# The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Chapter 13

CHAPTER XIII
MESMERISM DETHRONED
WITH the coming of spring in the year 1870 Mrs. Glover’s thoughts were definitely shaped for the work before her. She had decided to return to the city of Lynn and take up the teaching of Divine Science. She had the manuscript, “The Science of Man,” for a basis. From a worldly standpoint her resources were meager. Her small income had been carefully husbanded, but she had in hand only a modest sum for capital with which to venture into a city and rent rooms. Her wardrobe too was scanty, carefully preserved though it had been. That she was invariably neat and attractive in appearance is in itself a statement suggestive of a miracle. That she had had shelter, food, and clothing for four years on an income of two hundred dollars per annum, and had nowhere incurred the charge of charitable entertainment, and that she had all that time worked assiduously at her intellectual and spiritual problems is one of the mysteries of the possibilities of poverty, fully as beautiful in its revelation as the glory of opulence.
Richard Kennedy, the young man who with Miss Bagley had received her instruction during the winter, had no mind to leave his teacher. He had become so imbued with enthusiasm for the Science ​he had been studying that he wished to practise it, and he wished to begin his practise in the larger field of Lynn. He conceived the idea of accompanying his teacher and practising under her guidance. He talked it over with Mrs. Glover many times, joining her when she took her evening walk along the river at sunset, and eagerly setting forth his plans for mutual work. It was his desire to be under Mrs. Glover’s supervision, taking the burden of practise entirely on his shoulders and leaving her free to teach and write. He also believed that he could relieve her of many business cares. He had some capital, and so sensible was he of the enlightenment he had received that he was quite ready to risk his savings and to agree to share equally with Mrs. Glover any income which he might derive from the practise of Mind Science.
Mrs. Glover was not so ready to enter into this agreement with her young student. He had an unblemished reputation, had honorably conducted himself toward her with the chivalrous devotion of a son to a mother; but he was untried in the ways of life, there had been no test put upon him such as she well knew lay before him if he took up the work with her. She knew the city of Lynn, its somewhat harsh industrialism, its free intermingling of the sexes in the factory life, and the nearby temptations of Boston — all very different from the village life of Amesbury.
“Richard,” she said to him, laying a hand upon his shoulder and looking searchingly into his frank, boyish face, “this is a very spiritual life that Mind ​Science exacts, and the world offers many alluring temptations. You know but little of them as yet. If you follow me you must cross swords with the world. Are you spiritually-minded enough to take up my work and stand by it?”
Richard Kennedy thought he was. His eagerness and enthusiasm carried the day. Accordingly he accompanied Mrs. Glover to Lynn and they stopped at the home of Mrs. Oliver until they could make arrangements for offices and living rooms. Mr. Kennedy soon found a desirable apartment in a three-story building at the corner of South Common and Shepard streets, a little out of the business district and yet within easy walking distance of the main thoroughfares. This building remained for many years the humble witness of the earliest struggles toward a metaphysical college, the place where the rudiments of Mind-Science were first imparted in class.
The house was then a gable-roofed frame structure, surrounded by lawns and shade trees. The open space across the way was a large park, Lynn Common, lined with stately trees. The open view, good air, and commodious interior of the house made it an attractive place. Miss Susie Magoun had but recently leased the place for a private school for young girls, and she used the first floor for this purpose and the third floor for her own sleeping apartments. She was a good business woman, but quite young and somewhat nervous about her extensive financial obligations. When young Kennedy called on her one evening early in June, she was looking over the building and beginning ​to feel apprehensive about her second floor and what sort of tenants she would be likely to have there. The young misses who were to come there for grammar studies and the accomplishments of music, painting, and dancing were the daughters of the wealthier families of Lynn. It was necessary that her tenants should be desirable persons.
Accordingly Miss Susie Magoun was pleased when Richard Kennedy explained that he was a physician who would practise mental healing and that he was in partnership with a lady who taught moral science and was writing a book on her system. She thought it prudent, however, to reserve her decision until she saw the lady, who might be a Spiritualist and the mental healing resolve itself into trances and seances. All this doubt was swept away in her meeting with Mrs. Glover, to whom she straightway put those doubts into questions. Mrs. Glover unreservedly told her the facts, stating that she did not hold to any such views or practises. Her quiet, well-bred manner reassured the little schoolmistress, who forthwith let her second floor of five rooms to Mrs. Glover and Mr. Kennedy for offices and sleeping rooms. She presently found her tenants so agreeable that she persuaded an old friend to come to live with her and open a dining-room for them all in the house. Thereafter the family took their meals together.
Of Mrs. Glover’s religious views the schoolmistress remained unenlightened beyond these first explanations and the fact that she attended church regularly. Indeed they rented a pew together at the ​Unitarian church a few doors away on South Common street. The Rev. Samuel B. Stewart was the clergyman at the time. Why Miss Magoun should have withheld herself from a knowledge of Mrs. Glover's teaching is a matter of relatively small importance, yet it has some relation to the events of the succeeding months. She was young, social, and of a lively disposition. To her Mrs. Glover seemed somber, serious, austere. On the contrary, the young doctor, as Kennedy was now called, entered more into her plans. He took part in some of her social affairs. They met upon the same plane. It was he who paid the rent; it was he who would perform an errand for her in the city; it was he who exchanged the gossip of the hour with her. Indeed Richard Kennedy was little more inclined than was their hostess to accept the austerities of Christian Science.
The rooms which Mrs. Glover had taken were fitted up very plainly, for she had well learned the severe lesson of plain living and high thinking. She formed her first class in Mind Science shortly after they were settled. Her first pupils came from the shoe shops. Patients came in response to the modest sign which was put up outside the door. Mrs. Glover advised and instructed her associate in giving treatment. Meanwhile she continued her writing in her own rooms. The treatment interested the more speculative of the patients and they sought Mrs. Glover to talk with her and learn of this new Science. Thus the first students were gathered around her.
​It is not possible to draw a picture of those first classes in Mind Science that will appeal to a sense of the beautiful. The students who were drawn together were workers; their hands were stained with the leather and tools of the day’s occupation; their narrow lives had been cramped mentally and physically. Their thoughts were often no more elevated than their bodies were beautiful. They could not come to Mrs. Glover in the daytime, for their days were full of toil. At night, then, these first classes met, and it was in the heat of July and August. In the barely furnished upper chamber a lamp was burning which added somewhat to the heat and threw weird shadows over the faces gathered round a plain deal table. Insects buzzed at the windows, and from the common over the way the hum of the careless and free, loosed from the shops into the park, invaded the quiet of the room. Yet that quiet was permeated by the voice of a teacher at whose words the hearts of those workmen burned within them. “The light which never was on land or sea” was made to shine there in that humble upper chamber.
I have said this picture was not beautiful, yet it appeals to the deepest and highest sense of beauty, that sense through which the heart receives impression. Mary Baker laid her finger upon the central motive of life those summer evenings on Lynn Common, and the response was a realization of divine consciousness which reached throughout the world, not immediately, but gradually, persistently as the years passed. And that moment of exquisite ​tenderness, evoked in the humble upper chamber, seems destined to swell into an eon, where time melts into eternity; for it was in such a moment that the understanding of divine consciousness was imparted. God is no respecter of persons, St. Peter discovered. He had seen the despised Nazarene impart this consciousness to the fishermen on the shores of Galilee. The shoe-worker from his dingy bench, his foul-smelling glues and leathers, the whirr and clangor of machinery, saw the walls of his limitation melt, and experienced the inrush of being where the lilies of annunciation spring.
To these students Mary Baker was not somber, austere, or formidable. She was invariably interested and interesting, possessing a sympathy which went deep down to the heart of things. She rebuked sin and sickness alike and there was an invariableness about her queries and her eyes which searched their lives. Some could not endure such testing and fell away; others stood fast and experienced amazing results in their lives. There were healings of consumption, of tumor, of dropsy, and other extreme cases of disease made by these students, and such results were so amazing to the students that some of them were confounded by their very success.
One of her first students was George Tuttle, the brother of a woman whom Richard Kennedy, directed by Mrs. Glover, had healed of tuberculosis in an advanced stage. George Tuttle was a stalwart young seaman who had just returned from a cruise to Calcutta. It is said that he was asked what he ​thought he would get out of Mrs. Glover’s class in metaphysics. He replied that he didn’t think about it at all, that he joined because his sister asked him to. When he actually cured a girl of dropsy as a result of his first grappling with Mind Science, he was so surprised and frightened that he washed his hands of it forever.
It was not by overstating what Mrs. Glover had taught them, but by misstating her teaching, through misapprehension or through wilful distortion, that some of these earlier students became ineffectual and subsequently, through chagrin, were entirely estranged from the cause which they had at first so ardently espoused. One of the rebellious students was Charles S. Stanley, brother-in-law of the seaman Tuttle. He was a shoe-worker and a Baptist. The healing of his wife had led him to seek admittance to the class Mrs. Glover was conducting. After some questioning she admitted him, only to find him argumentative, controversial, determined to discuss dogma from the standpoint of a Baptist rather than a Christian. In the class were men and women, mostly shoe-workers. These students had various religious creeds; there were Methodists, Unitarians, Universalists, and others. The controversial Baptist affected the harmony of a class where other members had risen above creed into the consideration of pure Christianity. His arguments recurred from day to day until Stanley broke away from Mrs. Glover’s teaching without completing her course of instruction. Indeed she dismissed him for lack of teachableness, though he insisted he knew all there ​was of Mind Science. He practised without her sanction and with indifferent success for a time and later became a homeopathic physician.
Wallace W. Wright, a bank accountant, came to grief in his practise of Mind Science. He was the son of a Universalist clergyman of Lynn, and a brother of Carroll D. Wright, who afterward became United States Commissioner of Labor. His relations with Mrs. Glover were interesting because the rock upon which he struck was not superstition, as in the case of Tuttle, or dogma, as in the case of Stanley, but psychology. He precipitated a discussion which finally led Mrs. Glover to draw the line sharply between mesmerism and Mind Science, to indicate once and for all what Quimbyism was, what mesmerism is, and to rid her practising students of the custom of laying hands upon their patients.
Wright had entered her class with some intellectual perturbation but left it with enthusiasm. When he had completed the course he began to practise in Lynn and later he carried his work elsewhere with success, which continued so long as he was an obedient follower. But he began to alter in his mental attitude and to question the spirituality of what he was doing. He began to believe he was practising mesmerism. Thereupon his power to cure began to wane, until he lost it utterly. He wrote of his peculiar experience to a Lynn paper which published his letter. He said:
The 9th of last June found me in Knoxville, Tennessee, as assistant to a former student. We met with good success in a majority of our cases ​but some of them utterly refused to yield to the treatment. Soon after settling in Knoxville I began to question the propriety of calling this treatment “Moral Science” instead of mesmerism. Away from the influence of argument which the teacher of this so-called science knows how to bring to bear upon students with such force as to outweigh any attempts they may make at the time to oppose it, I commenced to think more independently, and to argue with myself as to the truth of the positions we were called upon to take. The result of this course was to convince me that I had studied the science of mesmerism.
Thus was summed up in a phrase the evil which had stalked like a shadow in the wake of Mary Baker’s religious investigation of years. The science of mesmerism, following upon the heels of Divine Science, was dogging and menacing it, threatening to worry and tear to pieces the good that was done. It explained in a word all her long struggle with Quimbyism; it explained the dereliction of those who had been earnest for a time and the interference of her students’ relations which had exhibited peculiarly baleful effects on her teaching. The full significance of hypnotism and mental suggestion did not come to her at once, though with that student’s explanation of his failure a vague outline of the workings of animal magnetism appeared.
The result of this letter was soon evident in Mrs. Glover’s life and affairs. It was not that Wright had abandoned the cause. Wright was bound to go by his very nature; intellectual self-sufficiency ​and scholarly pride were certain to claim him. He had a brief controversy with five of Mrs. Glover’s students through the medium of the Lynn papers in which he called upon Mrs. Glover to walk on the water, raise the dead, and live without air and nourishment. Then retiring from the controversy, he exultantly declared that Mrs. Glover and her science were dead and buried.
Mrs. Glover minded this no more than if, as she said to a woman student, he should declare he could dip the Atlantic dry. Such harassing of herself and work she had learned to expect and knew that it was not vital. As for Tuttle, the superstitious, who dropped Mind Science because it worked results which frightened him, he was not worthy of more than a passing smile; and Stanley, whose grievance was a most confused demand for a personal God, anatomy, and manuscripts, exhibiting a virulent case of acquisitiveness together with the fear that he was being duped, was annoying but negligible. It was no one of these three students who seriously affected Mrs. Glover’s work.
The test of Mind Science came actually and vitally in the mental attitude of Kennedy. She had accepted him as a co-worker with some hesitation. He was in the relation to her of a chosen disciple. To him she had expounded more deeply and intimately the physically inscrutable and intangible apprehensions of truth than to any other student. When this vision of the working of mesmerism came to her so clearly in January of 1872, she would have defined it to him. But when she came to do so, ​she beheld Kennedy remove himself from her tutelage. He was blind, deaf, and immovable. He was incapable of perceiving what she would have pointed out to him, and revealed himself as never having comprehended the nature of Mind Science and to be actually working with the processes of mesmerism and the hypnotic action of mental suggestion.
That Kennedy actually could not or would not understand that a line of cleavage separated Mind Science from mesmerism Mary Baker now realized. She realized it with sorrow, because of himself and because he had practised in her name. She had taught him principle, but had permitted him to make use of the method of laying his hands upon his patients. So she had permitted Hiram Crafts, Mrs. Wentworth, and Miss Bagley. The results now shown were personal, magnetic, confusing. In Kennedy’s case, it now appeared, he had surrounded himself with a bevy of patients who were not seeking truth but Kennedy. Through such methods and practises the pure doctrine of divine healing was liable to become a byword.
Some years later a suit was brought in her name, though without her consent, against Tuttle and Stanley for the object of collecting unpaid tuition. At the trial all three of these students, Tuttle, Stanley, and Kennedy, exhibited unreservedly their utter lack of comprehension of the first postulate of Mind Science. But Kennedy in particular, out of his own mouth, proved himself incapable of grasping it. In his testimony, which was preserved in the notes of the presiding judge, he said:
I went to Lynn to practise with Mrs. Eddy. Our partnership was only in the practise, not in teaching. I practised healing the sick by physical manipulation. This mode was operating upon the head, giving vigorous rubbing. This was a part of her system that I had learned. The special thing that she was to teach me was the science of healing by soul power. I have never been able to come to a knowledge of that principle. She gave me a great deal of instruction of the so-called principle, but I have not been able to understand it. … I was there at the time Stanley was there. I made the greatest effort to practise upon her principle and I have never had any proof that I had attained to it.
This statement made in court many years later was the fact revealed in the spring of 1872. It was the cause of the separation of Mary Baker and Richard Kennedy. Stated as he expressed himself in court it sounds very simple to a worldling. And as Mr. Kennedy related the cause of his separation from Mrs. Glover to the author, it appears a reasonable and ordinary event. He said their separation was not due to a quarrel but to a gradual divergence of views. He continued practising physical manipulation throughout a long career. He claimed to have no knowledge of Christian Science, having never read the text-book and failing to comprehend the spiritual significance of what he had been taught by word of mouth.
This divergence of view, that culminated in the severance of their relations, was developing for ​several months. The schoolmistress, Miss Susie Magoun, had married and gone to live elsewhere. A new tenant was in the house. Mr. Kennedy’s social life in Lynn had prospered through Miss Magoun’s introductions. His youth, charm, and affable address had made him happy in the acquisition of some influential acquaintances. And when the day came on which Mrs. Glover and he mutually destroyed their contract he went his way quite content. Looked at from a purely worldly standpoint he had been honorable and had not wronged his teacher.
But Richard Kennedy, as a student, had absorbed a great deal of her time, and as a practitioner he had absorbed a great deal more. This was relatively unimportant; the vital injustice was that he had misrepresented her Science to a large number of patients and was to misrepresent her for many years. Perhaps he had done this unconsciously, even as he was the unconscious agent in the precipitation of her struggle with the counterfeit of her Science. Animal magnetism had to be apprehended, defined, and stamped as the “human concept.” Doubtless it was as well that the struggle should be precipitated through him as another.
The conflict of opinion between these two resulted in fixing the purpose of Mary Baker to write a textbook. She had thus far taught Mind Science by lectures and by writing out manuscripts for students. She distributed such manuscripts unsparingly. These were copies of “The Science of Man,” which had been copyrighted, and also disquisitions on the ​Scriptures. She had encouraged her students to write their own conceptions of certain portions of the Scriptures, to stimulate them to deeper research. This practise she discontinued. She saw that they were not fitted to do such work any more than Kennedy was fitted to make his own deductions. Upon her it rested to do the work, and to guard her doctrine with the utmost zeal from contamination and adulteration.
When Mary Baker began to rid herself completely of the relics of the influence which Quimby had exerted over her mind, she ordered all her students to desist from stroking the head while treating patients mentally. She herself had never laid hands on a patient to heal him, but she had permitted her students to practise by this method. Seeing that the method was not in accordance with the principle of Divine Science, she wished all her students to discontinue its practise. Now it was that Richard Kennedy absolutely rebelled and left her; now it was that Miss Bagley of Amesbury refused to be guided by her. Wallace W. Wright had already come to grief by the use of the method. Mary Baker denounced it once and forever. From the spring of 1872 manipulation, or physical contact of any sort, had no part in Christian Science. And so at that early date she substantiated the Science of Man and Divine healing.
* ↑ Lynn Transcript, January 13, 1872.
* ↑ McClure’s Magazine, May, 1907.