Christian Science

She is sole accuser and sole witness, and her testimony is final and carries uncompromising and irremediable doom with it.

The Sole-Witness Court! It should make the Council of Ten and the Council of Three turn in their graves for shame, to see how little they knew about satanic concentrations of irresponsible power. Here we have one Accuser, one Witness, one Judge, one Headsman – and all four bunched together in Mrs. Eddy, the Inspired of God, His Latest Thought to His People, New Member of the Holy Family, the Equal of Jesus.

When a Member is not satisfactory to Mrs. Eddy, and yet is blameless in his life and faultless in his membership and in his Christian Science walk and conversation, shall he hold up his head and tilt his hat over one ear and imagine himself safe because of these perfections? Why, in that very moment Mrs. Eddy will cast that spiritual X-ray of hers through his dungarees and say:

“I see his hypnotism working, among his insides – remove him to the block!”

What shall it profit him to know it isn’t so? Nothing. His testimony is of no value. No one wants it, no one will ask for it. He is not present to offer it (he does not know he has been accused), and if he were there to offer it, it would not be listened to.

It was out of powers approaching Mrs. Eddy’s – though not equalling them – that the Inquisition and the devastations of the Interdict grew. She will transmit hers. The man born two centuries from now will think he has arrived in hell; and all in good time he will think he knows it. Vast concentrations of irresponsible power have never in any age been used mercifully, and there is nothing to suggest that the Christian Science Papacy is going to spend money on novelties.

Several Christian Scientists have asked me to refrain from prophecy. There is no prophecy in our day but history. But history is a trustworthy prophet. History is always repeating itself, because conditions are always repeating themselves. Out of duplicated conditions history always gets a duplicate product.

READING LETTERS AT MEETINGS

I wonder if there is anything a Member can do that will not raise Mrs. Eddy’s jealousy? The By-laws seem to hunt him from pillar to post all the time, and turn all his thoughts and acts and words into sins against the meek and lowly new deity of his worship. Apparently her jealousy never sleeps. Apparently any trifle can offend it, and but one penalty appease it – excommunication. The By-laws might properly and reasonably be entitled Laws for the Coddling and Comforting of Our Mother’s Petty Jealousies. The By-law named at the head of this paragraph reads its transgressor out of the Church if he shall carry a letter from Mrs. Eddy to the congregation and forget to read it or fail to read the whole of it.

HONESTY REQUISITE

Dishonest members are to be admonished; if they continue in dishonest practices, excommunication follows. Considering who it is that draughted this law, there is a certain amount of humor in it.

FURTHER APPLICATIONS OF THE AXE

Here follow the titles of some more By-laws whose infringement is punishable by excommunication:

Silence Enjoined. Misteaching. Departure from Tenets. Violation of Christian Fellowship. Moral Offences. Illegal Adoption. Broken By-laws. Violation of By-laws. (What is the difference?) Formulas Forbidden. Official Advice. (Forbids Tom, Dick, and Harry’s clack.) Unworthy of Membership. Final Excommunication. Organizing Churches.

This looks as if Mrs. Eddy had devoted a large share of her time and talent to inventing ways to get rid of her Church members. Yet in another place she seems to invite membership. Not in any urgent way, it is true, still she throws out a bait to such as like notice and distinction (in other words, the Human Race). Page 82:

“It is important that these seemingly strict conditions be complied with, as the names of the Members of the Mother-Church will be recorded in the history of the Church and become a part thereof.”

We all want to be historical.

MORE SELF-PROTECTIONS

The Hymnal. There is a Christian Science Hymnal. Entrance to it was closed in 1898. Christian Science students who make hymns nowadays may possibly get them sung in the Mother-Church, “but not unless approved by the Pastor Emeritus.” Art. XXVII, Sec. 2.

Solo Singers. Mrs. Eddy has contributed the words of three of the hymns in the Hymnal. Two of them appear in it six times altogether, each of them being set to three original forms of musical anguish. Mrs. Eddy, always thoughtful, has promulgated a By-law requiring the singing of one of her three hymns in the Mother Church “as often as once each month.” It is a good idea. A congregation could get tired of even Mrs. Eddy’s muse in the course of time, without the cordializing incentive of compulsion. We all know how wearisome the sweetest and touchingest things can become, through rep-rep-repetition, and still rep-rep-repetition, and more rep-rep-repetition-like “the sweet by-and-by, in the sweet by-and-by,” for instance, and “Tah-rah-rah boom-de-aye”; and surely it is not likely that Mrs. Eddy’s machine has turned out goods that could outwear those great heart-stirrers, without the assistance of the lash. “O’er Waiting Harpstrings of the Mind” is pretty good, quite fair to middling – the whole seven of the stanzas – but repetition would be certain to take the excitement out of it in the course of time, even if there were fourteen, and then it would sound like the multiplication table, and would cease to save. The congregation would be perfectly sure to get tired; in fact, did get tired – hence the compulsory By-law. It is a measure born of experience, not foresight.

The By-laws say that “if a solo singer shall neglect or refuse to sing alone” one of those three hymns as often as once a month, and oftener if so directed by the Board of Directors – which is Mrs. Eddy – the singer’s salary shall be stopped. It is circumstantial evidence that some soloists neglected this sacrament and others refused it. At least that is the charitable view to take of it. There is only one other view to take: that Mrs. Eddy did really foresee that there would be singers who would some day get tired of doing her hymns and proclaiming the authorship, unless persuaded by a Bylaw, with a penalty attached. The idea could of course occur to her wise head, for she would know that a seven-stanza break might well be a calamitous strain upon a soloist, and that he might therefore avoid it if unwatched. He could not curtail it, for the whole of anything that Mrs. Eddy does is sacred, and cannot be cut.

BOARD OF EDUCATION

It consists of four members, one of whom is President of it. Its members are elected annually. Subject to Mrs. Eddy’s approval. Art. XXX., Sec. 2.

She owns the Board – is the Board.

Mrs. Eddy is President of the Metaphysical College. If at any time she shall vacate that office, the Directors of the College (that is to say, Mrs. Eddy) “shall” elect to the vacancy the President of the Board of Education (which is merely re-electing herself).

It is another case of “Pastor Emeritus.” She gives up the shadow of authority, but keeps a good firm hold on the substance.

PUBLIC TEACHERS

Applicants for admission to this industry must pass a thorough three days’ examination before the Board of Education “in Science and Health, chapter on ‘Recapitulation’; the Platform of Christian Science; page 403 of Christian Science Practice, from line second to the second paragraph of page 405; and page 488, second and third paragraphs.”

BOARD OF LECTURESHIP

The lecturers are exceedingly important servants of Mrs. Eddy, and she chooses them with great care. Each of them has an appointed territory in which to perform his duties – in the North, the South, the East, the West, in Canada, in Great Britain, and so on – and each must stick to his own territory and not forage beyond its boundaries. I think it goes without saying – from what we have seen of Mrs. Eddy – that no lecture is delivered until she has examined and approved it, and that the lecturer is not allowed to change it afterwards.

The members of the Board of Lectureship are elected annually —

“Subject to the approval of Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy.”

MISSIONARIES

There are but four. They are elected – like the rest of the domestics – annually. So far as I can discover, not a single servant of the Sacred Household has a steady job except Mrs. Eddy. It is plain that she trusts no human being but herself.

THE BY-LAWS

The branch Churches are strictly forbidden to use them

So far as I can see, they could not do it if they wanted to. The By-laws are merely the voice of the master issuing commands to the servants. There is nothing and nobody for the servants to re-utter them to.

That useless edict is repeated in the little book, a few pages farther on. There are several other repetitions of prohibitions in the book that could be spared-they only take up room for nothing.

THE CREED

It is copyrighted. I do not know why, but I suppose it is to keep adventurers from some day claiming that they invented it, and not Mrs. Eddy and that “strange Providence” that has suggested so many clever things to her.

No Change. It is forbidden to change the Creed. That is important, at any rate.

COPYRIGHT

I can understand why Mrs. Eddy copyrighted the early editions and revisions of Science and Health, and why she had a mania for copyrighting every scrap of every sort that came from her pen in those jejune days when to be in print probably seemed a wonderful distinction to her in her provincial obscurity, but why she should continue this delirium in these days of her godship and her far-spread fame, I cannot explain to myself. And particularly as regards Science and Health. She knows, now, that that Annex is going to live for many centuries; and so, what good is a fleeting forty-two-year copyright going to do it?

Now a perpetual copyright would be quite another matter. I would like to give her a hint. Let her strike for a perpetual copyright on that book. There is precedent for it. There is one book in the world which bears the charmed life of perpetual copyright (a fact not known to twenty people in the world). By a hardy perversion of privilege on the part of the lawmaking power the Bible has perpetual copyright in Great Britain. There is no justification for it in fairness, and no explanation of it except that the Church is strong enough there to have its way, right or wrong. The recent Revised Version enjoys perpetual copyright, too – a stronger precedent, even, than the other one.

Now, then, what is the Annex but a Revised Version itself? Which of course it is – Lord’s Prayer and all. With that pair of formidable British precedents to proceed upon, what Congress of ours —

But how short-sighted I am. Mrs. Eddy has thought of it long ago. She thinks of everything. She knows she has only to keep her copyright of 1902 alive through its first stage of twenty-eight years, and perpetuity is assured. A Christian Science Congress will reign in the Capitol then. She probably attaches small value to the first edition (1875). Although it was a Revelation from on high, it was slim, lank, incomplete, padded with bales of refuse rags, and puffs from lassoed celebrities to fill it out, an uncreditable book, a book easily sparable, a book not to be mentioned in the same year with the sleek, fat, concise, compact, compressed, and competent Annex of to-day, in its dainty flexible covers, gilt – edges, rounded corners, twin screw, spiral twist, compensation balance, Testament-counterfeit, and all that; a book just born to curl up on the hymn-book-shelf in church and look just too sweet and holy for anything. Yes, I see now what she was copyrighting that child for.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION

It is true in matters of business Mrs. Eddy thinks of everything. She thought of an organ, to disseminate the Truth as it was in Mrs. Eddy. Straightway she started one – the Christian Science Journal.

It is true – in matters of business Mrs. Eddy thinks of everything. As soon as she had got the Christian Science Journal sufficiently in debt to make its presence on the premises disagreeable to her, it occurred to her to make somebody a present of it. Which she did, along with its debts. It was in the summer of 1889. The victim selected was her Church – called, in those days, The National Christian Scientist Association.

She delivered this sorrow to those lambs as a “gift” in consideration of their “loyalty to our great cause.”

Also – still thinking of everything – she told them to retain Mr. Bailey in the editorship and make Mr. Nixon publisher. We do not know what it was she had against those men; neither do we know whether she scored on Bailey or not, we only know that God protected Nixon, and for that I am sincerely glad, although I do not know Nixon and have never even seen him.

Nixon took the Journal and the rest of the Publishing Society’s liabilities, and demonstrated over them during three years, then brought in his report:

“On assuming my duties as publisher, there was not a dollar in the treasury; but on the contrary the Society owed unpaid printing and paper bills to the amount of several hundred dollars, not to mention a contingent liability of many more hundreds” – represented by advance – subscriptions paid for the Journal and the “Series,” the which goods Mrs. Eddy had not delivered. And couldn’t, very well, perhaps, on a Metaphysical College income of but a few thousand dollars a day, or a week, or whatever it was in those magnificently flourishing times. The struggling Journal had swallowed up those advance-payments, but its “claim” was a severe one and they had failed to cure it. But Nixon cured it in his diligent three years, and joyously reported the news that he had cleared off all the debts and now had a fat six thousand dollars in the bank.

It made Mrs. Eddy’s mouth water.

At the time that Mrs. Eddy had unloaded that dismal gift on to her National Association, she had followed her inveterate custom: she had tied a string to its hind leg, and kept one end of it hitched to her belt. We have seen her do that in the case of the Boston Mosque. When she deeds property, she puts in that string-clause. It provides that under certain conditions she can pull the string and land the property in the cherished home of its happy youth. In the present case she believed that she had made provision that if at any time the National Christian Science Association should dissolve itself by a formal vote, she could pull.

A year after Nixon’s handsome report, she writes the Association that she has a “unique request to lay before it.” It has dissolved, and she is not quite sure that the Christian Science Journal has “already fallen into her hands” by that act, though it “seems” to her to have met with that accident; so she would like to have the matter decided by a formal vote. But whether there is a doubt or not, “I see the wisdom,” she says, “of again owning this Christian Science waif.”

I think that that is unassailable evidence that the waif was making money, hands down.

She pulled her gift in. A few years later she donated the Publishing Society, along with its real estate, its buildings, its plant, its publications, and its money – the whole worth twenty – two thousand dollars, and free of debt – to – Well, to the Mother-Church!

That is to say, to herself. There is an account of it in the Christian Science Journal, and of how she had already made some other handsome gifts – to her Church – and others to – to her Cause besides “an almost countless number of private charities” of cloudy amount and otherwise indefinite. This landslide of generosities overwhelmed one of her literary domestics. While he was in that condition he tried to express what he felt:

“Let us endeavor to lift up our hearts in thankfulness to… our Mother in Israel for these evidences of generosity and self-sacrifice that appeal to our deepest sense of gratitude, even while surpassing our comprehension.”

A year or two later, Mrs. Eddy promulgated some By-laws of a self-sacrificing sort which assuaged him, perhaps, and perhaps enabled his surpassed comprehension to make a sprint and catch up. These are to be found in Art. XII., entitled.

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING SOCIETY

This Article puts the whole publishing business into the hands of a publishing Board – special. Mrs. Eddy appoints to its vacancies.

The profits go semi-annually to the Treasurer of the Mother-Church. Mrs. Eddy owns the Treasurer.

Editors and publishers of the Christian Science Journal cannot be elected or removed without Mrs. Eddy’s knowledge and consent.

Every candidate for employment in a high capacity or a low one, on the other periodicals or in the publishing house, must first be “accepted by Mrs. Eddy as suitable.” And “by the Board of Directors” – which is surplusage, since Mrs. Eddy owns the Board.

If at any time a weekly shall be started, “it shall be owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist” – which is Mrs. Eddy.

CHAPTER VIII

I think that any one who will carefully examine the By-laws (I have placed all of the important ones before the reader), will arrive at the conclusion that of late years the master-passion in Mrs. Eddy’s heart is a hunger for power and glory; and that while her hunger for money still remains, she wants it now for the expansion and extension it can furnish to that power and glory, rather than what it can do for her towards satisfying minor and meaner ambitions.

I wish to enlarge a little upon this matter. I think it is quite clear that the reason why Mrs. Eddy has concentrated in herself all powers, all distinctions, all revenues that are within the command of the Christian Science Church Universal is that she desires and intends to devote them to the purpose just suggested – the upbuilding of her personal glory – hers, and no one else’s; that, and the continuing of her name’s glory after she shall have passed away. If she has overlooked a single power, howsoever minute, I cannot discover it. If she has found one, large or small, which she has not seized and made her own, there is no record of it, no trace of it. In her foragings and depredations she usually puts forward the Mother-Church – a lay figure – and hides behind it. Whereas, she is in manifest reality the Mother-Church herself. It has an impressive array of officials, and committees, and Boards of Direction, of Education, of Lectureship, and so on – geldings, every one, shadows, spectres, apparitions, wax-figures: she is supreme over them all, she can abolish them when she will; blow them out as she would a candle. She is herself the Mother-Church. Now there is one By-law which says that the Mother-Church:

“shall be officially controlled by no other church.”

That does not surprise us – we know by the rest of the By-laws that that is a quite irrelevant remark. Yet we do vaguely and hazily wonder why she takes the trouble to say it; why she wastes the words; what her object can be – seeing that that emergency has been in so many, many ways, and so effectively and drastically barred off and made impossible. Then presently the object begins to dawn upon us. That is, it does after we have read the rest of the By-law three or four times, wondering and admiring to see Mrs. Eddy – Mrs. Eddy – Mrs. Eddy, of all persons – throwing away power! – making a fair exchange – doing a fair thing for once more, an almost generous thing! Then we look it through yet once more unsatisfied, a little suspicious – and find that it is nothing but a sly, thin make-believe, and that even the very title of it is a sarcasm and embodies a falsehood – “self” government:

“Local Self-Government. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, shall assume no official control of other churches of this denomination. It shall be officially controlled by no other church.”

It has a most pious and deceptive give-and-take air of perfect fairness, unselfishness, magnanimity – almost godliness, indeed. But it is all art.

In the By-laws, Mrs. Eddy, speaking by the mouth of her other self, the Mother-Church, proclaims that she will assume no official control of other churches-branch churches. We examine the other By-laws, and they answer some important questions for us:

1. What is a branch Church? It is a body of Christian Scientists, organized in the one and only permissible way – by a member, in good standing, of the Mother-Church, and who is also a pupil of one of Mrs. Eddy’s accredited students. That is to say, one of her properties. No other can do it. There are other indispensable requisites; what are they?

2. The new Church cannot enter upon its functions until its members have individually signed, and pledged allegiance to, a Creed furnished by Mrs. Eddy.

3. They are obliged to study her books, and order their lives by them. And they must read no outside religious works.

4. They must sing the hymns and pray the prayers provided by her, and use no others in the services, except by her permission.

5. They cannot have preachers and pastors. Her law.

6. In their Church they must have two Readers – a man and a woman.

7. They must read the services framed and appointed by her.

8. She – not the branch Church – appoints those Readers.

9. She – not the branch Church – dismisses them and fills the vacancies.

10. She can do this without consulting the branch Church, and without explaining.

11. The branch Church can have a religious lecture from time to time. By applying to Mrs. Eddy. There is no other way.

12. But the branch Church cannot select the lecturer. Mrs. Eddy does it.

13. The branch Church pays his fee.

14. The harnessing of all Christian Science wedding-teams, members of the branch Church, must be done by duly authorized and consecrated Christian Science functionaries. Her factory is the only one that makes and licenses them.

[15. Nothing is said about christenings. It is inferable from this that a Christian Science child is born a Christian Scientist and requires no tinkering.]

[16. Nothing is said about funerals. It is inferable, then, that a branch Church is privileged to do in that matter as it may choose.]

To sum up. Are any important Church-functions absent from the list? I cannot call any to mind. Are there any lacking ones whose exercise could make the branch in any noticeable way independent of the Mother. Church? – even in any trifling degree? I think of none. If the named functions were abolished would there still be a Church left? Would there be even a shadow of a Church left? Would there be anything at all left? even the bare name?

Manifestly not. There isn’t a single vital and essential Church-function of any kind, that is not named in the list. And over every one of them the Mother-Church has permanent and unchallengeable control, upon every one of them Mrs. Eddy has set her irremovable grip. She holds, in perpetuity, autocratic and indisputable sovereignty and control over every branch Church in the earth; and yet says, in that sugary, naive, angel-beguiling way of hers, that the Mother-Church:

“shall assume no official control of other churches of this denomination.”

Whereas in truth the unmeddled-with liberties of a branch Christian Science Church are but very, very few in number, and are these:

1. It can appoint its own furnace-stoker, winters. 2. It can appoint its own fan-distributors, summers. 3. It can, in accordance with its own choice in the matter, burn, bury, or preserve members who are pretending to be dead – whereas there is no such thing as death. 4. It can take up a collection.

The branch Churches have no important liberties, none that give them an important voice in their own affairs. Those are all locked up, and Mrs. Eddy has the key. “Local Self-Government” is a large name and sounds well; but the branch Churches have no more of it than have the privates in the King of Dahomey’s army.

“MOTHER-CHURCH UNIQUE”

Mrs. Eddy, with an envious and admiring eye upon the solitary and rivalless and world-shadowing majesty of St. Peter’s, reveals in her By-laws her purpose to set the Mother-Church apart by itself in a stately seclusion and make it duplicate that lone sublimity under the Western sky. The By-law headed “Mother-Church Unique” says —