curities and irrationalities
of such a system would simply be, for the minds to which it would
naturally appeal, added elements of power. Any system which has sickness
for its field and credulity for its reinforcement and a specious show of
half truth for its philosophic form and religion to give its sanction
and authority is assured, to begin with, of a really great following.
Its very weaknesses will be its strength. It will work best as it is
neither clear nor simple--though it must make a show of being both. And
if, in addition, there is somewhere at the heart of it force and truth
enough to produce a certain number of cures it will go on. What it fails
to do will be forgotten or ignored in the face of what it really does
do.

Now Quimby, through his own native force and such a combination of
circumstances as occurs only once in long periods of time, stood upon
the threshold of just such a revolution in the history of faith and
mental healing as this. He anticipated the method and supplied the
material, but he either did not or could not popularize it. He was not
selfish enough to monopolize it, not shrewd enough to commercialize it,
and, maybe, not fanatic enough to make it a cult. He was more interested
in his own speculations than in making converts and without one of those
accidents which become turning points in a movement nothing would have
probably come of his work save its somewhat vague and loose continuance
in the thought and teaching of a small group. (It is doubtful if New
Thought, which as we shall see grew out of his work through his
association with the Dressers, would have come to much without the
stimulus of Christian Science against which it reacted.) Some one was
needed to give the whole nebulous system organization and driving force
and above all to make a cult of it.

_Outstanding Events of Her Life: Her Early Girlhood_

Mary Baker Eddy did just this and Christian Science is the result. It is
idle to calculate the vanished alternatives of life but in all
probability she never would have done it without Quimby. She and her
followers would do far better to honestly recognize this indebtedness.
It would now make little difference with either the position of their
leader or the force of their system but it would take a pretty keen
weapon out of the hands of their critics and give them the added
strength which thoroughgoing honesty always gives to any cause. There
is, on the other hand, little l