● ● ● on results, on workability, on what Huxley called justification by verification; here was the insistence that if metaphysics was to survive it must come out of the academy into what James called “this real world of sweat and dirt.”21
Mrs. Glover’s metaphysics did just that. Ontology became not just a study but a way of mastering experience. An academic study seventy years later would conclude that the philosophical uniqueness of Christian Science lay in the fact that for the first time in history a practical metaphysics had appeared.22
As in every subsequent class of Mrs. Eddy’s, the instruction began with a direct confrontation of the question, “What is God?” People who had thought of Him as either a wrathful or a benign old gentleman in the sky were suddenly called upon to recognize Him as the Principle of being, the Soul of the universe. It is a measure of Mrs. Glover’s success as a teacher that these terms blazed with meaning for her students.
“The Science of Man” began:
Ques. What is God?
Ans. Principle, wisdom, love, and truth.
Ques. What is this principle?
Ans. Life and intelligence.
Ques. What is life and intelligence?
Ans. Soul.
Ques. Then, what is God?
Ans. The Soul of man and the universe.
Ques. Is God, man?
Ans. No, they are perfectly distinct and yet united; Soul or God is not man, nor is that which we call Soul, in man; while they are ever united as substance and its shadow; Soul the substance; man its shadow.23
21 [William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 72.]
22 Henry W. Steiger, “A Philosophical Investigation of the Doctrine of Christian Science” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1946).
23 Mary Baker Glover, “The Science of Man, by which the sick are healed, or Questions and answers in Moral Science,” manuscript, n.d., A10065, p. 1, MBEL. This is the version which Mrs. Glover apparently used for her first class.