This suggested, in imagery half biblical, half biological, the mystery of evil. But the strange night vision only echoed the conviction of her waking hours: in the presence of God evil simply could not exist. “Science dispels mystery,” she would write later, “and explains extraordinary phenomena; but Science never removes phenomena from the domain of reason into the realm of mysticism.”¹³⁴

At first she planned to call her book The Science of Life, and the title brought her to a direct confrontation of the new biology that was sweeping the world. Everywhere religion either shrank in horror from an evolutionary theory that looked to the blind stirring of primeval slime for the origin of man, or tried desperately to see in this blundering and ruthless process the work of a loving God.

Mrs. Glover took a different view. She readily granted that Darwin, whose Descent of Man had been published in 1871, might have given a reasonable explanation of the evolution of mortal man, but this, in her view, was not the man God had made in His own image and likeness. Although the words “evolve” and “evolution” occurred in her book again and again, together with such related words as seed, germ, species, generation, progenitors, propagate, and germinate, they were used metaphorically to describe the gradual appearing in human experience of the image, the true idea, of God.

“Life is not evolved, but evolves phenomena,” she wrote, and in a later edition of her book she would say even more explicitly: “Spiritual evolution alone is worthy of the exercise of divine power.”¹³⁵ It was the vision of Life as Spirit that had come to her in 1866, and all that had evolved in her thinking since then sprang from that germinal conviction.