It was directly after Mr. Spofford’s completion of class work that he called together a meeting of students for the purpose of arranging for renting a hall and raising a subscription toward sustaining Mrs. Glover as a teacher and instructor in weekly services. Mr. Spofford’s emotional and moral nature had been deeply stirred by his class work, so truly affected that he was able to say thirty-five years after to hostile critics of Mrs. Eddy that no price could be put upon what Mrs. Glover gave her students, that the mere manuscripts which he had formerly studied were, compared to her expounding of them, as the printed page of a musical score compared to its interpretation by a master.
no immediate reply to my question as to the disparity. After some hesitation he turned from the question by saying, “I believe Mrs. Eddy is the sole author of ‘Science and Health’ and I believe it is the greatest book in the world outside the Bible. … I don’t wish it to be understood that I have said Christian Science was Quimbyism. I said that Mrs. Eddy taught some of the Quimby doctrine when I first knew her in 1870. Mrs. Eddy developed her own ideas and wrote her own book, ‘Science and Health,’ and I was the publisher of the first edition and I know that book thoroughly. I don’t confuse in my own mind the work of Quimby and of Mrs. Eddy. I don’t see why the world should do so. It is clear to me that Mrs. Eddy at first taught some of the ideas of Quimby; that later she abandoned those ideas entirely for her own, incorporating her own system of religious interpretation in her book.” Mr. Spofford stated that he had been forced by persons who came into her circle to abandon Mrs. Eddy and the teaching of Christian Science. Mr. Spofford supplied the aforesaid magazine with a private letter of Mrs. Eddy to himself, written before her marriage to Dr. Eddy. In that letter occurs this passage: “No student or mortal has tried to have you leave me that I know of. Dr. Eddy has tried to have you stay. You are in a mistake; it is God and not man who has separated us and for the reason I begin to learn. Do not think of returning to me again. … God produces the separation and I submit to it. So must you. There is no cloud between us, but the way you set me up for a Dagon is wrong, and now I implore you to return forever from this error of personality and go alone to God as I have taught you.” — Human Life, July, 1907.
