● ● ● the reminiscence of a native of Amesbury whose Quaker grandparents used to have treatments from “Auntie Bagley”:
She [Miss Bagley—or Mrs. Bagley, as he mistakenly refers to her] wore gray corkscrew curls on the side of her head—and to my child mind they looked like cast iron or steel turnings. One day Mrs. Bagley and “another lady” (who I afterwards learned was Mrs. Eddy) were at my Grandfathers house. I was taken with a stomach ache, and Mrs. Bagley tried to help me by holding me in her lap—but those “steel curls” frightened me. The other lady who I just remember as a kind gentle lady then took me in her lap—and I felt very peaceful—I cannot remember the actual healing—but I am quite sure the pain left me.167
Miss Bagley, shaking her corkscrew curls, continued to “rub heads” as her lifelong friend Richard Kennedy did, but she always insisted that Mrs. Glover’s teaching was quite different from Quimby’s. The Quimby “Questions and Answers” she considered “not the same in line of thought,” and she “declined to purchase it, regarding it as practically worthless.”168 Mrs. Glover was indeed the discoverer of Christian Science, Sarah Bagley maintained, but from her Amesbury world she looked with a slightly miffed amazement at the place Christian Science came to occupy in the world.
For when Mrs. Glover left for Lynn in May with Richard Kennedy, to teach and practice what at that time she called Moral Science, she was launching onto an ocean of events that would carry her an immeasurable distance from the quiet banks of the Merrimack. The validity of anything announced as a scientific discovery must be submitted to open trial with clashing theories, interpretations, and convictions in a pluralistic world. Mrs. Glover was ready at last to face that world.
168 H. G. Hudson to Alfred Farlow, 28 August 1905, Subject File, Sarah O. Bagley, MBEL; Samuel C. Beane to Alfred Farlow, 28 August 1905, Subject File, Alfred Farlow - Attacks on Mrs. Eddy, pp. 5–6, MBEL.
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