The sentiment was a traditional Christian one, but a more rigorous schoolmaster than the church catechism taught her the fleeting and insubstantial nature of values rooted in matter.

Even in the teeming, bustling America of that day a doubt sometimes slid across men’s minds as to whether it might not all be an illusion. Such a doubt found expression, for instance, in an 1847 essay on “Shadows” by the successful New York banker and Knickerbocker writer Henry Cary (“John Waters”), but that may have been no more than the expression of a momentary weariness with the passing show.¹⁰² A deeper note sounds in an incomparably greater New Yorker, Herman Melville, whose outcast Ishmael arrived at his doubts and convictions from something other than fashionable epicureanism:

On the basis of her experience Mrs. Glover may well have suspected that life in matter is but a play of shadows. Yet from all she wrote in these years it is evident that she never doubted the existence of a world of absolute, indestructible values, usually envisioned in orthodox terms of a heavenly hereafter but undoubtedly sensed at times as the spiritual dimension of present experience.

In the same year as Cary’s article, The Covenant announced in April that its next issue would contain an article entitled “The Immortality of the Soul” by Mrs. M. Glover “written in the pure and chaste style  ● ● ●