Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/243

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
MESMERISM DETHRONED
203

and scholarly pride were certain to claim him. He had a brief controversy with five of Mrs. Glover’s students through the medium of the Lynn papers in which he called upon Mrs. Glover to walk on the water, raise the dead, and live without air and nourishment. Then retiring from the controversy, he exultantly declared that Mrs. Glover and her science were dead and buried.

Mrs. Glover minded this no more than if, as she said to a woman student, he should declare he could dip the Atlantic dry. Such harassing of herself and work she had learned to expect and knew that it was not vital. As for Tuttle, the superstitious, who dropped Mind Science because it worked results which frightened him, he was not worthy of more than a passing smile; and Stanley, whose grievance was a most confused demand for a personal God, anatomy, and manuscripts, exhibiting a virulent case of acquisitiveness together with the fear that he was being duped, was annoying but negligible. It was no one of these three students who seriously affected Mrs. Glover’s work.

The test of Mind Science came actually and vitally in the mental attitude of Kennedy. She had accepted him as a co-worker with some hesitation. He was in the relation to her of a chosen disciple. To him she had expounded more deeply and intimately the physically inscrutable and intangible apprehensions of truth than to any other student. When this vision of the working of mesmerism came to her so clearly in January of 1872, she would have defined it to him. But when she came to do so,