folk, but they
kindled their time and released forces which are yet in action.

New England, through a group of adventurous thinkers of whom Emerson was
the most distinguished, responded strongly to Transcendentalism. Another
group, as has been said, responded strongly to mesmerism and spiritism,
which were also a part of the ferment of the time in which Christian
Science and New Thought (I use New Thought here in the technical sense)
find their source. And finally, Quimby, who is a rather unexpectedly
important link in a long chain,--important, that is, to the student of
modern cults--reacted against mesmerism, felt and thought his way toward
some understanding of the force of suggestion in abnormal states,
applied his conclusion to faith and mental healing and gathered about
him--as has been said before--a little group of disciples who have
between them released far-reaching movements.

Mrs. Eddy and the Dressers were the outstanding members of this little
group of disciples. Mrs. Eddy soon dissociated herself from the others
and she supplied in "Science and Health" a distinctive philosophy to her
movement. She organized it into a church; she imposed upon it a
distinctive discipline. No little of the power of Christian Science is
due to this narrow rigidity which is itself the projection of the
personality of Mary Baker Eddy. But Christian Science did not carry with
it the whole of the group which had come under Quimby's influence, nor
indeed all of those who came under Mary Baker Eddy's influence. There
was during all the formative period of these modern cults a perpetual
process of schism.

We have as a result, then, two divergent movements related in
underground ways, though as marked in difference as in resemblance, both
of them beginning about the same time, both of them reactions against
accepted religious forces and validations, both of them with a marked
therapeutic content, both of them adventures in the conduct of life.

In the summary which follows I am in debt to Dresser's recent "History
of the New Thought Movement." The name New Thought was chosen as the
title of a little magazine devoted to mental healing, published in 1894
in Melrose, Mass. "The term became current in Boston through the
organization of the Metaphysical Club in 1895. About the same time it
was used by Mr. C.P. Patterson in his magazine _Mind_ and in the title
of two of his books." Other names were suggested--in England, Higher
Thoug