On the other hand Kennedy’s trip to Portland might serve as a symbol of his conscious turning back to the power of suggestion on which Quimby had wrought his cures a decade earlier. It is just possible that while there he got in touch with one of the Misses Ware or made inquiry in other quarters about the Quimby methods,68 for when Mrs. Glover finally forbade all further use of manipulation, Kennedy cited Quimby’s habitual use of this practice as a justification for his own continued employment of it.69
But the events which led to that decisive step had a drama and a significance of their own.
Some three months before Kennedy’s Portland trip Mrs. Glover had received nine written questions from Wallace W. Wright, the twenty-five-year-old son of a Universalist minister of Amesbury. The young man was considering the possibility of joining her next class. The questions for the most part had been proposed by his father.
The first one asked, “Upon what principle is your science founded?” and Mrs. Glover wrote firmly in reply, “On God the principle of man.” The sixth is of special interest: “Has this theory ever been advertised or practised before you introduced it, or by any other individual?”70 In the manuscript Mrs. Wentworth had copied two or three years earlier Mrs. Glover had written with assured conviction that no one except her had ever taught the Principle on which Science was founded and that only Jesus, the prophets, and the apostles had hitherto understood that Principle;71 yet in reply to Wright’s question she wrote:
Never advertised, and practiced only by one individual who healed me, Dr. Quimby of Portland, Me., an old gentleman who had made it a research for twenty five years, starting from the stand-point of ● ● ●
68 In a letter to a student in Portland in 1880 Mrs. Eddy makes an obscure reference to such a possibility. Mary Baker Eddy to George D. Choate, 3 March 1880, L04080, MBEL.
69 The passage in Glover, Science and Health, 1st ed., quoted on p. 364, gives a revealing hint of the argument Kennedy advanced to justify his use of manipulation.
70 [Wallace W. Wright to Mary Baker Glover, 10 March 1871, and Mary Baker Glover to Wallace W. Wright, 12 March 1871, Mary Baker Eddy letters, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library (hereafter NYPL).]
71 See p. 319.