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Horatio Willis Dresser (January 15, 1866 - March 30, 1954) was a New Thought religious leader and author. Dresser was born January 15, 1866 in Yarmouth, Maine to Julius and Annetta Seabury Dresser. His parents were involved in the early New Thought movement through their study with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. During his teens, Dresser's father was embroiled in a controversy with Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, whom he accused of stealing Quimby's concepts and using them as a basis for Christian Science. Horatio Dresser was admitted to Harvard in 1891, but dropped out in 1893 upon the death of his father. Ten years later he returned to Harvard, completing his Ph.D. in 1907. In
1895, Dresser became involved with the Metaphysical Club of Boston,
a group which Dresser would later refer to as the "first
permanent New Thought club". That same year, Dresser
published his first book, The Power of Silence. In
1896, Dresser founded the Journal of Practical
Metaphysics. Two years later, this journal was
merged into The Arena, for which Dresser was
subsequently an associate editor. The following year,
1899, Dresser founded another New Thought magazine, The
Higher Law. He was a past president of the
International New Thought Alliance. In 1921, after the Library of Congress made Quimby's papers available, Dresser compiled and edited a selection of Quimby's works, The Quimby Manuscripts. In this work, Dresser re-opened the controversy concerning Quimby and Mary Eddy Baker, attacking Baker in a chapter as well as the appendix of the book; for example:
Dresser married Alice Mae Reed in 1898. He was described, in an enthusiastic 1900 Atlanta Constitution article, as:
Dresser taught at Ursinus College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1911 - 1913. In 1919, Dresser became a minister of the General Convention of the Church of the New Jerusalem, a denomination built around the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, briefly serving as a pastor of a Swedenborgian church in Portland, Maine. |