeed, in the fall of 1862 in Quimby’s household in Portland, Maine, Eddy seemed to embark on the mission of her life. But the manner in which Eddy carried out that mission, shaping its theology and structure, was largely—and brilliantly—her own. In the years following Quimby’s death in early 1866, Eddy arduously, and with vision and intellect, codified Christian Science theology into her Science and Health. Followers considered it a revelatory work. Some observers, including Mark Twain, remarked on what they considered suspicious embellishments as the book passed through a series of revisions until its final edition in 1907. To critics, such changes suggested that the supposedly inspired text benefited from the hands of unseen writers and editors. But this kind of argument showed rigidity on the part of detractors more than it revealed concealed footsteps by Eddy, who was forthright about embarking on a continued refinement of her vision.*4
Is there evidence that Eddy devised portions of Science and Health from Quimby’s unpublished notes, to which she would have been privy as a student? As foreshadowed in Horatio Dresser’s 1900 letters, a source no less august than the New York Times seemed to believe so. Six years before Eddy’s death, in a withering, unsigned two-page spread published in July 1904, the Times depicted Mrs. Eddy as an ambitious student who picked over Quimby’s writings. The article included side-by-side columns of text that appeared to reveal an echo of Quimby’s notebook writings in the work of Eddy.
For her part, Eddy stuck to a version of events that depicted her not as a protégé but as a burgeoning teacher, even while under Quimby’s care. “I re-arranged a few of his short essays,” Eddy had written in 1888, “and gave him also some of my own writings which remained among his papers, and have been spoken of by persons unfamiliar with the facts as his own.” Eddy’s claim that some of her writings got integrated with Quimby’s evoked indignation among partisans. Yet a review of Quimby papers shows that Eddy’s claim that her writing, and that of others, got sorted in with Quimby’s may have merit.
Quimby’s son and executor, George—no friend to Eddy’s memory—acknowledged that Eddy had spent personal time with Quimby, “sitting in his room, talking with him, reading his Mss., and copying some of them, writing some herself and reading them to him for criticism.” A review of transcribed Quimby manuscripts shows that in 1868 Eddy had added a preface to the Quimby manuscript called “Questions and Answers,” which she and a few other students circulated among themselves. The New York Times, in its two-column comparison of similarities between the Quimby and Eddy writings, erroneously included this Eddy passage in the Quimby column, crediting it to him and further muddying the waters about who wrote what. In the experimental atmosphere of Quimby’s Portland circle, his unpublished manuscripts were copied and passed around, discussed and amended, dictated, revised, and recirculated. While the vast preponderance of Quimby’s material is original to him, a portion grew out of collaborative efforts at clarification and refinement, with the occasional commingling of notes.
Eddy was a woman of literary skill and verve, a force of thought and originality whose publishing, theological, and educational institutions were already carefully formulated by the early twentieth century. Quimby, for all his prescience and originality, produced many pages of sometimes ponderous concepts, which were amassed into folios that remained unread decades after his death, and even in their edited versions are rarely penetrated today.
Quimby was a great Yankee mystic and foresightful healer—a thinker who set the stage for New England’s mid-nineteenth-century renaissance of mental experimentation. He possessed a seminal, early understanding of the subconscious mind, which he fitfully sought to articulate. But Quimby was not the covert founder of Christian Science, nor was he the sole progenitor of mental healing. He was, rather, an instigator, a heroic experimenter, and a figure capable of inspiring intellects more disciplined than his own, among them Mary Baker Eddy, Warren Felt Evans, and Horatio Dresser.
From the ferment of these relationships emerged the philosophy of positive thinking. Swelling beyond the borders of the New England mental-healing scene, positive thinking would soon take on new names, such as New Thought and Unity, under which it entered American households. As its influence grew, however, the philosophy sometimes conflicted with the aims of the pioneers themselves.
* * *
*1 There were subtle but important differences between Franklin’s ethical literature and that of the Puritans. While the Puritans believed that man’s improvement was a matter of salvation and service to God, Franklin encouraged material success and the advancement up society’s ladder.
*2 Evans coined the term New Age, in its modern spiritual-therapeutic sense, in his 1864 work The New Age and Its Messenger. The “Messenger,” in this case, was Swedenborg.
*3 The book’s references to a “positive mental force” gave the movement some of its hallmark language. References to a “Positive Mind” had also appeared earlier in the work of a medium and spiritual writer from New York’s Hudson Valley, Andrew Jackson Davis, known as the “Poughkeepsie Seer.” In 1847, Davis described the universe as the product of the “active energies of the Divine Positive Mind.”
*4 Contemporary readers who approach Science and Health will find, contrary to commonly held views, not a turgid, difficult-to-get-through tome but, rather, a book of surprisingly sprightly passages that often anticipate present-day concepts in the uses of prayer and meditation for health.
chapter three
“to redeem defeat by new thought”
The day is plastic to you.
—Emma Curtis Hopkins, 1888
In 1884, a Manchester, New Hampshire, housewife in her early thirties left behind her husband and young son to move to Boston to devote herself to Mrs. Eddy, as followers called the Christian Science founder.
The housewife’s motives were at once evident and inscrutable. She had heard Eddy speak at a neighbor’s home in October 1883 and was enthralled with her Christian Science philosophy. The younger woman’s religious and intellectual interest intensified later that year when she traveled to Boston to take a class with Eddy. By August 1884, she resolved to leave her husband and nine-year-old son in order to join Eddy and the Christi
an Science fold in Boston. Though she hinted at abuse in her debt-ridden marriage to a high-school English teacher, all she wrote to Eddy was, “I am happily married to a young man … and have one sweet little son.” Whatever the true nature of her home life, her passion was for Christian Science alone.
This was Emma Curtis Hopkins. A mystic, a suffragist, and a brilliant student of Christian Science, she seemed fated to become one of Eddy’s most trusted companions. Instead, she became a source of Eddy’s ire—and later her competitor and scourge. The split between the Christian Science founder and her onetime student formed the opening of a chrysalis from which emerged a new and greatly popular strain of mind-power philosophy that went under the name New Thought.
From Apostle to Apostate
Emma Curtis Hopkins first encountered Mrs. Eddy in the fall of 1883 when the healer was visiting Manchester and staying at the home of one of her local students. Eddy’s hostess prevailed upon her to deliver a short discourse on Christian Science to a group of visiting neighbors. Emma was among them. For her, hearing Eddy was like an intellectual parting of the Red Sea.
She was enthralled with Eddy’s idea of a Divine Mind infusing all of life. By December, Hopkins wrote to Eddy saying that the same neighbor who had hosted her had cured Hopkins of “a late serious illness” using Christian Science methods. Hopkins told the Christian Science founder that she wanted to dedicate herself to her efforts. “I lay my whole life and all my talents, little or great, to this work,” she wrote Eddy on January 14, 1884.
Before Hopkins left her home to join Eddy in the late summer of 1884, Eddy granted the erudite younger woman the visible and valued position of editor of the church’s house organ, the Journal of Christian Science (renamed the Christian Science Journal in April 1885). Hopkins became the first person other than Eddy to hold that title. She was also given a place to live in the women’s dormitory of Eddy’s Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston. Hopkins asked only that Eddy not reveal that her job as the Journal’s editor paid no salary, so that her family wouldn’t have further cause to question her judgment in uprooting herself. “I must go to Boston without letting anybody (my relatives, I mean) know that I go as editor of a paper without salary,” she wrote to Eddy on August 16, 1884. For Hopkins the move meant a chance to study at the feet of the master, and that was everything she wanted.
One Simple Idea Page 5
