● ● ●  with the Reverend Enoch Corser over the question of predestination. Gradually the ties of orthodoxy had loosened. After returning to Lynn in 1870 she had attended for several years the Unitarian Church of the Reverend Samuel B. Stewart but had not joined it. Now, as she took the first tentative step toward a church of her own, it was clear that she must sever the ecclesiastical links of the past.

The first Sunday meeting at Templars’ Hall was held on June 6, and other meetings followed on the four successive Sundays. Sometimes they were characterized in the paper as meetings, sometimes as services, and Mrs. Glover was variously described as preaching and as lecturing. The average attendance was about one hundred. After a few Sundays, “free thinkers” and spiritualists began to swell the numbers and to heckle Mrs. Glover in the question period which she permitted after her address. Putney Bancroft, who led the singing while his wife played the melodeon, later wrote: “On such occasions we were very proud of our teacher. . . . Calm and undisturbed, with not a particle of hysteria, she would answer question after question in a manner which, if it did not convince, never failed to satisfy the inquirer of her sincerity.”¹⁶³

The last of these meetings, on July 4, was devoted to the subject of “Mesmerism and Moral Science Contrasted”—for the term “Christian Science” had not yet completely replaced the earlier designation. The following Saturday the Transcript carried a notice headed christian scientists, announcing that services would be discontinued “during the warm season.”¹⁶⁴ Actually it was several years before public services were resumed and again advertised. The time had evidently not come to found a church.

On several occasions Mrs. Glover had said to students, “I shall have a church of my own some day.” They thought, wrote Bancroft many years later, of a small Lynn church with a settled congregation; she thought in terms of a Church embracing the world.¹⁶⁵ Yet it was not easy to envisage a Church founded on a Science, though Emerson had written in The Conduct of Life: