As his daughter-in-law, I never knew Mr. Clarke to be in bed with any sickness after his healing and he lived to be over eighty years of age.61
Mrs. Glover was soon to learn that her worst obstacles were neither the skepticism that rejected all spiritual power as superstition nor the dogmatism that pronounced her the tool of Satan. A man’s foes are they of his own household, and her greatest challenge lay in her immediate circle.
Young Richard Kennedy was proving an immense success. [Lottie S. Wright] wrote to Sarah Bagley in March, 1871:
I find Dr. K. very pleasant, social and kind: among those whom he has benefitted he is held in high esteem as far as I have been able to learn. . . . The Dr’s rooms are crowded daily, the interest continually increasing, so that he scarcely finds a moment’s release from early morning till late in the evening.62
Kennedy had nothing to do with the teaching of Moral Science, and as time went on and his self-confidence grew he began to grow restive under Mrs. Glover’s close direction of his work. Moreover, she was beginning to insist that he should put less stress on physical manipulation as its incongruity with her own emphasis on moral regeneration became more evident.
From the outset she had tried to have him spiritualize this part of his practice. When he rubbed Sarah Bagley’s head she had told him to think in terms of rubbing out the spiritualistic elements still present in that lady’s thinking;63 when he rubbed Charles Stanley’s head she had told him to rub out in thought the dogmatism that made Stanley so ● ● ●
61 Grace M. Clarke, “Information Concerning John Curtis Clarke,” 29 September 1955, Reminiscence, MBEL. In many accounts the name is spelled Clark.
62 Lottie S. Wright to Sarah O. Bagley, 19 March 1871, 1922.001.0542, LMC. [Publisher’s note: The first edition calls the author “an unidentified correspondent”; subsequent research shows it to be Lottie S. Wright.]
63 Richard Kennedy to Mary Baker Glover, n.d. [Peel’s estimate: summer(?) of 1869], IC244.39.001, MBEL.