(This is Part 5 of a continuing series. Go back to Part 4.)
Before his death in Maine in1866, Quimby treated some 12,000 patients with what he called his "mental cure." Among those patients, four stood out:
Julius and Annetta Dresser, who became healers in their own right; Warren Felt Evans, who published the first book of New Thought (Mental Cure, 1869); and Mary Baker Eddy, who published Science and Health in 1875.
Mrs. Eddy was seriously ill when she came to Quimby in 1862. Quimby healed her and taught her and she was effusive in her public praise of him in letters to local newspapers.
Later, after his death and her founding of Christian Science, she claimed that the principles of mental healing had originated with her, a claim that was decisively refuted when Phineas Quimby's writings were published posthumously in 1921.
Mrs. Eddy, a prodigious organizer, founded the Christian Science Journal in Boston in 1883. Its first editor was Mrs. Eddy herself but in 1884 a new editor arrived, a remarkable woman named Emma Curtis Hopkins.
Mrs. Hopkins served as editor for about a year, but then, tiring of Mrs. Eddy's dogmatic ways, left the magazine. Ultimately Mrs. Hopkins settled in Chicago in 1885 and began an extraordinary career as a teacher of what she called "mental practice."
Emma Curtis Hopkins has rightly been called the "teacher of teachers," because so many of her students became teachers themselves and because of her great ability to light up her students with the fire of divine inspiration.
Among her 50,000 students were Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, founders of Unity; Ernest Holmes, the founder of Science of Mind; Nona Brooks, co-founder of Divine Science; H. Emily Cady, author of the classic Lessons in Truth, and many other teachers and founders.
Mrs. Hopkins was apparently the first person to hold that "mental cure" principles could be used not just for physical healing but for overall life-fulfillment as well.
Thus as the 19th Century drew to a close, New Thought began to be regarded as applying to all aspects of human well-being—physical, financial, emotional, relational—as a part of "abundant living."
Mrs. Hopkins laid great stress on God as Goodness. Not goodness as opposed to evil in some sort of battle, but rather, a Goodness that extended to all of existence. That is, reality was actually all goodness, regardless of any appearances to the contrary.
Moreover, she held that reality was not simply "ultimate" goodness—a goodness that would be achieved some day in the future—but instead, an all-encompassing goodness that was true right here and right now.
The idea that existence is all goodness can be extremely challenging at first. "What about war?" we say. "What about murder, rape, cruelty, pain, injustice and the whole litany of human suffering?" Doesn't that count?
Indeed it does. In fact, what makes it difficult for the mind to understand existence as all-goodness is that the mind can easily find so many counter-examples. Yet the heart can understand it, because the heart can understand that existence is love itself.
(This is the end of Part 5. Go to Part 6.)
—jim sloman, 12.13.03 for Mar 1.
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