A child drinks in the outward world through the eyes and rejoices in the draught. He is as sure of the world’s existence as he is of his own; yet he cannot describe the world. He finds a few words, and with these he stammeringly attempts to convey his feeling. Later, the tongue voices the more definite thought, though still imperfectly.150
So through these years she stammeringly tried to describe the new world she was daily discovering, and she “found a few words” to convey her thoughts. Some of the words were ones that Quimby had made familiar—truth and error, opinion and understanding, principle and idea—though they were also commonplaces of the schoolbooks she had known since girlhood and of the rationalistic faith Albert Baker had shared with her. What is interesting to see is the way her use of them was transformed by the new thing she was trying to say through them.
At the heart of her message was the conviction that Life is Spirit. Moses on the plain of Moab had declared: “See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; . . . therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”151 To a wayward and undisciplined people he brought this tremendous moral simplification, caught in two pairs of contrasting terms. With like simplicity Mrs. Glover found her chosen terms ranging themselves in stark antithesis. On one side were Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love—and all these words she was beginning to use as synonyms for God, although she had not yet evolved her later system of capitalization to indicate that fact.152 On the other side were all the words that denied the infinitude and perfection of Spirit and Spirit’s creation.
Just as the Mosaic contrast was no mere rhetorical figure but a desperately serious confrontation of ultimate values, so Mrs. Glover’s paired opposites—truth and error, wisdom and ignorance, science and belief, harmony and discord, soul and body, life and death, reality and illusion, being and nothingness—were no mere semantic exercise but a bold new way of shaping experience. They were tools of thought through which the apparent dualism of human life could be resolved ● ● ●
150 [Eddy, Science and Health, pp. viii–ix (bracketed text Peel’s).]
151 [Deuteronomy 30:15, 19.]
152 She did not use Mind as a synonym for God at that period. See pp. 367–368.