Christian Science Part 16

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-pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 Lectures.h.i.+p, 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 t.i.tle of it is a sarcasm and embodies a falsehood--"self" government:

"Local Self-Government. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts, shall a.s.sume 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 G.o.dliness, 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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sume 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--

"In its relation to other Christian Science churches, the Mother-Church stands alone.

"It occupies a position that no other Church can fill.

"Then for a branch Church to a.s.sume such position would be disastrous to Christian Science,

"Therefore--"

Therefore no branch Church is allowed to have branches. There shall be no Christian Science St. Peter's in the earth but just one--the Mother-Church in Boston.

"NO FIRST MEMBERS"

But for the thoughtful By-law thus ent.i.tled, every Science branch in the earth would imitate the Mother-Church and set up an aristocracy. Every little group of ground-floor Smiths and Furgusons and Shadwells and Simpsons that organized a branch would a.s.sume that great t.i.tle, of "First Members," along with its vast privileges of "discussing" the weather and casting blank ballots, and soon there would be such a locust-plague of them burdening the globe that the t.i.tle would lose its value and have to be abolished.

But where business and glory are concerned, Mrs. Eddy thinks of everything, and so she did not fail to take care of her Aborigines, her stately and exclusive One Hundred, her college of functionless cardinals, her Sanhedrin of Privileged Talkers (Limited). After taking away all the liberties of the branch Churches, and in the same breath disclaiming all official control over their affairs, she smites them on the mouth with this--the very mouth that was watering for those n.o.bby ground-floor honors--

"No First Members. Branch Churches shall not organize with First Members, that special method of organization being adapted to the Mother-Church alone."