The Shakers forbade
audible prayer and enjoined celibacy. There are parallels enough here to
sustain Milmine's contention that Mary Baker was at least largely
influenced by suggestions from her peculiar group of neighbours.

_Her Unhappy Fortunes. She is Cured by Quimby. An Unacknowledged Debt_

Mary Baker married George Washington Glover at the age of twenty-two.
She was soon left a widow and her only son was born after his father's
death. The story of the years which follow is unhappy. She was poor,
dependent upon relatives whose patience she tried and whose hospitality
was from time to time exhausted. Her attacks of hysteria continued and
grew more violent. Her father sometimes rocked her to sleep like a
child. The Tiltons built a cradle for her which is one of the traditions
of this unhappy period of her life. She tried mesmerism and clairvoyance
and heard rappings at night.

She married again, this time a Dr. Daniel Patterson, a travelling
dentist. He never made a success of anything. They were miserably poor
and his marriage was no more successful than most of his other
enterprises. He was captured, though as a civilian, during the Civil War
and spent one or two years in a southern prison. Futile efforts were
made at a reconciliation and in 1873 Mrs. Patterson obtained a divorce
on the grounds of desertion. Meanwhile she had been separated from her
son, of whom she afterward saw so little that he grew up, married and
made his own way entirely apart from his mother.

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 satisfact