● ● ● others; and believe that no one is so completely right that his adversary is completely wrong. But the action of Jesus has nothing in common with the disinterested speculation of the philosopher. To know that we have touched the ideal for a moment, and have been deterred by the wickedness of a few, is a thought insupportable to an ardent soul. What must it have been for the founder of a new world?115
For the moment Mrs. Glover turned to the old world of Tilton, but there was little rest and solace for her there. Abigail Tilton was now the great lady of the town, wealthy, conscientious as ever, but with a heart made bitter and empty by the death of her only son Albert in 1870, to be followed a few years later by that of her only daughter. Martha Pilsbury was in Kansas with her daughter Ellen and the latter’s husband. George Sullivan Baker had died in 1867, Samuel Dow Baker in 1869. There was little intimacy now between Mrs. Glover and George’s widow, Martha Rand Baker; and while Samuel’s widow deeply loved and admired her unorthodox sister-in-law till the end of her days, she did not live in Tilton nor could they have met often during the Lynn years.
After only a short stay among the disappearing landmarks Mrs. Glover moved on to Derry, New Hampshire, for a visit of a week or two with her kindly stepmother Elizabeth Patterson Baker, who was living there with a niece. The cool feeling between the two had long been healed, and in writing to her family Mrs. Glover would send love to her “dear mother.”116 Then back she came to Lynn, probably at the end of June.
A great musical festival in Boston that month celebrated the world peace following the Franco-Prussian War, but Mrs. Glover still had battles to fight, and the delight of listening to Strauss conduct his own waltzes was not for her. In a book entitled Scenes and Incidents in the Life of the Apostle Paul by Albert Barnes which her stepmother had given her she marked a passage that struck a solemn note:
115 Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus, translator unknown (London: Trübner, 1864), pp. 229–230.
116 On April 6, 1875, two months before her death, Mrs. Baker wrote Mrs. Glover an affectionate note addressed to “My own Dear Daughter” and ending, “My love to yourself and all who are kind to you.” Elizabeth Patterson Baker to Mary Baker Glover, 6 April 1875, Subject File, Mary Baker Eddy - Family - Bakers - Elizabeth Patterson Baker, MBEL.