Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/374

330 drawal more and more occupied her thoughts as a means to the end of establishing the impersonal guidance of the church. Certain personal and family matters crowded upon her for attention. She who had given so much to the world must consider somewhat her own affairs before taking up the problem, the great problem of the “church visible.”

During the difficulties of 1888 which may be realized as the clamoring of three hundred disappointed students who would have Mrs. Eddy to teach them and no other and the half hundred rebellious students who would rend if possible the local church, George Glover, Mrs. Eddy’s long-wandering son was present in Boston with his wife and children. Mrs. Eddy had seen her son but once before since he had been separated from her in his infancy. Having located him in 1879 in Minnesota, she had sent him a telegram requesting him to come to her. He was then a man thirty-five years of age. He came to Boston and visited her and Mr. Eddy at the home of the Choates where she was then residing temporarily.

While on his brief visit to Boston, Mrs. Eddy had studied the character of her long-alienated son with the eyes of maternal solicitude, and also the detached sense of independent individuality. Was this boy a Baker or a Glover? Moreover, was he a teachable man? In rehearsing his experiences on this visit to his mother in 1879, Glover is said to have since related to a newspaper correspondent that for some strange reason his mother would not