● ● ● bearing his own name, and filling his own place, but each a member of that holy family of which Jesus Christ the Son of Mary and the Son of God is the Elder Brother. When the impersonal Christ is born into the world in the fulness of his nature, the rights and sacredness of woman who is the virgin mother will be understood and acknowledged. The . . . woman’s position has already been given. Without woman, without the aid of the sympathies which are connatural to her affectionate nature, He could not and cannot be born into the world. Born of woman once he is born of woman forever.131
There is nothing to show that Mrs. Glover knew of Upham’s book. All her concern was now given to her own.
There is a tradition that on fine and not too windy days Mrs. Glover would frequently walk down to the Lynn beach with a bundle of manuscript under her arm. Making her way to a cluster of rocks which pointed out to the Atlantic, she would settle herself to write for hours on end, with nothing between her and the coast of Portugal but the rolling breakers and the gull-flashing air.
“Mortal existence is an enigma,” she would write later. “Every day is a mystery.”132 The ocean that stretched before her might have stood as a symbol of the mystery. Here was the flux and formlessness from which all mortal things proceed and to which they all return—the great unplumbed, unconscious elements of the human mind. Out of this watery womb, said the biologists, planetary life had crawled. Here was the ultimate enigma.
During the troubled events of 1872 Mrs. Glover had had a dream—a “vision,” she called it—which she afterwards related to a student. He recorded her words as follows:
131 Thomas C. Upham, Absolute Religion: A View of the Absolute Religion, Based on Philosophical Principles and the Doctrines of the Bible (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1873), pp. 251–252. See also: “God is both Fatherhood and Motherhood. . . . And from the eternal Fatherhood and Motherhood, furnishing, in their co-existent and co-operative duality, the only conceivable basis of such a result, all things proceed” (p. 49). Also: “Generically, or considered in the whole of its extent, the trinal out-birth, otherwise called the Son of God, without which the eternal Fatherhood and Motherhood could have neither name nor power nor meaning, is the whole of creation from its lowest to its highest form” (p. 73).
132 Eddy, Science and Health, p. 70.