uing his work except in a most modest way. She wrote
Julius Dresser who had come under Quimby's influence, suggesting that he
would step forward into the place vacated. "I believe you would do a
vast amount of good and are more capable of occupying his place than any
other I know of."[28] She asked Dresser's help in recovering from a fall
which she had just had on the ice and which had so injured her, as she
supposed, to make her the helpless cripple that she was before she met
Quimby. This fall is worth dwelling upon for a bit, for it really marks
a turning place in Mrs. Eddy's life. In her letter to Dresser she says
that the physician attending "said I have taken the last step I ever
should, but in two days I got out of my bed alone and will walk."[29]
Sometime later in a letter to the _Boston Post_ Mrs. Eddy said, "We
recovered in a moment of time from a severe accident considered fatal by
the regular physicians." There is a considerable difference between two
days and a moment of time and the expression of a determination to walk
in the Dresser letter and the testimony to an instantaneous cure in the
_Boston Post_ letter. Dr. Cushing, the physician who attended Mrs. Eddy
at the time, gives still a third account. He treated her, he says, over
a period of almost two weeks and left her practically recovered. He also
attended her in a professional capacity still later and offers all this
in a sworn statement on the basis of his record books. There is a very
considerable advantage in a philosophy which makes thought the only
reality, for, given changing thought and a complacent recollection,
facts may easily become either plastic or wholly negligible.

[Footnote 28: "A History of the New Thought Movement," Dresser, p. 110.]

[Footnote 29: _Ibid._]

_She Develops Quimby's Teachings Along Lines of Her Own_

The real significance of this much debated but otherwise unimportant
episode is that it seems to have thrown Mrs. Eddy upon her own
resources, for now that Quimby was dead she begins to develop what she
had received from him through both experience and teaching along lines
of her own. She had found a formula for the resolution of problems, both
physical and mental, which had hag-ridden her for years. She had a
natural mental keenness, a speculative mind, a practical shrewdness (the
gift of her New England ancestors) and an ample field. The theology, the
medical science and indeed the philosophy or psychology of the