User:Vassyana/New Thought

Hidden Depths
Waterfield, Robin. Hidden Depths. Routledge (2003). ISBN 041594791X. Page 153.

In its day, New Thought was a massive movement, whose most famous proponents were Warren Felt Evans, Henry Wood and Ralph Waldo Trine. Trine's book In Tune with the Infinite, published in 1897, sold 1.5 million copies. He taught that unhappiness, illness and so on are due to our being out of touch or harmony with God. We are in fact united with God, but can fail to realize it. Affirmations, visualizations, prayer, music and breathing exercises can help to restore the balance.

The popularity of all such movements, including New Thought and faith healing in general, was due to a widespread dissatisfaction with physicians for their lack of sympathy and negative suggestions. Nor was faith healing entirely without its merits: it proved good for neuroses, addictions and general improvement of morale.

Brittanica
Encyclopedia Brittanica. Online edition. "Faith healing". http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/200569/faith-healing

A different approach to the idea of divine healing is represented by the metaphysical healing movement in the United States called New Thought. Phineas P. Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy (a former patient of Quimby’s who founded the Christian Science movement) published numerous tracts exhorting their followers to beliefs that stressed the immanence of God and a link between bodily ills and mistaken convictions. Christian Science was unique in its view of sickness as a material state, subject to the transcendental power of the individual’s spiritual being.