When we admit that matter (heart, blood, brain, acting through the five physical senses) constitutes man, we fail to see how anatomy can distinguish between humanity and the brute, or determine when man is really man and has progressed farther than his animal progenitors. . . .
As a material, theoretical life-basis is found to be a misapprehension of existence, the spiritual and divine Principle of man dawns upon human thought, and leads it to “where the young child was,”—even to the birth of a new-old idea, to the spiritual sense of being and of what Life includes.57
But if the dawn of that idea still lay some years ahead, Mrs. Patterson at least turned puzzled eyes toward the supreme Teacher who had demonstrated a new order of nature in which Spirit had dominion over all.
It has been said that one way of escaping the tedium of conventional American life in the nineteenth century was to go west, the other way was to go “beyond.” The great wave of spiritualism which swept through the United States after the Fox sisters in 1848 began hearing mysterious rappings bore witness to the lure of the beyond.
Soon the busy tapping of telegraph keys, which had brought new lines of communication to the West, was matched by the busy tipping of tables the length and breadth of the republic. But whereas the first message sent over the first telegraph wire was, “What hath God wrought!” the messages tapped and rapped and tipped out on the tables were remarkable for their sheer banality and lack of any real religious significance. The ghostly small-talk of departed spirits seemed to promise a beyond which reproduced most of the drearier features of the here.
Back in Sanbornton Bridge Mrs. Patterson, then Mrs. Glover, had shared in the general interest in the new phenomenon. Apparently her natural curiosity was soon satisfied, for during the Franklin and North Groton years she was indifferent to the subject and indeed argued with her credulous Groton neighbor, Mrs. Kidder, against it.58 Had she been ● ● ●
58 Wilbur, Life of Mary Baker Eddy, p. 62, based on Mrs. Kidder’s own statements. Several people who knew Mrs. Glover intimately during the years of her widowhood in Sanbornton have denied that she had any interest in spiritualism, while Milmine on the other hand gives the usual number of sensational stories to prove that she was a full-fledged believer. The truth appears to lie somewhere in between. Mrs. Glover went into the new craze only enough to find out that she couldn’t believe in it. Milmine was unable to collect any gossip in Franklin or North Groton which would support the charge that Mrs. Patterson was then interested in spiritualism.
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