Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/161

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HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
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A few days after Mrs. Glover left, I and my mother went into the room which she had occupied. We were the first persons to enter the room after Mrs. Glover's departure. We found every breadth of matting slashed up through the middle, apparently with some sharp instrument. We also found the feather-bed all cut to pieces. We opened the door of a closet. On the floor was a pile of newspapers almost entirely consumed. On top of these papers was a shovelful of dead coals. These had evidently been left upon the paper by the last occupant. The only reasons that they had not set the house on fire evidently were because the closet door had been shut, and the air of the closet so dead, and because the newspapers were piled flat and did not readily ignite—were folded so tight, in other words, that they would not blaze.

Mrs. Clapp, in her affidavit, substantiates this statement.

The Wentworths never saw or directly heard from Mrs. Glover again.

While Mrs. Glover was in Stoughton, she apparently had no ambition beyond expounding Quimby's philosophy and declaring herself his disciple. She made no claim to having originated anything she taught.

Although Mrs. Eddy now believes that she discovered the secret of health through divine revelation in 1866, she was often ill while in the Wentworth house, 1868-1870, and on several occasions was confined to her bed for considerable periods of time. During her illnesses Mrs. Wentworth nursed and cared for her, rubbing her and treating her after the Quimby method.

During her stay in Stoughton she made no claim to having received a divine revelation, or to having discovered any system of her own. She seldom associated her teachings with religion as such, and preached Quimbyism merely as an advanced system of treating disease. In instructing Mrs. Wentworth she used a manuscript, which, she always