Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 58
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The Popular Culture Review
The two Quimby supporters had excellent grounds on which to
attack the originality and radicalism of the Eddy doctrine. Speaking
at the Church of the Divine Unity in Boston, Massachusetts, on
February 6,1887, Dresser declared that Christian Science was
fathered by P.P. Quimby and that a manuscript stolen from him by
Mrs. Eddy supplied the impetus for her writings.(25) Credence was
lent to this argument in 1921, when Dresser's cousin Horatio published
the Quimby papers. Horatio Dresser arrived at the conclusion that
Mary Baker Eddy most assuredly "borrowed” from Quimby in
formulating her own ideas; he also alleged that Quimby's mode of
healing was primarily spiritual, relying on the divine presence.
Every reference he made to Mary Baker Eddy attempted to confirm
the truth of this twin assumption: "The turning point with Mrs. Eddy,
as with all who came to Dr. Quimby was . . . the silent, spiritual
treatment which she received. . .." The manuscript entitled
"Questions and Answers," appearing at the end of each edition of
Science and Health, was alleged to be the stolen document referred to
by Julius Dresser and formerly entitled "Extracts From P.P. Quimby."
In conclusion, both Horatio Dresser and George Quimby (the
mental healer's son) said that the system of therapeutics called
"Christian Science Healing" was stolen from Quimby. However, both
disclaim responsibility for the religion of the same name. In a letter
from Belfast, Maine, written in 1901, George Quimby declared that
"the religion she teaches certainly is hers for which I cannot be too
thankful; for I should loathe to go down to my grave thinking that my
father was in any way connected with Christian Science."(26) By the
close of the 1880s, people who had once been sympathetic toward the
Eddy philosophy began to cry fraud.(27) Although New Thought
was utopian, it did not deny matter, sickness or drug cures and was not,
like Christian Science, inviting attack as a "theory which
contradicts scientific laws that we see proved everyday."(28)
The approach to the problem remained the same until the
dawning of the new century. In the nineties, it was still believed that
God left man to work out his own salvation; that the task was being
accomplished through science and man’s intelligence and that
Christian Science, denying the natural (i.e., material and physical)
goodness of man, was a deviation from nature and was, therefore,
fallacious because "nature is one with the highest life."(29) The
Christian Scie nce philosophy was still "unthinkable. . . [and] . . .