● ● ●  demands of spiritual sense might seem innocent or trivial enough in the first place; but if yielded to, might it not thwart further spiritual growth? She might not wish to hear Wright’s gossip about Kennedy’s domination of Mrs. Spofford, but time was to show that in this at least he spoke the truth. Eventually Kennedy would turn Mrs. Spofford wholly against her teacher and would also estrange her from her husband. Forty years later some of his first patients were bound to him as closely as ever, still relying wholly on his manipulations for the alleviation of their ailments, still helpless to help themselves.

Genial young man that he was, Kennedy, despite the evidence of his early letters, would end by denying blandly that he had ever understood Mrs. Glover’s teachings in the least or connected them with Christianity. He could hardly have hurt her more deeply than when he declared under oath a few years later that all he had ever learned from her was to rub people’s heads. The poet Blake has written that “if a man is the enemy of my spiritual life while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real enemy,” and reluctantly Mrs. Glover came to the conclusion that behind Kennedy’s surface inoffensiveness was the carnal mind’s enmity against God.⁹¹

The matter came to a head as the result of Wright’s public attacks. When that young man had first gone to Knoxville and was doing good healing work there in partnership with Mrs. Spofford, Mrs. Glover had noted a look of “indescribable envy” on Kennedy’s face when she commented to him that she had expected just such good results from Wright. According to her later account, Kennedy replied, “I hope he will do well, but I am afraid you will be sorry you ever took W—— for a student of metaphysics.”⁹² After Wright had returned to Lynn and announced that his simple purpose was now revenge, Kennedy denounced his conduct but seemed to Mrs. Glover to show a secret satisfaction in it. On one occasion she surprised the two of them conferring together in what seemed a suspicious manner, and her later conclusion was that Wright was in part an unconscious tool of Kennedy, even though the two disliked each other.