● ● ● doing some good and striving to advance the Truth. I find it is very hard for Mrs. Spofford to attend to her outside patients; frequently having to go a long distance in the evening through mud or rain to attend some one and often is quite weary but never sick. What I wish is that I might be sufficiently taught to at least attend to all of the outside patients wherever we may be situated. . . . Mrs. Spofford is having wonderful success and has recently completed cures that had been given up by the MDs. . . . I think she meets with success in nineteen cases out of twenty and has improved rapidly in the last two or three months, and when W W Wright says We meet with but little success he lied for he should have said I and told the reasons, which were primarily that he was practicing mesmerism or trying to which he acknowledges by his own statement; another was that he had the love of Mammon in front, and of God, behind.79
A week later Wright’s second letter appeared in the Transcript. Mrs. Glover in her earlier reply had quoted his words to her when he returned to Lynn—“My simple purpose now is revenge, and I will have it”—and Wright now explained that he had been provoked to say those “hasty” words by her language and tone when she refused to give him the five hundred dollars for which he asked.80 With these dubious credentials for the integrity of his purpose, Wright returned to his charge that what she taught was mesmerism:
[I do not] question the moral or Christian teachings which, as I before remarked, are used as a cloak to cover the real substance of this so-called science. . . . To live as this so-called science teaches would sever the affection between parents and children, brothers and sisters, and forbid all mingling with society or friends. Why? Because it tells us that man is a delusion; that man, the noblest work of God, the result of His creative genius, the flowers in the fields, the mighty forests, and the hidden wonders of the world, are all delusions, and the work of imagination.81
79 Daniel H. Spofford to Mary Baker Glover, 20 January 1872, IC327.44.002, MBEL.
80 [Glover, “For the Transcript,” p. 2; W. W. Wright, “Moral Science alias Mesmerism.—No. 2,” Lynn Transcript, 27 January 1872, p. 2.]
81 [Wright, “Moral Science alias Mesmerism.—No. 2,” p. 2 (bracketed text Peel’s).]