● ● ● a letter full of patronizing masculine badinage, recalling her as the gay and beautiful young girl he had known years before but expostulating that she had now got into pretty deep waters.177 And there was stony silence from her sisters.
Yet other readers caught a glimpse of something more. A reviewer in The Boston Investigator wrote:
[The work] shows how the body can be cured, and how a better style of Christianity can be introduced (which is certainly very desirable!) . . . It likewise has a hard thrust at Spiritualism, and taken altogether it is a very rare book. . . . We shall watch with keen interest the promised results of “Science and Health.” 178
The Christian Advocate of Buffalo went further:
This book is a metaphysical treatise showing how disease is caused and cured by mind. The book is certainly original and contains much that will do good. The reader will find this work not influenced by superstition or pride, but striking out boldly and alone. Full of Philanthropy, Self-Sacrifice and Love toward God and Man.179
Most encouraging of all to Mrs. Glover was the letter she received early in the new year from the Concord philosopher, Amos Bronson Alcott. On January 17 Alcott wrote her:
The sacred truths which you announce sustained by facts of the Immortal Life, give to your work the seal of inspiration—reaffirm in modern phrase, the Christian revelations.
In times like ours[,] so sunk in sensualism, I hail with joy any voice speaking an assured word for God and Immortality. And my joy is heightened the more when I find the blessed words are of woman’s divinings.180
177 D. Russell Ambrose to Mary Baker Glover, December 1876, IC250.40.002, MBEL.
178 [“New Publications,” The Boston Investigator, 31 May 1876, p. 5.]
179 [Quoted in Bancroft, Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her, p. 51.]
180 [Amos Bronson Alcott to Mary Baker Glover, 17 January 1876, Subject File, A. Bronson Alcott, MBEL.] See also Peel, Christian Science, pp. 47–136.