● ● ● to the classbook Mrs. Glover used with her first classes in 1870. It is entitled “The Science of Man by which the sick are healed, or Questions and Answers in Moral Science,” and a single question and answer from it illustrates the sort of demand she was increasingly to make on her students:
Ques. How can I succeed in doing this [i.e., in casting out error with truth] so that my demonstration in healing shall be wonderful and immediate?
Ans. By being like Jesus, by asking yourself am I honest, am I just, am I merciful, and am I pure? and being able to respond with your demonstration, to let what you can do for the sick answer this and not your lips.147
Where Quimby’s system of healing had been a mental technique, with physical accompaniments, Mrs. Glover’s was a religious discipline, moral as well as metaphysical; but she was still not ready to call it Christian Science, and Moral Science it remained for several more years. In its embryonic state, her system had not yet freed itself entirely from a Quimbyism which was basically incompatible with the deeper fundamentals of Christianity.
Under the lingering Quimby influence, she still permitted physical manipulation if the student could not rise to the purely spiritual method, although she tried to have him “spiritualize” even the manipulations. In an early version of “The Science of Man” she wrote:
[The practical application of the art is] first to leave your own belief or body when you will be in the principle & there be able to speak to another this principle which immediately controls the body[.] If this wisdom be not yet fully attained, the next method is by rubbing the head, while you at the same time take yourself utterly away from all thoughts of his complaints or their locality in matter. . . .
. . . What is matter? . . .
147 [Mary Baker Glover, “The Science of Man by which the sick are healed, or Questions and Answers in Moral Science,” manuscript, c. 1873, A11352, p. 14, MBEL (bracketed text Peel’s).]