In brief
Evans served as a Methodist minister for more than twenty years before he joined the Swedenborgian church in 1863. The Mental Cure was the first book to set out mental healing as a system. Following Swedenborg, he treats the spiritual world as the world of causes and the body as the place where effects appear.
Evans visited the healer Phineas Quimby in the 1860s. Historians still debate how much he borrowed from him, but this book gave the young mind-cure movement its first serious philosophy. The prose is Victorian and dense, so it rewards slow reading.
Key ideas
- Mind and spirit are causes; the body shows their effects.
- Illness often begins as a mistaken belief or a disturbed mental state.
- Healing comes through a change of belief and expectation.
- Faith is an active force, not only a feeling.
Who it’s for
Read it if you want the intellectual foundations of mental healing. It is the second step on our “mind and healing” reading path.