To Sarah Bagley she wrote, “This hour is the one that must come before the sifting from the tares could take place that is necessary to purge my number of pupils and give me to know who are worthy to be my followers and who are not.”94
Later in the spring she moved out to Peabody, a short distance from Lynn, to stay for some weeks with Peter Sim and his wife, Sim having been a member of the class she held that spring. Although she moved there for quietness so that she could write, she still went to Lynn almost every other day to try to heal the situation.
From Peabody she wrote Miss Bagley again on April 18. Speaking more openly of the “ruin” which some of her students—or rather, the “evil” in them—had been plotting against her, she declared:
I have felt it and knew it, but instead of stopping their influence in the community and putting them on their own resources when they must have gone down, for nearly all my time I have done little else than try to change this vile nature in them and to sustain them and the cause. God will meet this hour for me, and a doom is coming when the tares will be separated from the wheat before the world, even as they are before me today.95
To her it seemed a time of great clarification as well as of trial. Darkness was being separated from light, mesmerism from Science. Finally, on May 11, the partnership with Kennedy was completely dissolved, and he departed from the house on South Common Street where they had listened to the band concerts so happily two years before.
Almost unnoticed, the shade of Quimby went with him. Three years later Mrs. Glover would write in the first edition of Science and Health:
94 Mary Baker Glover to Sarah O. Bagley, March 1872, L08311, MBEL.
95 Mary Baker Glover to Sarah O. Bagley, 18 April 1872, L08302, MBEL. In another letter of uncertain date there is evidence of the influence which Kennedy continued to exercise over Miss Bagley, an influence which grew with the years. Mrs. Glover wrote her:
I have endeavored to teach you what I knew would be such a great blessing . . . and then Sarah, came the “cup” for me to drink[,] that you should deny me and say “all you ever had learned you had gained from Richard;” but the hour is now past, it has been drank, and I can now forgive it . . .
I sometimes think of you among the others and perhaps you sometimes think of me but more frequently I go to you to bless and instruct you.
Mary Baker Glover to Sarah O. Bagley, 26 May (year unknown), L03926, MBEL.