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    apostle, and many another great teacher and leader, she reiterated to herself, “This one thing I do.” Of course simple-minded people who take life as it comes from day to day find any one with so fixed an object in life a rebuke to the flow of their own animal spirits.156

Certainly this was true of Horace Wentworth, whose Grand Guignol account of Mrs. Glover’s leaving Stoughton in a whirlwind of rage and vindictiveness in the early spring of 1870 has been denied in whole and in detail by other members of the family who were actually there at the time, as Horace was not.157 From Mrs. Glover’s correspondence with Sarah Bagley and “Dick” Kennedy, it becomes clear that she left in accord with her own established plans; and if some members of the Wentworth household were all but heartbroken at losing her and others sighed with relief, that is not altogether surprising.

Mrs. Glover herself showed a good deal of the patience needed by any spiritual leader in dealing with well-meaning little people who cling to him for help and guidance but who feel they can nevertheless lecture him on how to conduct his life. Back in the fall of 1868 Sarah Bagley had written her that a certain Mrs. B. considered that Mrs. Glover “needed discipline,” but Miss Bagley’s own diagnosis was that she needed “a more entire trust in God.” Mrs. Glover may have looked at the words in amazement, but she wrote back with a mingled firmness and gentleness which pointed finally to Miss Bagley’s own need to be willing to work instead of wish:

Now my dear, if you both could understand the spiritual or rather the scientific sense of the 9th Chap of Luke you would see my life in its truer meaning. I am very grateful to you all for your kind care of me but my heavenly father “feedeth me.” Your desire, dear Sarah, to become purified of self, is a good one and a great one to attain; your prayer will never be answered, but your labor certainly will.158

During her time at Stoughton she wrote Sarah Bagley a good many letters, exhorting, encouraging, scolding, sympathizing, teaching,    

footnote-1

156 Wilbur, Life of Mary Baker Eddy, p. 178.

footnote-2

157 See Hufford, The Stoughton Years, pp. 32ff.

footnote-3

158 Mary Baker Glover to Sarah O. Bagley, 8 November 1868, L08307, MBEL. 

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