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Horatio W. Dresser (1866-1954) was born in Yarmouth, Maine, and died in
Boston, Massachusetts. He was an author and, like his parents before him, a New Thought
religious leader. Dresser is also noted as a past president of the International New
Thought Alliance. He married Alice M. Reed in 1898. In 1895, Dresser became involved
with the Metaphysical Club of Boston. He founded the
Journal of
Practical Metaphysics in 1896. Two years later, this journal was merged into
The Arena, for which Dresser was subsequently an associate
editor. The following year, in 1899, Dresser founded another New Thought magazine,
The Higher Law. Dresser obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1907
and taught at Ursinus College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1911-1913. In 1919, he
became a minister of The Swedenborgian Church in North America, and served briefly at a
Swedenborgian church in Portland, Maine. He wrote, edited, and compiled
A History of the New Thought Movement (1919). In addition to his writings on
New Thought, Dresser is known for having edited two books of selected papers by Phineas
Parkhurst Quimby in 1921 (
The Quimby Manuscripts). Dresser was
a strong advocate of Quimby, whom both his parents had studied under, and in this work
re-opened the controversy concerning Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, and her sources for
developing Christian Science. From 1932 until his death, Dresser was a psychologist and
spiritual advisor for the Associated Clinic of Religion and Medicine in Brooklyn, New
York.
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