When eight years old she avers that she distinctly heard a voice calling her name three times in an ascending scale. She writes,- "I thought this was my mother's voice, and sometimes went to her beseeching her to tell me what she wanted. Her answer was always: 'Nothing, child! What do you mean?' Then I would say: 'Mother who did call me? I heard somebody call Mary three times!' This continued till I grew discouraged, and my mother was perplexed and anxious" (R. & I., p. 15). This, she says, continued for twelve months, and became so insistent, that at length her mother read to her the Scripture story of the youthful Samuel, and bade her respond to the voice by saying, "Speak, Lord: for thy servant heareth."
Mrs. Eddy says: "The voice came; but I was afraid, and did not answer. Afterward I wept, and prayed that God would forgive me, resolving to do next time as my mother had bidden me. When the call came again, I did answer, in the words of Samuel, but never again to the material senses was the mysterious call repeated" (R. & I., pp. 18, 19). It is strange that the voice, so insistent for twelve months, should have ceased just when it had gained its point of compelling attention. The following description of Mary's hysterical temperament would tend to make one skeptical of the truth of the above statement.
"These attacks, which continued until very late in Mrs. Eddy's life, have been described to the writer by many eye-witnesses, some of whom have watched by her bedside and treated her in Christian Science for her affliction. At times the attack resembled convulsions. Mary fell headlong to the floor, writhing and screaming in apparent agony. Again she dropped as if lifeless, and lay limp and motionless, until restored. At other times she became rigid like a cataleptic, and continued for a time in a state of suspended animation" (M., p. 21). Once, a neighbor observing Mary's excited condition inquired of her father as to it, he replied bitterly:- "The Bible says Mary Magdalen had seven devils, but our Mary has got ten" (M., p. 21).
As Mary Baker grew to womanhood ill-health and nervous affliction followed her. Her desire for being rocked and swung was evidence of hysterical temperament. When a young widow, and the mother of a child, a large cradle was made for her in which she was rocked to sleep; a large swing was erected in her sister's house, where she then lived, and she would be swung for hours at a time.
When Mrs. Glover married Daniel Patterson things continued much as they were: "Mrs. Patterson's invalidism, from being intermittent, soon became a settled condition. She sent for her cradle while they were living in Franklin, and the older residents still recall the day that Patterson drove into town with a large wagon containing his wife's cradle" (M., p. 33). After a divorce was granted to Mrs. Patterson in 1873, on the ground of her husband's desertion, she was mostly known by the name of her first husband, Glover.
Gradually working into a system of mind-healing, she lived for years a strange existence-a mixture of poverty, ill-health, violent friendships ending with as violent quarrels, moving from house to house, where she began by charming and ended by disgusting those who in pity had befriended her.
The disappointment and weariness of the ambitious, struggling woman are vividly depicted for us in a sentence: "Untrained in any kind of paid work, she fell back upon the favor of her friends or chance acquaintances, living precariously upon their bounty, and obliged to go from house to house, as one family after another wearied of her" (M., p. 108).
And yet, amid all this that is sordid and scheming, there was a compelling personality about the woman to which the following is a striking tribute:- "Mrs. Glover's highly colored speech, her odd clothes, and grand ways, her interest in strange and mysterious subjects, her high mission to spread the truth of her dead master [Quimby, of whom more anon], made her an interesting figure in a humdrum New England village... All these people, with whom she stayed, love to talk of her and most of them are glad to have known her-even those who now say the experience was a costly one. She was like a patch of color in those gray communities. She was never dull, her old hosts say, and never commonplace. She never laid aside her regal air; never entered a room or left it like other people. There was something about her that continually excited and stimulated, and she gave people the feeling that a great deal was happening" (M., pp. 122, 3).
One description out of several will suffice to describe Mrs. Glover at this time, and throw a lurid light upon the kind of person she was.
At Stoughton she lived for many months with Mrs. Sally Wentworth, who was a Spiritist and believed in the healing power of Spiritism. "Mrs. Glover went into Mrs. Wentworth's house to teach her the Quimby system for a consideration of $300, which sum was to cover her board and lodging for a considerable period of time... The estrangement which resulted in Mrs. Glover's leaving the house began in a difficulty between her and Mr. Wentworth. Mr. Wentworth was indignant because Mrs. Glover had attempted to persuade his wife to leave him, and to go away with her and practice the Quimby treatment. After this Mrs. Glover's kindly feeling toward the family seemed to disappear altogether. Mrs. Clapp [Mrs. Wentworth's niece] remembers going to, the house one day and being disturbed by the sound of violent pounding on the floor upstairs. Her aunt, with some embarrassment, explained that Mr. Wentworth was sick in bed, and that Mrs. Glover had shut herself in her room and was deliberately pounding on the floor above his head to annoy him" (M., pp. 121, 123,124).
Other things of a similar nature occurring, Mrs. Glover was asked to move on. She left on a day when the whole family was away from home, without saying good-bye. When the Wentworths returned they found her bedroom door locked, and no clue left as to Mrs. Glover's whereabouts.
When at length the door was forced open, the son, Horace T. Wentworth, under affidavit, thus describes the scene: "A few days after Mrs. Glover left, I and my mother went into the room which she had occupied. We were the first persons to enter the room after Mrs. Glover's departure. We found every breadth of matting slashed up through the middle, apparently with some sharp instrument. We also found a feather bed all cut to pieces. We opened the door of a closet. On the floor was a pile of newspapers almost entirely consumed. On top of these papers was a shovelful of dead coals. These had evidently been left upon the paper by the last occupant. The only reason they had not set the house on fire evidently was because the closet door had been shut, and the air of the closet so dead, and because the newspapers were piled flat and did not readily ignite-were folded so tight, in other words, that they would not blaze" (M., p. 125).
Mrs. Clapp, in her affidavit, fully substantiates this statement.