● ● ● even on the first-century New Testament narratives. Yet it was not as the bearer of a new religion but of a new therapy that Mrs. Glover presented herself in Lynn. Five more years of development were necessary before her discovery would stand before the world as Christian Science.
When she and Kennedy came to Lynn in May, 1870, they stayed first of all with friends, the Clarkson Olivers, but before long they had found more permanent quarters on the second floor of a house at the corner of South Common and Shepard Streets, opposite Lynn Common. The rooms were rented from a young woman, Miss Susie Magoun, who ran a private school for young children on the first floor.
Kennedy—affable, Irish, and just turned twenty-one—was soon a great success as a healer. Behind the scenes Mrs. Glover counseled, encouraged, directed; and gradually she drew around her the more promising students who thronged Kennedy’s waiting room. On July 15 she wrote Sarah Bagley: “I have all calling on me for instruction. . . . Richard is literally overrun with patients. . . . We enjoy our moments of leisure more than can be named[.] In the evening of the 4th our rooms were filled with company to hear the concert given on the Common by the brass band.”2
While brass bands played and fireworks rocketed in little towns all over the United States to celebrate the Glorious Fourth, an increasingly industrialized America was plunging forward to more reckless tunes. The Gilded Age, about to be christened by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, was in full, inglorious swing. Even the optimistic Whitman was writing in Democratic Vistas:
I say that our New World Democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, . . . and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results. . . .
. . . For I say at the core of Democracy, finally, is the Religious element. . . .
. . . The local considerations of sin, disease, deformity, ignorance, death, &c., and their measurement by superficial mind, and ordinary ● ● ●