But this was a later answer. Back in February, 1872, Mrs. Glover did not see fit to reply to Wright’s challenge. Instead, a letter in the Transcript signed by George Barry, George Allen, Amos Ingalls, Dorcas Rawson, and Miranda Rice accused him of misusing the passages he had quoted from their teacher’s manuscripts. Looking back on their progress, they wrote, they could see great gain, with much more ahead and “immensity looming up in the future.”⁸⁵ Unimpressed, Wright in a final letter published on February 24 announced that because of her silence in the face of his challenge “Mrs. Glover and her so-called science are virtually dead and buried”—a judgment which, in Georgine Milmine’s phrase, suggests that he did not possess the gift of prophecy.⁸⁶

Many years later, at a time when she was under fire, Mrs. Eddy wrote, “I do not regard this attack upon me as a trial, for when these things cease to bless they will cease to occur,” and in Science and Health she would write, “Trials are proofs of God’s care.”⁸⁷ The blessing in Wright’s attack was that it brought her face to face with the problem of mesmerism. This was the real challenge in his articles, not the jejune demand that she walk on the Atlantic.

In the course of the controversy Wright had made some telling criticisms of the physical manipulations which certainly belonged to animal magnetism rather than to Moral Science. Could Mrs. Glover cure a horse of scratches by rubbing its head? he asked. Mrs. Glover might have replied that she never taught that rubbing heads could cure anyone or anything; nevertheless the reasons she had given for permitting her students to continue this practice were still vulnerable to his criticism.