A quick little article of a great book.

There are many who still think Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was the father of the New Thought movement and mind cure.  When Catherine Albanese published The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans through Indiana University Press, a very different story emerges. For one, Evans wasn’t a Quimby disciple. He wasn’t taking notes in the same room as Quimby and Evans had already wrote his own book long before Quimby’s name ever crossed his path.

Warren Felt Evans (December 23, 1817 – September 4, 1889)

Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889) was a Methodist minister from New Hampshire. He kept detailed diaries from 1850 to 1865. He recorded quite a lot about his health, his doubts, what he read, his revelations and the hours he spent in prayer. He lists Madame Guyon, Thomas à Kempis, Swedenborg but not Quimby. The journals show a man figuring out the real battlefield… was in his mind.

A very generous quote from Albanese’s book,

Evans visited Quimby in Portland at least twice, once probably in 1863 and once perhaps in September 1864, when he chronicled his seasickness on a visit to Bath, Maine, less than thirty-four miles from Portland. Yet his journal makes no mention of Quimby at all, and Evans’s reticence about him continued in his published work. It was only in his second mental-healing book that he acknowledged, six years after Quimby’s passing, that “the late Dr. Quimby, of Portland, one of the most successful healers of this or any age,” embraced the view that the cause of illness was “wrong belief.” Changing the belief would, therefore, cure the disease. “By a long succession of most remarkable cures, effected by psychopathic remedies,” wrote Evans, Quimby had “at the same time proved the truth of the theory and the efficiency of that mode of treatment.”

Was the autodidact Quimby someone to be distanced in a quest for professional stature by a much more-learned Evans? Were Evans’s memories fading as the years passed? Have contemporaries and later scholars, often with deep sympathies for Quimby and his formative role in New Thought, overemphasized Quimby’s influence on Evans? Or, as his journal entries and early published writings hint, had Evans through his own spiritual journey gradually arrived at conclusions that were similar to Quimby’s?

According to the traditional account of Evans’s life, Quimby had both helped to heal Evans and instructed him. That would place Evans among a series of patient-students that Quimby had attracted. Among the others about whom we know were Mary Baker Eddy, who later founded Christian Science, and Julius Dresser and Annetta Seabury, who as a married couple eventually became major New Thought leaders in the Boston area. But evidence suggests that in Evans’s case it would probably be closer to the mark to see Quimby as a catalyst for Evans’s growing sense of vocation as a mental healer and also not as someone who had healed Evans (since he continued to be ill after the time frame of his visits).

For example, in a public lecture in 1887, Julius Dresser told his audience that in 1876 Evans had confided to him personally “an interesting account” of his second visit to Quimby. On that occasion, Evans “told Quimby … that he thought he could himself cure the sick in this way. Quimby replied that he thought he could.” Evans took the encouragement seriously. “His first attempts on returning home were so successful that the preacher became a practitioner from that time.”

By 1888, though, Evans was remembering the story with a different nuance. He told A. J. Swarts—also once a Methodist minister, and an ex-Christian Scientist—that he (Evans) had never worked with Quimby. In an interview published in his Mental Science Magazine, Swarts recounted that Evans “called twice briefly on Dr. Q. in Portland nearly twenty-five years ago, and his interviews satisfied him that his own methods of cure were like those which Dr. Q. employed.” Swarts added that Evans spoke “well of him [Quimby], and of all the workers, simply desiring all to be honest and to ‘give credit where credit is due.’”

Once again, the argument for a parallel path is real. Perhaps there were fading memories, and certainly a realized sense of his own success as a healer may have altered Evans’s later narrative. Still, independent scholar Keith McNeil has argued exhaustively that a hypothetical Evans-Quimby relationship, which converted Evans to mind cure and healed him, is largely the artifact of accounts by Horatio (son of Julius) Dresser, William J. Leonard, and other New Thought sources. Most later authors followed these earlier summaries uncritically and never explored counter-evidence.

With journal entries and pre-1863 published books to lend important corroboration for the McNeil case, a revisionary reading—highlighting the gradualism of Evans’s spiritual and vocational changes—becomes yet more persuasive.

What Evans does record, however, are moments of divine contact and revelations which are more like someone crossing the veil of consciousness itself:

November 27 — Thanksgiving Day

Preached at 11 a.m. on The Hand of God in American History.

In the evening, in my study, I experienced a state it is not easy to describe. I can give it no better name than losing myself in God — a kind of annihilation or suspension of all the powers of my soul.

I was only conscious of naked existence. There was no emotion of any kind, no desire, no joy, or conscious peace — no feeling, no misery, no guilt, no thought, no imagination. I was conscious of nothing but simple being. My will was lost.

It was not a trance, nor an ecstasy. It was not an unhappy condition. It was an inconceivable stillness — a silence like that which reigns beyond the bounds of creation, in empty space.

Does it proceed from a closer union with God? Is not this loss of all emotion something like the state of the Infinite Mind? I apprehend it is a passing into God — a passing into the pure divine.

It seemed a purely spiritual state, almost a disembodied state, for the senses were closed. Yet I repeat, it was not a trance. My divine Teacher has shown me that an emotional state is not the highest in religion. He who seeks the state of ecstasy and is satisfied with nothing but the intoxication of emotion has not fully lost himself. He is not wholly unselfish.

Union with God, which is a very different thing from ecstasy, is the end at which a Christian should aim. – 1856

This is not exactly a man chasing Quimby’s healing method. It’s more like someone discovering the “I AM” on his own. What Evans described in his own notebooks wasn’t hypnosis or mesmerism either. It was inner causation.

I have thought much of the power of a living faith, by which I mean a faith that is connected with love, or which proceeds from love. Such a faith is power, and it seems to me that its power is but little understood.

In the primitive Church the power of faith was understood. In the Church of the future it will be so again. Once, faith had power over disease. Here undoubtedly was no violation of the laws of nature, but the unfolding of a higher law. A law is only the mode of the Divine action.

Faith once gave the mind power over the material world, to some extent. All causation, all force lies in the spiritual world or in some mind, uncreated or created. Will is the only causal agent in the universe. The phenomena of the outward world are effects, the causes of which are in the world of mind.

It is not incredible that in the primitive age of Christianity, when a new influx from God came down to the world, the minds of the disciples, through faith, affected the natural world. It is something more than an Oriental hyperbole when Christ says, “If ye had faith as a grain of mustard, ye should say to this mountain, Be ye removed hence, and it would obey you.”

So by faith the sycamine tree could be plucked up. It is true there is a spiritual sense to the word mountain and sycamine tree in these passages, but that does not make the natural sense wholly false.

(I believe our Savior expresses in these words the law of the soul’s power over matter — a law that in the future will be more fully developed.)

Emanuel Swedberg

Swedenborg 

Evans’s mind was soaked in Swedenborg, the mystic who said the physical world corresponds to the spiritual.

We have often felt in our own experience what is so beautifully and simply expressed by Swedenborg, in H. H. 413:

“I observed that when I wished to transfer all my delight into another person, there followed a new influx of delight, more interior and more full than the former; and that in proportion to the amount that I desired to impart, was the amount of that which flowed in; and I perceived that this was from the Lord.”

Here is unfolded the law of the kingdom of the heavens, as immutable in its operation as the regular succession of phenomena in nature.

By 1860 three years before his supposed Quimby conversion, he wrote that disease starts in the mind in The Happy Islands.

Evans even recorded the precise mechanism:

I see how it is that by believing I have the thing for which I am praying, causes me to have it. It is implied that the faith is divinely imparted. It proceeds fr. Gd. Faith is truth, and truth fr Gd. is something real & substantial. If one prays for recovery to health, and the Ld gives him to believe that he is recovering, that faith is only the truth that it is so, received from the Ld. To believe that I am being recovered to health, if that faith is self-originated, accomplishes nothing, But if my belief of it is a truth received fr Gd, or if my faith is the faith of Gd, it becomes a substantial reality. Faith in its essence is truth; and truth is substance. Hence the Author of the Ep. to the Heb. says, “Faith is the substance (ΰπόστασις, Latin substantia) of things hoped for.” (Heb. 11:1.) Now if the Ld imparts to {one} me a divine conviction that a certain blessing is mine, that faith being a substantial reality,—being the substance of what I desire—puts me into an actual realization of what I am praying for. But this is all based upon the fact that faith is truth, & truth is a divine substance that finds its first source in the life of Gd.

But one is in danger unless he is truly enlightened of taking mere impressions for a divinely inwrought conviction. How may one know that his belief that a certain thing is so is the faith of Gd, and not a mere impression originating in our own minds or coming fr. evil and false spirits? I do not know unless in this way: what comes fr. Gd carries with it the evidence of its divinity. There is no mistaking what is divine. Gd shines by his own light. We have received the sprt that is of Gd, that we may know the things that are freely given to us of Gd. If He gives any thing, He imparts with it the evidence that it comes fr Him.

That is the Law of Assumption in a very raw form.

Some advice for the journey:

I also felt as I never did before, that while I may have great disturbance in my external mind, (I know not what else to call it,) I may have profound peace within.

There is an external and an inmost department of the soul. This we may be certain of in this way. We are conscious that we have certain thoughts in our minds, and there is a department of soul lying farther inward that enables me to see my thoughts, as distinctly as the eye sees material things.

So of my emotions, or feelings. In my external mind there may be great sadness, grief, anxiety, and other disturbing elements, yet there is an inmost center of the soul calm as the deep of eternity. Into this evil does not enter. It is appropriated as the residence of God in man.

Evil lies farther outward in our nature. If it should once become seated in the inmost deep, the holy of holies of the soul, our salvation would be an impossibility. But into this divine habitation evil is not permitted to enter. If God does not consciously dwell there, it is closed—it is a solitude.

Evil enters us from without, by an external way; God from within by an internal way. There are times in my experience, when in my external spiritual nature there is great commotion; but when I flee into the inmost apartment of the temple of the soul there is unutterable bliss and everlasting rest. There is the calmness of the passionless nature of God. There is a region of spirit beyond the reach of storms.

Happy the man who has learned to enter into himself, and there commune with God. There the human spirit may mingle with the infinite Spirit, and live eternal life. Oftentimes, by retiring inward from the external disturbing elements, the joy and peace that we find within will diffuse itself over the surface.

There is always quiet in the deep. There is the calmness of God. It is within that we must find Him.

He found the same truth mystics across centuries found:

Feb. 27th, 1858

At times my soul has had a clearer sense of the allness of God than I ever before experienced. One night on my bed my soul lost itself in the All— it seemed to me that there was nothing but God— that He was the life, the support, the substance of everything which exists.

I thank God for rest in the all-pervading Deity. This inward consciousness of God, this living and moving in the divine element, has made all times and places alike. Every day is exalted to the dignity of a Sabbath, while the Sabbath is not lowered to mere secular time.

Sometimes I find formal prayer to be an impossibility. I enter my closet, fall upon my knees, hold my soul in the divine presence, but have no special burden of prayer, no particular requests to make. I can only sweetly rest in the will of God, while my heart from its inmost center silently breathes out the prayer, the holiest in earth or heaven—

May Thy will, not mine, be done,
May Thy will and mine be one.

It’s true that movements love fathers. They make the story easier to tell and sell. Julius Dresser and his circle built Quimby into the patriarch of mental healing and turned Evans into a supporting character. But the journals show he had the discipline of a Swedenborgian, the insight of a mystic, and the will of a scientist which finally allowed the inner law to be revealed to him.

• (1860) The Happy Islands; or, Paradise Restored
• (1860) Divine Order in the Process of Full Salvation
• (1862) The Celestial Dawn; or Connection of Earth and Heaven
• (1864) The New Age and Its Messenger
• (1869) The Mental Cure (Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the Body, Both in Health and Disease, and the Psychological Method of Treatment).
• (1872) Mental Medicine.
• (1876) Soul and Body.
• (1881) The Divine Law of Cure.
• (1885) The Primitive Mind Cure.
• (1886) Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics.

The Spiritual Journals of Warren Felt Evans: From Methodism to Mind Cure (Religion in North America)

Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889) converted to Methodism while at Dartmouth College, became a minister, and spent his Methodist years as a spiritual seeker. His two extant journals, edited and annotated by Catherine L. Albanese, appear in print for the first time and reveal the inner journey of a leading American spiritual pilgrim at a critical period in his religious search. A voracious reader, he recorded accounts of intense religious experience in his journals.

Appendix A

Just for example, this is from the Quimby-Dresser – New Thought Alliance archives