Wright also began healing by the new method and at first was very successful. But he soon quarreled with Mrs. Spofford, rebelled against the discipline imposed on him by his healing work, found his doubts of the whole enterprise growing, and correspondingly lost his power to heal. In a rage he wrote Mrs. Glover and demanded five hundred dollars from her, his full tuition back and an extra two hundred to compensate him for his wasted time and wounded feelings. In the same mood he included in the letter insinuations about Mrs. Spofford’s relations with Kennedy.
In her reply Mrs. Glover told him she wanted to hear no such gossip and refused his demand for money:
The happiness of life is in doing right, and in holding the consciousness of this and of having filled our short page of existence with worthy examples and worthy lessons for our fellow man. To be happy and useful is in your power, and the science I have taught you enables you to be this, and to do great good to the world if you practice this science as laid down in your MSS. Time alone can perfect us in all great undertakings, and . . . you cannot be perfect nor I cannot be perfect until we have passed through the furnace and are purified. You are now in a chemical.74
This last word was one she had borrowed from Quimby, putting her own construction on it. For her it signified a temporary worsening of symptoms and stirring up of resistance in an individual or situation as the action of truth was felt. As “chemicalization,” it survives in the vocabulary of Christian Science today. Certainly some sort of emotional ferment is evident in Wright’s next letter to her.
What he has written about Mrs. Spofford and Kennedy is truth, not gossip, he insists. Mrs. Glover’s students are generally unhappy. Deliver him from her example! He spurns her “base insinuations” against him:
The chemical you say I am in has been with me most of the time since I took this up, as I am “floored” in arguments with myself, & cannot sustain the positions your MSS. take. And my conversations ● ● ●
74 Mary Baker Glover to Wallace W. Wright, 16 August 1871, L09012, MBEL.