In the eighties, anonymous letters mailed to me contained threats to blow up the hall where I preached; yet I never lost my faith in God, and neither informed the police of these letters nor sought the protection of the laws of my country. I leaned on God, and was safe.
Healing all manner of diseases without charge, keeping a free institute, rooming and boarding indigent students that I taught “without money and without price,” I struggled on through many years; and while dependent on the income from the sale of Science and Health, my publisher paid me not one dollar of royalty on its first edition. Those were days wherein the connection between justice and being approached the mythical. Before entering upon my great life-work, my income from literary sources was ample, until, declining dictation as to what I should write, I became poor for Christ's sake. My husband, Colonel Glover, of Charleston, South Carolina, was considered wealthy, but much of his property was in slaves, and I declined to sell them at his decease in 1844, for I could never believe that a human being was my property.
Six weeks I waited on God to suggest a name for the book I had been writing. Its title, Science and Health, came to me in the silence of night, when the steadfast stars watched over the world, — when slumber had fled, — and I rose and recorded the hallowed suggestion. The following day I showed it to my literary friends, who advised me to drop both the book and the title. To this, however, I gave no heed, feeling sure that God had led me to write that book, and had whispered that name to my waiting hope and prayer. It was to me the “still, small voice” that came to
