● ● ● anything to do with salvation. But Mrs. Glover thought differently. Moral Science was a necessary preliminary to Christian Science.
Her next class was held in November. One of the members, Samuel Putnam Bancroft, has left an invaluable account of the period in his book Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her in 1870.29
He stresses her devoted service to her students. In addition to the twelve lessons over a three-week period which constituted the course, she gave them private instruction between lessons when necessary and treatment when requested. She “was always ready to respond to the call of these students,” Bancroft wrote, and they were never really graduated:
Every meeting with her was a lesson; every letter received from her. This continued for years. I have never known of any of her loyal students to complain of not receiving full value for money paid, or asking to have it refunded. For my own part, I will say that from my limited practice in healing I received many times the amount I paid her, besides enjoying over fifty years of almost perfect health.30
This point is important, for Mrs. Glover had now advanced the price of her course to the astonishing sum of three hundred dollars. This was almost one-third of the average annual income of a Lynn shoe worker. She herself wrote later that she was greatly troubled at asking so large a fee but was led to do so by “a strange providence”;31 and the interesting fact is that even some of her “disloyal” students felt as Daniel Spofford did when he wrote at the end of his life, “I will say, and always have said, that her teachings in spiritual science were beyond any money consideration.”32
29 Samuel Putnam Bancroft, Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her in 1870 (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, 1923).
30 Bancroft, Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her, pp. 10, 6.
31 [Mary Baker Eddy, Retrospection and Introspection (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1920), p. 50.]
32 Daniel H. Spofford to Mary Beecher Longyear, 27 June 1921, 1921.016.0001, LMC.