One Simple Idea (5 page)

Starting in early 1859, Evans had struggled with a breakdown in his health that seems to have involved a painful bowel disorder. “My health so completely failed me last April that I could not preach,” he wrote in his journal on September 19, 1859. “I have not preached for more than six months.” In what must have been a particular sorrow for the learned minister, “There was a time when I could not so much as read.”

In the grip of his illness, Evans looked for answers in both religion and the reaches of his own mind. By the following spring he was convalescing, and recording some of his earliest connections between disease and mental state. He wrote in his journals on April 12, 1860:

Like Quimby, Evans was perched between religious and psychological language—imploring God to cure his “mental disease.” By the time Evans wrote those words, he was already a renegade in the Methodist ministry for his interest in Swedenborg. He had begun exploring Swedenborg’s theology around 1858, and for several years he attempted to combine his Methodist beliefs with Swedenborg’s outlook. Evans’s efforts at marrying the two thought streams began breaking down, however, in 1862 when he aroused church ire with his publication of
The Celestial Dawn
, a short book that explored Swedenborgian mysticism (though without naming the Swedish seer as its source of insights).

Evans’s discovery of Swedenborg not only marked his drift away from Methodism, but brought him to the threshold of a mental-healing methodology. He was thrilled by statements that he found in Swedenborg, like this one from the seer’s final 1771 book: “There is not anything
in the mind, to which something in the body does not correspond; and this which corresponds may be called the embodying of that.”

Evans did not always capture such statements in full context, as will later be explored. But within the folds of Swedenborg he discovered justification for his developing outlook that disease and suffering “is only an appearance” based in the images of the mind. “All disease,” Evans later wrote, “so far as it has a material or bodily expression, must have had a preexistence in us as a fixed mode of thought, that is, as an idea.”

By April 1863—shortly before Evans met Quimby—the minister recorded in his diaries an insight that he somewhat struggled to articulate. It contains the keynote of the next century’s positive mental therapeutics: “I see how it is that by believing I have the thing for which I am praying causes me to have it.”

Faith, Evans continued, “proceeds from God” and “if my belief of it is a truth received from God, or if my faith is the faith of God, it becomes a substantial reality.”

At this crucial point Evans arrived at his insight that
faith is a force
, which manifests “an actual realization of what I am praying for.” While framing this principle in Christian terms, Evans is saying that
mental certitude and visualization, backed by faith, is the engine of creation
. If Evans had put down his pen at that moment, and written no more, he could be credited with the founding premise of positive thinking.

In Evans’s later books, the qualities of faith and right-thinking became increasingly interchangeable. “If thought and existence are identical,” he wrote in 1885 in
The Primitive Mind-Cure
, “then it follows to think rightly is to be well and happy.” It was a simpler—and more radical—sounding of the insight Evans first recorded in his journals in 1863.

Hence, Evans, by the time he met Quimby, had already developed significant portions of his mind-based metaphysics. Evans left no record of how he initially learned about Quimby’s mental healing, or precisely what he hoped to gain from him. His personal attitude toward Quimby was perhaps most clearly voiced in a little-known interview Evans gave toward the end of his life. In early 1888 a Chicago writer and editor, A. J.
Swarts, himself a former Methodist minister, ex–Christian Scientist, and devotee of mind-cure philosophy, interviewed Evans at his Massachusetts home. In the March 1888 issue of his
Mental Science Magazine
, Swarts recalled meeting the movement’s elder statesman:

In the same interview Evans told Swarts that in summer of 1863 he “was passing through Portland”—not that he ventured there in search of a personal cure—and “that he called upon Dr. Quimby … to ascertain his methods of treatment, and that he found them to be like those he had employed for several years.”

Julius Dresser, a friend of Evans’s who had also worked with Quimby, recorded Evans saying in 1876 that he had been something of an eager student to Quimby, and that their time together was brief only because Evans’s grasp of the master’s methods was quick and sure, and his teacher gave him the nod to begin healing patients on his own. It is possible that this depiction of Evans’s mentorship was accurate, and that Evans, as an older man speaking to Swarts, was minimizing Quimby’s contribution. But whatever foreknowledge Evans brought to Quimby’s door, and precisely what he experienced there, Evans’s body of work leaves no question that he developed the earliest and clearest
public articulation of the philosophy of mental manifestation and affirmative thought.

Because Quimby published almost nothing during his life—his edited notebooks did not begin to see publication until 1921—it is the records and writings of Evans, rather than the methods of Quimby himself, that impacted the first generations of the positive-thinking movement. Early mental healers and students of positive-mind philosophy may have believed that they were imbibing the thought of Quimby in Evans’s books, when, in fact, they were receiving Evans’s own independently worked-through insights.

This misperception—which persists today in metaphysical classes and New Thought seminaries—was due to polemical lines that were drawn in a debate involving another, far better known, spiritual thinker who passed through Quimby’s world.

Starting in October 1862, Quimby began treating a New Hampshire woman named Mary Glover Patterson. In later years remarriage would change her name to how it is remembered in religious history: Mary Baker Eddy.

In the 1870s, Eddy went on to found one of the nation’s most significant new religions, Christian Science. Rather than extol of the powers of the mind, Eddy’s Christian Science saw the human mind as the seat of all illness, violence, and illusion—conditions that were to be overcome by the realization of the one true reality: the divine, all-permeating Intelligence of God. The human mind and earthly matter, Eddy reasoned, possess no ultimate reality; rather, all things are grounded in the true Mind of God, who wishes only good for his creation. Where prejudice, sickness, and sorrow appear, they are merely the false perceptions of man and the illusory world of shadows in which he lives.

Christian Science sought to resurrect the healing ministry of Christ
through a rediscovery of spiritual scientific laws of healing and a radical metaphysic that rejected that existence of earthly matter. It became a movement of tremendous growth and influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time Eddy met Quimby, however, she had not yet embarked on her theology. Whether, and to what extent, she adapted that theology from Quimby became the subject of a fiery and long-standing debate.

When Eddy reached Quimby’s door in fall 1862, she had already contended with years of hardship. Her rural childhood played out under the rule of a taciturn and sometimes eccentric father. “My father was taught to believe that my brain was too large for my body and so kept me much out of school,” she recalled. Not infrequently confined to her household, the young Eddy attained a remarkable self-education with the help of siblings who shared their classroom lessons, giving her a working knowledge of Biblical and classical languages.

By the age of twenty-three in 1844 Eddy was widowed while carrying an unborn son in her womb. In frail health, Eddy was eventually unable to care for her child, and she watched helplessly as her boy, George Glover (named for his deceased father), was adopted at age six by the Eddy family’s former domestic servant and her husband. The adoptive parents lived a carriage ride away in New Hampshire so Eddy was able to see the boy from time to time. When George turned eleven, however, his guardians moved away with him to Minnesota. To avoid any struggle by George to stay near his mother, his adoptive family told the boy that she was dead. The mother and son did not see each other again until George was in his thirties.

In 1853, Eddy was remarried, this time to a philandering dentist, Daniel Patterson, who off-and-on vanished from Mary’s life, and was finally taken prisoner by the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The man wasn’t a Union soldier but was foolish enough to go sightseeing on an active battlefield at Bull Run.

Alone, confused, and suffering from a chronic and undiagnosed
spinal disorder, Eddy sought out Quimby’s “mind-cure” in fall 1862. Under Quimby’s care she began to feel her strength return. She visited again in the summer of 1863 and several times after until the spring of 1865.

Eddy grew absorbed with Quimby, talking privately with him, taking notes, occasionally writing local articles and delivering talks about his work. But her time with Quimby was also fated to be relatively brief. The man she called her “doctor” died in January 1866, less than four years after they met. Eddy’s own father had died three months earlier. And her second husband, after escaping his imprisonment, was largely absent and unfaithful. Further still, soon after Quimby’s death Eddy suffered a fall on an icy sidewalk in Lynn, Massachusetts, in February 1866, which left her bedridden and frayed her nerves.

It was a time of psychological extremes for Eddy. Yet at such moments she could display steely determination, vowing to walk again and poring over Scripture for succor and insight. She later called it a period of great spiritual discovery. Yet she also, and inevitably, felt the agony of the near-simultaneous losses of a father, a spiritual healer, and a husband, all of it compounded by her poor health.

In her distress, Eddy looked for a new mentor. She wrote to another of Quimby’s former students, Julius Dresser, the acquaintance of Warren Felt Evans. Writing on February 15, 1866, Eddy implored Dresser, who was working as a journalist in Yarmouth, Maine, to take up the helm of Quimby’s work.

“I am constantly wishing that
you
would step forward,” Eddy wrote. “… I believe you would do a vast amount of good and are more capable of occupying his place than any other I know.” Eddy struck a tone of desperation: “Now can’t
you
help me?… Please write at once.”

Dresser took almost three weeks to reply on March 2. It was a busy time for the Dresser family, as Julius’s wife, Annetta, had given birth weeks earlier to the couple’s first child, Horatio, who arrived the day before Quimby’s death. Horatio would later gain note on his own as a historian and philosopher. While Julius felt deep affection for Quimby,
and sincerely believed that he and his wife owed Quimby their health, he had no intention of revisiting the past. He refused Eddy’s plea. “As to turning Dr. myself … it is not to be thought of for a minute,” Julius replied. “Can an infant do a strong man’s work? Nor would I if I could.”

By now an established newspaperman, Julius regarded Quimby as a failure of sorts for having spent so much time tending to patients and so little time formalizing his methods. “Dr. Q’s work killed him,” Dresser wrote, “whereas if he had spared himself from his curing, and given himself partly … to getting out his theory, he would have, at least, come nearer to success in his great aim than he did.”

Somewhat oddly, Dresser compared Quimby’s failure to that of the original spiritual healer, Jesus Christ: “So with Jesus. He had an effect which was lasting and still exists. But his great aim was a failure. He did not succeed, nor has Dr. Q succeeded in establishing the Science he aimed to do.” His reply closed the door on any relationship with Eddy.

Isolated and uncertain, Eddy devised a way to answer her own calling for spiritual guidance. Reflecting on her experiences of Quimby’s healing methods, and embarking on her own intrepid reading of Scripture, she began to lay the groundwork for her theology of Christian Science. Eddy’s revelation, however, differed in both subtle and significant ways from Quimby’s teachings. While the clockmaker saw the human mind as a vessel of divine power, Eddy saw it as an instrument of illusion. The “mortal mind,” she reasoned, must be eradicated so that the Mind of God could be revealed as the one absolute reality.

Eddy insisted that evil and sickness were unreal. They are products of the corrupt and illusory man-mind. The only true reality is the Intelligence of God, in which man is an image. Did Eddy literally mean that evil was unreal? When asked if Christian Scientists believe that evil exists, Eddy responded: “Yes, inasmuch as we do know that evil, as a false claim, false entity, and utter falsity, does exist in thought; and No, as something that enjoys, suffers, or is
real
.” The subtlety of her rejection of the ultimate reality of evil could easily lend itself to misunderstanding, especially among people or movements that wanted to embrace Eddy’s
ideas about the unreality of evil but found it difficult to make the leap to her denial of the actual existence of matter, which included the uses of “material medicines.”