● ● ● slew.” Ignorant, profane, and sometimes roaring drunk though the man might be, Barry told Mrs. Glover that he enjoyed being there, and added a little primly, “One can learn even from such an illiterate specimen.”144
Here was a figure who might stand as a symbol of the particularity and contrariety of human life, its ornery, crotchety, idiosyncratic variety. Here was George Glover’s Deadwood and, mutatis mutandis, London, Tiflis, Shanghai. Any author who hoped for universality must face toward this world, not flinch away from it, and Barry’s letter showed his confidence that Mrs. Glover, immersed in authorship, still maintained her relish for the salt and savor of human life. Her book might announce the divine origin of man, but she intended it to speak to the human condition.
Within a century it would have to meet the test of speaking in Russian and Portuguese and Dutch, to congregations in Bombay and Warsaw and Buenos Aires, to student organizations in Oxford and Witwatersrand and the Braunschweiger Technische Hochschule, to children in Dallas and Winnipeg, Stockholm and Jakarta, to businessmen and housewives and farmers and actresses and deep-sea divers and research chemists.145
The book included a minimum of the vividly local and temporal. A scientific textbook, as Mrs. Glover intended it to be, must necessarily generalize, using a basic, technical vocabulary which covers the largest possible number of concrete instances. At the same time any work of Christian inspiration draws lifeblood from the enormous, rich, historical concreteness of the Bible. The Christ had been lived once in a particular corner of history by a particular person, and in order fully to transform human life, Science must be fully Christian.
The term “Moral Science” began to disappear from her vocabulary, and in the final draft of her book before it went to the printer the term “Christian Science” appeared in several places. At first she wrote it “Christian science,” but in the last words of the last chapter, a chapter entitled “Healing the Sick,” it took its present form:
144 George Barry to Mary Baker Eddy, 19 October 1873, IC645a.66.043, MBEL.
145 Cf. A Century of Christian Science Healing, pp. 146–234.