About the New Thought Author Warren Felt Evans

(December 23, 1817-1889)

“All outward power that we exercise over the things about us is but a shadow in comparison with the inward power that resides in imagination and will” -Warren Felt Evans

Warren Felt Evans was an American author of the New Thought movement. He became a student of the movement in 1863 after seeking healing from its main founder, Phineas P. Quimby. He was the founder of a mind-cure sanitarium in Salisbury, Massachusetts, and has been referred to as “the recording angel of metaphysics”. Evans was born in Rockingham, Vermont, and was the sixth of seven children. He studied at Chester Academy and entered Middlebury College in 1837, later transferring to Dartmouth College. He left in the middle of his junior year for financial reasons. In 1840, he married M. Charlotte Tinker.

In 1838, Evans became a Methodist minister until 1863, when he eventually left the Methodist Church and joined the Church of the New Jerusalem after reading and becoming inspired by the books of Emanuel Swedenborg. In 1863, Evans went to Portland, Maine, to find healing the the philosophy and methods of Phineas P. Quimby. Soon after, he opened a mental medicine office in Claremont, New Hampshire. He and his wife also opened an office in Bosten, where they practiced and informally taught the principles of mental healing for 20 years. The Evans received patients in their own home in Salsbury, where they had moved in 1869. They did not charge for their services or instruction beyond accepting free will offerings, and no one, no matter how poor, was ever turned way. Charles Brad

W.F. Evans not only healed, but he wrote a great deal. His great achievement was in being the first to write about the new thought-healing methods and its basis as taught and practiced by Phineas. P. Quimby. His first book was published six years after Quimby died. Evans became the first in a long line of exponents of the basis of New Thought ideas and methods to set them forth in published book form.

Charles Braden, a metaphysical historian, wrote that Evans “was the only important figure, aside from Mrs. Eddy, who attempted to work out a consistent and philosophically supported system of metaphysical healing and mental healing after Quimby. Warren Felt Evans continued to write until his death in 1889.

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PUBLISHED WRITINGS BY WARREN FELT EVANS:

• The Divine Law of Cure (1881) 

• Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therapeutics (1886)

• The Happy Islands, or, Paradise Restored (1860)

• The Mental Cure: (Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the Body, Both in Health and Disease, and the Psychological Method of Treatment). (1869) 

• Mental Medicine A Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Medical Psychology (1873) 

• The Primitive Mind Cure; The nature and power of faith: or, Elementary lessons in Christian philosophy and transcendental medicine (1885) 

• Soul and Body, or, The spiritual science of health and disease (1875) 

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