Modern Religious Cults and MovementsAtkins, Gaius Glenn
Religion
Modern Religious Cults and Movements
Atkins, Gaius Glenn
Christian Science; New Thought; Religion; Spiritual healing
In 1861 Mrs. Patterson's physical condition was so desperate that she
appealed to Quimby. Her husband had had some interest in homeopathy and
she was doubtless influenced by the then peculiar theories of the
homeopathic school. (Indeed she claimed to be a homeopathic practitioner
without a diploma.) She had had experience enough with drugs to make her
impatient and suspicious of current methods of orthodox medication.
Under Quimby's treatment she was physically reborn and apparently
spiritually as well. It is necessary to dwell upon all these well-known
details to understand what follows and the directions which her mind now
took. Milmine's analysis is here penetrating and conclusive. She had
always been in revolt against her environment. Her marriages had been
unhappy; motherhood had brought her nothing; she had been poor and
dependent; her strong will and self-assertive personality had been
turned back upon herself.
She had found no satisfaction in the rigid theologies of the time. She
had sought help from accepted religion and religion had had nothing to
give her. We have to read between the lines and especially to evaluate
all this period in the light of "Science and Health" itself to
reconstruct the movement of her inner life, but beyond a doubt her
thought had played about the almost tragic discrepancy between her own
experiences and the love and goodness of God. She had known pain and
unhappiness in acute forms and had found nothing in what she had been
taught ample enough to resolve her doubts or establish her faith.
She found in Quimby's philosophy a leading which she eagerly followed.
Now for the first time she is really set free from herself. A truer
sense of dramatic values would have led Mrs. Eddy herself to have made
more of the unhappy period which began to come to an end with her visit
to Quimby and would lead her disciples now to acknowledge it more
honestly. It is a strong background against which to set what follows
and give colour by contrast to her later life. The twice-born from Saul
of Tarsus to John Bunyan have dwelt much upon their sins and sorrows,
seeking thereby more greatly to exalt the grace of God by which they had
been saved. Mary Baker Eddy came strongly to be persuaded that she had
saved herself and consequently not only greatly underestimated her debt
to Quimby, but emptied her own experiences of dramatic contrasts to make
them, as she supposed, more consistent, and her disciples have followed
her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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