● ● ●  from Dr. Quimby in the Sentinel are from one of his earlier articles, and do not adequately represent him.”¹³⁵

However, twenty-two years later when “Questions and Answers” had become the cornerstone of the Quimby charges against Christian Science, Dresser wrote, “Copies of this manuscript were kept on hand to loan to new patients, and some of the patients made their own copies.”¹³⁶ But the only “new patient” actually known to have had, or have made, a copy of it, apart from Mrs. Patterson, was her one-time friend Sarah Crosby.¹³⁷ Until and unless a good deal more is unearthed about the origin and history of “Questions and Answers,” there must remain some doubt whether it is an expression of Quimby’s thinking before or after he met Mrs. Patterson.

His unquestionable stamp is on much of it, as when he writes: “God is the great magnet or mesmerizer[.] He speaks man, or the idea, into existense and attaches his senses to the idea and we to ourselves are just that and only that which we think we are. So is a mesmerized subject, they to themselves are matter.”¹³⁸ Yet unusually idealistic elements are found in it also, as Horatio Dresser recognizes when he points out that in his other manuscripts Quimby “calls matter much more than a ‘shadow’ or ‘idea.’ ” The disparate elements in this work create more than the usual confusion to be found in Quimby’s writings, as Dresser again recognized in his comments on it.¹³⁹ Some of the difficulties disappear if one assumes that part of the thinking in it emanates from a source other than Quimby.

At any rate, this is the document Mrs. Glover carried around with her for several years and always referred to as “Dr. Quimby’s manuscript,” whether or not she had any part in its composition or revision. She allowed a few of her early students to read it but did not teach from  ● ● ●