● ● ●  a Deputy United States Marshal. Two years after that, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, and before long the lure drew Glover into the wild, disordered society of Deadwood. An unpolished but essentially upright young man, unfortunately burdened with a slatternly wife, he seemed to drift further away from his mother’s life with every step. Although they were later reunited for brief periods and felt the strong ties of duty and affection throughout their lives, they both realized at last that their feet were definitively set in different paths.

So far as he could, young George Barry of Lynn took the other George’s place. He felt that through the Science he had learned from Mrs. Glover he had been literally reborn. No task was too arduous to show his love for her: he ran errands, performed chores, hunted rooms, attended to her finances, and above all copied and recopied her growing manuscript. He was the first of her students to ask if he could call her “Mother,” the term which Civil War soldiers had used for their nurses and which had come to be associated with woman’s ministry of healing. She in turn made a will leaving him everything she had, in recognition of his services.

Many of Mrs. Eddy’s later students were to think of her as a mother; and her loneliness, on which so many have commented, found comfort in the term. Yet beyond all attachments of sentiment was the deeper relation of motherhood she bore to what she saw as the true child of promise: her book. Later she would write in that book, “When a new spiritual idea is borne to earth, the prophetic Scripture of Isaiah is renewedly fulfilled: ‘Unto us a child is born, . . . and his name shall be called Wonderful.’”¹³⁰

The Christ-idea, as she saw it, was the impersonal Truth which had been lived and demonstrated by the personal Jesus but was at hand for every man, woman, and child to embody in his own thinking and living. Something of this is expressed in a book Absolute Religion by the Congregationalist Thomas C. Upham, published in 1873, a year after Upham’s death: