● ● ● to Tilton. From there on May 27 she wrote her eminently sane young friend Fred Ellis: “O, Mr. Ellis, do talk with me about God, about wisdom, love and Truth. I am almost lost in this hour I am so bitterly tried by such accumulating falsehoods.”112
Her loyal students rallied to her with a passionate longing to help her. George Allen wrote her that if he met either Wright or Kennedy he would be tempted to lift them to the other side of the street: “They . . . may come out with another plot but they must beware or next time something stronger than letters will be had to condemn them!”113 And in his next letter to her he burst out indignantly, “It seems to me all wrong, wrong, Wrong, that you must so suffer and be brought low.”114
In the course of time the squalid intrigues of those whom she called “absurd striplings” would sink into insignificance, but the issue involved would remain the same even when the battle was on a global scale. It was, as Mrs. Glover saw it, the ancient struggle of self-will against the will of God, and even in its banal provincial setting it was given a new dimension by the liberated power of mind.
The great religious leaders have never looked on the clash of good and evil as a matter for detached philosophical debate. Renan, a few years earlier, had written with his usual ironic sympathy of the archetypal figure who gave his life for the world:
Jesus . . . was not able to receive opposition with the coolness of the philosopher, who, understanding the reason of the various opinions which divide the world, finds it quite natural that all should not agree with him. One of the principal defects of the Jewish race is its harshness in controversy, and the abusive tone which it almost always infuses into it. . . . Jesus, who was exempt from almost all the defects of his race, and whose leading quality was precisely an infinite delicacy, was led in spite of himself to make use of the general style in polemics. Like John the Baptist, he employed very harsh terms against his adversaries. Of an exquisite gentleness with the simple, he was irritated at incredulity, however little aggressive. . . . A critical philosopher would have said to his disciples: Respect the opinion of ● ● ●
112 Mary Baker Glover to Fred O. Ellis, 27 May 1872, L05664, MBEL.
113 George Allen to Mary Baker Glover, 24 May 1872, IC641P2.65.010, MBEL.
114 George Allen to Mary Baker Glover, 30 May 1872, IC641P2.65.011, MBEL.