After a few meetings Mrs Glover offered to my wife a manuscript of many pages. . . .
The manuscript was difficult to read, being interlined and full of changes, and I did not read much of it. My wife became interested in it and read it with care. During the evenings and one Sunday while the manuscript was in my house, a large portion was read to me, and my wife and I talked over the doctrines set forth in it, not all new, but often suggesting new ideas. . . . Sometimes the alterations in the manuscript suggested that the writer was trying to find better language, so as to express more fully ideas which her mind had grasped, but which she could not put satisfactorily into words. Her intellect and spiritual nature had evidently absorbed certain Christian principles, which were not set forth in the Bible or in the theology of any church known to her as fully as she desired, and which she was trying to put into language more acceptable to her. . . .
After we had read the manuscript and were talking the matter over we realized that perhaps Mrs Glover had cognition of certain great principles in the life and teachings of Christ which were not well understood or properly set forth by religious teachers.61
What soon became apparent was that she herself must become a teacher. She was not ready to promulgate her evolving ideas simply through writing.
After a brief though happy stay at the Ellises, Mrs. Patterson for unknown reasons moved back to the Clark boardinghouse on Summer Street, sometime in the late autumn of 1866.
George Clark, the son of the family, was a swaggering, cocksure, but amiable young fellow who had only a few months previously returned from a voyage at sea. As “Yankee Ned, the sailor author,” he later had a book of adventure published—with a vast amount of editing by the publisher, one assumes. In 1888, under the same name, he wrote out his reminiscences of Mrs. Patterson. For Christian Science itself he had mirthful contempt—the idea that matter was unreal seemed to him ● ● ●