There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms, or psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry.166
At that period Mrs. Glover still half hoped the traditional churches would accept Christian Science, but she also recognized their vested interest in the past. Her distrust of church organization as she had known it found expression in the first edition of Science and Health:
The mistake the disciples of Jesus made to found religious organizations and church rites, if indeed they did this, was one the Master did not make. . . .
No time was lost by our Master in organizations, rites, and ceremonies, or in proselyting for certain forms of belief: members of his church must answer to themselves, in the secret sanctuary of Soul, questions of the most solemn import.167
Yet her references even at that time to a church of her own showed her equal distrust of a wholly individualistic approach to Science. Her greatest struggles in the thirty-five years ahead of her arose from what she increasingly came to see as the necessity of marrying church organization with individual demonstration.
More and more she recognized that only Christian discipline could relate her vision of absolute Science to the manifold needs of men. At first she seemed to hesitate between forming a scientific society and a church, and within the next few years she would actually form both the Christian Scientist Association and the Church of Christ, Scientist; but education and worship were finally to be fused in a unique way, symbolized by the “Lesson-Sermon” studied by individual Christian Scientists on weekdays and read at church services on Sunday. Thus Science and Health would come to be regarded as both a scientific and ● ● ●
166 [R. W. Emerson, The Conduct of Life (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), p. 210.]
167 [Glover, Science and Health, 1st ed., pp. 166–167.]