. . . Nothing. . . . That which is called matter is a shadow of substance, but believing it substance makes it error, therefore matter is an error and belief.148
This passage illustrates how far Mrs. Glover still was from her later unequivocal position on such matters. Her explanation was that neither the students nor their patients could conceive of a healing practice that did not involve doing something materially. In later years she wrote:
Science is not obtained the moment wherein its Principle is discerned or discovered. The discoverer has to take footsteps therein before he can state scientifically a Science. . . .
But in the beginning, to know how the students could mentally practice on the sick puzzled me. I had not by any material means or method demonstrated on the sick the power of Divine Science and did not believe that my students at the start could reach my purely mental attitude of healing. I thought they must approach it from their standpoints and gain the results of Truth on themselves before they could practice through prayer and heal the sick.
I learned from a strict observation of metaphysical practice the impossibility of demonstrating Christian Science through any material method.149
Related to the problem of cultivating her students’ willingness to rely on spiritual power alone was the problem of conveying to them a system of spiritual values wholly apart from matter.
In the preface to the last edition of Science and Health, in the passage that speaks of her early crude essays in scriptural interpretation as “the first steps of a child in the newly discovered world of Spirit,” Mrs. Eddy goes on to speak of those other essays which eventuated in The Science of Man as it was finally published:
She [the author] also began to jot down her thoughts on the main subject, but these jottings were only infantile lispings of Truth.
148 [Mary Baker Glover, “The Science of Man,” manuscript, n.d., A11353, pp. 9, 15, MBEL (bracketed text Peel’s).]
149 Mary Baker Eddy, manuscript, c. 1900–1910, A10407, pp. 5–6, MBEL.