“The Science of Soul,” to which she referred in her letter, was most probably a variant version of the short work generally known as “The Science of Man,” supplemented perhaps with other manuscript material to make it bulky enough for a “volume.” While no extant copies of “The Science of Soul” are known, there are numerous manuscript copies and versions of “The Science of Man,” variously titled, several of them being in Mrs. Wentworth’s handwriting.
The genesis of this key work, from which Mrs. Glover was to teach her earliest classes, has been befogged by misunderstanding. It has been confused by many biographers with a totally different manuscript entitled “Questions and Answers” written in whole or in part by Phineas Quimby. To clarify the matter one must go back to the days when Mrs. Glover, then Mrs. Patterson, was reading Quimby’s manuscripts, writing her own gloss on them, leaving some of her own writings with him, and in general trying to reconcile her Christianity with his evolving system of suggestion.
Out of that period emerges a brief work composed of fifteen questions and answers, a work whose beginnings are shrouded in a rather unusual degree of mystery. The several copies of it now in the possession of the Quimby family in various handwritings are dated either February or June, 1862—in either case several months before Mrs. Patterson met Quimby—although in a letter to Georgine Milmine on March 13, 1906, George Quimby wrote of having “the original” in his possession “with the date ’62 or ’63 on it.”134
There is no mention of this work in any of the lectures, articles, books, or known letters of the Quimby champions of the eighties and nineties—namely, Julius, Annetta, and Horatio Dresser, and George Quimby—until after a copy of it in Sarah Crosby’s handwriting came into the possession of the editor of the Christian Science Sentinel and passages from it were printed in the Sentinel of February 16, 1899, to show how it differed from Mrs. Eddy’s teaching. Horatio Dresser then replied in an article in The Arena in May, 1899, “The extracts quoted ● ● ●
134 George A. Quimby to Georgine Milmine Welles, 13 March 1906, Subject File, Georgine Milmine - Research Notes II, MBEL. It was unlikely to have been the original, since the extant copies are all in other hands.