Mrs. Glover herself had clipped out of the Banner of Light in December, 1869, the long reports of a series of lectures by Professor William Denton on the origin and antiquity of man—a popular exposition of new geological and biological discoveries, espousing Darwinism against the “Jewish Jehovah” and biblical fundamentalism.⁸

Other items she cut from the same paper show why, for a time, she felt it necessary to keep an eye on that spiritualist organ. Words akin to her own but used in a context which gave them a meaning abhorrent to her were cropping up in it from time to time. One article in 1869, for instance, had declared, “How to drive away error with truth, is the highest practical teaching; and such teaching, in its own nature, is a direct emanation from the Divine Mind.”⁹

She appears not to have found it worthwhile to scan the paper after 1869, but occasional phrases in it continued to show linguistic resemblances. An article early in 1871 addressed “God. . . who art our Father in wisdom and our Mother in love,” and “Thou Infinite and Perfect Principle of Life,” explaining that “he is not a personal God, . . . but . . . he exists as the Great Mind Force of the Universe.”¹⁰ If these phrases were not to be attributed to literary poltergeists,¹¹ then they must be the result of the Zeitgeist, but they in no wise endeared spiritualism to Mrs. Glover. In a copy of The Radical which Sarah Bagley sent her she marked her approval of an article attacking on scientific grounds the spiritualist habit of attributing everything to the agency of spirits, underlining especially one sentence: “This is the old spirit of theology, which, in this form, has only changed base.”¹²