Page:The Quimby Manuscripts.djvu/118

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114
LETTERS FROM PATIENTS

[Nearly a year later, writing from Wilmington, Ills. this patient expresses the thought that her restorer has helped her since she left home, although she has had little to meet save homesickness. She says in part:]

I wish you would take away that longing for the East, at those times when I feel I would give all to see Dr. Quimby. I try to think you are not far away. I like to think of that place by you which is mine. I laugh over the “sittings” I had with you, don't you? when I think how dreadfully distressed I was lest you were wanting to cast me out of the way to give room for new friends. How funny that you should know how I felt all the while. How you can understand the feelings hidden within others are entirely ignorant of, appears to me quite mysterious. When I consider what you have done for me and others, and that you are continually doing greater and greater cures, I conclude I cannot tell what may not be done, and that you possess a knowledge far superior to any other person I have known or heard of. I am glad I ever came to you, almost glad I was sick to need your assistance, that I might know and feel these things. When one is raised from a long illness to perfect health, as it were instantly, do you not realize what a healthy person cannot? Would they want to help feeling glad, and that the man who did such a splendid thing for them was the nicest, best man in the world?

It does me good to know the Science is being appreciated, that you are successful. . . . I want to know if a knowledge of mind acting on mind will enable one to control an ungovernable child without using any means of punishment, and what you do in the next world with profane, drunken, stealing, murdering men—people commonly sent into eternal punishment?

I wish I could tell you how I feel. But it is the same as when I sat with you: an undefinable longing for something.

[Another letter of the same year begins by raising a problem :]

I wonder if everything that occurs through life that makes me sad has got to make me sick. Can't you tell me something about it, and give me some good fatherly advice? Something quite unpleasant has occurred since I was in