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it cannot be learned except by desire for the truth, that Wisdom that can say to the winds of error and superstition "Be still" and they will obey.
It is not a very easy thing to forsake every established opinion and become a persecuted man for this Truth's sake, for the benefit of the poor and sick, when you have to listen to all their long stories without getting discouraged. This cannot be done in a day. I have been twenty years training myself to this one thing, the relief of the sick. A constant drain on a person's feelings for the sick alters him, and he becomes identified with the suffering of his patients: this is the work of time. Every person must become affected one way or the other, either to become selfish and mean, so his selfish acts will destroy his wisdom . . . or his wisdom will become more powerful. . . .
It is not an easy thing to steer the ship of wisdom between the shores of poverty and the rocks of selfishness. If he is all self, the sick lose that sympathy which they need at his hand. If he is all sympathy, he ruins his health and becomes a poor outcast on a charitable world. For the sick can't help him and the rich won't.*
*The resource, Quimby points out elsewhere, is found through knowledge that this Wisdom is from God; brings strength, guidance, freedom. Contrast Quimby's spirit as disclosed in this letter with that of later therapeutists who lacked his great sympathy.
[Whenever in his letters to the sick Dr. Quimby speak of spiritism we find him sceptical concerning alleged messages from the "dead." In one letter he says, "As my mode of treating disease is entirely new to the world, the spiritualist claim me as a medium. I deny this, but believe that mind acts on mind, and that it is the living, and not the dead; so here is where we differ." He then goes on to tell about a woman who was greatly misled by an unscrupulous medium. The result was so serious that the woman left her husband in a fit of jealousy, and when Dr. Quimby was called had tried to take her own life by cutting her throat. After hearing a sides of the case, and finding the woman virtually insane, Dr. Quimby sat by her to restore her, her state being so violent that he had to hold her by main force. After four or five hours she was brought to her senses and so quieted that she fell asleep. Then followed Quimby's explanations to both husband and wife, showing how they had been misled, the
