Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/177

This page has been validated.
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
139

Once relieved of the necessity of compelling attention from hither and yon, she conserved her powers and exerted herself only when she could hope for a commensurate result. In following her through the six years prior to 1870, one is struck with her seeming helplessness against herself and against circumstances, and with the preponderant element of blind chance in her life. Before she had been in Lynn a year, she had come to work with some sort of plan, and her life was more orderly and effective than it had ever been before. Her power was one of personality, and people were her material;—her church, which so persistently denies personality, is built upon it. Her abilities were administrative rather than executive, and without a cabinet she exemplified the old fable of the impotence of the head without the body.

Mrs. Glover at first called the thing she taught merely "science," but when she had her professional cards printed they read:

MRS. MARY M. GLOVER,

TEACHER OF

Moral Science.

Her first students in Lynn were persons whom Richard Kennedy had cured or friends of his patients. The case of two young men in her first class will serve to illustrate. Mrs. Charles S. Stanley, who was suffering from tuberculosis in an advanced stage, was greatly benefited by Kennedy. She entreated her husband and her half-brother to take instruction under Mrs. Glover, and they did so. Her husband at first felt that he had an aptitude for the subject and eventually became