Religion: New Thought

Man is made up of truth and belief; and, if he is deceived into the belief that he has, or is liable to have, a disease, the belief is catching and the result follows it.

This contagious dogma was uncorked 70 years ago by an unlettered New England clockmaker, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby of Belfast, Me. He had discovered that he could mesmerize people, and in collaboration with a clairvoyant youth named Lucius Burkmar he cured all manner of ills. To him in 1862 went a formidable, twice-married invalid, Mary Morse Baker Glover Patterson, who after her third marriage was to become known as Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science church.

Cured by Quimby, Mrs. Patterson absorbed his ideas, wrote of them in letters and public prints, composed a poem upon his death in 1866. According to all her biographers except the official one (Sibyl Wilbur), she attempted in later years to laugh off a very great debt to Quimby. His followers, however, have never minded. Whereas Christian Science grew into a well-organized church, Quimbyism remained an individualistic movement which did not even get a permanent name until the 1890s. Then it became known as New Thought.

Last week in Washington was held the 25th annual congress of the New Thought Alliance, an extraordinary federation of Christian societies which, unlike Christian Science churches, believe in the reality of matter, take only the Bible as their revelation, maintain preaching ministries, accept ”love offerings” for their work.

In orphic language and with copybook maxims, they all attempt the peculiarly American feat of relating the arcane and the infinite with dollar-&-cents success. Some New Thought member organizations: the League for Larger Life; Unity (TIME, July 25); Divine Science; the Fellowship of Life Abundant.

Best-known New Thought preacher in the U. S. is Rev. Emmet Fox—a board member of the Alliance—who for the past year and a half has been preaching to an average 5,500 people every Sunday in his “Church of the Healing Christ” in Manhattan’s Hippodrome. A onetime British electrical engineer, New Thoughtist Fox believes in a universal Law to which anyone may tune his mind in “scientific prayer.”