● ● ●  unlikely name for a textbook of metaphysics, but then there had never before been a metaphysic that healed. Several months later Dorcas Rawson brought her a copy of the Wycliffe Bible in which the phrase in Luke 1:77 rendered “knowledge of salvation” in the King James Version is given as “science and health.”¹⁴⁹ The twentieth century would emphasize the etymological relation between such words as heal, hale, whole, and holy, and it seems evident that for Mrs. Glover the word health meant spiritual wholeness.

The title, like everything else in Mrs. Glover’s book, was sui generis. She herself later wrote of her works as “hopelessly original.”¹⁵⁰ When Putney Bancroft in after years heard people question whether Science and Health had indeed originated with her, he would reply impatiently, “I heard her talk it before it was ever written,” and in 1920 he wrote, “I do not claim Mrs. G. was without faults, but Plagiarism was not one of them.”¹⁵¹ She seldom quoted, he added, except from the Bible, and the first edition of Science and Health bears him out.

Looking back on this period, Mrs. Eddy would write: “I had no time to borrow from Authors[.] Such a flood tide of truth was lifted upon me at times it was overwhelming and I have drawn quick breath as my pen flew on feeling as it were submerged in the transfiguration of spiritual ideas.”¹⁵² Once she was convinced that she must write the book, nothing else counted. As Bancroft feelingly summed it up: